martakartus

I was in this dream the other day in which I was made a very strange proposal by an old schoolmate, who I haven't seen in ages. The situation was just too odd. As I was following her down a corridor, I was checking my hands and pinching my nose all the time, but I must have been doing the RCs too quickly and mindlessly, because they all showed me I was awake. A great chance to become lucid, lost.

I was with a few people, probably family members, in a kind of dark room. I was sitting on the floor in front of a magic tunnel slide, I could see a lot of flashing images coming from it. Apparently, it was a tunnel of dreams. I decided to throw myself into it and as I was going through it I saw a ton of images, like an endless sequence of pictures from dreams passing before my eyes at full speed, but I didn't get to stay in any of those dreams.

This was the last REM cycle before waking up and it was hard for me to tell which of those images were from this weird dream and which were fragments previous to this one.

I've been having pretty disturbing dreams about my ex these last few nights. See, we were in a healthy relationship for three years and a half, but we started going out when we were almost 15 and we simply grew apart. I broke up with him over two years ago and we haven't kept in touch since, even though it was a clean break-up. Now I have been happily in a relationship with another guy for a while. Thing is, I bumped into my ex last Friday and we had a two-minute interaction, the typical "how's it going". The next day, sacred coincidence, I bumped into him again at a concert, but we didn't talk much either. Both times it felt quite awkward because we never meet anymore and we hadn't even seen each other in almost a year. Then the series of dreams started.

They started two days ago. I dreamt he sent me a Fb friend invitation (he removed his Fb profile some months ago and made a new one just recently, so we're not friends) and left me a message asking why I avoided any chance of talking to him. Yesterday, I dreamt he tried to cut off my legs with a chainsaw. And today I had a dream which involved him and his mother in a pretty nasty way (sexually, somehow), but I can't quite recall the action, I just remember I woke up feeling quite disgusted. Seriously, unconscious mind, what the hell are you trying to tell me?

Of course, all of them were non-lucids. Had I been lucid, I'd have tried to find a way to figure out what was going on.

This is a non-lucid dream I had tonight, but it boosted my motivation.

I was at my house, sitting on a couch, reading some newspapers. Some articles published in them caught my attention. Each paper had an article which talked about studies that have been done about lucid dreaming. They all came to the conclusion that people who have lucid dreams often, see their intellectual habilities enhanced, while also being happier than people who don't have them. This was supposedly due to the fact that lucid dreamers have a higher level of awareness and self-awareness in their daily lives and this seemed to create new neurological pathways in the central nervous system. Interesting.

In the dream I was glad such things were being published because maybe it would encourage other people to take the journey, but deep down I knew mostly everyone wouldn't pay much attention to it.

I have heard lucid dreamers say they feel more intellectually capable since being into it, but I don't know this for myself. What I have felt though is that I more easily feel happier because of it. By making lucid dreaming a background thought in my mind, I always feel I'm making steps forward to better myself, so to speak. And as for the neurological pathways thing... I don't really know where I've got the idea from, maybe I read it somewhere but I don't remember. But casually, I'm studying the nervous system in a Physiology subject at uni, no perhaps it's not so much of a coincidence.

Last night, I set an alarm at 3.30 am to attempt a DEILD. The alarm is very gentle and I made it turn itself off after a minute. It woke me up as expected, but my first reflex was to switch it off. I quickly remembered my goal and prevented myself from moving too much. I lied on my back and waited for the alarm to shut up.

When it did, I was feeling really groggy and thought it would be easy to get into a dream. Suddenly I was worried that maybe it was too early and I would still enter a deep sleep state, therefore making the whole thing unworthy. Despite my efforts to stay awake, I soon lost consciousness and woke up at 8 am with only a small fragment of a dream in mind. And as far as I can tell, I wasn't lucid in it. Dammit.

Needless to say, any advice is most welcome

What I found interesting about this dream was that, despite being a non-lucid, some of the DCs had a strange attitude towards me.

I was to meet at 10 am with a group of people for an excursion (which we were really going to do in real life the day after I had this dream). I was the first to arrive at the meeting point, but I had to go back home to get a couple of things. Once some of the people started arriving, I excused myself and went back to my house.

I was almost there when I found a girl who went to my school when we were little. She is a year or two younger than me and has a twin sister, but I have never really been friends with either of them. She stopped beside me and asked me what my name was, because she had seen me before but didn't remember. Without hesitating, I told her my first and last name. Then, she said something like "she's the dreamer! My sister won't believe me when I tell her". This should have triggered lucidity, but I don't remember having become lucid. I was just taken aback and went on doing my thing.

