• Lucid Dreaming - Dream Views




    View RSS Feed

    Verre

    1. Minor Antics (DILD/FA/NLD)

      by , 10-15-2015 at 06:46 PM
      Ritual: Woke up around 5am after four hours of sleep and decided to make a proper LD attempt. To reinforce my intention I used supplements, my usual stack of Alpha-GPC, L-Theanine, and Bacopa. Did some SSILD cycles until I felt too wakeful, and then breathing/counting. After falling half-asleep and waking up again, I turned on my side.

      DILD: My recall is poor from the fact that I haven't been journaling diligently, and I also didn't write more than a few notes promptly after the dream, so I don't clearly recall the onset of lucidity. I just remember that I was in a small, empty, square room with white walls and beige carpet, and I knew I was dreaming. I had the idea that I should better integrate with the dream through physical activity, so I did some high-knee running for a few circles around the room, and followed it up with jumping jacks. This felt absurdly easy compared to the physical strain of exercising in WL, and the sense of incongruity almost collapsed the dream.

      I managed to hold the dream together, but now I was feeling dissatisfied, and I decided that I didn't like this room with its ugly beige carpet. I went through the door and found myself outside, which was a nice change. I found myself in a small yard bordered by beautiful vegetation, glossy green leaves and vividly colorful flowers.

      FA-NLD: At this point I had an FA during which I lost lucidity by believing I was actually awake. I recall telling someone about how beautiful the outdoors was in the dream I just had, compared to the bland indoor environment. The dream proceeded to take the form of a meeting with colleagues at work, though the details have faded.

      DILD: At some point after the meeting, I was driving in a car with two women and realized I was dreaming again. I had reviewed the TOTMs during my WBTB, and was very confident in my recollection that one of the basic tasks was to blow a car horn! That will be easy, I figured, since I'm already driving a car... in fact, I feel bad because it's almost too easy. Dream took care of that, so when I pressed the horn, no sound came out. I ended up putting a lot of concentration into trying to coax some sound out of the horn, and the best I could get was a kind of doorbell buzz.

      After giving up on my efforts to make the car horn sound louder or more realistic, I pulled over to the side of the road, and got out of the car with the two women. We were on a small rural road with a nice view over some fields. Now I wanted to try one of the advanced tasks, to pass into a DC's body. As I approached one of the women with this intention, I noticed her appearance had changed: previously she had been a fully-clothed middle-aged woman of non-descript appearance. Now I was walking toward the body of a nude young woman with no head! It wasn't that the head had been chopped off, her body just ended at the neck, a smooth stump.

      I didn't let this deter me and walked right into the body. I realized that the lack of a head was handy: since the only "headspace" I was occupying was my own, I didn't feel any confusion about my identity—although it made the task less interesting than it might have been. However, I began to suspect that since the body had been facing me as I merged with it, now my head might be attached backwards! This thought was so disconcerting that I woke up before I could look down and check.
    2. Catbird Fish (DILD)

      by , 08-11-2015 at 08:39 PM
      Ritual: It's been over a month since I've done any deliberate dream practice, due to a combination of low motivation and being really busy in WL, so this morning I woke up early to feed the cats and decided to turn it into a WBTB. To reinforce my intention, I took a very small amount (2mg) of galantamine, backed up with alpha-gpc and l-theanine. I lay on my back and tried to concentrate on my intention to get lucid, but my focus was almost completely lacking, and eventually I dozed off only to be startled awake by my own snoring. I turned on my side and fell asleep without any further efforts.

      I am in a store that specializes in custom-made, artisanal candy and chocolates. There is a table covered with samples, and I am surprised to see one set labeled with the names of my dad and a cousin, apparently commissioned by them for some event. It consists of three types of chocolate meant to be dipped into three different flavored creams. I want to try all three, but there is only one sample of each flavor and I am competing for them with other customers, so I miss out on one or two.

      My disappointment is eased when the lady proprietor brings out more samples, but these turn out to be biscuits and candy, rather than the chocolates on the first table. Still, they are very appealing in all their colors and textures, and I am standing over the table unapologetically sampling one thing after another when I feel a strange tremor in the floor. The motion becomes more intense, and the other customers start to panic because they think it is an earthquake, but I recognize that it is a different kind of motion. It doesn't feel like the ground is shaking under the building, but rather like the building itself is sliding over the ground, which is of course impossible, unless...

