Thread: The Book of Dreams According to Endymion

To begin I thought I'd start things off with this fairly high-level LD I had recently. I think it highlights some unique things as well as some of the areas where I could use some improvement. Again, feel free to comment...

“Meeting Morpheus” [LD]
10/23/08
~4:30 a.m. (recalling at 7:00 a.m.)
[DILD; ~30 min]

Much more than ever I am kicking myself for writing this down so late after the dream happened…so many important events forgotten In the dream, I find myself lying in my bed in my RV, trying to WILD. I’m frustrated by a noise or a light that keeps coming on and off from my peripherals. Eventually I decide to get up and see what’s causing the disturbance. Around the corner I discover my mother watching TV or something. She is happy to see me, and walks up to me. We chat for a while, and then decide to go outside. As we are descending the steps outside my RV, I realize with a rush of consciousness that it makes no sense for my mom to be here right now. I look at my hand and count my fingers, and there are six, so I’m off!

The scene shifts, and I am standing outside my home in Green Bay. I remember to do some preparatory exercises, like remind myself I’m in a dream in real time, rub my hands together, shout “increase lucidity and clarity x1000!!” ask some memory questions out loud, and focus on the details of a particular object. I then decide to fly around for a while, landing on the top of my next door neighbor’s house. Finally I take the initiative to carry out my dream goal: finding Morpheus, lord of dreams, and asking him questions about lucidity. To do this, I try the spin a new dream scene technique. This takes a few tries to work, as the immediate result is a complete blackness – a total lack of visuals. This is interesting in itself, as the lack of a visual element seems to kick my mental focus into overdrive, leading to a high awareness of the fact that I’m in a lucid dream but everything around me is gone…like I’m inhabiting the inner recesses of my mind.

Eventually a new scene does appear, but it’s not what I expected. I find myself standing in the middle of a narrow, grated metal industrial staircase in a factory. I look around and briefly take in an impression of the setting, noticing a lot of blue and yellow hues. Workers are running up and down the staircase at a frantic pace, and I seem to be in their way. Somehow I exit the staircase and end up in a production bay full of light with many workers busying themselves on assembly lines. I walk down to the floor and start talking with a girl I take to be the manager. I ask her how to contact Morpheus, and she tells me that he’s on the top floor office.

Next thing I know I’m right in the entrance lobby on the top floor, which is a richly-textured, wood-paneled office space. I go up to the male receptionist and request an audience with Morpheus, but he says Morpheus is too busy to see anyone right now. Regardless, I ignore the receptionist and go wandering the halls looking for him. I find a closed door and set my expectation to see him in the next room. I open the door and am initially disappointed to see it empty, but to my delight, after a while Morpheus grabs my shoulder from behind and then keeps walking forward. Morpheus, physically, is a very tall black man (about 8 ft), with a fair amount of weight on him. He has short, vertical dreadlocks and is wearing only a thin crimson vest, unattached down the middle, showing part of his bare chest. He looks more native African than African-American.

I address him with respect and humility, then start asking him the questions I had prepared beforehand, struggling a bit to remember them. At first he doesn’t want to answer any of my questions, saying he’s too busy, and he walks out of his office down the corridors of the floor. I beg him to wait and answer my questions. I follow him where he’s walking and begin asking, “what is the key to achieving and maintaining the highest lucidity possible?” I don’t remember his answer, but I think it was indirect, like a riddle. I then ask him “how do I prevent unwanted dream characters from appearing in my dreams?” For this one he turns to face me as he answers, saying something like “look at the G & C Company; the answers you seek are contained therein” (In the dream he named a specific company, but now I can’t remember what he said; I only vaguely believe the initials were G & C). Once again he hastens to get on with his other business, but I press him, desperate to get answers. I ask him what is the secret to summoning and teleportation, but he is too far gone to answer these. I force myself to wake up so I would remember the answers I did receive, but even right as I woke these details were fading fast. Coupled with the fact that I didn’t record this dream until 2 hours later, a lot of useful information was lost.

After a few minutes I fall back asleep and reenter roughly the same dream (at least my goal is the same). Once again I encounter his receptionist/secretary, and, being calmer and more patient, offer to schedule an appointment. Luckily, this is not necessary because the next thing I know I am walking alongside Morpheus again, this time outside in an open garden rather than in his office. This time he’s not in such a hurry and more willing to listen. I’m pretty sure I ask similar questions again, but I have no recollection of the answers he gives.

Either before or after this final encounter with the dream lord (not sure of when chronologically), I find myself in a waiting room with my mother. We each have a phone receiver in our hands, and a phone cord connects the two receivers. Strangely, we are both floating as this happens, as if there is no gravity in the room. At this point I get really philosophical and ask her if she thinks I’m a character in her dream, she’s a character in my dream, or if we’re sharing this dream. I forget what she says

The last scene I remember is a false awakening (non-lucid) in my RV trailer in which my brother’s cat Geppetto is in the kitchen area with his female partner and a litter of whimpering kittens, which are all sitting in a bucket with a small pool of water at the bottom. The kittens are all stark white and have large ears and eyes and sharp, fang-like teeth. I start freaking out, unsure of what to do, thinking of how much of a potential headache this could be. I rather forcefully pick up his partner cat by the collar and toss her out the front door. As the door hangs open for a moment, a white fox appears on my steps and tries to jump through the open gap. Reacting quickly, I pin the fox against the door with my leg. He starts yelping, keeps pushing forward, and eventually gets in. Then the dream ends and I awaken for real.


LOG: 10/22/08 – 10/23/08

Supplements (& dosage) taken before bed: 100mg 5-HTP, 2.5mg Melatonin
Supplements taken in morning: 200mg Mucuna Pruriens, 600mg GPC, 8mg Galantamine, 400mg Choline (with toast to aid digestion)
After how many hours of sleep? 4.5
Dreaming when I woke up to take supplements? Yes
Exercises done after taking supplements: Repeating my intention
How long did it take to fall back asleep after taking supplements? Probably less than 1 hour
Sleep position: Directly on my back
Transition details (if WILD):
Intensity of vibrations, acceleration, or other part of transition:
Dream quality: 7
Ability to recall dream: 3
Visual vividness: 8
Tactile vividness: 6
Auditory vividness: 9
Participation level: 9
Lucidity level: 8
DILD or WILD? DILD
Ability to control reasoning: 8
Ability to control emotions: 7
Ability to control will: 6
Physical side effects? None
Mental side effects? None
Lessons or theories: Interesting to succeed so well at falling asleep on my back. It was smart to force myself to awaken after having my questions answered by Morpheus, but I really need to be more disciplined about writing dreams down right away after they happen so as not to lose details. Toast in the morning along with the capsules is definitely helpful to prevent stomach grumblings and murmurs.

Firestarter: How do you remember specific answers given to you by dream characters, especially when there are so many of them?

“Fireworks and Space Shuttles” [LD]
10/17/08
7:05 a.m
[DILD; ~10 min]

I find myself sitting down by myself in a restaurant that seems intimately familiar to me in the dream, but one I don’t recognize when I think back on it. I’m in one of those 2-person booths directly facing the entrance. I look up at the blank wall and think to myself how upset I am that they took down the TV that was positioned there. Soon after I think this, I notice a group of middle-aged women walk in that I realize are the mothers of classmates I had back in grade school, like Margaret G and Sharon H’s mom. I try to shrink back in my seat to avoid eye contact, but I think one of them sees me.

I contemplate leaving to avoid the pity invitation they’ll probably give me when the realize I’m all alone here, but stick around just a little too long. Sharon H’s mom comes up to me, but instead of inviting me to sit at their table as I expected, she starts talking about how she heard about the trail work I was doing at Wyalusing. She is particularly concerned about a check dam that she hopes I replaced. I tell her I’m not sure which particular check dam she’s referring to. Looking a little dissatisfied, she turns and leaves, but I could care less. I stand up to leave, but before I exit I sneak a peek at the kitchen, where I notice John P's mom cooking. I think this is strange but then it kind of “makes sense” when I leave the building and notice the building I actually was just in was John P’s house! I get on my bike with the intention of biking back to my RV at Wyalusing. Along the way, as I am on Rolling Green St. in Green Bay, I ride my bike by putting my chest on the seat and straightening my legs off the backside. I notice it begin to snow lightly, and realize that this is now just too strange to be real.

I dismount my bike and look at my hand as a reality check, and sure enough there are at least 6 fingers. Since it is nighttime, I try doing something I never thought of before or even set as a lucid goal: shooting off fireworks from my palm. I fire one off far away into the night sky, and the trail is faint so I’m skeptical, but a few seconds later the sky is lit up by a brilliant explosion of color. I’m amazed, and with a wave of my hand I extend the spectacle all across the sky, with hundreds of similar fireworks going off simultaneously, the grandest of finales. All the while this is happening, the song “Paradiso Del'Anima Persa” by J Ralph is playing, further adding drama and excitement to the scene.

Satisfied, I keep walking along, and eventually notice a NASA space shuttle about to launch (there are even small blue flames coming out from beneath it). I decide it would be cool to ride this shuttle into outer space, so I quickly run towards it. The path I’m following takes me through this building, which is very open like a gym and with windows giving me a constant view of the shuttle, but I can’t seem to be physically able to penetrate the windows, even while trying to fly through them (also there is a steel grid linking the windows together, making each window smaller than my body). I decide that this would be a good time to try to “spin a new dream scene” to get past the wall. I start spinning, and my visuals all go black, which make me worried I’m waking up, but several seconds later I’m right where I wanted to be, in front of the shuttle! Strangely, the shuttle then drops down a chute directly underneath it, apparently to build up momentum before it leaves the atmosphere. I stand there looking down into the abyss of the chute, the shuttle below where I can see. I take some time to marvel at the detail of the ledge I am sitting on, it’s ultra-smooth panels and vibrant hues of purple and blue and gold. The darkness beneath me makes me nervous about jumping down the chute to mount the shuttle, even though that’s what I would need to do to attach myself to it for launch. However, before I can make up my mind for good, my alarm clock rings and I awaken.

LOG: 10/16/08 – 10/17/08

Supplements (& dosage) taken before bed: 100mg 5-HTP, 2.5mg Melatonin
Supplements taken in morning: 8mg Galantamine, 400 mg Choline, 200 mg Mucuna Pruriens (plus toast to help digestion)
After how many hours of sleep? 5.5
Dreaming when I woke up to take supplements? Yes
Exercises done after taking supplements: Reiterating my intention, counting to myself
How long did it take to fall back asleep after taking supplements? 50-60 min
Sleep position: on my left
Transition details (if WILD):
Intensity of vibrations, acceleration, or other part of transition:
Dream quality: 8
Ability to recall dream: 7
Visual vividness: 6
Tactile vividness: 9
Auditory vividness: 8
Participation level: 9
Lucidity level: 8
DILD or WILD? DILD, but I was lucid right off the bat
Ability to control reasoning: 8
Ability to control emotions: 5
Ability to control will: 7
Physical side effects? None, not even the stomach grumbling I usually get with Galantamine (the toast probably helped)
Mental side effects? None; high level of energy when I woke up!

Lessons or theories: Keep using the spinning technique – it works very well. Flying around Iron Man style is quite do-able and effective. Strong need to stop treating DCs as if they have the power to stop me from completing my intentions.

“In Which I am a Domestic Terrorist”
11/10/08
~4:00 a.m.

I find myself in the Green Bay Wal-Mart parking lot holding onto a pack with about 5 homemade bombs gerry-rigged onto the back to disc golf discs. I also have another disc that can remotely detonate the bombs. My first target is a display near the front main entrance. I plant a bomb, then walk away about 100 feet before detonating it. As soon as I finish the deed, I get pretty scared, thinking the authorities have so many ways to identify me – that I did a poor job of being discreet about this. Even so, after the explosion there are no sirens blaring in the background or cops coming after me.

I then notice a cluster of holiday shoppers lined up right in front of the main entrance to Sam’s Club. Behind them, stretching back into the main parking lot, is a huge steel framework (like scaffolding with a giant gap in the middle for cars to drive through). All along this structure are posters saying “Cheney” in big bold letters. Also along the structure are many security cameras, with more being installed as I walk by. Nevertheless, I contemplate bombing the entire crowd, thinking how much damage I could do with so little effort. Then I reconsider that plan, worried about both compromising my morals as well as feeling fear of imprisonment for murder should I succeed. I decide it isn’t worth it, so I wait for the crowd to disperse before I plant a bomb near a cluster of shopping carts near the entrance.

I then return to my car, toss the extra bombs in the backseat, drive away, and right before the final turn out of the parking lot, detonate it. As I drive back to my Green Bay home, it starts snowing and (freezing) raining extremely hard. I have a terribly difficult time trying to see out of my front windshield. I take my glasses off and clean them several times in case they were the problem, but this doesn’t help.

Then instead of going straight at the final intersection, I turn left onto Packerland. Soon after this turn my mode of travel inexplicably turns to a bicycle. While I’m riding along on my bike, my back tire pops and the pressurized air goes flying out visibly in front of me. Two drivers, as they pass me, point to a bike shop on the left side of the street, but I just keep on riding forward with a flat tire because I want to get off the road as soon as possible.

My destination, my safe haven, is apparently a restaurant further down Packerland Ave. where I know the owners. Just as I enter the restaurant, I notice Butch S. and some other Ice Age Trail folks leaving with a plate of salad and some other dishes. I pass them by quickly even as Butch tries to greet me, as I’m so worried about being followed by the cops. The one reply I give them is a quick “yes” after they ask if they can use the Camry. Then Diane, the restaurant owner, sees me dripping wet in the front of her restaurant holding onto a bike. She’s obviously very upset at this scene, as she immediately grabs my hand and my bike and drags me into a back room, scolding me for repeatedly bringing my bike into her restaurant. I apologize, then the dream ends and I awaken.

LOG: 11/09/08 – 11/10/08
No supplements taken tonight (in fact, I was surprised to have such a vivid dream, having consumed a fair amount of alcohol the night before)

“Conversations with Jack-O-Lanterns and other Ghoulish Adventures” [LD]
11/12/08
~5:00-5:30 a.m.
[DILD; ~30 min]

I don’t know how this dream starts, but I think it is another DILD. The first thing I remember is brandishing a fierce katana with a soft, spongy handle. I hold this out directly in front of me as I make dramatic leaps and bounds for the sheer joy of it. The next thing that I remember is having a FA where I wake up in the backyard of my Green Bay home. Even so, I just know it’s around 6:00 a.m. and I have to get up to get to work on time. I stand up from the bench on the deck, and as I’m going to cross the screen door to get inside, my cousin Olivia R shows up, and from behind the screen asks me if I could help her with a puzzle she found in a newspaper. I tell her I can’t help her right now, as I am already probably late for work.

I have another FA in my Green Bay home but in a different room this time. When I get up, I ask my Mom if Olivia was here, and she says “how did you know?” Something about this makes me realize I’m dreaming, and I do yet another light switch RC to confirm, the light I use this time being the light over the backyard deck.

In the next scene I remember I find myself walking down Green Ridge Dr. at night. Across the street I notice a fairly large jack-o-lantern sitting on my neighbor’s lawn. I remember last month’s Dream Views task and decide that since a pumpkin is right here, I might as well see if I can get it to talk. I go up to it and introduce myself. Without any difficulty, the jack-o-lantern comes to life, getting even larger and looking at me. We have a short conversation but sadly I do not recall anything that was said.

Having regained lucidity at this point, I decide it would be a good idea to try my dream goal of summoning a genie from a lamp and using its wishes. I try the reach behind my back method of summoning multiple times, but can’t get it to work. Even after I fail at this, I rub my hands, thinking maybe the lamp is unnecessary to conjure the genie. No genie appears, but as a pleasant side effect the dream becomes more vivid because of the hand rubbing.

The next scene I find myself walking down Open Gate St., once again in my old neighborhood, at night. Continuing on with the Halloween theme, I notice two boys approaching me in the dim light. They are each carrying chainsaws, and immediately the dream turns into a nightmare as they try to hunt me down and slice me with their chainsaws, even though I try to ignore them at first. This doesn’t work, as the next thing I feel is one of their saws slicing into my back. I turn around and decide to fight back. Somehow I procure a chainsaw of my own, though it is much smaller than the ones the boys have, and theirs seem to even be expanding and getting bigger (one even turning into a pole-chainsaw) as I hopelessly try to deflect the bars. Multiple times I feel the blades slice my body, but they never go all the way through and it isn’t realistic pain, more like tickling. Eventually I put a stop to this madness by simply telling them to stop.