I went into my house, got a bottle of water for the excursion and came back out. Then I remembered I needed sleeping pills, which I actually only take when I am very nervous and can't sleep, and so I headed to the Chemist's. While I was in the waiting line, two women were having a heated argument about politics, but I wasn't paying attention. When I got to the chemist and asked him for the pills, I was surprised at his question: "do you dream much?". I answered: "of course I do, I easily remember three to four dreams a night". The people in the waiting line looked at me in desbelief and started whispering at each other. Again, this didn't trigger lucidity. Then, the chemist gave me a small "notebook" (it wasn't really a notebook, but I can't come up with any better name) and on the cover you could read "Dream Journal". He said I could enter a dream recall contest. I started laughing because I thought I could only fit one or at most two days worth of dreams in that tiny notebook and that it was pointless. I went out of the Chemist's still laughing.

The dream went on for a while, but there weren't any more strange behaviours from DCs. I thought it was interesting because I had never seen any DC behave like this. Somehow it reminded me of the way some of them behave in the movie Inception.

I was at my Uni. There weren't any classes that day but I had to attend to a couple of compulsory seminars. At the entrance of the lecture room were two people handing out small pieces of paper with either the word YES or NO written in them. These were the answers to a question similar to "will you stay until the seminar finishes?". When I went past one of the men handing out these pieces of paper, he only had some of the YES left but none of the NO, so I had no choice. I planned on staying for the whole seminar anyway, but he said "sorry" and handed me a YES piece of paper with a 20-euro bill under it. I pretended I didn't notice in case it was a mistake, but I had the feeling he was trying to bribe me.

After this, my classmates and I entered the lecture room, which pretty much looked like a theatre. We stayed for the whole seminar and, when we were going out, I noticed something in my hand. I looked at it to find two 10-euro bills, which had basically come out of the blue. I reached for my pocket to find the previous 20 euros I had been given and felt the bills in my hand. They felt like real money. I was amazed at how much money I had made out of nothing.

I had this non-lucid nightmare a few days ago, but it was so vivid and detailed I thought it was worth an entry.

The whole dream was dark, like it was night. I was walking down a street in my town, it was quite crowded, and I noticed some of the people were dressed in a strange way. Something that really caught my attention was this really big man lying on the floor, his body was deformed. I went past him feeling a mixture of disgust and shame.

A while afterwards I went back to that street walking in the opposite direction, I don't remember where I was coming from. The big man was still there and I noticed another guy, not as big as him but with an equally deformed body, lying near him. Again I went past them, only to find the whole street was full of people dressed up as any kind of scary creatures. I thought that must have been some kind of event, but still I was scared some of them would chase me.

At some point I turned to the right, trying to get away from that crazy atmosphere. To my surprise, that street was completely empty and, quite strangely, it was darker than the other. I could barely see where my feet stepped and I was asking myself why on Earth would all the lights be turned off in such a gloomy street.

All of a sudden, I noticed someone was walking after me, just a few metres away. I decided not to worry about this and instead, make sure I didn't trip into anything or anyone walking in the opposite direction. In order to do this, I let out a scream every now and then or just said words, anything to make myself noticeable. I had the feeling there was a bike coming towards me, so I made louder noises to let the rider know where I was. The bike went past just a few centimetres away from me.

Then, I had the urge to look down to my feet and saw a tube which was well over 30 cm in diametre, and I saw it just in time to not stumble upon it. At this point I noticed I couldn't open my eyes. My eyelids felt really heavy and it was like they were glued shut. I thought this was really strange and there had to be a way I could open them. I even tried it with my hands without success.

The dream finished shortly afterwards, once I was getting suspicious about everything that was going on. I guess I would've become lucid if it had gone on for a bit longer.

I was part of a game which somehow reminded me of The Hunger Games. It took place at my street, and we were a number of people divided in two groups. There was a raffle (the word "reaping" from the book came to mind) in which two names were called out, one person from each team, and these two people would fight to death. I was horrified when I heard my name being called, and I would fight against a girl who was in the same class as me in primary school. I haven't heard from her in ages, but well, there she was. She had a small sharp knife but I had nothing, so I was offered the chance to be given a weapon of their choice. Obviously, I agreed. They gave me a small sword which had a round end. I was disappointed, but I had to deal with it.

My opponent and I started running towards each other. I was almost crying and saying I didn't want to do it, but I knew I had to. When the girl was still a few metres away from me, she threw the knife towards me in an attempt to thrust it into my brain straight away. I was lucky that not the blade, but the wooden handle hit my head, and then it fell on the floor, leaving me unhurt. I turned around, picked it up and started running to her with my sword before me, and of course she started ro run away. When I reached her, I tried to stab her in the back, but because of the sword's round end, it just wouldn't get in. A few seconds afterwards, I noticed the wind was blowing against the blade, making it even more difficult. She somehow managed to escape and got into a house. I could see her from a glass window and I started trying to cut the glass with my sword, but of course it didn't work. An old couple came to the window from inside the house and told me to go away.

