Bridger's Oneironautic Expeditions

I'm driving my car through a neighborhood around sunset time when I spontaneously realize I might be dreaming. I continue to drive the car, talking to myself about being lucid and focusing. I park the car on the side of the road and step outside. I walk to the front of the car and touch the hood before getting down on my hands and knees and feeling the pavement. I pick up a handful of dust and dirt from the road and roll it around in my hand. I want to sit down somewhere, so I imagine a bench on the other side of the road and release the dirt from my hand imagining it transforming into the bench. It was hard to do this, however, so it doesn't happen, but when I look farther up, a bench is there in front of me. I go to sit down and just observe around me for a while. I look up at the sky which has gorgeous colors of sunset with light and dark blues contrasting the streaks of clouds floating stationary high above. A bird also flies over head. I imagine the bird swooping down towards me, and sure enough, it heads straight at me with great speed. I duck out of the way exclaiming how close it was. The bird jumps up on the bench, and wants to climb on my finger. I hold it out but realize the bird is larger than I thought. It looks like a fluffy falcon or hawk with some kind of fancy feathers crowning the top of its head. I hold out my whole hand instead and it leaps onto it. A group of people comes up to me and starts talking, including me in their conversation. The whole time they're talking, I feel like the dream is speeding up and I try to slow it down by keeping myself grounded. Eventually, they walk away but I want to remember their names. I ask them but I can't recall any of them. Looking down at the concrete, I see the small ridges and patterns on top characteristic of smoothed concrete. I get down on the ground until my eyes are level with the ridges and imagine the sides of the ridges being trees with a path running down the middle. As I get up slowly, I find myself in the forest, still with the group I was talking to. The trees sway overhead, but I soon wake up.

The title of this dream is to commemorate my physical dream journal being completed by this entry. May the second journal be more amazing than the first!

Before I began dreaming, I was attempting the MILD after my second to last alarm went off, but so far, I had not yet fallen back asleep and was concerned my final alarm would be going off at any moment...

I'm arriving home at night to a house that I'm not familiar with. Walking up to the door, I notice a lot of bicycles in the front yard. As I walk over to some of them, Goose, my GF's dog, runs up to me all energetic and he starts poking his head through the spokes trying to bite at them. I continue to walk up to the door. Once I enter, I see everyone sitting around nursing drinks I assume to be alcoholic. More than my roommates are there, though, and it feels like the end of a big party. Before walking farther in, we get on the subject of dreaming, and I break into a lesson for everyone. I tell them exactly what I was trying to do this morning, "Set your usual alarm clock time in the morning, but also go back 90 to 100 minutes before that and set another alarm. Get out of bed with this alarm, go to the bathroom or something, then go back to sleep all while repeating the phrase in your head, 'the next scene will be a dream'." I say how it's a good way to induce lucid dreams called the MILD method after implementing the WBTB method. I walk all the way into the main room now and sit with a couple guys discussing what I had said. They talk about weird things that could pop up in dreams like a duck wearing a leather jacket. I agree with them and ask them if they would question whether they were dreaming or not after they saw that. I also make a joke by saying "Duck Gun" trying to relate the ducks and leather jackets to Top Gun. It feels stupid but both of the other guys laugh. Suddenly, I get the feeling to do a reality check since I realize I've just been talking about them before. I push my fingers through my other hand successfully and realize I'm dreaming. I look around the room for a second trying to stay calm. There's a lot more people now, all of them talking. I want to go back outside so I get up to leave when one of the guys I was talking to also gets up and shakes my hand. It takes me a couple attempts to get his name right, but apparently it was "Lemon". I walk outside to find it's a brilliant sunny day. Summer comes to mind as spots of vibrant colors, I assume to be from flowers, cover my peripheral vision with large trees over the road in front of the house. It appears I'm in a neighborhood. There's a small picnic table with a pull out bench in the front yard and I go over and sit down. I try grounding myself in the dream more by looking over my hands and touching the wooden bench, feeling the grains and knots in the wood. A friend comes out of the house talking in a very sad voice, but I'm pre-occupied with maintaining my awareness. I suddenly decide to toss the bench I've been sitting on far away just to see what it would do. My roommate comes outside too, and I tell him I just threw the bench to infinity. As I watch it, I see it catch the wind, though, and it falls back in to the neighborhood some distance away. The idea of flying comes to me so I prepare to do this. Instead of my normal routine of jumping into the air to begin, however, I decide to be more controlled with it. I hold out my arms and imagine myself floating off the ground. Before I leave the ground, everyone leaves in a car and the wind becomes a bit gusty. Suddenly, I find myself starting to float. It's working! I continue to focus, also taking note of the surroundings. The wind starts to carry my off, much like a hot air balloon. As I'm drifting with the wind, I try to ground myself more and think of the next thing I want to do, but I wake up

I'm in a small room with some other people sitting on a bench. The bench is up against a wall running the length of it, and the other two sides of the room are glass, forming a triangle shaped interior. I realize I'm dreaming just because of the vividness. I look at my hands and try to slow everything down. My vision feel constrained for some reason. I drop to one knee and try to ground myself by doing the finger push. It works pretty well, with some slight resistance at first. My vision, still constrained is bothering me so I reach up to my face to find I am wearing sunglasses. Taking them off makes it much better, and I have my peripheral vision back. I also take off a hat I was wearing and makes my vision better as well.. Remembering my dream intention to talk, I sit back down on the bench, about to call out to the dream, when I suddenly lose lucidity.