DJ Comments

Canis,

That's a really good idea. I could try it. I could try to watch some lucid videos or something before bed. I know I've had visual stimuli influence my dreams on many occasions. I need to see the lucidity. A video on the subject may be enough.

Thanks for thinking of me. I'll work on that!

My dreams followed close behind what I was thinking about as I went to bed.

This is cool. How often do you find your dreams matching up with your waking life activities / thoughts just before bed? On occasion I can do this, but it's extremely hit or miss, and never seems to match up very well.

If this is something that's a common occurrence for you, I wonder if you might have good luck obsessing about lucid dreaming and reality checking right before bed. And since you also tend to get up in the middle of the night to record memorable non-lucids, that could be an even better shot at lucidity.

Ever tried anything like that?

Interesting. I'm more likely to try to boost my tryptophan and adenosine, though I drink some coffee during the day.

Check this out: "Adenosine occurs naturally in foods such as the mushroom Ganoderma lucidum (Reishi mushroom)."

That's rich on multiple levels.

Yes, exactly right on the adenosine! In addition, caffeine raises levels of norepinephrine and dopamine, both of which are helpful for lucid dreaming.

The downside, of course, is that caffeine is also really, really good at keeping you awake. It seems like it's only practical at quite low doses, at least from what I've read/observed.

Thanks for the links. I'll look into them when I can.

It's interesting you bring up caffeine, though not a surprise. Caffeine blocks adenosine receptors. Adenosine is associated with sleep.

Heh, sorry, the "aminergic system" shorthand has been on my mind recently after reading a handful of articles that Scot Stride released. Basically, the functions of the brain which are governed by serotonin, dopamine and norepinephrine. These articles were mostly about some of the more bleeding-edge research that Thomas Yuschak was doing into lucid dreaming brain chemistry. Here's where I found them: Oneirology: The Study of Lucid Consciousness "A Review of Sleep Research ": Lucid Dreaming: A Valid Explanation (A lot of the links are broken, but the experiment with caffeine was interesting.)

It sounds like this really was a lucid dream then. Congratulations! Not every LD experience is going to involve soaring across the world like Superman and shooting lava from your eyeballs. All we're after is a great experience, and this sounds like one.

As for pursuing Task of the Month vs. pursuing the opposite sex, if you're motivated and having fun, you're doing it right! Who knows? Maybe February Task of the Month will let you do both.

Good night of dreaming!

I've never heard of the aminergic system, and now that I've looked it up, it isn't very clear, except that it has some relationship with eye movement, including REM. You've studied!

Yeah, old girl friend.

The water dream was likely lucid. If pressed, I would have to say I knew I was dreaming; I simply wasn't in control. I love collecting lucid's, but I'm more interested in the dream feelings themselves. It was so real. In fact, it might have been better since I didn't think to stabilize. I simply enjoyed a really lucid feeling.

When I am lucid, I almost always RC. I pretty much know I'm dreaming so that when an RC fails, I look at my hand, I stare at it until it looks weird. I know it will, and it always does.

Still wish I could have some of your dreams, though most of my lucids are right on. I can hardly be bothered by the TOTM, which I would actually enjoy pursuing. Instead, I pursue the opposite sex.

That "In the Water" dream sounds great, lucid or no. It sounds like your awareness was building to really high levels. I wonder if the scene was so peaceful that it didn't give you much of a "kick" in the aminergic system that might normally make you lucid. You know that feeling of semi-shock you get when a reality check fails and then you're just alive in the lucid dream and things become totally unambiguous? That was probably all that was missing.

You know, I find that reality checks are ideally suited for these kinds of situations. There are dreams where I'm totally clueless (most of them), and dreams where I immediately recognize that this is all a dream. It's those dreams in the middle where you have these vague feelings of doubt but nothing that's quite enough to reanimate your sleeping mind by itself. Those are the ones where reality checks really work their magic. I've been trying to get the RC habit going again. I'd gotten a little arrogant about RCing but lately I've had a bit of a reawakening about how valuable they are.

The OGF acronym took me a second to figure out. (Has to be "old girlfriend".) At least that makes more sense than me interpreting it as "OG", like "Original Gangsta". Unless these two dreams occurred in an early 90s gangsta rap setting, which would be kind of awesome.

I think you're absolutely right about logging all dreams at least somewhere. I just do my non-lucids in a big Google doc where I have no fear of boring anyone but myself when I write out beauties like "Long Meeting Dream #3 -- Discussing Unit Test Failures".

Yours always seem interesting, though. I mean, just look at the first line of your tag cloud! I rest my case. LOL.

Dreams are indeed awesome. Couldn't agree more. I'm not sure how I went most of my life pretty much ignoring them.

I hear you about sparing people boring dreams. I typically log my boring dreams because there will be some detail that meant something to me, and then I don't want to leave out the rest.

I also find dreams in general awesome, free story. I love the disconnect between thoughts, so I just log all my dreams. I don't really want to forget any of them.

Well I thought this one was very cool, especially judged against many of my own non-lucids. I only use my DV journal for lucid dreams, so that tends to really bias it in favor of having a lot of my most interesting dream content.

Leaving out non-lucids has spared everyone all the dreams where I'm working, having some sort of meeting, cleaning something, or performing some other insanely tedious task. I have some good non-lucids, too, but it's way more hit and miss for me than for others it seems. Some of the journals I read on here kinda blow my mind.

You may want to give the Task of the Month stuff a try! (The one I referred to me in my earlier comment is about doing an extreme winter sport.) I find them to be pretty amazing motivation, although I failed utterly the first couple of months I tried to do them. Seems to help focus me a bit and there's something so... collaborative about trying to do things a bunch of other LDers are also trying.

Canis,

I don't even know what any of the tasks are. My dreams are exciting compared to life, but boring in the realm of dreams. I'd rather have one of yours.

Wouldn't THAT be cool!?

Wow, the feel of that opening scene reminds me a lot of the most recent lucid that I had! I'm grateful that in mine I didn't have to escape the plane the way you did and slide down a mountain ridge on my unprotected butt! LOL.

Then again, that might be kinda fun. If you'd have thrown some skis on, you'd nearly have Advanced Task of the Month.

This was a throwback to a tree that I grew up knowing at my grandparents house, but one year they had to cut it down.

I dream about the same thing, I loved that tree.

o_O



Woot! I voted for him too!

Awesome! I'm glad you see beyond the trite lines people always throw out when you say you are voting 3rd party. Great minds think alike!

Time kind of wrapped around itself. Very odd.

o_O

BTW, yes, I am voting Gary Johnson IWL.

Woot! I voted for him too!

I was outside. There was a meteor going across the sky. I moved to a clearing in the trees to see it better. The sky was full of like 10 meteors. It seemed as though the sky was on fire. It was the end of the world. That was a wild visual.

This sounds beautiful. I used to have end of the world dreams quite often, but it's been awhile now.

No, that's not a real term.

I was with MJ. I was on a skateboard, lying down, and he was on my back.

Lol at the mental image I got when I read this. XD

She commented that she liked boobie gluers.

HA! Boobie gluers. That's not a real term, is it? If so, I can't say that I'm a fan.

He's an asshole.

My brother the asshole.

Sorry, that wasn't dream. That part was a poem I just made up called, "My Brother Asshole."

How poetic and deep!