The Oneironaut's Odyssey

I've been thinking lately about something a friend said to me, apparently if you stay properly hydrated during the day then your body will need 30% less sleep during the night. This is because keeping hydrated allows it to function better during the day so you don't need to recover as much while sleeping. I started paying attention to how hydrated I've been and noticed that the days where I stay extremely well hydrated result in the nights being more vivid with a higher chance of lucidity. I had 2 lucids last night which was unexpected, especially since the activities I spent time on doing yesterday usually result in me being less aware (reading, gaming, watching shows, exercising). My awareness has also just been generally gobshite over the past few days, despite meditating every night. I also didn't meditate last night since I was too tired, but I did consume a massive amount of liquids throughout the day. The only variable I can think of was that I drank like 3 different kinds of tea which I usually don't drink at all. Other than that my diet was completely the same as always.
I think staying hydrated could be a key condition for myself getting lucid at night, so I'll keep paying attention to it for now.

Dream 1 - Cafe Playground
I remember being with my daughter inside a playground (like the ones in McDonald's). She was much younger than she is now so I was helping her out a lot. I remember being able to see her mother/family outside the playground, we decide to head down a slide and go see them. We get down safely and go sit in the cafe that we appeared in. Next to me is someone from the family but I can't recognize who. I order a smoothie, it must be blueberry (guessing from the blue colour). I think I get up to go pay or something and I realize the baby isn't on me, so I turn around and go pick her up but I realize I'm dreaming. I wander past the cafe (it's like a small cafe they in the middle of the mall) and look around. The area seems similar to the mall near where I live, I think about what to do and come to a decision. In 1 of my previous lucids I was able to enter a VIP area by the elevator and wanted to see if I could get in there again. I find an elevator and press the button a few times. Geeze I feel like it's not working, eventually I wake up. The dream was pretty standard for my lucids, about 30-60 seconds.

Dream 2 - Star Wars office
It was like I was in a star wars video game (like jedi academy), I was doing a mission in an enemy base. The corridors were all metal and there was an opened gateway to my right. Past the gateway was a rocky cliff that seemed to end in an endless abyss, but there was another gateway on the other side. I'm sprinting along as I see this gateway, the doors on both sides are slowly closing, I do a huge leap over the abyss and tumble under the gateway on the other side. It was really close but I managed to make it before the door closed. I then enter the stars wars galactic government room, with all those floating things the politicians talk from. I remembered that in a video I watched a while ago the race E.T. was from was part of the galactic government, for some reason I really felt like looking around for them. After not being able to see them (though there were definitely a whole variety of alien species around) I had the awareness to become lucid. I decided that, unlike in my last lucid earlier in the night, I would reality check and attempt to stabilize a bit and then pursue a dream goal. I pushed my thumb into the palm of my hand, stretching it and confirming the dream state. Next I decided that I'd continue my search for a dream guide, the area I was in was more like a business work floor now. I remember seeing a girl walk past so I tried asking her if she was my dream guide, she kept moving away too fast and I couldn't catch up. She was only walking at a normal pace and I was running, she should have been a metre apart but eventually the distance increased to several metres and she disappeared. I got too caught up in the chase and ended up waking up.

Went to bed later again as I was exposed to TV for the first time in a long while.. Where does time even go?
I'll have to restart my dream recall goal (3 dreams every night for 3 days in a row).

Dream - School trippin'
I was on a school bus, we were going on a field trip somewhere. I had a lot of bags (these were the bags that I had left in my flat to be picked up by a moving truck) and I remember unloading them from the bus storage. So many bags, I can't possibly move them in one go... I pick up 2 bags and follow along with everyone else, deciding to make a couple trips to get everything to wherever we're headed. I distinctly recall there being a very realistic sexy big breasted (she had a boob job) brunette woman (in her thirties?) at some point who was guiding me. I don't think she appeared to me in person, but may have been an image on my phone. She had no shirt or bra either . There was also another girl that was the same age as me, she was a strikingly beautiful voluptuous blonde. She gets replaced suddenly by a feminine looking guy with short brown hair... Wait a second... Is that a wig? I think to myself that I think it's actually the girl in disguise. I continue to a playground train which we're supposed to climb onto. It's literally a playground, yet it's somehow a train? I climb up the bar ladder on to the wooden platform, Katie tells me that I shouldn't hog all the space because of how many bags I have. I say that I won't... So bossy. I dump my bags into a corner and climb back down to the bark ground, Katie comes up to me again with 2 of my other bags. Huh? She went and brought my bags for me? "Thanks, how many bags are left?" I say, she responds by telling me there's 3 left (she says it in a way that makes me think she's feigning that she doesn't care, though it's really nice of her to help me out). I think to myself that 3 can't be right.. I should only have 2 more bags? I don't stop to think about this properly. I look at my phone and I see that sexy big breasted brunette woman again, she's in a .gif with the brown haired guy. The woman has her breasts bouncing left to right (they're huge ( . Y . )), the gif is pretty well-made but I can see where the frame resets, the guy isn't doing much except trying to look cool. I notice that there are 3 loops in the .gif, they each play twice before seamlessly switching to the next one. WHOA! Suddenly it switches again... I notice that the guy has turned back into that beautiful blonde, I knew it was a wig! She's in tight-fitting gym clothes with her stomach showing and she's swinging her hips from side to side. It's incredibly hot . The entire scene of seeing this .gif on my phone wasn't very long but it was very vivid and very intense. The end

