What got me to start again, yet it’s only very rare that I do, was a Reincarnation dream I could feel, but not see. (nor smell etc just feel, emotional, physical, etc).

The last night I dreamt when I was little I was hooked up to one of those machines. That night I didn’t dream, and the doctor himself said I didn’t dream. So the whole “have dreams but don’t remember them” thing is not an absolute, by any means.

And as for the “someone outside the dreamworld might Nic” I agree with So-and-So

I would further propose the following hypothesis: in the context of this story, there are two different dream states – ordinary dreams, and visits to Dreamland. After all, it seems unlikely that every dreaming kid on the planet visits Dreamland every night; Dreamland would be overrun with human brats. By the same token, adults dream, but virtually never visit Dreamland. So with that hypothesis in mind, it is possible that Dan has been dreaming his entire life, but has never remembered his dreams and never visited Dreamland; and that Alex has been dreaming (without memory), but not Dreaming (visiting Dreamland) for the last 8 years.

(Note that I am certainly not the first to consider two different dream-states; I’m mostly drawing from my familiarity with Robert Jordan’s Tel’aran’rhiod concept. I’m reasonably certain that his work is probably rooted in some real-world mythology somewhere.)

So, the point of all that rambling: no seizures.