The next thing I know my attackers and I, along with other formerly costumed Halloweeners are cleaning off in a locker room type setting. I discover that the boys who attacked me are just actors and didn’t have any malicious intent in their actions. I meet some other interesting people, most notably a brunette who introduces herself as Monica Osborne, who is a reporter for a school newspaper and interviews me about the chainsaw scene. She is wearing novelty glasses where one eye is normal and the other is replaced with a googly eye along with a shiny blue Halloween costume.

After meeting Monica and deciding her name to be of some importance to remember, I try to force myself to wake up. However, I have the hardest time actually doing so. Granted, it takes me a while remember how to do so correctly…first I just shout “wake up now!!” which just triggers a string of FAs. In one FA I’m sliding my head across my bedroom floor in frustration at still being in the dream. In another, I find myself on my bed with pills and supplements (mainly Melatonin tablets) strewn all about my bed. Finally I remember to just lie down and “go to sleep” in order to wake up, which does in fact wake me up for real.

LOG: 11/11/08 – 11/12/08

Supplements (& dosage) taken before bed: 100mg 5-HTP, 5mg Melatonin
Supplements taken in morning: 600mg GPC, 200mg Mucuna Pruriens, 8mg Galantamine, 400mg Choline (plus pop-tart to aid digestion)
After how many hours of sleep? 5
Dreaming when I woke up to take supplements? No
WBTB session length (if applicable): about 10 min
Exercises done after taking supplements: repeating my intentions x2
How long did it take to fall back asleep after taking supplements? ~ 1 hour
Sleep position: on my left, tilted slightly up for the first dream. On my right, legs crossed for the next two dreams
Dream quality: 4
Ability to recall dream: 5
Visual vividness: 7
Tactile vividness: 3
Auditory vividness: 6
Participation level: 8
Lucidity level: 3
DILD or WILD? DILD
Ability to control reasoning: 5
Ability to control emotions: 3
Ability to control will: 3
Physical side effects? Stomach grumbling
Mental side effects? none
Lessons or theories: Try summoning objects by reaching into an unseen area and expecting to pick them up instead of just reaching behind my back. Rolling has become an established, effective way to break out of the limbo state between wakefulness and sleep when doing WILDs. Work on remembering conversations, even if this means forcing myself to awaken.

“Meeting Old Schoolmates on the Way to the Yellow Brick Road” [LD]
11/17/08
~3:40 a.m – 4:30 a.m.
[WILD; ~50 min]

This dream actually starts out as a regular nonlucid dream in which lucidity is talked about. I find myself with my family in our Green Bay home but with elements of my RV in it. For example, in the first scene I am with my brothers, all sitting in a booth downstairs. We are all interested in lucid dreaming and are attempting to have one, but Sam is yelling or chanting something while I am trying to relax completely and fall asleep with a WILD. Eventually I give up because of the noise, yell at him for being so disruptive, and leave the room.

I finally get some quiet alone time in a room upstairs. I lie down and this time successfully WILD (within the dream). The sensation of the transition is so vivid and real though that it felt like I was WILD-ing from an awakened state. When I judge to be past the threshold, I roll out of my body into my other dream body. At first everything is black and I feel disoriented, stumbling around a lot, perhaps with a headache. Eventually I make my way out of the room and find myself in a much more spacious and luxurious dwelling than my Green Bay home really is. The first room I enter is a very bright kitchen area with sunlight streaking in everywhere. I see a digital clock on the stove (which is embedded into an island-bar). Out of habit, I decide to do a RC, and sure enough the time changes from 1:20 to 1:02, with constant fluctuation even when I am looking right at it. Parts of the interior environment change before my eyes and become even more spacious & luxurious without any direct intent on my part. My mother makes an appearance from the floor upstairs and I ask her where “Easter breakfast” is. She replies, “in a minute” (or something...weird).

I snap back into a more heightened awareness and decide to leave the house, do my LD prep and attempt my dream goal of following the yellow brick road (DreamView’s November task of the month). As I exit from the front door, I notice everything man-made is the front yard is made of very finely finished (mahogany?) wood – columns, tables, even the floor (driveway) itself. As I walk then I do my LD prep, first saying “this is happening in the here and now, this very moment” (I find this incredibly helpful in boosting mental clarity). Then I rub my hands together, shout “increase lucidity now!” and “increase clarity now!” The combination of all these things is very impressive and as a result the dream is amazingly clear and vivid. I remember to remember a recent memory, but I’m not sure if I succeed or fail at this (I can’t recall the memory I would have remembered), but I proceed as if I succeed, since I don’t dwell on it. To complete my LD prep I focus on the dream scenery and marvel at how I can create such a world from my mind. At this last point, after jogging for a while, I find myself outside of the all-wooden area and am in a heavily landscaped area with stone blocks and a view out onto a tremendous city.

I decide to get down to business and find the yellow brick road. I say to myself, “I know with 100% certainty that the yellow brick road lies around the next corner” to build up my expectation. So I turn the corner and…nothing, just the same type of scenery. I’m frustrated but keep jogging around, trying to think of another way to get there. Somewhere along the line I decide to take to the skies and fly. Not long after I’m airborne, I spy a bridge with some people on it. I descend onto the bridge near two girls, one blonde and the other a darker-skinned brunette with a large face that I recognize as an acquaintance from high school (her name escapes me at the moment). After I land I ask them if they know where the yellow brick road is. The blonde is quick to answer, saying something along the lines of, “Oh, I’ve been there many years ago, but I forgot where it is now.” I ignore them and fly off once again.

The next scene I can remember, I find myself in a partially-indoor harbor of some kind which is surrounded on 3 sides by walls. I walk up a central platform and once again marvel at how vivid and clear this dream is. Then the visuals begin to fade. Luckily, I recognize this quickly, and save the dream by spinning. Back on the platform, I notice a boy standing next to me who I recognize as someone who was one grade behind me in grade school. I ask him if he knows how to get to the yellow brick road. He says he doesn’t, but his buddy does, and he points to another boy a few levels up behind an open window along one of the harbor walls. So I fly from the platform over to the friend, landing inside the opening. This is also a boy that I went to grade school with, but I can’t remember his name. After I ask him about the road, he points and tells me I need to get on the raft that’s just about the leave the harbor.

Following his instructions, I fly down to the waiting raft, but the captain, a white-haired Aussie with an attitude, tells me I’ll be killed flying around like that. Out of respect, I land on the solid ground next to the docked raft before I board on foot. Right away we are off, floating in a very narrow and controlled channel. We take a left out of the harbor and continue on the narrow channel. Once we are completely out of sight of the main harbor docking area, another boy grasps tightly onto my hands under the captain’s orders, locking my wrists together. The captain then says this is a necessary precaution for his own protection. Despite my feeling of bitterness, I go along with it, at least until they can take me to the yellow brick road.

Eventually we dock up and disembark where the channel ends. We continue walking on foot through another corridor. After some minutes pass, I decide I can’t stand being locked up like this anymore, so I thrash wildly to get the kid off me. This proves very hard, and he won’t let go. I am even more frustrated because I realize that since I’m lucid this kind of shit shouldn’t stop me from exercising control over the dream, but yet it does. Shortly after I have this thought, I awaken.

LOG: 11/06/08 – 11/17/08

Supplements (& dosage) taken before bed: 100mg 5-HTP, 2.5mg Melatonin
Supplements taken in morning: 600mg GPC, 200mg Mucuna Pruriens, 8mg Galantamine, 400mg Choline (plus pop-tart to aid digestion)
After how many hours of sleep? 5
Dreaming when I woke up to take supplements? Yes (about a toxic purple haze)
WBTB session length (if applicable): ~ 30 min
Exercises done after taking supplements: Repeating my intentions x2
How long did it take to fall back asleep after taking supplements? ~ 1 hour
Sleep position: on my left, tilted slightly up
Transition details (if WILD): gentle, tactile, with me rolling out of my body
Intensity of vibrations, acceleration, or other part of transition: 3
Dream quality: 9
Ability to recall dream: 9
Visual vividness: 9
Tactile vividness: 6
Auditory vividness: 7
Participation level: 9
Lucidity level: 8
DILD or WILD? WILD within dream
Ability to control reasoning: 8
Ability to control emotions: 5
Ability to control will: 2
Physical side effects? Stomach grumbling, gas when I woke from dream
Mental side effects? None

Lessons or theories: I find it is a lot easier to remember numbers from dreams (even ones seen early on) than conversations. Case in point today was the numbers from the digital clock RC. Remember to try to get a soundtrack playing when taking GPC. When I can sleep in some more I should try to take the Mucuna and the GPC earlier to try to synchronize their peak plasma times with Galantamine.

“Fugitive from the Lucid Dreaming Authorities” [LD]
11/25/08
6:00 a.m. – 7:00 a.m.
[WILD; ~ 1 hour]

This starts out as a WILD with a fairly significant gap in consciousness, but when I regain it my dream body is lying down in the basement in my sleeping bag just as I was before I went to bed. The thing that makes me regain consciousness and realize I’m dreaming is the fact that the TV is on right in front of me, and it wasn’t when I went to bed. Onscreen is a football game featuring a team with maroon jerseys. Instead of lifting my body up, then walking off upright, I levitate/hover over horizontally from the couch to the open carpet, and only then do I pick myself up and stand upright. So it is essentially an OBE transition.

The room is very dark at this point. I think about how to get out of my basement, then decide to try flying straight up through the ceiling. However, this doesn’t work so well and I end up just walking up the stairs. When I get to my kitchen I see my father and brother in there lounging around. I go up to my father and ask him, “Do you know that you’re a character in my dream?” I forget what he says, if anything.

I then walk out to the deck in my backyard. It’s still very dark (nighttime), so I decide to try to add some light to the scene by making the sun rise. It takes a while before I catch on to what I need to visualize to make this work: displacing the stars to make room for the sun. When the sun finally does come up, it is quite pale and tiny, almost like a bright moon. I stay on the back deck a while and do some LD prep. First I remind myself that I’m dreaming and that this is happening “in the here and now – this very moment.” Then I do a lot of hand rubbing, shout “increase lucidity now!” and “increase clarity now!” These last two gestures don’t seem to do much to enhance lucidity, but what really makes a difference is focusing intently on objects like the beams of wood in my deck and a hanging lamp. Everything is crystal clear after doing this. Satisfied enough, I walk back inside, planning to use one of the doors as a portal to the yellow brick road.

While inside, I walk down the hallway to the front door and try very hard to expect to see the yellow brick road on the other side, but when I open the door it’s not there…all I see is my front yard. Disappointed, I stay inside, closing the door and trying the portal/expectation method on other doors in the house, to no avail.

I think I then have another FA back to where I’m sleeping in the basement. Everything is dark again, though I do notice a shiny, curvy and sharp axe just sitting feet from where I “woke up.” It’s unusual but I don’t give it more than a passing thought. Somehow I then get upstairs, but I’m not sure how. Once there I go back outside and raise the sun, but this time it is much easier now that I can visualize the stars shifting and making way for it. After I go back inside I decide to abandon the yellow brick road attempt after so many failures. Instead I go for the old standby: sex.

As I walk upstairs I just happen to encounter two very interesting females that are putting out like crazy. I say interesting because they look to me to be more like faeries; roughly human-sized but smaller, with delicate features and wearing bright-colored, flowing attire (though mainly a lot of skin is showing). I was planning on summoning my usual partner, Evelyn, but with these two so willing I thought I’d just accept the winds of fate and make love to them instead. I tell them to follow me and we arrive at one of the second floor bedrooms. There it is very flirty and sensual, and I’m especially attracted to the girl wearing pink. At first I don’t remember explicitly undressing, but I do remember a lot of kissing, which feels great and authentic.

Before long I hear a noise in the other room. Someone opens the door and I realize that I am victim once again to my own subconscious sabotage; DCs appear to be flooding the outer room. I tell the faerie-girls to hide under the bed while I go deal with them. Unfortunately, I don’t learn my lesson from prior experience and my way to “deal” with them is to try slamming the door shut against their oncoming bodies, as if my sheer physical force I could get them to leave and then lock the door. There are two men who have their arms partway stuck in the door when I go to slam it shut, and they aren’t budging. To escalate things, I whip out a katana from God knows where and start hacking at their arms. Gashes appear in their arms, but the two guys just laugh and refuse to budge. I realize this is a losing battle and sprint back into the room. The girl in pink looks at me with tender and solemn eyes and says “you promised.” Man, if only girls were this willing in real life! I think I try to console her, but I only have seconds before the room is overrun with DCs.

Once again I’m pretty sure I have another FA here. When I get back up to ground level I go outside and, still intent on having sex, decide to use the corner of my house to summon Evelyn and do this without so much drama. However, despite calling her name, Evelyn fails to appear. I’m beginning to suspect that it’s much harder to summon using the expectation method in such a high-level LD. Frustrated, I fly about, not really even knowing what to do anymore. I see the moon up in the night sky, and, noticing it is about five times larger than usual, am tempted to try to fly there. I start my flight, but I soon reach a limit above which I can’t fly. The moon shrinks back down after this failed attempt as if to mock me.

The next thing I remember is having another FA, this time right on my front lawn next to my driveway. After I do a quick RC in which I have six fingers, I get out of my sleeping bag and see, projected against the night sky in the distance, what looks to be a website displaying very confidential and sensitive information. I make a sincere effort to remember what I’m seeing, but as soon I resolve to do this, I get a significant pain in my hips and a stern male voice booms out from the sky something along the lines of: “You were not supposed to see this. Forget everything you saw and just wake up.” The threat and the physical pain are enough to get me to try to do as the voice commanded, though I still try to make every effort to remember the words I saw projected (ultimately I failed at this, because I don’t remember).

Unfortunately, despite lying down to try to wake myself up, I still have another FA, and just a few yards away from where I just laid down no less! When I get up I see pictured blocks with images of leaves on them, which I can’t really explain. I’m fully aware that I’m still dreaming at this point, but now I’m just desperately trying to find a way to wake up so I can remember the words I saw earlier. I notice a crowd gathered on my front lawn, on the other side of the driveway. I just intuitively know that these are the LD authorities, in league with the man whose voice boomed out from the sky at me earlier. They are gathered to discuss my fate and any possible punishments. Instead of fleeing though, I go right up to them and start punching them, possibly even taking out a weapon and swinging it at them. They start to flee to where they’re just out of reach, then send this ferocious pit bull at me. Before I can even react, it has its jaws clamped around my right arm and is not letting go. Interestingly, the pain is a lot like the pressure put on your arm when taking a blood pressure test. It is mild and spread out rather than acute and sharp. I finally have the presence of mind to try LaBerge’s method here, looking the dog in the eyes and telling it “I love you.” This works perfectly; the dog instantly lets go, then just sits there in front of me obediently, tongue hanging out. I pet its head, saying things like “who’s a good doggie?” etc., until I finally tell it to go attack its owners (who are standing not too far back from this whole scene). It just scampers back innocently, all malice apparently drained away by my gesture of empathy.

Satisfied, I walk away from the whole scene, back towards my house. Before I can get inside, however, I am confronted by a middle-aged woman who introduces herself as “Duncan Heima” (strange name for a woman, I know). She says she is president of the LD Institute or Authority or something (basically, the same group that was gathering together deciding my fate). She tells me, “the crimes you committed today are indeed serious, but we’re willing to grant you leeway because before you came along it was long thought that males were unable to issue commission (by which she means ejaculate) in dreams.” Needless to say I am weirded out by this statement. I ask for her name once again and she tells me. She asks for me to follow her into their van for some more questioning or something. I go along without complaint. As we are getting situated in the van, with Miss Heima in the middle between myself and one other person (a tight fit), I notice some more of her features: she is brown skinned, shorter and stockier, with gentle and delicate features. I can’t help but ask for her name a third time just to be absolutely sure I remember it when I awaken. She laughs because she thinks this is silly or that I’m retarded or something, but does for a third time tell me her name. And even after hearing it three times I am still not sure I remember it 100% correctly. Finally, shortly after this I awaken for real and resolve to see if I can find out if this “Duncan Heima” is a real person.