      "Don't worry, everybody!" I say authoritatively. "This is a dream." I open the front door to see if I was right about the movement, and sure enough, the whole building is sliding sideways through a forest at great speed. While I wait for our journey to end, I continue munching confections: I was particularly enjoying one fennel-flavored cookie shaped like twining leaves and tinted delicately green. Recalling that I was planning to resume my diet tomorrow in waking life, I figured I should take advantage of this opportunity to stuff my face with calorie-free dream food!

      The building eventually came to a halt, and I went outside to explore the new environment. I recall it was now an urban area, but some of the transitional details are vague. Somehow I met up with my husband and another guy, no one I recognized, and we drove through the city in a really nice convertible sportscar (modeled on the picture of the BMW i8 he showed me last night in WL). I think we were going to see a movie but maybe it wasn't showing (I don't remember watching one) so we went back out to get the car. It was parked some distance away, so to retrieve it faster, I concentrated on making it drive itself back to us, and to speed things up even more, I had it fly through the air.

      "Thank you, robot valet," I said, as the car gently landed in front of us at the curb. My husband got in the driver's seat, and I got into the back again, but when the DC squeezed into some weird sidecar niche, I climbed over to take the passenger seat. For some reason the car had a British layout, so the driver sat on the right with the passenger seat to the left.

      Since I had demonstrated that the car could fly, we took off directly into the air to avoid street traffic. However, our flight path didn't feel stable: we were getting buffeted in strange ways. I pointed out that while this car was incredibly aerodynamic on the ground, it was not designed for flying: a sturdy little pod would be better for this purpose. We dropped back down to the pavement and now the car performed beautifully, hugging the ground with impressive traction even though the streets were wet, and roaring forward at incredible speed.

      "Where are we going?" I asked. Even though I wasn't in the driver's seat, as the dreamer I felt like I was actually the one steering. My husband said he wanted to pick up some things from the Hall of Records, and helped me locate the building. Inside, it turned out he was retrieving some parcels that had been mailed to him. He mentioned that one package was three days late, because the sender had needed to mail out a movie script first. "Why didn't he just bring them both to the post office at the same time?" I asked, to which there was no satisfactory answer. The parcels contained research materials, and now that my husband had them in hand, he wanted to do some work. "Okay, you work," I said. "I need to go do something."

      I had remained partly lucid the whole time, but I had been enjoying the dream enough to let the narrative play out. Now that things were wrapping up, I remembered that I had planned to catch a fish for the TOTMs. I went around behind the building and conveniently found a stream flowing by. The water was shallow and crystal clear, so I peered in to see if I could spot any fish. What I actually saw swimming underwater were... kittens!

      "Actually this will make things easier," I reflected. Now I wouldn't need to bother with a fishing rod, hook, and bait. Kittens were much easier to catch! I dangled a length of ribbon over the water until a kitten surfaced and started batting at it, then lured it closer to me until I could scoop it right up in my arms. I concluded that the creature I had caught was a "catbird fish" (I'm not sure why it wasn't just a "catfish," but this was the term that seemed right at the time) and knew I should examine it closely so that I could write a clear description in my report.

      Once I was holding the animal, it was no longer the size of a tiny kitten but had swelled into a plump armful. It was no longer quite cat-shaped, either: now looked more like a stuffed animal with the bodily proportions of a totoro: big rounded torso and very short arms and legs. Although my "catbird fish" didn't physically resemble a fish, I sensed that there was something fishlike about its bones, even if I couldn't see them.

      I studied the head first, which was still cartoonishly cat-like overall, but with significant differences. The mouth was very unusual: more narrow and vertical than that of a real cat, almost beaklike the way it protruded, but with large exposed teeth. There were two large incisors on the top and bottom, but both sets of incisors were adjacent to one another in the center, more like those of a rat than a cat, but wider and flatter.