Dream experience: 8 (pretty standard dream but the girls were incredibly vivid and the experience was quite intensive and has been on my mind most of the day)
Dream awareness: 2-3 (Not aware enough to be lucid, but I was aware of inconsistencies during the dream. Awareness reached ~3 during the .gif part due to vividness and emotions)

Non-dream
Non-lucid
Lucid

Dream fragment - Walking around town
I just remember waking up from my first dream cycle and thinking that I had 2 separate dreams. I was walking around my home town, near the roundabout but not really sure what happened. There seemed to be a large gap and then I was in a new dream.

Dream 1 - Survival
Imagine those crypts in Skyrim that are dome-like with the opening in the top, I jumped into one of those and the interior was really dark. It had a similar atmosphere to something like 'Doom' or 'Quake', and there were there rectangle flesh aliens attached to the ground. Roughly an arms length, maybe 20cm wide and 5cm high, they were everywhere kind of just radiating out from the centre. They attack you by lurching one side up and slamming onto you. Their 'flesh' is like a bundle of red sinew that when attacking, will become fibrous and latch around its victim. When I fell into the room there was so much of it and it was grabbing at me. I don't know how but I seemed to kill a whole bunch of them, the 'don't know how' part was interesting because I seemed to have no memory of how anything works. I watched a video on Youtube by Cracked called 'The Stumbling Dead' which is a joke about how the Walking Dead can all understand each other but they have no idea what the f*ck is going on . I seemed to be in that kind of mindset, my hair was ragged and really long, my skin was dirtied and the only clothing I had was a rag around my waist. I tried getting away from the alien things, there appeared to be a tunnel leading out of the dome room on one side which I felt like I had been down before. At this point it was almost like the dream had a game-like theme to it, where if you failed you could retry which was why I thought I had been down the tunnel...

Dream 2 - Balloons
I seemed to be dungeon crawling with a few friends, I had been through the dungeon before (was some kind of game world) and was advising them on certain things. It was pretty stereotypical for a dungeon, stone brick walls with high ceilings etc. We turned up in a room which apparently just has a tonne of enemies spawn and the easiest thing to do is just bypass everything by running to the exit. I tell my friends about this but the look in their eyes tells me that they want to grind some experience.. "*sigh*, okay then we'll do that" . We head down the stairs next to the entrance when suddenly I realize there's some stupid event going on. A plethora of freakin' balloons surges up in front of us. 'Ugh god damn it why now?', the aim is to pop as many balloons or a special balloon which gives you heaps of points. I spot the special balloon (which is blue and white) and take a whack at it with some kind of whip-like sword, it smashes against it but the balloon doesn't pop. It seems to be a lot harder to pop than other balloons :/. I chase after it and whack at it a few times but nothing happens. A guy called Chris from my geology class shows up, he's hitting other contenders to earn points. There seems to be a lot of people competing now, in the distance about 20m away I see the announcer of the game narrating the points people are earning. He's wearing a suit and holding a microphone. Chris pokes me in the stomach with a long stick. "1 point to Chris!" the narrator shouts. "God that's cheap" I say, he isn't even trying to get balloons -.-... Chris stabs at me again with his stick which is more like a really long staff. It's pissing me off now, stop it dude. I grab his stick and take it off him, then snap it in half. I know this is against the rules but damn he was annoying. I walk past him and leave, taking the broken stick with me. I notice that he now has a new stick "Ugh what a douche". I enter a passageway leading to another part of the large room the competition is being held in. The place is so colourful now, there's even a colourful playground nearby. I remember thinking about how the whole stick thing was typical behaviour for a friend of mine called Matt. When we'd play Jedi Academy on LAN he would pick the longest lightsabers and then just do flips all over the place that one-hit everyone. And because they were so long you couldn't do anything about it .