LOG: 11/24/08 – 11/25/08

Supplements (& dosage) taken before bed: 100mg 5-HTP, 2.5mg Melatonin
Supplements taken in morning: 600mg GPC, 200mg Mucuna Pruriens, 8mg Galantamine, 400mg Choline, 2400mg Piracetam (after dream)
After how many hours of sleep? 4.75
Dreaming when I woke up to take supplements? Yes
WBTB session length (if applicable): 35 min
Exercises done after taking supplements: Repeating my intentions x2
How long did it take to fall back asleep after taking supplements? ~ 1 hour
Sleep position: On my left
Transition details (if WILD): I regain consciousness and realize I’m dreaming when I notice the fact that the TV is on right in front of me, and it wasn’t on when I went to bed. Instead of lifting my body up, then walking off upright, I levitate/hover over horizontally from the couch to the open carpet, and only then do I pick myself up and stand upright. So it is essentially an OBE transition.
Intensity of vibrations, acceleration, or other part of transition: 3
Dream quality: 9
Ability to recall dream: 9
Visual vividness: 9
Tactile vividness: 8
Auditory vividness: 8
Participation level: 10
Lucidity level: 9
DILD or WILD? WILD (ish)
Ability to control reasoning: 8
Ability to control emotions: 5
Ability to control will: 3
Physical side effects? Lots of stomach grumbles, mainly because I didn’t take any food with my supplements this morning
Mental side effects? Very distressing to try to wake up and be unable to, especially using a tried-and-true method. I woke up with a lot of “mental weight,” meaning the end of the dream was very dramatic and intense and it carried over in my emotions after waking.

Lessons or theories: Showing kindness to DCs actually works to get them to stop bothering you. Need to incorporate this more into my responses to DCs rather than being quick to violence. Using doors and the expectation method to summon things has been consistently failing for me for a while now, and this failure seems to be a vicious cycle because it instills doubt and lack of confidence into all my future attempts. I either need to try summoning something less ambitious and build my confidence back up or try a new method entirely, because this is severely hampering my ability to complete my dream goals. After this dream I did a Google search for “Duncan Heima” and some alternate spellings, but nothing came up

“Lego Brick Road” [LD]
11/29/08
6:00 a.m. – 7:00 a.m.
[WILD; ~ 1 hour]

The transition from wakefulness to sleep is very direct; no gaps in consciousness as far as I can tell. I have the sensation of my brain falling asleep like any other body part. Eventually I just know that I can roll out of my bed and into my dream body (OBE). Sure enough, this works on the first try. Everything is dark and I am very disoriented, stumbling around and having a headache too. I am in my basement (where I fell asleep). I turn around and try to add light to the scene through sheer force of will. I am somewhat successful, because as I turn the corner the next thing I see is my cat. When he sees me he turns around and darts off in sheer terror, leading me to entertain the possibility that this is a genuine OBE and this animal, my cat, sees my astral body and is afraid. Well I get to test this theory because I wake up right after this encounter, and when I do I realize that my cat has no way of getting into the basement – I specifically took him up and shut the door before this attempt so he couldn’t crawl over me and wake me up in the middle of an LD.

It takes me a few minutes to fall back asleep, but when I do I have another WILD, emerging once again in my basement. This time I can stay in the dream long enough to walk to the top of the stairs and into my kitchen. I look around and see some family members but basically ignore them. The whole scene is still quite dark, so I open the door to the backyard and walk out. I hold my hands up to the sky and concentrate really hard on making the sun rise. It takes longer than usual, possibly because it’s cloudy and I have to “part the clouds,” but eventually I add more light to the scene by causing these strange wisps of light to appear high in the sky. They are basically translucent rectangular strands that shimmer with light from all the colors of the rainbow. It’s actually quite beautiful, but at the time I was disappointed that I failed to get the sun to appear. Then I do some LD prep like rub my hands together and focus in on specific objects to increase my senses (I think I remember even licking a post or something).

I walk back through the house and into the front yard. Despite my past failures, I decide to try to walk the yellow brick road (YBR) again. Since the expectation and the “politely asking DCs” methods have failed me, I resolve to DEMAND that a DC take me to the YBR. I find someone and demand that he take me there right this instant, but here some of the details are lost and my recall is fragmented. I know that someone leads me into this very tightly enclosed, claustrophobic office space. A receptionist directs me into an even smaller private office down the hall. When I walk in it is vacant, and I walk over to the corner, a little cubby with a glass window looking out onto the hallway. While staring out through it, I hear a noise in the main office area behind me. Hoping not to disturb anyone, I try to walk through the glass, pushing experimentally with my fingers first. Unfortunately I don’t have the willpower to accomplish this, though it is a skill I should work on in the future. So I’m forced to walk back through the private office before I can get to the hallway. As I walk through, a lawyer is talking to his client. I try to be discreet, but the lawyer notices me immediately and starts fuming, yelling at me about how this is a private space, I have no right to be in here, etc. I just ignore this pompous asshole and get out as fast as I can.

Somehow I arrive back at my front driveway. A little unsure of how to proceed in my goal, I just fly around for a while. As I am discovering to be the case, I have a very easy time moving side-to-side, but back and forth motion in the air is much more difficult. But as I’m playing around, I discover a technique that works for me: tilting my body forward when I want to move forward and backward when I want to move backward. Makes sense I guess, but I hadn’t tried it until now!

I fly around some more and somehow end up at a crowded mall or plaza. I enter a restaurant and see my grade school friend Mike G. sitting down in a booth with his family, waiting for their order to arrive. My subconscious probably inserted him into this dream because I saw him while doing a charity run the other day. Anyway, I run up to him from behind and begin shaking his shoulders (almost violently), commanding him to take me to the YBR. He seems annoyed, but tells me to enter a certain secret backdoor on the other end of the mall.

So I walk over to the door he described and open it. On the other side is a complete change of scenery. I’m outdoors and the landscape is a very barren desert with rolling sand dunes in the distance. A railroad line runs right in front of the door, and two workers are sitting there trying to look busy. I go up to one of them and demand that he take me to the YBR. All he does is laugh at me and tell me that the YBR is 8000 miles to the south. I despair at this and think that there’s no way I can fly there in time before I awaken. Luckily though, I hear the train coming down the tracks. I figure I can take the train to the YBR, so I hop on as it passes.

Time is condensed here, because the next thing I know I’m standing in front of this strange factory. I enter the main doors and realize that, at long last, I am there! I’ve found the YBR, but it’s nothing like I anticipated; I’m standing on yellow Lego bricks that are moving on a conveyor belt further into the interior of the factory. I stand on the bricks, letting the device take me forward into the great unknown. However, after a while something goes wrong: the bricks are no longer perfect rectangles of that golden yellow, but all kinds of odd shapes and all kinds of colors. On top of that, the conveyor belt switches direction, so now I have to walk against the direction of motion (like a treadmill). I struggle to maintain my balance, and eventually fall off entirely. As soon as I hit the ground, it seems, I am confronted by none other than Willy Wonka and a group of his oompa-loompas. He tells me that he is dreadfully sorry that his road malfunctioned and that he’ll try to get it fixed right away. Then he leaves, but one of his oompa-loompas stays behind. He comes up to me and asks me, “How long did it take you to get to the yellow brick road?” I reply, “about a month.” He says, incredulously, “a month? Most people take years to get here and have to defeat either the good or evil dragons to do so. It’s much more efficient to do what you did and just go the business route.” This statement amuses me greatly, but I notice I’m having hip pains and I awaken right then, unable to continue the conversation with this strange creature.

LOG: 11/28/08 – 11/29/08

Supplements (& dosage) taken before bed: 100mg 5-HTP, 2.5mg Melatonin
Supplements taken in morning: 600mg GPC, 200mg Mucuna Pruriens, 8mg Galantamine, 400mg Choline, 2400mg Piracetam (after dream)
After how many hours of sleep? 5
Dreaming when I woke up to take supplements? Yes
WBTB session length (if applicable): 30 min
Exercises done after taking supplements: Repeating my intentions x2
How long did it take to fall back asleep after taking supplements? 1 hour
Sleep position: on my left
Transition details (if WILD): Very direct; with no gaps in consciousness as far as I can tell. I have the sensation of my brain falling asleep like any other body part. Eventually I just know that I can roll out of my bed and into my dream body (OBE). Sure enough, this works on the first try.
Intensity of vibrations, acceleration, or other part of transition: 2
Dream quality: 6
Ability to recall dream: 7
Visual vividness: 7
Tactile vividness: 8
Auditory vividness: 5
Participation level: 9
Lucidity level: 8
DILD or WILD? WILD
Ability to control reasoning: 8
Ability to control emotions: 6
Ability to control will: 4
Physical side effects? Stomach grumbling and gas
Mental side effects? None

Lessons or theories: I’m actually quite surprised that demanding a result from DCs is more effective than asking politely, but it seemed to work better in my multi-LD quest to find the YBR. Unlike when I first started taking supplements, I’m finding now that all my WILDs seem to be OBE-like in nature. I’m also surprised that I had no FAs that I can recall…most of my long LDs are characterized by many FAs. I need to also remember to also lay off the Mucuna Pruriens for a while because it hasn’t been helping recently. Overall, I'm just super-happy to have completed the task of the month after trying so long to so!

“Castle in the Sky” [LD]
12/02/08
7:00 a.m. – 7:50 a.m.
[WILD; 50 min]

Unlike most of my recent WILDs, this one is not OBE-like in nature, but rather one in which I enter a scene that was formulating in my mind through hypnagogic imagery. I don’t remember much about the scene I enter except that it is in an interior hallway. I feel like I have to exert a fair amount of effort to insert myself into the scene. My recall for the rest of the dream that follows is very fragmentary, so I’ll just jump from fragment to fragment of what I remember (not necessarily in chronological order).

I vaguely remember doing my LD prep, rubbing my hands and shouting “increase lucidity x1000!!” (neither of which has much effect on the dream). But when I focus on the grains in the wooden board of my back deck, the dream’s clarity increases noticeably. I also remember trying to get a soundtrack playing and succeeding, but I forget what song or even what kind of music plays. Then I find myself standing on the street in front of my house. I’m kind of unsure of what to do, forgetting my goal of experimenting with different modes of travel/teleportation. So I just fly straight up, possibly thinking of visiting other planets for the DV task of the year. At first I go up at an incredible rate, almost as if reverse gravity is in effect (accelerating). Buildings get smaller and smaller until they fade entirely. But eventually I can’t sustain it any longer and I begin tilting over like an arc and then falling. The scene fades away before I hit the ground.

The next scene(s) I remember is a series of FAs that happen right in the basement, where I am actually sleeping. As a side note, when I did my WBTB, I heard lots of noise coming from the floor above me due to my brother getting ready to leave for school. In this FA, the noise continues and keeps me from getting “back to sleep,” so I am really annoyed. I yell up at them to quiet down. My brother then comes down and makes fun of me for trying to WILD, poking me and making it impossible to get back to sleep. While this is happening I have a sort of “dual-awareness,” like I am halfway between being in the room with my brother and halfway in another LD. I tell him this and sort of use it as a threat, like, “I could use my lucid powers on you” or something lame like that. This happens a number of times, each time the room changing slightly to become more and more bereft of furniture. By the end of it, all there is in the room is an antique-looking tan couch. I think seeing this change finally reignites my lucidity and I break free from the cycle of FAs.

Some time later I find myself waiting in line at some cafeteria surrounded by stone walls. It takes me a few moments, but then I regain my lucidity and take the opportunity to kiss a pretty girl who is standing in front of me in line. After I withdraw, she has a big smile on her face (I think she really enjoyed it…and so did I!) I then walk out of the cafeteria into an exterior courtyard. I walk to the edge, then look out over the side. I am amazed to realize that this whole complex – this castle – is floating thousands of feet in the sky. For some reason, I have a burning desire to jump off and just see what happens. So I jump off and experience the most realistic sensation of falling I have ever had in a dream. I fall for a long time, perhaps a minute or so, before I think about how great it would be if a griffin swooped in and caught my fall a la Gandalf in Lord of the Rings. Almost as soon as I think this, it happens! A majestic brown griffin swoops in and I grasp it, riding on its back. We fly upwards at an incredible speed, and I can feel the wind whip against my face as we punch through clouds on our way back to the flying castle. It is so realistic, much more so than any of my solo attempts at flying – not to mention so fun and exhilarating…perhaps more so than I have ever had in an LD before. However, that’s the last I can remember of the dream before I wake up (though possibly more could’ve happened that I don’t remember).

LOG: 12/01/08 – 12/02/08

Supplements (& dosage) taken before bed: 100mg 5-HTP, 2.5mg Melatonin
Supplements taken in morning: 600mg GPC, 8mg Galantamine, 400mg Choline (plus pop-tart to aid digestion) and 2400mg Piracetam (after dream)
After how many hours of sleep? 5
Dreaming when I woke up to take supplements? Yes
WBTB session length (if applicable): 35 min
Exercises done after taking supplements: Repeating my intentions x3
How long did it take to fall back asleep after taking supplements? 1 hour
Sleep position: on my left
Transition details (if WILD): not OBE-like in nature, but rather one in which I enter a scene that was formulating in my mind through hypnagogic imagery. I don’t remember much about the scene I enter except that it is in an interior hallway. I feel like I have to exert a fair amount of effort to insert myself into the scene.
Intensity of vibrations, acceleration, or other part of transition: 6
Dream quality: 9
Ability to recall dream: 4
Visual vividness: 5
Tactile vividness: 7
Auditory vividness: 7
Participation level: 7
Lucidity level: 6
DILD or WILD? WILD
Ability to control reasoning: 5
Ability to control emotions: 5
Ability to control will: 4
Physical side effects? Slight stomach grumbling
Mental side effects? None

Lessons or theories: It would’ve been nice to have a December task of the month to work on, as I sort of struggled to come up with a dream goal during my WBTB session. I need to do better at remembering to do a RC every time I wake up so I can recognize FAs for what they are. I don’t know if this had anything to do with recall, but I didn’t take Mucuna Pruriens this morning and my recall was quite spotty. I’ll be sure to do a comparison next time I do decide to take the Mucuna.

“The Great Sleigh Ride” [LD]
12/05/08
7:05 a.m. – 8:00 a.m.
[WILD; ~55 min]

This dream started off with a rather interesting WILD transition. I had read on the DV forums about someone using the circular motion of the wheel-lever on a fire hydrant as an anchor to grasp onto and pull oneself into the dream. I decided to try and use this method, so when I felt all my other body parts fall asleep, I concentrated on the image. Although I’m a pretty poor visualizer, the grasping motion and consequent rotation of my hand (and body) along with the wheel was very visceral and real, despite the blackness that I saw. At that point it felt like my head was detached from my body, my consciousness was concentrated all in my head, and my head was spinning downwards into my pillow. Eventually a scene appears, and it just happens to be a few feet from where I am sleeping (in my basement).

Luckily, the light is on already so I don’t have to worry about that. And at this point I have what I would call perfect lucidity (a 10 on all the scales in my log), a clarity of mind undiluted by frustration with DCs, extended dreamtime, or anything else. It’s a full transfer of consciousness from waking to sleeping – high level lucidity in the true sense of the word. Unfortunately, this state doesn’t last long. The first thing I see when I enter the scene is 3 white strings hanging from the ceiling (where normally there is one – for turning on the light), which I judge to be odd even at the time. Then I walk a few paces forward and recite my starting line, “This is a dream. This is happening in the here and now. Stay aware and focused and in the moment. Don’t get distracted.” Then I hold up my left hand and look at my fingers. Although I have five, I notice that my middle finger is bent at the joint where it normally could not bend. Curious, I decide to see if I can move it back into place. Amazingly, this action occurs both in the dreamworld and the real world…when I move my left middle finger in the dream I also move it on my sleeping body. It is enough to cause me to awaken.

Without moving then I attempt to DEILD. It takes me a few minutes, but I manage to WILD again. This time I also have the “spinning down through my pillow” sensation. My memory isn’t as sharp here though, as I only vaguely remember appearing somewhere around my house. I remember doing some of my LD prep, like rubbing my hands together, shouting “increase lucidity now!” and focusing in on an object – but I don’t recall exactly where all this takes place, although I think it’s in my backyard. Here I also raise the sun to add light to the scene.

This next part is part speculation based on what I had planned to do in the dream beforehand, but my recall isn’t sufficient to fully claim this all happened (and I need to fill in the plot gap somehow). Anyway, I turn around and use the gate in my backyard to try to summon Morpheus, lord of dreams. I politely ask him to come in through the gate, and he does. I summoned him because I have been having trouble teleporting to a desired location, and thought I could have him take me there and relieve some of the burden on myself. I tell him I want to get to the North Pole so I can get on Santa’s sleigh and complete the DV task of the month. He asks me to grab onto his arm, and I obey. Then both of us begin spinning.