      After studying the mouth closely, I looked back up and saw that the round, wideset eyes were now completely white. I recalled noticing normal pupils before and wondered if they were rolled back in the head. Just when I was thinking that the creature was starting to look a bit scary, with its weird mouth and whitened eyes, suddenly it spoke up in a very friendly voice: "Hello!" I responded in kind, smiled at it, and continued my examination.

      It had the fur of a cat, brown tabby stripes with patches of white here and there: a white triangle on the throat and chest, a little white on the belly, and white gloves. I checked and determined that all four paws were white. After looking over the creature thoroughly, I returned the "catbird fish" to the stream.

      The environment had shifted around me: the stream was no longer outside, but occupied a room in a building that had put together exhibits pertaining to different countries. I wondered which country had supplied my "catbird fish," and looked around until I saw the words "This is Canada," inscribed under the surface of the stream. I wondered what other countries were being exhibited—somehow I knew there were supposed to be five of them—and if I could find any rooms with bodies of water suitable for fishing. It would be cool to catch dream fish from several different countries!

      I wandered around the building looking for the other exhibits, but to my disappointment, all the others were closed. I went to the front desk to ask about this, and became even more incensed when I noticed a sign informing me that the price of admission was $898.99. I complained angrily to the desk clerk: how could they justify charging so much when only one of the five exhibits was even open?! He simply pointed me to a second sign, which listed a complicated set of refunds that reduced the price of admission to only $1.25.

      "Oh, alright then." I figured $1.25 was a reasonable fee for the one exhibit I had seen, and was willing to pay. I had a bunch of change in my left hand, and started trying to count out five quarters into my right palm. The first few attempts inexplicably failed due to the shifting numbers and appearances of the coins. "This is really hard to do in a dream," I commented, and wondered if it would be easier if, instead of trying to shift the correct number of coins from left hand to right, I put them directly down on the desk as I counted.

      I started making a little pile of quarters, but had only counted out two before coins that had initially resembled quarters turned out to be square when I set them down, and I had to start a separate pile for them. The third round, quarter-sized coin that I managed to produce had a square hole in the center like those old Chinese coins, and the fourth one had three triangular holes, but by this point I realized that this would never get done if I was too much of a perfectionist. All I needed was one more vaguely quarter-shaped coin to complete my stack of five, but suddenly all the ones still in my hand appeared to be the wrong shape and size. I picked something arbitrarily to finish the stack. I was well aware of the irony of going to so much effort to pay for something in a dream, but since it was so unexpectedly challenging, I felt that it would be a good exercise to try to see it through!

      Updated 08-11-2015 at 10:00 PM by 34973

      Categories
      lucid , task of the month
    3. Wind Propulsion (DILD)

      by , 05-07-2015 at 07:02 AM
      Ritual: WTB 12am, WBTB 4–5:30am (working), woke 6:15am with dream.

      I dreamed I was working in a museum and I had assembled a collection of objects to show people. I had left a bunch of things lying outdoors on a forest path and wanted to bring them in, so I grabbed an armful of tall leather boots (there were least six pairs in different styles) and walked back to the museum. By the time I reached my destination I was only carrying one pair, and thought I must have dropped the others along the way. I wasn't sure where to store the boots I had brought back, but I looked around and decided to lock them up in a tall armoire of Japanese design. I opened up the doors and there was another set of doors behind the first, and another set behind that, three in all before I reached the interior.

      I decided to take my car to go back and get the rest of the stuff since I had left a lot of things lying on the path and I wasn't doing a good job of bringing them back by hand. I have a third-person impression of watching my car wind its way through a narrow gorge: at times I was afraid the rocks were too close together for the car to fit, but I found it easy to lift the car off the ground and twist it as needed to avoid the rocky outcroppings. After getting safely through the narrow rocks I felt very pleased with my success, and decided that I should spend more time driving like this, using the wind as propulsion. This jogged my memory: wind! Wasn't that one of this month's TOTMs? At that moment I became lucid and decided to attempt the task.

