"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" - unam.

hair. I tried to see if I could see each hair. You know how there's a little area of color just
where the sun is reflecting ­­ the diffraction effect, I could see that! I could see each hair
as sharp as you want: perfect vision!
Another time I had a dream in which a thumbtack was stuck in a doorframe. I see
the tack, run my fingers down the doorframe, and I feel the tack. So the "seeing
department" arid the "feeling department" of the brain seem to be connected. Then I say
to myself, Could it be that they don't have to be connected? I look at the doorframe again,
and there's no thumbtack. I run my finger down the doorframe, and I feel the tack!
Another time I'm dreaming and I hear "knock­knock; knock­knock." Something
was happening in the dream that made this knocking fit, but not perfectly ­­ it seemed
sort of foreign. I thought: "Absolutely guaranteed that this knocking is coming from
outside my dream, and I've invented this part of the dream to fit with it. I've got to wake
up and find out what the hell it is."
The knocking is still going, I wake up, and. . . Dead silence. There was nothing.
So it wasn't connected to the outside.
Other people have told me that they have incorporated external noises into their
dreams, but when I had this experience, carefully "watching from below," and sure the
noise was coming from outside the dream, it wasn't.
During the time of making observations in my dreams, the process of waking up
was a rather fearful one. As you're beginning to wake up there's a moment when you feel
rigid and tied down, or underneath many layers of cotton batting. It's hard to explain, but
there's a moment when you get the feeling you can't get out; you're not sure you can wake
up. So I would have to tell myself ­­ after I was awake ­­ that that's ridiculous. There's no
disease I know of where a person falls asleep naturally and can't wake up. You can
always wake up. And after talking to myself many times like that, I became less and less
afraid, and in fact I found the process of waking up rather thrilling ­­ something like a
roller coaster: After a while you're not so scared, and you begin to enjoy it a little bit.
You might like to know how this process of observing my dreams stopped (which
it has for the most part; it's happened just a few times since). I'm dreaming one night as
usual, making observations, and I see on the wall in front of me a pennant. I answer for
the twenty­fifth time, "Yes, I'm dreaming in color," and then I realize that I've been
sleeping with the back of my head against a brass rod. I put my hand behind my head and
I feel that the back of my head is soft. I think, "Aha! That's why I've been able to make all
these observations in my dreams: the brass rod has disturbed my visual cortex. All I have
to do is sleep with a brass rod under my head, and I can make these observations any time
I want. So I think I'll stop making observations on this one, and go into deeper sleep."
When I woke up later, there was no brass rod, nor was the back of my head soft.
Somehow I had become tired of making these observations, and my brain had invented
some false reasons as to why I shouldn't do it any more.
As a result of these observations I began to get a little theory. One of the reasons
that I liked to look at dreams was that I was curious as to how you can see an image, of a
person, for example, when your eyes are closed, and nothing's coming in. You say it
might be random, irregular nerve discharges, but you can't get the nerves to discharge in
exactly the same delicate patterns when you are sleeping as when you are awake, looking
at something. Well then, how could I "see" in color, and in better detail, when I was
asleep?