The scene goes black for a while. Then I reemerge in a Christmas-themed waiting room, sans Morpheus. In this room there are many families waiting in one of those windy snake-lines to see Santa. I decide there’s no reason for me to wait, so I use my lucid powers to “toss” people out of my way with a flick of my hand (like magic). I get to the end of the room but don’t see Santa right away. So I say, “Oh Santa, you can come out now” and sure enough he appears. I then say something like “meet me at the sleigh.” I jump through the nearest window to the “tarmac” right outside. I see the landed sleigh right in front of me, with Santa in the reins. It’s a green-colored vehicle of very modern design…sleek curves on an overall oval-shaped sleigh (almost looks like a mini Mon Calamari Cruiser from Star Wars) and no reindeer in sight (it’s motorized, apparently). Worried that he’s going to leave without me, I sprint over to it, jump, and catch on to one of the side guard-rails. It turns out I was just in time, as not a moment later the sleigh takes off and is in the air. I’m still holding on for dear life on a guard-rail bumper thing, but Santa doesn’t seem inclined to invite me to sit shotgun. I actually don’t mind – it’s much more exhilarating this way for me.

We go zooming about the night sky this way for a while, the wind whipping in my face the entire time as we reach incredible speeds. I’m having quite an adrenaline rush. Later, along the way, I have these thoughts that become manifest moments later. First I think about how cool it would be to fly right past the full moon. Then it happens – we are like those silhouettes you always see in Christmas movies of Santa flying past the moon. Then I think about how odd it is that there are no reindeer in front of the sleigh. As soon as I finish this thought, I see two reindeer tethered right there in front. They both turn around and look at me at the same time – I think they even give me a playful wink. Gradually more and more reindeer appear (two at a time) until there is the full contingent.

The scene then goes black and I am in a void for a while. I have the belated realization that I should try spinning, so I do so, but it is slow and awkward and I don’t have a specific destination in mind. Eventually I reappear in a cave. Although it’s not very dark since much light is filtering in from holes in the top, there’s hardly any room to move. It’s extremely claustrophobic, and I feel trapped. In a state of panic, I try to break through the rock in places. It’s a brownish-tan sandstone and flakes off pretty easily with enough willpower on my part, but as soon as I destroy a rock barrier and move onto the next pocket of open space, new rock appears out of nowhere to pin me in. This goes on for many minutes. It’s almost as if some malevolent force is trying to keep me trapped and is teasing me with the prospect of being able to break free from this prison.

After a long struggle I finally succeed in breaking free from the rock-cave-maze to an open pasture. Awaiting my arrival is a young blonde girl. I’m so happy to have escaped that I run up to her and kiss her. She blushes. I try to say something, possibly how happy I am to be free. However, when I move my lips no sound comes out (even though I recognize what I said intellectually). This strange occurrence gets me into professor mode, and I remember about a DV thread speculating about whether there is actually sound in dreams or if it is all in our mind. I decide to test this hypothesis by shouting my statement over and over until it finally comes out as true sound. It takes about 3 or 4 tries until I actually hear my voice, and it is scratchy and awkward, as if appearing only begrudgingly. I’m fascinated, but I also want to see if I can hear the voice of my DCs. I command the girl to say a certain sentence. She clearly doesn’t want to cooperate, resisting my command until I strongly insist she say it. Finally she acquiesces, and I can hear her (though I forget what sentence I commanded her to say). But as soon as she’s done speaking, she begins a harsh transfiguration, morphing into what looks like an ogress, along the lines of Fiona from Shrek. She’s much bigger and angrier, but retains the same silky blonde hair. She starts chasing me and I run, then fly away as fast as I can. When I do get airborne, I once again have a lot of difficulty moving horizontally across the landscape, though I can fly up and down effortlessly (this has become a rather disturbing trend in my LDs recently). Anyway, just as I’m standing in the air gazing out onto the barren, rock-filled landscape below me, the scene fades to black again.

I make a nominal effort at spinning, but it’s good enough; I reappear in a classroom setting, about to take an exam. I lose my lucidity at this point. There are hundreds of people with me in the room, and I instantly feel a lot of pressure. Then I just “know” that this test is for the job application to the Florida Trails Association, strangely enough a job I already got accepted for. Nevertheless I’m panicking and fill out my answers through sheer instinct and gut reaction. The next moment, it seems, we are all gathered to receive our test scores. As I get mine back I am amazed that I only got one answer wrong for a score of 97% or something. I discover that the only person who did better was the guy sitting next to me, my old trails crewmate Dave C, who got a perfect score. Apparently also the scores are all public information, for the snob sitting across from me expresses disbelief at how I could’ve outscored him, considering his superior knowledge from many more years of trail work experience. I just shrug, but he insists that it’s a fluke. Trying to explain myself, I just tell him my method; I tell about how I just visualized a bird’s eye view of the trails for design purposes on this one section. But then Dave stands up for me, telling the other guy that I shouldn’t have to apologize to anyone about my great score…that I earned it.

Then the scene changes again, this time back to my basement. I’ve regained lucidity at this point, but it’s not very strong at all, certainly not as strong as it was earlier. Kind of running out of ideas, I decide to try to find someone to have sex with. I’m not even sure who I have in mind, but I manage to summon a blonde chick who ends up being quite ethereal, flickering in and out of existence. One minute I’m feeling her up, the next she disappears and I am touching empty space. I get frustrated, especially because on top of this I have several FAs in which my brother and his friend come down to the basement and somehow realize what I’ve been up to with the girl. I get embarrassed, trying to cover it up, until I finally awaken for real.

LOG: 12/04/08 – 12/05/08

Supplements (& dosage) taken before bed: 100mg 5-HTP, 2.5mg Melatonin
Supplements taken in morning: 600mg GPC, 200mg Mucuna Pruriens, 8mg Galantamine, 400mg Choline (toast to aid digestion), plus 2400mg Piracetam (after dream)
After how many hours of sleep? 4.5
Dreaming when I woke up to take supplements? Yes
WBTB session length (if applicable): 1 hour
Exercises done after taking supplements: Repeating my intentions x2, visualizing the rotating wheel and grasping onto it to pull myself into dream
How long did it take to fall back asleep after taking supplements? 25 min
Sleep position: on my left
Transition details (if WILD): I had read on the DV forums about someone using the circular motion of the wheel-lever on a fire hydrant as an anchor to grasp onto and pull oneself into the dream. I decided to try and use this method, so when I felt all my other body parts fall asleep, I concentrated on the image. Although I’m a pretty poor visualizer, the grasping motion and consequent rotation of my hand (and body) along with the wheel was very visceral and real, despite the blackness that I saw. At that point it felt like my head was detached from my body, my consciousness was concentrated all in my head, and my head was spinning downwards into my pillow.
Intensity of vibrations, acceleration, or other part of transition: 7
Dream quality: 9
Ability to recall dream: 6
Visual vividness: 8
Tactile vividness: 8
Auditory vividness: 9
Participation level: 9
Lucidity level: 7
DILD or WILD? WILD
Ability to control reasoning: 7
Ability to control emotions: 6
Ability to control will: 8
Physical side effects? Slight stomach grumbling, slight headache and sweat upon awakening
Mental side effects? Intense feeling upon waking.

Lessons or theories: I thought it was fascinating to discover that sounds (at least for me) only truly exist in dreams if I put a lot of conscious effort into hearing them or speaking them. Otherwise, conversations and such are purely telepathic. It was also fascinating to move my dream finger and simultaneously and without conscious effort move my real finger as well. Yay me for completing December’s advanced task of the month too.

“Sense Party” [LD]
12/08/08
7:20 – 7:35 a.m.
[WILD; ~ 15 min.]

I have a WILD in which the transition is hard to remember (I think I might have rolled out of my body), but it was quite unremarkable. In any case, at the start of the dream I find myself a few feet away from my sleeping body, in my basement. Unlike my previous WILDs of this nature, there is already a lot of light in the room. I walk a short distance, then remember to do my LD prep. I put a lot of effort into these this time because my goal for this morning is to become as aware as possible with the highest sensory experience. I won’t describe exactly the methods I use because I’ve described them in this journal many times before and it’s basically the same routine.

I then go upstairs and out into my front yard. I am tempted to just start flying but I resist the urge, remembering to focus on maximizing my sensory awareness. I walk over to my neighbor’s yard across the street and climb up the tree not far from the road. I stay in here for a while, trying to truly feel the texture of the bark. I am amazed to notice that the bark is part wood, part metal, almost like the wood is just the outermost layer that has been punctured in places throughout the trunk. While this is happening I begin to feel self-conscious and anti-social, as I notice that there is a party getting started in my neighbor’s garage (whose tree I’m standing in). It’s like a summer picnic/barbecue or something. My dad or brother asks me to get down from the tree and join them at the party.

So I jump off and follow them into the garage. Inside, there’s this long picnic table with a white tablecloth. Michelle L. (my neighbor) insists I have a hot dog. I pick it up, and it looks like a polish sausage wrapped in a bun. Right before I bite into it I have the thought of how fortuitous this is since I wanted to try utilizing all my senses, and here I can try tasting something. However, when I bite into it there is a distinct lack of any taste. I don’t dwell on this long though, because I awaken seconds after biting down. I realize that my real body made the same biting motion – my jaws clamped down the exact same way.

I don’t move and try to DEILD. Luckily, I am successful within a few seconds. I am back in the garage, but farther back now, sitting at the end of the table. I wait for more people to arrive to start the main course, and they do shortly. We all make small talk for a while, then someone pushes a laptop in front of me and opens it. As soon as this happens, I realize I’ve been sitting still for too long…but I’m powerless to change it, as I awaken for good the next moment and I can’t spin my way back into it. I try to DEILD for about 5 minutes but give up when I realize I’m just too hot, my body is too stiff, and I have too much on my mind.

“Morpheus’s Misdirection” [LD]
12/08/08
8:20 a.m. – 9:25 a.m.
[WILD; ~1 hour]

After cooling off and switching positions from the previous dream, I have another WILD. Again the starting details are hazy, but I think I transition to somewhere in my house, probably the basement. I round the corner and look at my hand out of habit, noticing six fingers. As I begin to ascend the stairs to the floor above, I hear this phenomenal orchestral music that I can’t really describe or replicate now…but I’m pretty sure it is completely original, like nothing I’ve ever heard before. The visuals go black and I have to spin to save the dream. Around this point I discover that spinning left instead of right is much faster and more effective (maybe because I’m sleeping on my left?)

I have a nonlucid FA in my brother Alex’s room, a different part of the same house. I’m with my other brother Sam, and we both know we are in the wee hours of the morning and everyone else in the family is sleeping. We talk about LDs or Star Wars or something, then the dream visuals go black again and I spin to save it.

Now I’m in my front yard and fully lucid once more. A pair of girls are walking across the street into our yard and I just know they want to small talk which is what I do not want to do. I quickly skip past them, just saying hi or something, and walk into my next-door neighbor’s yard. There I remember my other goal of doing the DV task of the month – boarding public transportation and seeing where it takes me. I use the corner of my neighbor’s house to say “Oh Morpheus, you can come out now.” Well, he doesn’t come, so I decide to use the traditional expectation method. I round the corner and I see him farther back, but there. As I hoped and expected, he took the form of the Morpheus from the Sandman graphic novels rather than Laurence Fishbourne from the Matrix. He has this form only shortly though, for when he approaches me and I get a better look at him, his body seems to have changed to that of Scott S., and old grade school friend of mine.

I tell him I want to get to the “train station” and he says “follow me,” so I do. Oddly, he walks right back into our backyard, mopes around talking to some other people until finally coming back to me and, surprised at what he learned from the others, wants to know about my internship at Mt. Rainier National Park (like he’s catching up on my life from grade school). I tell him that that was a while ago now, and my mind is focused on my new Florida trails position. He looks impressed. I go up the slide on the jungle gym and as I’m about to slide down, once again the visuals go black and I’m forced to spin to save it.

When I reenter the dream I am more clear-minded; I grab Morpheus/Scott and insist we get on with the train station. We return to the front yard, next to the road. I have the realization that I want to alter my request slightly…someone I talked to along the line informed me of a secret underground hideout underneath the Madison Metro Bus System, from Blount St. to the Capitol (but still public transportation). I point to a sheltered bus stop that somehow appeared right across the road and ask Morpheus if we can use that to get there. He says we’re in the wrong city and to follow him.

He starts walking down Sundown Court (a cul-de-sac in my neighborhood), and the landscape changes as he does. Rather than drab suburban sprawl, I vividly remember an elegant semi-interior walkway with columns on my left. It is a moment of crystal-clear lucidity and awareness, but I keep following Morpheus because I finally think we’re on the right track. At the end of Sundown there’s this swanky café, which we enter. It’s designed with a lot of red and silver, modern architecture. I just “know” that now we’re in Madison. Morpheus seems to know everyone in the establishment. There’s multiple levels, but we go down to the lower one near the register. There’s a group of his friends sitting on a very elevated table on high stools. They seems very friendly and extend this to me, offering me drinks and food (ice cream and the like), but I refuse, impatient to see where this is all going. Morpheus goes around introducing me to more people, and I realize just how big this café is. I remind Morpheus to get on with the bus stop. He begrudgingly agrees to leave the place, but it takes a while for us to do so. As we leave, there is a line formed to get into the place that is at least 50 people deep. Then we get outside and I realize that this restaurant was embedded into a larger building, like University Square or something, in a high-density place like State St. Sadly, before we can get to the bus stop, I awaken for good.

LOG: 12/07/08 - 12/08/08

Supplements (& dosage) taken before bed: 100mg 5-HTP, 2.5mg Melatonin
Supplements taken in morning: 600mg GPC, 200mg Mucuna Pruriens, 8mg Galantamine, 400mg Choline (plus pop-tart to aid digestion), 2400mg Piracetam (after dream)
After how many hours of sleep? 5.25
Dreaming when I woke up to take supplements? Yes
WBTB session length (if applicable): 1 hour
Exercises done after taking supplements: Repeating my intentions x2, focusing on the “wheel” a bit
How long did it take to fall back asleep after taking supplements? 25-30 min
Sleep position: on my left
Transition details (if WILD): OBE-like, pretty unremarkable otherwise (not very intense)
Intensity of vibrations, acceleration, or other part of transition: 2
Dream quality: 9
Ability to recall dream: 6
Visual vividness: 10
Tactile vividness: 9
Auditory vividness: 9
Participation level: 9
Lucidity level: 9
DILD or WILD? WILD
Ability to control reasoning: 8
Ability to control emotions: 9
Ability to control will: 6
Physical side effects? Stomach grumbling, gas
Mental side effects? None

Lessons or theories: This is the second time recently that a dream action has elicited the corresponding action in my physical, sleeping body. I’m not sure exactly what causes this, since the other time it was moving my finger rather than biting into food. Also, remember to spin left instead of right when attempting to save a fading dream…this seems to work much better. Oh, and plan on getting a lot warmer after a dream than when I first fall asleep…if I’m too hot when I awaken it’s a lot harder to DEILD.

Firestarter: Has anyone else done something in a dream that elicited the corresponding action on their actual body? If so, what happened, and why do you think it happened?

I had a few more LDs between the last dream I posted and this one, but they weren't that interesting. This one perhaps seemed more profound to me that I could convey in writing. When I woke up I just had this feeling that I had discovered some great wisdom, but the specifics of this had vanished by the time I tried to recall it. Anyway, judge for yourself...

“The Lucidity Workshop” [LD]
01/04/09
7:40 – 8:40 a.m.
[WILD; 60 min]

I have a successful WILD using the “roll out” method once again and stumble around disoriented for a while on my basement floor in the darkness. Eventually after walking around for a while I find a light spot and look at my fingers. Even though I see five, I never doubt that I’m dreaming and try to sprout a new pinkie off the side of my hand just to prove it. It starts working, but before it’s completely grown I’m satisfied and move along. It’s still quite dark as I walk upstairs and out the front door. When I’m outside, even though it’s still dark, I forget to do both my LD prep and to add light to the scene.

Walking down the street, I see a neighbor (who I don’t recognize) fixing a sailboat in the middle of the street. Curious, I hop up onto the boat and walk down the deck lengthwise. The boat seems immeasurably huge at this point, taking up my entire vision. When I get to the middle I have to walk through a shallow pool of water that has collected in a depression there. When I finally get to the end of the boat, the only way out it seems is through this very narrow tube lined with plastic transparent air bubbles (kind of like a soft waterslide without water).

I slide down the tube, though it’s not easy because it’s really tight and there’s a lot of friction. It spits me out in this reception area. Two girls are standing near the doorway into the hall outside. They look like they’re trying to ignore me; when I go up to them and ask them where to go, they hesitate for a while before telling me to go down the hallway and to the right.