      I raised my arms and called out in a loud voice, "Wind!" I remembered that the task required not using any active power to fly, but letting the wind pick me up and carry me wherever it might be going. So after summoning the wind, I waited passively but invited it to lift my body in the air. The air picked me right up like I was as weightless as a feather, and I relaxed into it. It was wonderfully pleasant and enjoyable to be buoyed up in this way. Curiously I looked around me, wondering where we might be going. I have the impression of thick flocks of birds darkening in the air in what seemed like abstract geometric patterns.

      I recalled that the bonus task also involved mastering the elements, and wondered if I could use this same wind to knock things down on the land below without getting buffeted too much while I was floating in it. I peered down at the trees, which appeared to be somewhere between 50 to 100 feet below me (I'm terrible at estimating vertical distances). They were in full green leaf and showed no sign of being blown about excessively by the wind at its current strength. I thought it would be a shame to knock down such beautiful trees, and before I could convince myself otherwise, I felt the air around me destabilizing and woke up.
    4. "No Chicken" + "No Pants" (NLD fragments)

      by , 04-01-2015 at 07:08 PM
      Recall has been terrible for the last week or more, absolutely minimal. Last night was a little better, maybe 2/10: I dreamed all night but could barely piece anything back together, even right after waking up.

      NLD fragment, "No Chicken": I was in the backseat of a car being driven by someone else. I can't remember why we needed a live chicken. Although I had no awareness that I was dreaming, I knew instinctively that I should be able to conjure a chicken out of thin air by will alone, and I got frustrated after trying again and again with no success.

      NLD fragment, "No Pants": My mom wanted to enter an underground cave complex that had been set up as a tourist site, but I was afraid they wouldn't let me in because I wasn't wearing pants. I solved this problem by taking off my bulky green sweater and slipping it on like a skirt, fastening it by tying the arms together in front. Though this left me with nothing but a sports bra on top, I buttoned my coat over it and at that point felt like I could pass muster. In the cave, I looked down at my improvised "skirt" and thought it was working pretty well—to a casual observer, it might even look like I was wearing a normal skirt with a sweater tied around my waist.

      I commented, "Okay mom, this is the weirdest thing I've ever done." Though in retrospect I have to acknowledge that it really wasn't all that weird in the great scheme of things.
    5. Give me back my car! (NLD)

      by , 11-12-2014 at 06:17 PM
      I was returning to my car in a parking lot, and when I went around to the driver's side door, I was surprised to find the headlights on. This was surprising. Had I left them on somehow? I hoped the battery hadn't run down too much. But then I noticed the passenger side door was open as well. I peeked into the backseat to make sure no one had gotten in and was hiding back there, then went around to close the passenger door. At that point I saw three guys in front of the car, one holding jumper cables. I'm not sure how they got my car open but apparently their aim was to use it to help jumpstart the car next to me. It looked like they had just finished. I indicated the other car, from which I could distinctly hear the purr of the engine, and asked "So it's running now?" to confirm my impression what had just taken place.

      Things seemed resolved so I was about to get in and drive away when I discovered that one of the men was now in the driver's seat and my husband, who hadn't been in the dream at all before this, was occupying the passenger seat. When I asked if I could have my car back, the driver said something like, "I just need to do this first," and started backing up. I don't know if he thought he was being helpful by backing out of the parking space, but the car kept rolling backward, and since there was no room for me inside, I was trying to run backwards right next to it while keeping my grip on the passenger side door, which was still open in front of me. This was challenging and I worried I might fall and be dragged across the pavement. It occurred to me that it might almost be worth it if it made the guy realize how unhelpful he was being, but I managed to keep my balance.

      The guy kept backing up to the point where he—accidentally, it seemed—overshot the edge of the parking lot altogether and went rolling backward down a grassy embankment, me still hanging on outside and struggling to keep my balance and pace them. Finally the ground leveled out and the car gradually rolled to a stop on the grass. At this point I was rather annoyed, and leaned in to tell the driver, "No one else can drive my car the way I can. Can I please have it back now?"
      Categories
      non-lucid
    6. Photographing the Dragon Moon

      by , 09-11-2014 at 07:30 PM
      Ritual: After five hours of sleep I woke naturally and was determined to make a good WILD attempt. I spent an hour-long WBTB reading and writing about dreams, then returned to bed just before the sun rose. Despite a promising transition phase in which I observed hypnagogic visuals and audio distinctly manifesting, I was interrupted by frequent re-awakenings and eventually realized it was time to turn on my side and enter real sleep. I fully expected to WILD at this point because the conditions felt ideal, but instead I just had NLDs.