I went back to the starting point, knowing I could do nothing but wait. A while afterwards, she came from the other side of the street. I went near her and the fight turned into a heated argument. First, a single neighbour came out to the street to complain about the noise, then another one joined him and they both were telling us to shut up. The man who was leading the game told us we would leave it for another day, and I felt frustrated. As I went back to my house, I thought I had things to do on the next two afternoons, so it would have to be on the third day, at most.

I was with a friend of mine at a girl's house, in the garden. I don't remember exactly what we did, but the girl suddenly started chasing after both of us. She had a sort of spray can and threw a gas against us. I feared the gas could be toxic, so I tried my best not to breathe it. As we started running, I noticed it wasn't so hard for me as it normally is in a dream. It's a common dream sign of mine to be chased after and not be able to run because I feel my body is really heavy, and I may even see myself crawling on all fours. This dream sign made me have my last lucid, and in this particular dream, it almost did as well. I thought to myself "it isn't such a struggle for me to run in this dream", but somehow I didn't become fully lucid and the dream just followed as a regular non-lucid. Anyway, it's good that I noticed, at least.

After a stupid mosquito woke me up this morning I thought I had lost a quite detailed dream. I had it on the tip of my tongue but I couldn't remember a single bit of it. A while afterwards, it came back to me like a bombshell.

In it, I had just been watching a play with my uni friends at a theatre. It was like a circle theatre and we were sitting on one of the upper circles (sorry for my vocabulary, I'm not sure I'm using it the right way, I hope I make myself clear). When the play finished, we went down the stairs and towards the exit. Then, we went past an aisle and into another dark theatre, not in use at that time, and the exit was at the other end of this one.

When we were there, I remembered I didn't have my bag with me and I didn't know what I had done with it. Suddenly, I saw a couple of my other uni classmates making their way back to the first theatre because one of them had forgotten her bag there. I assumed mine would be there too, so I followed them. When we arrived, we found the theatre was being prepared for the next play, there were ushers, who were wearing a funny outfit, showing people to their seats. I went near one of them and asked if I could check if my bag was there, but he told me the theatre had been emptied and there was nothing left. The other girl asked another usher who told her she could have a look, so I did the same. She found her bag quickly, I spent a little while but found it in the end. Finally, I made my way to the exit, where my friends were waiting for me.

Now that I'm working on my dream recall, I found interesting that the surroundings were so vivid and realistic and that they didn't change throughout the dream. I drew a map of the place in my dream journal, but I really wish I knew how to draw properly because it's almost impossible to describe it with words.

I was working for a secret company and played the role of Mr. Cobb in the movie Inception. The surroundings were different than the ones in the film, in my dream it all took place in a house, but every now and then I kept seeing Cobb's children.

Our mission was to plant an idea in a woman's subconscious. To do that, we needed three layers of dreams, and in each layer I had to find the way to "plug" her into that machine and go a layer deeper. In my case, though, there was no dead husband trying to sabotage the mission or anything like that.

During the night, I've woken up in some occasions (or dreamed I woke up, I can't really tell). Almost every time I did I thought I would do some kind of RC to make sure I wasn't dreaming and not lose touch with reality. I also thought I needed to remember as much of the dream as I could to be able to write it down when it finished (though in the end, I haven't been able to recall much detail). After each of these short awakenings, I fell asleep again and the dream continued. At about 5.45 am, I decided I had woken up too many times and maybe the next time I fell asleep I would enter a different dream, so I got my dream journal and wrote this down. It's been a strange night.

PS: yesterday night, I watched Inception right before going to bed, and I was almost sure I would have a dream about it.

This morning, after coming back from a concert, I had a quite curious non-lucid dream.

Thing is, I went to bed at 4.30 am, more or less. I fell asleep and awoke at about 8 am, recalling very little of a dream I'd just had. I thought it was way too early and I still had time to have more dreams and pay attention to remember them. Then, I fell asleep again.

I "woke" a while afterwards. I was on my bed wearing my pyjamas (the same I was actually wearing). I had a look at my watch, it was 10.30 am. "Fair enough", I thought, "but I can still try to sleep more" (Side note: I always have trouble sleeping when I go to bed so late, I keep waking up many times). I looked around me and saw a couple of the friends who I had spent the night with, standing by my bed. One of them had a device which, he told me, was used to monitor the dreams to be able to retain more detail. I only needed to put two suction pads on my chest and just sleep. I thought it was a bit strange, but I followed his instructions.

It was then when I finally woke up. The first image my eyes caught was almost the same as the one I had when the dream started, apart from the fact that my friends weren't there. Again, I looked at my watch and was startled to realise it was 10.29 am. I did a RC to make sure it wasn't another false awakening, but this time I really was awake.