I follow their instructions, but am met halfway by “my psychiatrist” (I don’t have a psychiatrist IRL). Anyway, I’m still lucid but I play along; apparently his job is to understand and improve my lucidity or something. We go back to his office and he gives me some advice and a task (both of which I forget). Before long I leave and go back down the hallway, turn left into a different room (maybe this has something to do with the task he gave me?). Here I meet a guy who is a lot more friendly and we start having these great, playful discussions on the nature of the dreamworld vs. the “real world.” I wish I could remember what we talk about, but unfortunately I don’t. I do remember asking him if I’m really in control of all the people here and he proposes a test or something like a battle of wills. Essentially, he tries to do something, then I hold my hand up to “magically” stop him from completing what he’s trying to do. It turns out that I am able to stop him this way. He looks dismayed, but I assure him that I won’t use my powers to destroy him or anything.

At this point, the dream fades and I try to spin to save it, but I’m too late; I have to reenter by rolling out of my body once more. Luckily, this works a second time and I find myself once again back in my basement. When I get out to the front door, I remember to try to raise the sun to add light to the scene. First I try to locate it, and find it at the edge of the horizon, a very tiny sphere under a blanket of clouds covering the rest of the sky. Slowly at first but then faster I get it to move, but it only moves behind the wall of clouds and therefore doesn’t add much more light to the scene. It’s enough, however, for me to go about my business. This time I remember to do my LD prep, saying “This is a dream. This is happening in the here and now. Stay aware and focused and in the moment. Don’t get distracted.” I forget to do the other elements of my prep, but just saying this improves my mental clarity quite a bit.

I then decide to go back to my “lucidity workshop” to finish my affairs there. I don’t know how I manage to get there, but next thing I know I’m back in that office. Once inside I have the most interesting meetings with very friendly DCs, but I can’t fucking remember any of what was said! Eventually my psychiatrist calls me back in (apparently he was waiting for some results to finish). He tells me I’m a capable lucid dreamer and that I’m ready to leave the clinic. He leads me back out into the hallway. Everyone I’ve met along the way shows up and congratulates me.

Before I get to the main lobby, I am directed into a side room to the left where our group comes upon a receptionist. She’s embarrassed because we caught her while she was making some goodbye cookies for me and they weren’t ready yet. I tell her it’s OK, that it’s no problem whatsoever, etc. I give everyone a big hug. I notice Jerome Bettis standing towards the back of the pack of people, yapping on about his travels in Algeria. He keeps asking people if they know where Algeria is, but no one does except me (I tell him it’s in North Africa) and he’s impressed that I know this. Finally I say goodbye to everyone and leave for good.

At this point, the dream fades. I spin to save it but get tossed in a nonlucid dream. In this dream I’m playing in the Magic: the Gathering World Championship, but all the matches are on Magic Online rather than with cardboard cards. Furthermore, I’m sharing the same computer with my opponent (a portly blonde teenage boy), which is weird because we can see each other’s hand and to some extent what we’re trying to do strategy-wise. I’m freaking out because I have no clue how to use Magic Online. I fumble around with the interface but successfully cast a planeswalker (one that I’ve never seen before). However, I don’t know how to use it’s abilities (something involving “daggers”), so I call Stephen N over to help me. All this time my opponent is complaining about how much time I’m wasting being slow and all. Stephen tries to explain how to use the planeswalker but I have a hard time understanding. Unrelatedly, he shows me this actual paper card he got from playing Magic Online, which is about half the size of a normal paper card and oriented horizontally. I’m just worried about my chess clock ticking down, but at this point I can’t really take the whole situation that seriously. I go back to playing, see some more animations on the screen and before I know it the dream ends and I wake up.

LOG: 01/03/089 – 01/04/09

Supplements (& dosage) taken before bed: 100mg 5-HTP, 2.5mg Melatonin
Supplements taken in morning: 600mg GPC, 200mg Mucuna Pruriens, 8mg Galantamine, 400mg Choline (plus graham crackers to aid digestion), 2400mg Piracetam (after dream)
After how many hours of sleep? 5
Dreaming when I woke up to take supplements? Yes
WBTB session length (if applicable): 30 min
Exercises done after taking supplements: Repeating my intentions x2
How long did it take to fall back asleep after taking supplements? 60 min.
Sleep position: On my right
Transition details (if WILD): OBE-like, starting with the “roll out” method
Intensity of vibrations, acceleration, or other part of transition: 3
Dream quality: 6
Ability to recall dream: 7
Visual vividness: 7
Tactile vividness: 5
Auditory vividness: 6
Participation level: 9
Lucidity level: 6
DILD or WILD? WILD
Ability to control reasoning: 6
Ability to control emotions: 7
Ability to control will: 6
Physical side effects? None
Mental side effects? None

Lessons or theories: Really frustrating to not remember basically any of the many conversations I had (which I know were very profound). Also this was probably the first time I completely forgot to even attempt to carry about my dream goal, which was the Dream Views task of the month, exploring the lost city of Atlantis.

“The Lost City” [LD]
01/08/09
8:30 – 9:40 a.m.
[DILD; 70 min]

I’m not exactly sure if this was a WILD or a DILD, but if it was a WILD I don’t recall the transition. Either way, I enter the dream being fully lucid (no questioning or reality checks required) somewhere in my house. Although I forget to do my LD prep initially, this time I remember my goal of trying to visit Atlantis. First I try doing this by opening doors and using the expectation method, but this gets me nowhere, perhaps because my mom and brother are standing around distracting me.

Later my brother is lounging on the deck in our backyard. I walk out there but as soon as I stop I’m unsure of what I want to do, so I do the first thing that comes to mind: flying around. At first flying is hard because it’s cloudy, or at least that’s what I tell myself in the dream. Strange how “logic” works in dreams! After a while, though, the flying comes easy and I shoot through the air Iron Man style. Then for whatever reason I decide to try to shoot fireballs from my hands, like magic (while still in the air). To my amazement, this actually works! The fireballs come out from my palms in arcs, clearly affected by gravity by the time they hit their target. Also, the “balls” themselves are like flaming coals or something and they make a small explosion when they strike. Anyway, first I shoot random flammable stuff around the yard like hanging laundry and piles of newspapers. Then I decide to up the ante and see if I can set the picnic table on fire. Sure enough, I manage to do this without a hitch.

After experimenting with fire for a while, I decide to see if I can do the same with lightning. So I try to shoot lightning bolts from my palms (Oblivion style), but strangely, this doesn’t seem to work. It sure feels like lightning is coming out and striking something in the distance, but visually nothing appears. I have this thought that it’s not working because it would be too fast, compared to the fireballs which were slow. I don’t agonize over this though and return back indoors. Here I just wander around for a while, the whole time floating down hallways and staircases and such, doing aerial flips as I go just for fun.

Finally I once again remember my intention to get to Atlantis, so I try a different method this time: spinning. Honestly, I shouldn’t even bother with the whole doors method anymore because spinning is so much more effective for me. Needless to say, it works again this time. I get to the scene that I had planned out in my mind before the dream – a sandy beach bordering the sea that leads down to Atlantis. Here there are a lot of distractions, like little cities built into the sandy cliffs and creatures prancing around along the shore. For some reason I feel this compulsion to destroy the tiny sand-cities, so I go around kicking them into oblivion for a while. Then I get back on track and enter the water, diving in and swimming deeper and deeper. As soon as I submerge I have this realization that I’ve never really done underwater breathing while lucid. I imagined it would be unlike real life in terms of visibility, resistance, and the whole texture and lung sensation, but to my surprise it was very life-like, with little pockets of air even coming from my exhales and the visibility being generally very poor like in real life. When I get to a certain depth everything goes black; I have the tactile sensation of still diving ever deeper in the water, but I can’t see anything. Eventually even this is lost as the scene fades.

I end up somewhere else (probably home again), but this time I try a new strategy, one that in hindsight seems very clever: I just reach out and grasp on to a trident, which materializes right in my hands. When I pull myself towards the trident, the old scene vanishes and a new one has taken its place – right in Atlantis! I find myself alone in this museum-like room. The walls are translucent and look sea-blue from the water reflecting in through the glass – a very elegant and fitting atmosphere overall. All around me are displays of fantastic sea creatures – fish and mermaids and such. I walk along them and when I get to the last one, a huge blue and gold eel or barracuda or something, it starts looking at me! It looks kind of cartoonish, like something out of a Disney movie, but it comes alive and starts talking even, all the while it’s mounted there in the center of the room. Unfortunately, I forget what it says, but this creature was definitely the thing that stuck out most in my mind while reflecting on the dream.

Eventually I leave the museum room and come to this lobby area full of activity. It reminds me of a food court in a shopping mall. All the denizens of Atlantis are going about their business, completely oblivious to me. Although I feel a lot happens after this, I can’t remember any of it. Perhaps I go on having some nonlucid adventures in Atlantis, but I can’t recall one way or another. The next thing I know I’m awake in my bed.

LOG: 01/07/09 – 01/08/09

Supplements (& dosage) taken before bed: 100mg 5-HTP, 2.5mg Melatonin, 100mg L-Theanine
Supplements taken in morning: 600mg GPC, 200mg Mucuna Pruriens, 8mg Galantamine, 400mg Choline (plus graham crackers to aid digestion), 2400mg Piracetam (after dream)
After how many hours of sleep? 5
Dreaming when I woke up to take supplements? Yes
WBTB session length (if applicable): 30 min
Exercises done after taking supplements: Repeating my intentions x2
How long did it take to fall back asleep after taking supplements? 90 min.
Sleep position: On my right
Transition details (if WILD):
Intensity of vibrations, acceleration, or other part of transition:
Dream quality: 7
Ability to recall dream: 5
Visual vividness: 8
Tactile vividness: 9
Auditory vividness: 4
Participation level: 8
Lucidity level: 7
DILD or WILD? DILD
Ability to control reasoning: 3
Ability to control emotions: 5
Ability to control will: 9
Physical side effects? None
Mental side effects? None

Lessons or Theories: I think I happened upon a really great way to teleport to desired locales: physically grasping an object that reminds me of that place (in this case, a trident) and letting it “suck” me into its scene. Maybe it won’t work this well every time, but at least it’s a handy tool in my lucid travel toolkit. I also wonder if my ability to shoot fireballs had something to do with the Mucuna Pruriens I’ve been taking. I’ve noticed a gradual increase in seemingly “magical” powers that I’ve been able to do since taking the supplement. Surprisingly, this has come amid my declining ability to use expectation to get results.

Did you get your name from Dan Simmons book?

Actually I've never heard of that book before now; I forget where I heard the name initially, but it's mainly inspired from the Endymion of Greek Mythology, who you can read about here. Do you recommend that book? From a quick Amazon scan, it looks like it's part of a sci-fi series...

Well, the first book is called Hyperion, and I HIGHLY reccomend that one. I havent read the other but i heard theyre just as good and better.

“Atlantis Revisited” [LD]
02/11/09
5:30 – 7:00 a.m.
[WILD and DILD – 90 min]

I have an intense transition where I feel like I’m traveling through a worm-hole. Then I drop from my bunk down to Reid’s on the floor. It isn’t until I land that my vision stabilizes somewhat. Still, for a while everything is blurry, I feel dizzy, and my limbs still feel tingly like they did before I crossed over to the dream. I sit there for a while looking around for Reid, who is nowhere to be seen (though I know he is there sleeping in reality). It’s dark but I can still see his green pillow. I shout his name at the top of my lungs, but no sound comes out. I get up and try to turn on the light, but it doesn’t work (surprise, surprise). Then I walk over to Matt’s bunk and try to see if maybe he is there. In the meantime a fair amount of light is lost from the scene, and by the time I get there it’s pretty much pitch black. Regardless, I feel around with my hands where his body should be. It turns out that he isn’t in the room either. I awaken shortly thereafter.

After a few moments of being awake, I have another WILD with an intense vortex/worm-hole like transition. This time instead of winding up back in my room, I enter into a new scene: It’s a beautiful summer day and I’m swinging on a swing in a playground somewhere. I’m very lucid at this point, so I stop and get off the swing, thinking about my dream goal of shooting someone with cupid’s arrow. However, I become immediately distracted by this yellow package on the ground in front of me. I pick it up and read it; it says “Master’s Etherium” or something. Inside is a paper wrapping which I move to open, but I awaken again before I can get a look at it.

Here there is a gap in my recall, but the next thing I remember is having a nonlucid FA in which I am awoken by Alex P’s sister (who I’ve never met but I just know it’s her). The scene is once again my bedroom in the FEMA trailer and I notice that Reid isn’t sleeping in the bottom bunk, but rather Alex P (from my last SCA crew) is. I briefly have the thought that “I haven’t been paying enough attention to Alex this whole time.” Anyway, his sister wakes us both up, telling us to get ready for breakfast. I give her a nasty look when I crawl out of the bedroom in my pajamas.

In the dining room (which now is the one in my Green Bay home rather than the FEMA trailer) a bunch of my relatives are gathered, clearly at the behest of my aunt Chris. Breakfast food is being placed on the table, which is long and very narrow. Sam and I are tasked with spreading a thin tablecloth over the center of the table. Without any effort on our part, the tablecloth (a delicate, finely laced item) rips apart in multiple places. Chris isn’t paying attention at first, but sees this when she turns around. My mom and Ginny are sitting across from me and telling me how rude and inconsiderate Sam and I are for ruining Chris’s delicate tablecloth. Chris herself is now grunting in agreement and obviously pissed off. I have a hard time taking blame for this, since the cloth practically ripped itself apart. Sam (sitting next to Kayla) yells “Fuck!” as this all happens, getting my relatives even more upset and worked up. Now Chris erupts in fury, yelling at him for his foul language. Now it finally dawns on me that this is actually a dream, so I decide to have a little fun. I stand up and start yelling “Fuck You!” to everyone at the table in turn, adding “I don’t care what you think because this is all a dream anyway.”

Soon after this outburst I walk out of the house and onto our front yard. It’s nighttime, and I forget about my goals for a while and instead just fly straight up in the air. It’s dark and I can’t see much. At some point, I come down again, but what follows is a fairly big chunk of dream that I can’t remember.

Some time later I remember my goal of getting to the beach. I see a red door that’s not even shut but just obscured. I turn the corner, knowing that I’ll see a beach on the other end. Sure enough, this works and I am at the beach. But it’s still nighttime and the beach is completely vacant. I get sidetracked into doing something else (which I don’t remember)

In the next scene I recall, I emerge from a crowded interior place (like a mall or something) to a street at night. I walk and fly around for a while until I come to a sports arena. No one is around, but I see a door leading into the arena from the ascending stairs on the outside. I bust through the door with some force (because I figure it’s locked), intending to return to the beach. Instead I’m flung into pure blackness, and I fall down.

My fall continues for a while until I notice that it’s more of a sinking feeling than true falling. At this point a small amount of light enters the scene and I find myself under a ton of water inside the arena. There is no visible end to the water. I just swim around for a while until I come across a strange structure – it appears to be an inflatable fortress with little pods for rooms, complete with windows and everything. I decide that this is once again Atlantis, and that I’ll just use my dream time to explore here for a while.

A boy swims out from the structure to meet me and tells me to come inside. I go ahead and follow him. Once inside, I see that this whole fortress is a little boys’ dream: a complete water fighting base. They tell me that it was sponsored by Super Soaker or some other toy company. Inside there are pressurized water guns, some of which are shut down and retired for being “too powerful.” The whole place is literally a relic of the 90s that these kids have inhabited long since it was forgotten by everyone else. They give me a full tour, including the living quarters upstairs which are really claustrophobic and I have to crawl around to navigate, kind of like a playground at Chuck E. Cheese’s. The last thing I notice (after looking out the back window) is that the whole “base” is located next to an airplane landing strip (no longer in an underwater arena). I ask the kids if all the jet engines roaring keep them awake at night, but they say that the planes don’t brother them. Then the oldest boy says that he’s in college now and that living here is the only way he can afford to do that. Then I awaken for good.


