In your Dreams
There’s a crystal garden in space Peter Maich likes to visit. It’s on a far-off planet and features crystallised plants that make the 3D flora featured in the movie Avatar look second-rate.
Maich will often go there just to sit and admire their beauty. That’s if he’s not wandering around a European art gallery, flying like a sea eagle, or contemplating sex with anyone who takes his fancy. At times Maich can see things with close to 360° vision. He’s even died a few times, once as a tree. And if he really wants to shock people, he occasionally sticks his hands into his head, squishes his brains around and pokes his fingers out from his eyes.
Yes, you could say Maich, a 62-year-old owner of a commercial fishing training business from Westport on New Zealand’s South Island, has lived a rich life. Richer in experience, you could argue, than explorers, kings, conquerors, billionaires and movie stars.
In fact, if you didn’t know better, you might look for a supernatural explanation for the sensational scope of Maich’s endeavours, or even attribute his abilities to superpowers. After all, what else could explain a being who has the capacity to commune with gods, strike down demons and exchange dinner recipes with aliens?
But Maich is very much a flesh-and-blood mortal. He’s just not one who puts his life on hold for eight hours each night the way most of us do. Maich’s superpower, if you want to call it that, is that he is a 10th-dan lucid dreamer. A Brando or De Niro of unconscious nighttime entertainment, a legend in his own lucid lunchbox.
It’s an ability he first tapped into over 50 years ago and has dedicated most of his life to – both waking and sleeping – in the truest sense of that phrase. And it’s an ability he firmly believes “bleeds into” his waking life.
“It’s pretty cool,” he deadpans on the phone from Mapua, near Nelson, where he’s spending a few days running maritime licence exams. “The dream world is real to me in the sense that the experiences leave memories. All my senses are working with them and so everything’s absolutely real. I respect it. But I also push boundaries in
