Entaria

Non-dream
Dream
Semi-Lucid
Lucid

I am in my room, getting ready to go somewhere or do something, I don't know exactly what. For no apparent reason, I think "what if this is a dream?" but decide everything feels far to realistic (As a side note, my dreams are rarely so realistic that I can wonder if it is a dream, and decide that it isn't. 99% of the time, as soon as the thought crosses my mind, I become lucid. Although in this case, the fact that my room was perfectly tidy should have been enough of a clue...) I decide that now is a good time to do a reality check anyway (because I'm still trying to make reality checks enough of a habit that I do them in automatically when dreaming). I look at the doll with two long braids that sits on top of my dresser, close my eyes for a second, and open them again.

What the hell? The hair is in a different position. That can't be right, I must not have been paying attention.

Just to test and prove to myself that I am awake, I step into a more open part of the room and jump while thinking about flying, fully expecting gravity to follow normal rules.

But instead, I float up and hover near the ceiling ("Holy crap...")

Okay, I guess I am dreaming.

I remember reading a post about making dream time "longer" than the amount of time I'm actually asleep, and decide to try it. (Unfortunately, despite being lucid, I am still not particular logical, and this was something I was not planning on trying until after I'd gained fairly good dream control, which I don't currently have) I first decide to simply demand that the dream lasts for an hour, but I know right away that it hasn't worked, and the dream starts to fade. I stabilize it as much as I can, but it is still "dark" around the edges. I remember a different technique where you "travel" to another dream realm where time is different, and say "I want to go to the realm where one waking minute equals one dream hour."

Nothing happens, and I'm not sure if I said it right, or if I had even said it out loud at all, so try again. This time, a portal of some sort appears in the wall beside me, and I go through it. As I do this, I hear a rather sinister voice say "Getting a little advanced, are we?"

I fall backwards through blackness for a few seconds, just like the person who posted the technique had described, and find myself back in my room.

Hoping that it worked, I remember my goal of learning to "waterbend," and fly through the wall, trying to visualize the beach at my cottage on the other side. But, as I go through the wall, the dream fades, and I wake up.

I resist the temptation to move, and stay perfectly still once I realize I have woken up, and continue to visualize the beach, as well as imagining that Katara from Avatar: The Last Airbender is there to teach me.

I am suddenly in the dream, with Katara (and sometimes Aang) there. She talks to me a little bit as I try to do waterbending, but I don't remember what she was saying. I'm doing pretty good with the waterbending, getting it to move around the way I want it to.

Suddenly, for some reason, she becomes evil, and there are people in boats swarming the beach attacking me. And I start attacking back, experimenting with different ways to move the water around, and freezing it to throw little ice darts at some of the attackers. I realize that I can just leave, or ignore the attackers (because they aren't actually doing anything to hurt me) but decide that this is actually kind of fun, and keep at it. For some reason, things start flipping between "cartoon 2D" and "3D," which kind of weirds me out, but then I think "Hey, that's kind of cool," and start doing it on purpose.

At this point the dream is starting to fade again, and I suddenly remember "Crap, I was going to try the task of the month. I NEED AN INSTRUMENT!"

Some sort of cross between a flute and a clarinet appears in my hand, and I start playing it while everything continues to fade. For whatever reason, without me choosing to do so, I/the instrument play(s) the classic "snake charming" Arabian music.

I wake up, and once again try to slip back into a dream right away, but it doesn't work.

I've been attempting WILDs for a couple of weeks now, but keep getting stuck in transition because of persistent hypnic jerks, something that has always happened in the past when I've non-purposefully started slipping into REM sleep while still more-or-less lucid/conscious. But, I have frequently in the past (particularly in the morning, if I go back to sleep after my alarm has gone off) gone straight to REM sleep without any problems, so I thought I would try a "WILD" without making a conscious effort to remain lucid, and was kind of successful...

Non-dream
Dream
Semi-Lucid
Lucid

(Some things happened before this, but I can't quite remember what they were) I am lying face down in a puddle, and hear a male voice reminding me that I'm trying to attempt a WILD, but I'm not quite there yet. That voice gradually morphs into my own voice, which is sometimes coming from an outside source, and sometimes coming from me. I get up and start walking forward with a great deal of difficulty (dream logic said that this was because Sleep Paralysis was setting in) I'm keeping my eyes half closed so I don't wake myself up, and every now and then stop at a "landmark" (tree, road, etc.) and tell myself I need to "save my place" by doing some sort of action (like breaking a branch) so that if I wake up, I'll be able to go directly back to that spot when I start attempting to WILD again. (What???) I get to a large stone wall, and the male voice from the beginning of my dream tells me that there is a small door in the bottom of the wall, and that when I crawl through it, I will be in my dream. I locate the door (which is really just a small hole) and wiggle through it.

After I crawl through the hole, I find myself on some sort of medium-sized rocky hill. To my right is a forest, and to my left is the beach at my cottage. (this was good, I wanted to attempt this month's challenge of diving to a ship wreck and collecting treasure. My plan had been to go to my cottage, because I know it quite well and frequently dream that I'm there, so I figured it wouldn't take a whole lot of effort to keep the dream world from falling apart if I went there) The sky is very dark and cloudy, and looks like it is going to rain. I want it to be nice and bright, and try to will the clouds to go away. This doesn't work, so I wave my hand at them like I'm half fanning half brushing them away, and they fall away down beyond the horizon. It's not quite as bright as I would like it, so I wave my hand again upward like I'm trying to pull something up, and the sun rises behind me and shoots across the sky, too far so it's right on the opposite horizon and the sky is red like at sunset. I "pull" the sun up slowly this time, but then think no, maybe I'd like it better at sunset, and push it back down. I play around with this for a few minutes until I'm happy with the colour of the sky and the position of the sun. I look out across the water, and think that, rather than attempting the challenge of the month, I'd like to recreate the land from the fantasy novel I'm writing (ARRRRG, NO! Stop changing your mind once you're in the dream *slaps dream self... again*) . I look up at the sky and think "castle" and when I look down, the forest is still there, but the beach and water have been replaced by rolling hills and a castle in the distance. But... rather than being the impressive castle in the side of a mountain I had imagined for my novel, it looks like one of those "fairy princess" castle made of paper towel rolls and paper cones, all bright pinks and yellows. Yuck. I decide to at least change the colour to something more reasonable, and wave my hand over it a few times until the colour changes to more muted browns and greens (still not what I want, but close enough). I look around and realize that everything is much darker and fuzzier than it should be, as though my eyes were half close. So, I make the brilliant decision to open my eyes wider...

... And open them in real life. ("Crap!")