LOG: 02/10/09 – 02/11/09

Supplements (& dosage) taken before bed: 100mg 5-HTP, 2.5mg Melatonin
Supplements taken in morning: 600mg Alpha-GPC, 200mg Mucuna Pruriens, 8mg Galantamine, 400mg Choline (dreamamins)
After how many hours of sleep? 5
Dreaming when I woke up to take supplements? Yes
WBTB session length (if applicable): 30 min
Exercises done after taking supplements: Repeating my intentions x2
How long did it take to fall back asleep after taking supplements? 1 hour
Sleep position: on my left, tilted up slightly
Transition details (if WILD): very intense, like going through a worm-hole or vortex
Intensity of vibrations, acceleration, or other part of transition: 9
Dream quality: 7
Ability to recall dream: 8
Visual vividness: 6
Tactile vividness: 5
Auditory vividness: 7
Participation level: 8
Lucidity level: 5
DILD or WILD? WILD at first, then DILD
Ability to control reasoning: 3
Ability to control emotions: 5
Ability to control will: 5
Physical side effects? None
Mental side effects? None

Lessons or theories: Not that I had any doubts, but I pretty much disproved the validity of OBEs as objective experiences with this dream. Need to find a way to stabilize and stay in an initial WILD, because these are by far my most lucid experiences.

“Rhinos and Rainbows” [LD]
03/18/09
4:10 – 5:30 a.m.
[WILD; 80 min]

First I have a short OBE-like WILD. It’s long and extended, with a few scenes of hypnagogic dreams beforehand. In one of these I remember a ball of electricity concentrated in my head, with bolts shooting outwards (inwards?) from it. Sarah A. is there marveling at this feat, but it doesn’t last long before I awaken for a brief moment.

Next is the transition to the main WILD. I imagine a point of light in front of my body, then I float towards the light and it grows more distinct. Eventually a scene forms around me – a generic bedroom (which lends it an OBE-like quality, even though I’m really sleeping in a tent). There seems to be a great heaviness in my chest and lungs, which I later realize may have been caused by my sleep position. Even my feet seem restricted – tied up, even. I get out of bed and walk to the dresser with great difficulty. Not only do I feel dizzy and disoriented like in a lot of OBEs, I have a real hard time breathing as well; I’m taking gasping breaths for air. Nonetheless I still manage to get to the dresser. I open it up and see a lot of my own shorts there. Thinking once again that I’ll “see if OBEs are real” I start tossing out clothes onto the floor to see if they’ll be there when I awaken (even though, once again, I’m sleeping in a tent!) When I’m done with this I stumble into the next room. In here there’s a bed with somebody sleeping, completely obscured by the covers. Curious, I jump in right next to this person and pull down the covers. I find that it’s my father, looking pale and lifeless (he called me yesterday and was very sick). I start to hyperventilate even more than I was already and thus wake up.

The next dream segment is a lucid DILD, but a lot happens that I don’t remember. In the next scene I can recall, I find myself within a big expanse of open country, surrounded by lakes. A storm front moves in and it starts raining, but there are patches of sky where light is still filtering through. This reminds me of my DV Task of the Month goal: to walk on a rainbow. None are present, so I decide to make one. At first I give a half-hearted effort at spinning a new dream scene, but it doesn’t work and I realize that this is the perfect spot anyway. Next I try creating the rainbow by tracing its arc across the sky with my middle and pointer fingers. It takes a few tries at first, but this eventually works! The rainbow itself is a bit dull, but it’s there so I can’t complain.

Then I try finding the source of the rainbow so that I can approach it properly. I fly over the landscape until I see where the colorful light touches the ground. It happens to be right at the cusp of a cliff overlooking a lake. Strangely, it starts snowing while I am still a few steps from touching the rainbow. By the time I get there just seconds later, a few feet of snow have already accumulated. It gets me thinking the wrong thought: what else could possibly stop me from completing my goal? Of course, to think it is to in some sense expect it, and to oblige me a huge African rhinoceros comes charging at me from behind! I’m not lucid enough to control or ignore it, so I run in terror – though I do run up the rainbow itself. Strangely, with all the snow, a lot has accumulated on the rainbow’s surface, lending it a colorful, translucent quality. The splotches of color, however, are not striped but rather are concentric circles. I see all of this in a flash as I make a panicked jump out of the path of the charging rhino.

Of course, Mr. Rhino isn’t just passing by, but is actively hunting me down, so he turns around for another pass. This time I’m on the rainbow itself, which is really narrow, so there’s not much space for dodging at all. When he’s within feet of me, I just instinctively grab a colored snowball (which happens to be orange) and chuck it at the rhino. To my amazement, this causes him to turn into jelly, taking on the orange color of the snowball but keeping roughly the same rhino shape. Seizing the moment, I sprint past the gelatin-like rhinoceros and run further up the rainbow. However, the rhino doesn’t stand frozen like that for long; he returns to his usual form and charges at me again, angrier than ever. Knowing now how to neutralize him, I once again throw an orange snowball at him when he gets close. This works, and we continue this game for a while – the rhino charging, me turning him to jelly, until the scene changes.

In between here is a lot of flying around, but I just can’t place where it all takes place. That is, except at the tail end of it, when I find myself at this gigantic pool complex with all sorts of diving boards and platforms hundreds of feet in the air. I stop here as I feel it would be fun to do some acrobatics and dives into the water. So I land on one of these platforms and then dive off right away, spinning and twirling until I hit the water. As soon as I resurface I fly into the air and, when high enough, let gravity take over and drop back into the water, spinning the whole time. It’s great fun, but after a few times of doing this I lose my lucidity (at least partially) and just tread water. A group of people including Justin P. rows up in a canoe and starts taking pictures of me. As they do this I realize I am holding an expensive camera in hand myself, and all of a sudden all I can think about is keeping the camera dry, above water. I spend the next few minutes paddling with my feet toward shore, holding the camera in hand. But eventually the scene shifts and I am spared that embarrassment.

In the new scene I am outdoors in an open space not unlike the previous rainbow scene, once again fully lucid. I decide that the other rainbow didn’t really count and that I want to create a more “pure” rainbow walk experience. So this time, with considerably less difficulty, I trace a beautiful rainbow across the sky with my fingertips. It’s bright and vibrant – how a rainbow should look. I fly over to where it meets the ground, although here the light looks a bit duller, but at least there are no rhinos! I make the first step onto it, and as I walk on its surface, I notice the “material” to be a thin, translucent, papier-mâché type substance. By all means it should not hold my weight, but it does. Further, as I press onward, the rainbow’s arc flattens out, but only in anticipation for my approach, for not ten feet in front of me the arc remains intact. I walk, run, and fly around this marvelous creation for a while, but eventually the scene changes once again, this time to a crowded mall.

As I walk down the mall I see a very sexy Indian girl, whom I instantly grab and start making out with (as is obligatory it seems). When our lips touch my vision seems to fade, but I remain firmly rooted in the scene – the main result is simply that my sense of touch – and the feeling of the kiss itself – is greatly amplified. Of course, kissing was just a prelude to the next level, but it remains as or more enjoyable than sex in my dreams. But yes, we start fucking as I mount her from behind (my vision still reduced). This feels great and doesn’t have a lot of the problems I have been encountering with sex in dreams lately. But it still doesn’t feel like it’s building to a climax. So I ask her to switch positions and as she does I notice that no longer is she a cute Indian girl, but rather a large, older white woman with blonde hair. Her ass is still quite attractive, so I just shrug and continue on. This new position also feels great, but once again the whole act stagnates and I realize that I won’t be able to come. It becomes a moot point anyway as the next moment I have a false awakening.

This first FA I really don’t recall anything about, except that I know it happened. There is another that follows though, and in this FA, Matt M. busts into my bedroom (in an RV trailer), excited to show me these two animals he found and caught. I’m pissed at having been “woken up,” but I get up anyway and have a look. He lets this giant bug loose on the table – it’s a flat, millipede-like bug with many appendages, but much thicker. In addition, it has a color gradient going from red to orange. Then he plops a second one down very nearly like it, but blacker and smaller. They are pretty docile at first, but then they start scurrying about and we both try in vain to recapture them. Soon the red and orange insect turns into a scorpion and stings Matt in the arm. I ask if he’s alright, but he just looks at his wound emotionlessly for a while before leaving.

Glad to be alone again, I walk into the kitchen to get a bite to eat or something. When I arrive and open the cabinet, I find to my surprise a litter of kittens that have been trapped there, starving, and are now meowing for food. I have pity on them, and as I pick them up I realize just how light and malnourished they are. I fix them some milk, but as I do this I question the reality of this all and decide to do a reality check. I look at my fingers, and sure enough, there are at least six there. However, the next moment I awaken for real.

LOG: 03/17/09 – 03/18/09

Supplements (& dosage) taken before bed: 100mg 5-HTP, 2.5mg Melatonin
Supplements taken in morning: 8mg Galantamine, 400mg Choline (Galantamind), 600mg alpha-GPC, 200mg Mucuna Pruriens (plus 2400mg Piracetam after dreaming)
WBTB session length (if applicable): 30 min
Exercises done after taking supplements: Repeating my intentions x2
How long did it take to fall back asleep after taking supplements? 1 hour
Sleep position: (at first) on my back, with my arms over my chest and my feet crossed; (later) on my right
DILD or WILD? WILD
Transition details (if WILD): a lot of hypnagogic scenes appear at first but I never fully enter them. Later, I imagine a point of light in front of my body, then I float towards the light and it grows more distinct. Eventually a scene forms around me – a generic bedroom
Dream quality: 8
Ability to recall dream: 9
Lucidity level: 6

Lessons or theories: Still need to work on increasing my logic and rationality in lucids; there was no need for that rhino or that camera over the water to trip me up.

This dream is probably one of the most authentic nightmares I've ever experienced, but not in an obvious way. It also flirts with what can happen when one flickers between waking and sleeping at the end of a sleep cycle - states of reality get blurred.

“Paralyzed at Bonnaroo”
07/05/09
7:40 a.m.

I find myself being approached by a group of my friends, some old and some new. The only ones I am certain are there are Dave K., Sander D., and Krista L. They come up to me and ask me if I want to go to the Bonnaroo Music Festival. I’m flattered and say, “Sure, of course.”

Next thing I know we are at the actual festival, driving around and looking for a place to park. I think I’m driving. It’s nighttime and there’s no staff to be found to direct us where to park, so I just find the most convenient spot, in a grassy lot on the final row nearest the road. We get out and go wander around while I remark that we ought to get a schedule before we do anything or we might miss some of the bands we want to hear. Strangely, it seems there’s hardly anyone else here, like we have the whole place to ourselves.

We enter this little toy store (which is actually a legitimate store, not a vendor’s kiosk). Dave is running through the aisles purposefully while others follow. I stop and take out a letter I have started to write to Megan P. with the intent of finishing it while the others are shopping. It’s written on a crummy sheet of torn-out notebook paper. Before I can write anything though, Dave calls for me and I walk over to him. He asks my opinion about this game he’s looking to buy. I mumble something indifferently, like, “if you like it you should buy it.” He does.

As we make our way back to the main grounds, a parking officer approaches us and tells us we need to move our car. He says that the final row is reserved for the disabled (ironic, considering what comes later). I offer to go back and move the car, putting it in the parking lot in front of a Best Buy store, though I don’t recall going through all the motions of doing this – I just know it happens.

When I get back, someone from our group hands me a schedule they picked up while I was gone and tells me I’m going to like who’s playing tonight. I open up the sheet and am overjoyed to discover that Ratatat is playing at 8:00! I tell everything that I have to go to that show, but they are not nearly as psyched as I am. They tell me to get there at 9:00 for some reason which I take to be legit (like an opening band is playing that hour or something).

Dave leads us to this private room indoors somewhere where he says we will play the game he bought in the toy store earlier. We all follow along. Deeply absorbed in the game, hours fly by. Finally I check my watch and am heartbroken to see 10:00 p.m. staring me in the face. I freak out, pacing through the room trying to gather my stuff and see if I can catch the last of the Ratatat concert. Someone tells me not to bother; that they’re surely done by now. I slump down, dejected.

We all have some drinks while we finish the game, myself more than anyone else. By the time we’re about to leave and go back to our tents for the night, I am shit-faced and can hardly walk straight without assistance (foreshadowing!).

I have no memory of either putting up the tent next to our car in the Best Buy parking lot or retiring to it, but all of this presumably happens. That night I have a series of vivid dreams (yes, within this dream). The one I can recall most clearly involves Krista pushing me around the Best Buy parking lot while I sit in a shopping cart like a little kid. The transition between dreaming and waking up here is broken up, with me going in and out of different states, and it lasts a long time. I know I want to get up and end this cycle, but for some inexplicable reason I cannot. I have another short dream in which I realize that I left my letter to Megan in the toy store and some random customer discovers it and reads it. I awaken again, only to see the same sight of my green SCA water bottle, headlamp, and REI logo imprinted on the inside of my tent. At some point Dave calls me and tells me to get up already…”we have to get back to the festival.” Again, I am powerless to get up. I just lie there feeling extremely confused as to why my body just refuses to cooperate with the simple command of “get up.”

Belatedly, the almost inconceivable sinks in: I’m paralyzed! I literally can’t move my feet (or my arms it seems, but I can actually move those). As if to confirm, I reach behind my back and touch my spinal cord at my neck. I feel a large, loose piece of vertebrae along the axis that I can shift around with my hand. I postulate that if I can just get it back in its rightful place, I’ll be able to walk again. I try this for several minutes until I finally tell Dave in a panicked voice to call 911 immediately, that I need to get to a hospital. I’m freaking out here and the terror is real. I’m certain that everything that’s happening is actually happening. But then I take a huge inhale from my actual body, noticing a slight shift in the environment but nothing too major; after all, the sight in front of my eyes is the exact same as it was in the dream: green SCA water bottle, headlamp, and REI logo staring me in the face from the tent. A few seconds go by before I actually realize that it was a dream and that I’m not in fact paralyzed. I’ve never felt such relief after waking from a dream!

Note: I took 100mg of 5-HTP and 2.5mg of Melatonin before bed, but did not WBTB or take any other supplements.

Hey guys...
I recently downloaded the DreamJournal program that someone in this forum (sorry, forgot who!) created, and am taking advantage of it's "Publish" feature. Therefore the formatting style of this journal has changed to coincide with the program. If you haven't tried this program, I highly suggest you do so! It's a great little piece of software, able to keep track of goals, tags, statistics, and a lot more. Anyway, here is my most recent dream:

19.07.2009

Tango Through Gardens (WILD)

NON-DREAM DREAM LUCID

3:50 - 4:30 a.m. (40 min)

After about ten minutes trying to fall asleep on my back, I shift to my right side. While I was on my back I could feel my extremities fall asleep but my mind was too active to fully make the transition. When it did finally happen, it was more visual than tactile, with dream fragments forming and dissolving until one drew me in.

That one just happens to place me at my childhood Green Bay home. I think I start out upstairs in the blue bathroom. Immediately I remember to do my LD prep, even as I am walking towards the front door. I say the usual "This is a dream. This is happening in the here and now (!) Stay aware and focused and in the moment. Don't get distracted." Then I think I say the "increase lucidity x1000!" and "increase clarity x1000!" lines, but maybe I just think them to myself. In any case, they don't have too much effect but my lucidity level is already like 9/10 - probably the most lucid I have ever been so far.

I get outside on my front lawn and it is nighttime. I take a few steps before remembering to spin a new dreamscape; I plan on going to a beautiful tropical island. So I jump up and do an exhilirating spin in the air, making dozens of revolutions with my body. However, only part of the scene changes - among the neightborhood streets and houses drifts sand and water and rock. But when I rotate my body a bit further, all vestiges of the neighborhood disappear. What's left is a craggy coastline with calm water lapping a sandy shore, though still nighttime. Not as ideal as I hoped, but at least a change from that same old neighborhood. Something jostles my memory: activating all my senses. Before I do anything I basically confirm that with the exception of sight (and possibly sound), none of my other senses are working until I put conscious effort into feeling them. My memory is a little hazy here but I think I go through all of the senses except taste (maybe I try eating sand?). Along the way I focus on little details like the rocks to add further clarity to the dreamscape.

Eventually I get the idea in my head to try to raise the sun to add light to the scene, as, not only is it night, but it's completely cloudy too (though not pitch-black). I try making the motion of lifting up my arms to "summon" the sun, but although this has worked in the past, it fails this time after several concerted attempts.

Next I get the idea of trying to walk on water. I just approach the sea, trying to build up my confidence and expectation, but once again fail. This time it's alright though, because the cool feeling of water on my skin is worth it. I keep walking, through water deeper than my head, after which it becomes swimming. I dive and descend to great depths and at great speed, back and forth, with no need to come up for air. All this is purely tactile, however, as my visuals are completely black. As such, it only lasts maybe half a minute before I have a brief, split-second awakening.

