lucid

I don't remember any of the visual content of this dream (though it was there), only thought and tactile sensations. Actually, I remember white light like a bright overcast morning, but none of the details. Then I remember 'becoming lucid' and beginning to shout 'increase lucidity', 'increase vividness', etc. which seems to work now, and then seeming to get some sort of response from the dream. But I can't remember the sense of 'wow, this is so real' that I take as the litmus test for lucidity. Notably, at some point in the dream I recall trying to strip naked, which suggests I wasn't fully lucid. If I were ever lucid in this dream, even semi-lucid, it would be an encouraging sign because unlike most I have, it happened during the night without ever waking up.

I think there was another dream that involved something about high-speed trains (my oldest dreamsign, going back to 2011 or earlier, is railway tracks).

I had this series of dreams after waking up early and going back to sleep, which is typical for my previous lucid dreams. I was familiar with some of the features of these dreams: a realistic environment not usually drawn from real life, realistic dream characters who are part of the scenery instead of the plot (and sometimes ignore me), and dream chaining.

I can't quite remember the beginning. Before I went to sleep, I recall deliberately daydreaming to occupy my mind, so it might have developed out of that. At some point I found that I could have WILDs really easily. All I needed to do was let my mind wander, I'd soon see some realistic imagery (or once, a geometric pattern), and at some point, rather than getting caught up in the dream's plot, I'd just go 'yep, this is a dream'. I was able to improve the quality by shouting 'increase lucidity' and so on. The dream chain included:

- One where I found myself in a large building with a vague 'institutional' feel, having corridors and a reception desk. Most of the dream characters seemed to ignore me, even after I did the "You're all in my dream, what do you think of that!?" thing, which I sort of felt like I wasn't supposed to do. I found an old lady who did respond to me and asked her something, but I don't remember what she said.

- A non-lucid false awakening in which a kid climbed through my window, much to my anger, causing me to go and get a sort of spatula in case I needed to repel the intruder.

- One where I found myself in a garden or courtyard surrounded by three-storey Edwardian architecture. There was a small, cubical brick building similar to a power substation. I decided to test my dream control abilities. Simply by telling the dream that my hands were sticky like a gecko's, I climbed up the brick wall and stood at the top. I then marvelled at the feat and pondered what to attempt next; I didn't want to try anything that might disrupt the dream. I considered trying to turn into an animal but rejected it, for example.

- Misc.: I also recall some SP-like sensations of shouting but having no voice coming out, being unable to feel myself breathing, or having a dry throat but being unable to clear it. I recall trying to shoot 'energy balls' out of my hands by sheer willpower and failing. I recall looking at my bedroom despite knowing my eyes were closed and sagely recognising it as a false awakening. I recall the realistic sensation of having an orgasm after doing nothing more than passingly thinking about it. I recall the sensation of partially separating from my body by sitting up in bed but failing to fully do so.

I don't know if the chain started with a real lucid dream, and I definitely caught onto one or two bits of false awakening imagery while still asleep, but as soon as I woke up in real life I realised that my supposed 'really easy WILDs' were actually all from a false awakening. I'd been dreaming about lucid dreaming the whole time.

Background

I'd known about lucid dreaming for a long time, but it took longer for me to experience it, and it was essentially spontaneously. I'd found I could accidentally go through a WILD-like trance when struggling to fall asleep after waking up early. The dreams would start off at a distance, like a television screen, and then become 'real', often as dream chains that I had some conscious influence over. Sometimes they were fragmented (e.g. being frozen in darkness, having very blurry vision, or the only sensation being the feeling of flying very fast), but now and then the clarity and reality of the scenes I experienced would blow me away. Still, I was unable to stabilise them. A few days ago I discovered that spoken commands like 'increase lucidity' could turn a vague fragment into a full-fledged visual scene, which was encouraging.

Waking Myself Up From A Burglary Dream

I'd told myself that I would write up any dreams I'd have that night and post them to DV for my first entry, so it's only fitting that I ended up having my first (semi-)lucid nightmare. After waking up in the morning and went back to sleep, I had a dream where I was sitting around a table with a few people, including, I think, a family friend. I was concerned about an exam that was coming up. I was worried that a question about acid-base chemistry was going to come up; something involving a base in ammonia, and I was sure that it was some other substance than the ammonia itself - NaBH4 or NH4OH. But the exam was cancelled because of an outbreak of 'parainfluenza', and this news was accompanied by the image of a woman with sore-looking yellow eyes. Since it was cancelled, I could rest easy and go to sleep.

This led into another dream where I was at home in the night, looking down the stairs so that I could see an area near the front door. I heard noises near the front door and looked closer. There was a fairly short man standing there. I thought it was my father - though I wasn't expecting to see him - so I called out to him. Rather than respond in kind, he shushed me, and I realised that it was an intruder. More of these intruders came through, so I retreated into a nearby empty room. At this point I began to suspect something was off. I thought I might be dreaming, but if so I wanted to wake up, so I could be sure and not have to worry about the intruders anymore. This wish suddenly ended the dream. It was replaced by text filling my field of view, being read off by a calm male voiceover. It said something along the lines of, "Welcome to your lucid dream. Wake up now or wake up dead in two weeks." At the time I think I had enough critical faculties to not be sure if this was right, but I realised I was in sleep paralysis and I really wanted to get out of it. I found that, surprisingly, I could slightly move my body with great effort. With what felt like a lot of willpower, I forced myself to move and woke up.

There wasn't any lingering feeling of terror, which is my usual criterion for a nightmare, but I think this fit the bill, if only because it made me realise that a semi-lucid dream could still be unpleasant.

Video Game Fragments

I was watching a boy playing a FPS game, switching between my view of him and a view inside the video game itself. He was clearing a large building with many corridors similar to a hospital - of what enemy I don't know - and then went up a curved staircase, which had many offices running alongside it, arranged in a staircase fashion themselves. The general aesthetic was wood and blue light. By entering this area he went into a sort of mini-game where he blitzed through the offices at high speed, which also involved strips of light flashing on his mousemat very fast. I thought it involved predicting the lights, but when I asked he told me that it was actually a very fast memory game, which observation seemed to confirm.

I thought about the idea of being sleep-deprived from addiction to virtual reality. I imagined a person distracting themselves from their tiredness by immersing themselves more into it. I have a dream in which I see scenes from an online FPS game called Xibalba, which I think actually represent a place within one level. Bizarrely, I also pondered the merits of a religion that worships the electron transition in one type of molecule (containing nitrogen!) versus a rival religion that worships another.