      NLD: I had just left a cafe and was walking down the sidewalk to where I had parked a couple blocks away. The sky was oppressively dark, darker than seemed natural, and I composed a couple lines to try to describe it:

      The world cowers beneath an enormous dark,
      Unrepentent and unredeeming.


      I wasn't sure if I liked them but figured I should write them down as soon as I could, because if I came up with a whole structure I could always come back to it and work it into something better.

      As I entered the parking lot I noticed the moon. The last few days have seen a huge harvest moon, but this one was even bigger, with that sallow yellow hue that tints it when it is still low in the sky. Moreover, the pattern on its face was unusual: it resembled a winged dragon, drawn with iconic simplicity and in a rampant position like a figure on shield heraldry. I felt an urge to photograph it.

      I opened the passenger side door, left it open, and sat down on the edge of the seat to brace myself so I could try to frame a good clear shot of it on my iPhone. I thought I felt movement and the image was bouncing around on the screen, the moon lost among some trees now. Was the car driving off with me? How inconvenient! I reached to the side and jerked up the emergency brake, then returned to my attempt to take a picture.

      As I held up the phone again and looked at the image on the screen, I was more alert to the possibility of movement this time, and yes, I was able to confirm from it that indeed we were moving, and this was preventing me from taking clear photograph. Bad car! We were now driving rather quickly down a city street so I scooted fully inside and managed to get the door closed. (I realize now that in the dream the car door was hinged in the back and opened backwards, flat against the side of the car, rather than being hinged in the front and opening outwards as in WL.)

      Once the car door was closed I wanted to get control of the car back, so I awkwardly climbed over into the driver's seat. A towel seemed to be wrapping around my feet and impeding me, but with some effort I managed to get myself seated appropriately so that I could take over the driving. I had been planning to do some other things before leaving the quarter of the city that we'd come from, but by now we had driven away too far for it to be convenient to return, so I decided to just go home instead.

      After that I was waking up, but there was one more scene where I was standing next to a tram and again wondered if I wanted to return to the area I'd been in at the start of the dream. Once more I decided not to, since I couldn't be sure the tram would go to the right place either, and I was at that point under the impression that it was the tram, not my car, that had driven off with me.

      Then I realized with exasperation how absurd it was that dreams continually present me with situations that are extraordinary by the standards of waking life, yet I usually don't recognize them as evidence of dreaming. Why not? "I guess I just don't find them strange" was all I could come up with. Later I realized that I was at least still half in a dream state as I had these thoughts, and didn't realize I was dreaming then either.
    7. Parking Mishap

      by , 08-19-2014 at 08:03 PM
      We stopped at a Greek take-out restaurant. I saw bags of take-out orders being loaded onto a plane to be shipped all the way to Greece. "Wow, this place is hardcore," I thought.

      We had parked right under the nose of the plane, where there was a niche just big enough for the car (a 2006 silver Volkswagen bug) to fit. I was a worried because it looked like the plane was about to take off, but figured it would be okay, since the plane would have to back up first, which would release the car from underneath it, and then the plane would turn ninety degrees to access the runway. The car should be fine. Still, I thought I should check. I called up to a lady in the cockpit, "Hey, is it alright if we park--"

      Before I could even finish the sentence, a metal plate slammed down over the nose of the plane, closing up the niche where our car was parked. Meanwhile the plane began to pull backward, flattening the top of the car. There was a white flash and the sound of an explosion, and I knew the car was ruined.

      I was annoyed because I had been hoping to inherit this car when my husband was done with it. Still, what was done was done, and there was no point getting bent out of shape now. So I tried to stay calm and figure out if there was anything practical to be done.

      Note: 2006, the year of the car, is clearly WLR (waking life residue), as last night I was comparing various editions of a book that included this year. The plane is also WLR as I've been flying a lot recently. Not sure where the Greek restaurant came from.