After which I am plunged back into the dream and into a new scene entirely, still very much lucid. This scene is very unfinished, like an artist's work-in-progress, with black spots on the periphery. In fact that's the very feeling I have - like a character in a painting, of which I am co-creator as I walk through it. I start on a balcony overlooking a well-kept garden on a beautiful, sunny spring day. I wander around the bend and find a stunningly gorgeous black-haired girl in a white apron watering plants along the edge of the balcony. I approach her and wordlessly embrace her. The embrace transforms into a sort of dance, a tango, as we explore the garden together with bodies intertwined. The feeling of her body pressed tightly against my own as we lock hands is eupphoric, though it never becomes overtly sexual. Anyway, from the balcony we "float" down to the garden proper below. Constant movement, I remind myself. The scene is fleshed out before our very eyes, as if the master painter is frantically trying to fill in the black spots on his canvas. Beautiful-colored flowers, vines, & trellises emerge, many hanging around white columns. We make a zig-zaggy path for no apparent reason, tangoing all the while. I never directly look at the girl face-to-face through all of this, and although I always feel her body, at times I get the sense that she has become invisible or something. Along the way I make periodic stops to admire a flower or the marble of a column, but even though this adds detail and strength to the scene for a while, it doesn't last forever and the happy moment fades away.

Thus the scene shifts and I find myself once again at my childhood home, this time on the back deck (how hard it is to get away from that damn place in my dreams!) I'm still lucid, though not as high-level as before. Still, I remember to try the Dream Views task of the month of exploding. So I try to summon a bomb directly into my hands. I take them slightly out of my line of sight, then re-emerge with a rough slab of meat, like a steak or something. I conclude that "the bomb must be implanted in the meat and about to go off." So I hold it tight to my chest and sure enough, a moment later there is an explosion-like sound and I am flung dozens of feet off the deck and onto the backyard lawn, lying prone on the ground and feeling pain in my chest from the blast. Even though I pre-visualized and expected to be blown into a thousand tiny pieces, I remain fully put-together. After a few moments of lying there helpless, the scene changes once again.

What follow are a series of short scenes in which I am always lucid, but at declining levels and I can't hold onto the scene(s) for any length of time. Also I only remember fragments. One involves me sitting in the indoor Lolo Hot Springs in Montana, having a conversation with the Baron Vladmir Harkonnen from Dune. In another I'm trying to escape from a building, but before I jump from a window I notice my reflection in the glass and take note of how I look: my face is very faithful, and I have long hair as I am currently sporting (wheras before when I saw my reflection in dreams my hair was much shorter than it actually was at the time). In another fragment I am out in some city at night, hopping from rooftop to rooftop with mega-jumps, but for no apparent reason. At some point during all of this, I awaken for real.

LOG: 07/18/09 - 07/19/09

Supplements (& dosage) taken before bed: 100mg 5-HTP, 2.5mg Melatonin
Supplements taken in morning: 8mg Galantamine, 400mg Choline (Dreamamins), 600mg alpha-GPC, 200mg Mucuna Pruriens
WBTB session length (if applicable): 30 min
Exercises done after taking supplements: Repeating my intentions x2
How long did it take to fall back asleep after taking supplements? 1 hour or more
Sleep position: on my right
DILD or WILD? WILD
Transition details (if WILD): it was more visual than tactile, with dream fragments forming and dissolving until one drew me in.
Dream quality: 8
Ability to recall dream: 8
Lucidity level: 9

Lessons or theories: It seems I'm getting better at remembering to activate all my senses and focus on details. It's totally worth it, and makes my consciousness and the clarity of the dream increase manifold.

25.07.2009

Thugs Invade Moyer (Non-lucid)

NON-DREAM DREAM LUCID

9:05 a.m. (pre-lucid)

I have a day off at Moyer base and it's early in the morning. I am walking down highway 55 toward the Panther Creek Inn with my cousin Tiana. Not long after we start our walk we hear the sound of a motor coming our way. We step to the side of the road and to our surprise not one but two cars pass. Shortly after that we hear more motors. This time three cars are traveling in caravan, and instead of continuing past us on the road, they veer off sharply right in front of us and drive on this very rugged, unpaved "trail" through the woods. It's more like a set of worn out tire tracks, but they are going like 40 mph. Intrigued and having near seen this turnoff before, we follow them on foot.

Turns out they didn't go far before parking; we see their cars after just a few moments' walk. The occupants are out of sight, however. Tiana and I walk left, eager to explore this new environment. In front of us there's a wide open space that looks too perfectly geometric to be natural. I walk closer and eventually it dawns on me: this once used to be a gigantic swimming pool, but has become overgrown with vegetation after years of neglect. I jump down inside the now-empty pool and think of all the cool things we could do with this place. After another quick glance around I see some other abandoned sports areas, like a field where people used to play soccer and a baseball batting cage. Soon Tiana is approached by someone from the group that arrived in the cars earlier. She is asking him a bunch of questions about the place, including, "Is this a National Park?" The guy she's talking to laughs heartily after hearing this, and I just sigh in embarassment because of how stupid a question that was.

Ready at this point to go out exploring further on my own, I leave Tiana alone to talk to her informant and continue walking left. Turns out the batting cage I saw briefly earlier is not covered in vines and vegetation but is in very good shape. In fact, in front of it there's a whole well-groomed baseball diamond and mown lawn. The rest of the newcomers are standing around this area, getting ready to play baseball. They don't see me and I'm not entirely eager to meet them, so I just watch them from a distance for a while.

Eventually I decide to go back up the road and walk around further, maybe try to determine where the first group of cars parked. I walk past the Moyer driveway, but to my left I spy another feature that doesn't exist in reality: a trail leading into a grassy clearing. Along this trail are a bunch of signs staked into the ground advertising a McDonald's which lies at the end of the trail (pointing with an arrow). I follow the signs for a while, but while I don't get to the McDonald's itself, I come across a fancy jungle gym that's slick, shiny, and colorful. There's no one here, however, and I still haven't found the second group of strangers, so I turn around and walk back to the road.

When I get back on the road, all of a sudden I see them: there are dozens of them all gathered on a grassy clearing on the uphill side of the road. As I walk past I get some unfriendly looks. One guy comes up to me and tells me that I should run and hide, that there's this guy Steve who's looking for me because he thinks I stole his girlfriend's blouse or something (I'm not exactly sure what the item is supposed to be). Anyway, I get scared and decide to briskly walk back to Moyer base where I'll be safer.

When I get back I tell Sarah O. that I'm being hunted down and that I need to find a hiding place right now. She takes me to this yellow room that is not very well-hidden at all, but I don't complain. There are at least four windows, and it's right next to this atrium that is a gathering place for people to eat lunch and socialize. At least she locks all the doors and puts an extra layer of glass down behind the main glass door. She tells me she has to leave, but that I should just huddle down in the corner where the sightlines are the worst for any potential pursuer.

So I take her advice and lie scared in the fetal position in the corner of the yellow room. Not long after she leaves I see Steve out of the corner of my eye, looking through the window trying to see if I'm in here. At a certain point I lose hope of remaining undetected, and it is precisely at this point when he turn his head in my direction and spots me. Immediately he starts pounding on the door, shouting my name. Realizing there's no point to hiding anymore, I walk up to the door and try to have a rational conversation with him and convince him I didn't take anything of his or his girlfriend's. He's fuming, yelling "Gimmie back that blouse, bitch!" I shout back (have to shout to be able to be heard through the glass and chatter in the background) that I don't have the blouse. He obviously doesn't believe me and keeps demanding I return what's "his" as he plays around with the lock, trying to get it open. As this is happening, many people, mostly the newcomers but a couple SCA members including Chris P. arrive in the atrium to eat lunch. When I see Chris I try yelling to get his attention, but he is oblivious to me and eventually walks away. Finally I try this line of argument with Steve: I tell him that dream logic is different than real logic, and that since this is a dream he only thinks I took the blouse (so close to being lucid, but I never fully acknowledge that I am in fact dreaming right now). I try to get a girl that is sitting down nearby to back me up on this, but she says she has no idea what I'm talking about. I think she just is scared of Steve and/or has loyalty to her group and not me. In any case, the dream ends shortly thereafter, and Steve never actually catches me.

OK, so I just now realized there's a setting on the DreamJournal program to change the color of the nonlucid and lucid portions of a dream, so therefore I am going back to the original color scheme I laid out in my first post: black for nonlucid sections, blue for lucid sections. Any commentary will be in gray, however (I like this better now).

11.08.2009

Benevolent Whirlwind (DILD)

NON-DREAM DREAM LUCID

4:40 a.m.
(no supplements, but an unintentional WBTB at 3:30, which I think helped me become lucid)

There's a few nonlucid scenes that take place first, but I'm not sure in which order they happen. Nonetheless here they are: in one scene there is family upheaval. Some of the characters from Weeds are involved, and I for example percieve myself to be one of Nancy's sons. Anyway, before going to school on a Monday morning, I discover the night before that my "mom," Nancy, has has sex with my "uncle," Andy. Moreover, she tempted him into it and it lasted for two hours. As I learn this, unbidden images play back in my mind of the act. Nancy is very apologetic and full of regret, as she knows there is no way to keep this a secret and that it will cause massive familial discord (in the dream, her husband Judah is still alive).

In another scene (where the Weeds relationships are nonexistant), I'm in a Costco-like superstore near the entrance. As I walk in I see people I know - aunts, uncles, etc - until finally I see my dad. His shopping cart is full of a certain type of gift for me (a bulk item, probably on sale), but I forget exactly what it is. For his part, he's surprised to see me as in a few hours he's scheduled to get on a plane to come visit me (in Idaho, presumably). After a brief salutation I leave him be and walk further back into the store.

Eventually I come upon a massive table where a form of advanced Settlers of Catan is laid out and ready to play. My brother Sam and some other people appear and we play a game of this (which involves military units like generals, soldiers, etc.). I think I can come out victorious, but my main memory of all this is cleaning up the pieces after the game ends. Sam starts to walk away as soon as it ends, which makes me angry and I shout at him to get back and help clean up. He does so begrudgingly. What really get me upset though is that while I'm putting the military units away into a clear plastic bag, the bag breaks and all the pieces go spilling out onto the floors. That's the last I can recall of that scene.

There's a huge gap in my recall, but suffice it to say that I somehow become lucid, albeit at a very low level at first. My memory picks up after some lucid scenes, and I'm in my childhood home. As I enter the computer room it's very dark but not pitch black. For some reason my mind turns to sex. My idea for conjuration this time is to use the remote to turn on the television in front of me to a sex scene, then "jump in" and get a piece of the action. So, remote in hand, I press the ON button. At first I'm disappointed because all that appears is a corporate meeting room with business executives seated around a long table. But soon they all start getting freaky, the action centered around a man & woman who first get partially naked and then start fucking on top of the table. Midway through the act, one of the bystanders tells them to stop and says, "wait, aren't we forgetting something here?" On hearing this, the man in mid-coitus says, "Oh yeah, you're probably right," whips out a condom, and puts it on, eager to resume. "No, no, no," the female bystander replies. "I mean shouldn't we let our creator participate? It only seems proper." The man groans in annoyance, but I don't waste any time. As if on cue, I jump into the television and into the scene. The naked woman seems willing enough to switch partners, and soon she's riding me from on top. As per usual, once we make body contact my visuals decline markedly and even the tactile sensation feels inauthentic.

Perhaps because of this, the scene changes after less than a minute. Now I'm in some other indoor setting, not exactly sure where, but it has a cozy, homey aspect to it, complete with the smell of baking bread or some such pleasant aroma. Paradoxically, I also sense a stifling academic aspect to the house, like a conference is taking place in an adjacent room or something. It's just a premonition, but it's enough to want me to leave and get some fresh air.

When I open the front door I see a remarkable mountain vista, majestic peaks rising in the horizon beyond the neatly manicured lawn of grass that comprises the front yard. The view is sullied somewhat by scattered dark clouds, but the very sight of these jump-starts my memory and makes me think of the DreamViews task of the month of creating a tornado.

Emboldened, I put my preconceived plan of how to do this into action. Slowly and carefully, I point my finger at the clouds and spin it around in a circle, bidding the clouds themselves to follow suit. I do this for a solid minute, going faster and faster with my finger as the whirlwind builds momentum. Finally, when I judge the time to be right, I make a sharp downward motion with my hand. As I hoped, this causes the whirlwind to touch down and become a tornado before my very eyes! And what a beautiful tornado too, for instead of being dark and gritty like real-life tornadoes, it's clear and transparent, visible mainly by the blurring of the objects behind it and a few green leaves it has picked up along the way.

Not content to merely watch this from a distance, I want to prove to myself that this is the real deal. So I run up to the tornado and throw myself into it, putting myself completely at it's mercy. To my delight, I'm swept up in the current of air, ascending ever higher while spinning - but not for a moment feeling fear. On the contrary, it's great fun, kind of like a roller coaster. When I get to the top of the cyclone I'm spit out, but I have the prescence of mind to hover in the air for a while before gently floating back to the ground.

Apparently I had a spectator during this whole episode and I find upon landing a girl of about college age smiling and clapping earnestly. She tells me what an accomplishment I've achieved, and I swell with pride. But soon her friend appears and she ignores me, listening to her friend blabber about some environmental conference her parents are attending in New York City, called BUILD or something. Feeling like my moment is over, I once again return inside the house.

This time I definitely enter the kitchen, as I catch Sarah O. in the act of baking a special birthday cake for me. Upon seeing me she quickly tosses it into the oven and slams the oven door, trying in vain to conceal this surprise from me. I don't get worked up over this as I'm trying hard to remember what my other lucid goal was. But try as I might, it just doesn't come to me before I wake up.

20.08.2009

The Fisherman's Lure (DILD)

NON-DREAM DREAM LUCID

4:20 - 5:00 a.m. (40 min)

Very oddly, this dream starts as a false awakening. In it, I'm in my tent, frustrated that I'm unable to fall asleep (which, incidentally, was literally true for a good 15 minutes before this). I roll over and see my laptop right next to me. It's open and the video player is running. All I do is click the space bar and the movie that was playing resumes. It's some anime film, and the only image I can remember from it is some very buff dude with his shirt off and who has red, spiky hair. After watching this for a while, I get worried that I'm wasting my battery power, so I stop it.

I try to get back to sleep, but after shuffling around restlessly for a few minutes, I get gup and out of my sleeping bag. Now my surroundings feature four walls - my own private bedroom in the wilderness. It's a messy, shoddy room, with electronics strewn about everywhere, but at least it has privacy. Upon seeing my laptop again, I decide that "if I can't have a lucid dream tonight, I can at least jerk off while my computer still has battery power." Except, I get distracted for a moment and when I go to sit down at the desk, my computer is gone! (Well, the "case" anyway; the monitor's still there). I search around for it frantically, tossing old game systems (there are three Nintendo 64s in the room) out of the way callously. As this happens, more and more light is gradually entering the room as morning approaches. Just when I finally find my laptop again, my aunt Chris enters the room with the tray of Christmas cookies, telling me to have some. I must be pre-lucid at this point, because I caustically disregard her and say, "Not now, I want to get at least one jerk off in before morning" as I move the table with my laptop to the other end of the room.

I never end up jerking off; there's a gap in recall here that's frustrating because in it I somehow become fully lucid. Where my memory picks up I'm in an open field, hopping up and down and jumping around to add detail and maintain dream stability. In fact, this pattern continues throughout as I am very instinctually aware of the efficacy of this technique.

Eventually I come to the ruins of a colleseum or amphitheatre - something very ancient and in Greek or Roman style. The columns are basically all that are left, the rest having been overgrown with weeds & wildflowers. At this point I remember my goal of asking a DC how it feels to be a DC in my dream. Only, I am totally alone and no one else is around. I run through gaps in the columns, shouting something like, "Come on out!...Anybody! I'm waiting for you!" This forceful method doesn't work for a while, but as I'm shouting even louder and more desperately, I give the faintest hint of expectation to myself that someone is behind one of the far columns. Sure enough, when I run past and that area emerges into my line of sight, someone is there, waiting for me (it seems). I see a very exotic looking adult man, with brown skin, long, curly, black hair, and a flowing, purple silk shirt loosened on top to reveal part of his chest. I stop in my tracks, grateful my technique has borne fruit. I then walk towards him and ask, "Who are you and how does it feel to be a character in my dream?"

At first he smiles and has a very congenial look about him. Then he says, "I am the Fisherman. [pause] Come with me, fairy. You're mine now." This is definitely not a request; I've fallen into a trap! Instantly he shoots an invisible "hook" at me, which tethers me to him like a harpoon. Then he turns around and starts dragging me away to his realm (ostensibly). I feel powerless under the relentless tug of the line, my body dragging in the grass of the field.

Just as I'm consigning myself to my fate, I catch a brief glimpse of a maiden on horseback about 100 feet away. She's wearing a veil and seems like a princess - in fact, this whole scene seems like a fairy tale - and I, supposedly, am the fairy. The princess doesn't notice me, however. Maybe she sent the Fisherman to catch her a fairy to begin with. Regardless, something about seeing her strengthens and renews my will to escape. I think to myself, I'm lucid, this is my dream, I don't have to take this. I turn back the way I came and claw my fingers into the ground. A roar of unbelief issues from the Fisherman behind me. My visuals go black for a moment, but I know now that I have the strength to break free; my capture was only as real as I made it, that I let it happen.

The next thing I know I'm rocketing across the field unbound, enjoying a surge of freedom. Later it slows into the pace of travel I was using earlier, the hopping and jumping, ADD-like method. Soon I reach a jungle gym populated by a diverse mixture of people. Satisfied that I completed my main goal, I resolve to try completing one of the DreamViews Tasks of the Year - visiting the Lighthouse of Alexandria. I approach an older Asian woman (in her 50s) and ask her how to get to this Lighthouse. She ponders for a moment, then tells me to follow her.

We don't go very far. Apparently, she was just the first guide on the first stage of my journey. She leads me to a harbor. Then she points to a storefront on the other side of the harbor, separated from our side by water. All she says is to go through that shop and they will lead me on from there. Not in a position to question, I do as she says, flying over the water and into the shop at full speed. I realize the shop itself is really just a front; where I really need to go is beyond, into the hidden chambers behind it.

I bust through the back door, through a hallway, and crash into the kitchen. A group of female cooks laugh at my clumsiness, but one presents me with a peice of bread, hot & fresh from the oven. The bun lady! I exclaim to myself with a warm sense of strange nostalgia. Even though I've never encountered her before in my dreams or elsewhere, she seems intimately familiar. But she is gone before I can thank her or even see her face. As I sit there eating the bare bun, my lucidity wanes. The bread tastes great, surely, but I've forgotten my purpose here. I realize this eventually in the dream, but by then it is too late. I jump frantically from wall to wall in the kitchen like Spiderman, but even this renewed last-ditch sense of movement can't stop the dream from fading.

LOG: 08/19/09 - 08/20/09

Supplements (& dosage) taken before bed: 100mg 5-HTP, 2.5mg Melatonin
Supplements taken in morning: 8mg Galantamine, 400mg Choline (Dreamamins), 600mg alpha-GPC [NO MUCUNA PRURIENS]
WBTB session length (if applicable): 30 min
Exercises done after taking supplements: Repeating my intentions x2
How long did it take to fall back asleep after taking supplements? ~40 min
Sleep position: on my right
DILD or WILD? DILD
Transition details (if WILD):
Dream quality: 7
Ability to recall dream: 7
Lucidity level: 5

Lessons or theories: Hopping and jumping around and generally staying active is an excellent way to stablize the dream, but it can cause one to be easily distracted and lose focus. I have no idea where this "Fisherman" character came from, but he intrigues me greatly. I wonder if he'll show up in any future dreams.

20.08.2009

The Taste of Lucidity (WILD)

NON-DREAM DREAM LUCID

5:00 a.m.

After the first LD, I awaken but lie motionless in my sleeping bag. I successfully DEILD/WILD back into the dream. The transition is fully tactile, as my visuals are black for a long time before reemerging. I imagine myself spinning rapidly; then I am spinning rapidly. To fully make the transition, I imagine ground beneath my feet, then "push off" forcefully, propelling my spinning body up and into the great unknown. I'm shooting upward at an incredible speed, until finally I judge the time to be right to add visuals. I imagine the planet Earth visible from my vantage point in outer space. Soon enough it appears, along with stars all around me. But I stay focused on Earth. For some reason I entertain the idea of what it would be like if dreams could be recorded and used to make Hollywood movies. I play "director," using hand motions to position, rotate, and re-position the planet how I want it and doing a lot of zooming in and out as well. The thought crosses my mind, If I don't get the geography of the continents right, will this be a legitimate source of footage for a movie? Won't it look amateur? As I think this, the shape of Africa becomes an amorphous blob and bloats out into the Atlantic, very much unlike it's actual shape.

Somehow this "playing God in outer space" scene transitions to the kitchen of my childhood home. On the counter are three different kinds of treats - chocolate chip cookies, and oreo cake-like dessert, and store bought creme wafers. I try them in the order listed and it ends up being the most sensuous dream tasting experience I have had to date. The cookies are remarkable - they are soft and gooey - the most delicious chocolate chip cookies I have ever tasted in my life. I literally stuff my face with them until I decide I should probably give the other treats a fair trial.

The cake is good but not spectacular, about the same as it would taste in real life. The creme wafers, though, are terrible. They are extremely hard, and when I bite down I fear my teeth are going to crack or fall out. But I eventually chomp through one after a great amount of effort and I have is a sore mouth and teeth to show for it.

After this I decide I've had enough tasting for now and walk over to the living room. My brother Alex is on the couch watching a preseason football game. It's the Patriots vs. the Bills, and it's just starting. As the players jog onto the field I laugh because I see both teams are sponsored by Pepsi, and they have Pepsi logos on the back of their jerseys. I remark to Alex that it's off that they have the old Pepsi logo, though. The first snap happens a moment later, and, comically, the Patriot's quaterback, Tom Brady, decides to goof off by juggling the football with his feet (like a soccer player) in the end zone. None of the opposing players try to sack him, and he gets like 9 or 10 juggles before the refs blow their whistles to end the play. After this reverie I snap back into greater lucidity and decide to leave the house via the back windows, but the dream fades and I awaken before I carry through with this.

24.08.2009

Ever-Shifting Egypt (WILD)

NON-DREAM DREAM LUCID

3:35 - 4:30 a.m. (55 min)

I have little memory of how this all starts, but I know I was seeing hypnagogic imagery as I drifted to sleep and I was quite alert at the time, so I'm pretty sure it was a WILD. The first scene I remember takes place in a grassy field looking out onto a stunning horizon of jagged mountain peaks and an ancient, holy temple nestled between two of the peaks. At first my visuals are very weak, like the opacity setting in Photoshop is turned down below 50%. I'm just ripping up grass and smelling it to stabilize the dream and also to see how vivid my sense of smell is in dreams. After a while I succeed in stabilizing the dream (not sure how, but later I just jump up and down and it works instantly). I keep on pulling up grass and trying to smell it, but I just can't sense anything (insofar as grass has a smell, which I think it has quite a strong one). I wish I could remember more of this scene, but here starts a gap in recall over a fairly significant dream time span.

I think I somehow get back to my childhood home and my brother Sam is there, but it's very dark and my movement is restricted. Anyway, at some point I snap back into it and decide to try the DreamViews Task of the Year of visiting the Lighthouse of Alexandria. So I spin a new scene to ancient Egypt.

At first the world I enter seems very authentic - brick and clay buildings embellished with turquiose roofing, a populous city next to the Mediterannean, nothing modern in sight. The sights and sounds of the bustling city are exhilirating, and I take a moment to absorb the rich atmosphere. It is so detailed, a world unto itself with people going about their business with their own worries, that it's hard to believe that this is taking place all in my mind. I fly around the harbor for a while, seeing temples, statues, and monolithic structures but nothing so grand that it pops out to me as the Lighthouse itself. After searching for what seems like minutes, I fly across the harbor to a plaza on the other side. There I see a procession of elegantly dressed people walking. I descend down to ground level and start walking next to an impressive-looking man in ceremonial blue dress. I ask him how to get to the Lighthouse of Alexandria. He just points straight ahead and says to follow the plaza to the end and it's right there before the water. After thanking him, I resume flying in that direction.

As I fly, the scenery changes remarkably without my noticing it until I stop. Now, instead of an authentic ancient Egypt, I see around me a huge glass dome and bright lights. The bright lights are mainly coming from the lighthouse itself, which I find without difficulty. The building is situated inside the glass dome and the light is completely covering its exterior. It's advertising the lighthouse's sponsor, the Houstan Texans, in brilliant blues and reds. The team's logo is plastered all around the surface of the building and is moving in subtle animation. I'm greatly surprised by all of this, but it doesn't dampen my resolve to go inside and check out the lighthouse.

I enter at ground level and begin to ascend windy flights of stairs. Being in a close, confined space hampers my visuals a bit, so I hop up and down to restore them as I walk. Eventually the stairs terminate, but instead of being in a glassy room next to a ball of fire as I imagined, I'm in a circular room with many doors. Everything in the room, including the walls and doors, is made of wood. Not knowing where to go, I try opening a few doors at random. These happen to be bathrooms that are occupied, and they get slammed back in my face almost as soon as I open them. I go back to the center of the room, defeated, just about ready to give up, when a group walks in. I figure they know where they are going, so I follow them. They go through a door that leads to a giant swimming pool with a glass dome surrounding it. There must be hundreds of kids playing in the pool, causing a ton of commotion and ruckus. All part of the lighthouse, I guess. My lucidity isn't as great by this point, so when I walk along the edge of the pool and a kid taunts me while treading water, I am unable to resist the urge to get back at him by a little old-fashioned water wrestling and horseplay. I jump in and try to catch him. Unfortunately, he gets the better of me and pins me down underwater. The feeling of being underwater in a pool is extremely authentic and I don't for a moment worry about coming up for air, but nonetheless the kid's maneuver is enough to cause the scene to fade away.

Immediately I enter a false awakening in which I wake up in a room with Ben P., his brother Josh, and Charlie C. Ben and Josh are awake, and Ben's sitting on his bed while Jos is at his computer desk. I get up and start talking to them, possibly about my dream. But something isn't right. I can only hear out of one ear and there's there's this nagging noise of a radio ad being played somewhere in the background. Further, I have a vague perception of a bridge between my dreaming body and my real body, centered on the drool coming from my mouth. All of a sudden I tell Ben and Josh, "I think I'm still dreaming." Then I explain about the hearing problem and the ad playing as proof. They both laugh and say that they can hear the ad too, it's coming from Josh's computer, and of course I'm awake. They don't have me entirely convinced, though. I tell them that maybe I'm trapped in a state between waking and dreaming. They still think I'm nuts. Just as I'm about to give it up though, suddenly the thought strikes me that this isn't my bedroom; my real body is sleeping in a tent in the Idaho wilderness. I must be dreaming after all! Even though I tell this to Ben and Josh, they leave the room right then, evidently bored of trying to convince me otherwise.

My lucidity still isn't high, though. I notice Charlie trying to set up this computer game on multiplayer between my computer and his and I'm immediately distracted. I walk over just as he gets it set up. Looking at the menu screen, I figure it's a first person shooter based in Soviet Russia. But once we start playing, I realize that it's a role-playing game very similar to Pokemon, with creatures we collect as pets doing battle against each other. I make a remark about this to Charlie, but he doesn't pay attention.

Soon I get bored of the game and as I am pacing around the bedroom I suddenly remember the other DreamViews Task of the Year: exploring the Great Pyramids at Giza. Immediately I jump up and begin to spin in the air, intending to teleport there. I don't end up in the desert, however, but in an opulent hall with golden columns and dazzling bright light shining down from glass windows up above. The whole structure is a big, open, cylindrical tower adorned with statues, draperies, rich gold & gems. Soon I realize that it's a temple frequented by pilgrims from all over the world. I look up and see, at the apex of the temple, a giant statue of a godess. She must be the deity in whose honor this temple was built. Then I get this incredible feeling that she's beckoning me up to meet her face-to-face, that she has a message for me. It's irresistible. I fly up slowly, consciously trying to be very aware of my surroundings. As I do this I notice that the detail and opulence of the place are in direct proportion to my awareness. This is a valuable lesson in itself. As I approach the top and the goddess I get this exalted feeling, like I am in the midst of something divine and otherworldly, a religious transcendance. The richness and splendor or the temple only add to this feeling.

When I reach her statue face-to-face, though, I'm in for a bit of disappointment. For one, her face is quite ugly, with strange-looking eyes, a crooked nose, and distorted cheekbones. I thought she would be young and blonde, but she's old and has black hair. She doesn't speak to me in words, but there's a stone tablet with moving letters on which she conveys her message to me. The tablet is situated next to her right foot and displays it's text in orange type. The first message is about two sentences long. I try desperately to read it, but although all the words are in English, they make no sense next to each other. The phrase is meaningless jibberish. I tell her directly that I don't understand. Instantly the letters rearrange themselves into a new phrase. But this one is even worse than the first, as none of the words are in English. The goddess's expression shifts subtly into one of frustrated disappointment at my failure to understand the message. But at this point I have grown hopeless and apathetic.

I drift back down to ground level. As I make to leave, I see Russell Crowe, a pilgrim about to receive a blessing or message from the goddess. He asks me how great I feel after receiving her wisdom. I tell him not to bother, it's a waste of time...the messages she gives are just jibberish. Crowe grows instantly enraged and violent. He says we have to settle this right now, in the adjacent bar. Amused, I play along. In the bar, we hop up on top of the bar platform, ready to duke it out. A crowd of spectators has formed around us, eager for action. We both slam beer bottles against the side to make sharp weapons of broken glass. We then run at each other and start to exchange blows. But soon after this starts, the dream scene shifts.

Now I find myself in an airport terminal. I'm still lucid and remember my plan of getting to the pyramids, but for some reason I feel I have to go through the proper channels to do so: i.e., fly through designated flight zones, land at airports, etc. As I wander the airport trying to find the right terminal, I come across a jacuzzi peopled by about four women. The desire comes over me of wanting to prove my sense of touch is vivid and intact. I go up to one of the women, a young, pretty girl with black hair who looks foreign, and start kissing her passionately. She kisses me back and and we both enjoy it while it lasts - maybe half a minute, if that. Then I abruptly run away without looking back, preoccupied with flying to Giza and finding my terminal.

Some intervening scenes are skipped from the dream, and the next thing I know I'm coming in for a landing at an Egyptian airport (flying with my own body, of course). As ground control is waving my on, I overhear reports on the radio of strange extraterrestial spaceships rapidly approaching. The man on the radio is shouting desperately for gunners on the ground to shoot the ships down. Soon I can see them: giant, hulking masses of futuristic design coming in for a landing through our atmosphere. My own goal suddenly seems shrouded in insignificance as all attention is on the invading spacecraft.

On my periphery I see gunners firing lasers from turrets at the ship. Surprisingly, the combination of all this firepower blows huge holes in the ship and it starts exploding, crashing down in freefall. I decide to ignore all this and fly on into the desert, towards the pyramids, which I can now see with my naked eye.

Before I get there, though, I'm directed through an indoor room, like customs or something. They assign me an Egyptian guide, who I suspect asks mostly as a government agent spying on me to make sure I don't steal anything or whatever. He looks like a shady guy in any case. When we get back out, we're at the base of the pyramids and the scene has a very Indiana Jones-type feel, like everything's being explored for the first time.

At the base of the pyramid, the first stone slab serving as an entrance is barred shut, blocking the way. To the left of it, though, are three stone statues of dogs, all right on top of each other. For some reason the idea occurs to me of licking each dog statue on the nose to try to open the barrier. I do this, and the taste is very real, like hot stone with a layer of sand on top. And sure enough, this causes the slab to slide away and grant us entrance.

Unfortunately, we are unable to get very far one inside, as there is an impenetrable horizontal ceiling cutting off any further ascent. This ceiling covers the whole dream scene, both inside the pyramid and outside, and despite my efforts to fly through it, I just can't. My "partner" chuckles at my misfortune and I become helpless in my frustration.

The scene shifts again, this time for a brief false awakening in which I recount to whoever is with me the epic dream I just had. This doesn't last long, though, and soon after I awaken for real.

LOG: 08/23/09 - 08/24/09

Supplements (& dosage) taken before bed: 100mg 5-HTP, 2.5mg Melatonin
Supplements taken in morning: 8mg Galantamine, 400mg Choline (Dreamamins), 600mg alpha-GPC [NO MUCUNA PRURIENS]
WBTB session length (if applicable): 30 min
Exercises done after taking supplements: Repeating my intentions x2, 61 point relaxation
How long did it take to fall back asleep after taking supplements? ~30 min
Sleep position: on my left
DILD or WILD? WILD
Transition details (if WILD): can't remember
Dream quality: 9
Ability to recall dream: 9
Lucidity level: 8

Lessons or theories: This dream was an excellent example of how awareness level can affect the quality of the setting of a dream. It was also the most powerful for me thus far in a spiritual sense, even though no particular messages or revelations were given to me. The temple setting itself was glorious and evoked tremendous awe and wonder within me.