• Lucid Dreaming - Dream Views




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    ZAD's DJ


    Short-Term Goals:
    * Become lucid at least once a week (every week so far since August)
    * Meet my dream guide more often
    * Improve visualization ski
    Long-Term Goals:
    * Have a ten minute lucid dream once by the end of 2019

    Common Abbreviations - [F] My fiancee [D] My dog [CH/9] Childhood home [APT/8] Current apartment
    Most of my DJ entries have been copy/pasted from my quick morning phone notes lately for lack of time.
    Will try to have higher quality entries in 2019.

    1. Ending My Four-Night Lucid Streak - September 23-24

      by
      ZAD
      , 09-24-2018 at 03:22 PM (ZAD's DJ)
      Sep 23 2018

      Four nights lucid in a row! PB!

      [D] FA where I'm in bed, feeling my breath intensely. I can see two spheres of breath rotating and flowing throughout themselves, as if each of them is tearing itself inside out. The spheres are located a few inches in front of my face and are about 5 inches in diameter each. They're arranged one atop the other forming a sort of figure 8. I shift to seeing this in third person from the left side. Maybe they're feeding into each other? But I see and feel their movement aligned with my even, deep breaths.

      [?] Wrote something in my DJ but can only vaguely make out the words "tonight", "Jesus", and "fool". Awoke 5:30am.

      [L] In 9. The dream starts in my bedroom. My bunk is high, almost shoulder level (like one of my old dorm rooms). There are some assorted items laid out on the bed. It's dark outside. I'm trying to find something. The dream shifts to the front yard briefly, then to the kitchen. I need to make F a BLT without lettuce or tomato, on a long sourdough slice. For some reason I'm trying to find a saucepan (maybe to cook the bacon?) but the only one I can find is submerged in water in a white bowl next to the sink. The pan has a thin coating of spaghetti sauce on it. Around this point I become lucid, or rather reach the threshold of awareness, but decide not to do anything about it and to observe instead. I don't consciously control anything, from dream body to dream logic. I put down the slices of toast in the toaster, and they seem too long but somehow change dimensions to fit. At first the slices are vertical as expected, but after looking away and back, they are arranged horizontally at the bottom of the toaster. I'm talking to F this whole time. Finally I tell her "I'm lucid". She doesn't really react. I decide to do something improvised, a coordinated reality check. I hold out my palm and either through speech/nonverbal command or through expectation, I have her stick her finger through my palm. It worked! However now I couldn't really see her, and could see through her. She was transparent and I could clearly read some text behind her that took the form of her body. The dream shifted quickly and I was outside the kitchen looking in, and the lights were off. I said aloud "lights on!" and some dim lights came on but not all. The dream started to fade. I remembered to do math but lost the dream before I could. When I awoke I tried to DEILD, however I could only see the emerging scene if I strained my eyes to the bottom-right corner; there were maybe 5 or 6 scenes that emerged. When I opened my eyes it was around 6:40.

      [F] I find myself outside a sliding glass door with a family inside. They let me in, they're part of a resistance and they're hiding me from someone; before this I was in a ditch. This was in-depth but unfortunately my pen ran out of ink.

      [D] I was in a church library. There were bookcases that slid apart, and I was shoved inside. Inside it was dark and there were others. We could see through the cracks of light left by the books. After several implied weeks of pleading my case that we weren't able to read the books in the dark, those imprisoning us finally gave us some better quarters. It was some sort of speakeasy establishment, and our quality of life went up (we had alcohol and other entertainment) but now some of the black prisoners were slaves/barmaids.

      Sep 24 2018

      I had at least four dreams but can only remember two. I'm trying to utilize a memory palace for dream recall when I don't have a physical DJ next to my bed, but it's not always working (although it does help a bit).

      [D] I'm in the backyard of 9, in full knight's armor. I'm carrying a metal jug of gasoline or urine. It's daytime outside and I'm splashing this mystery liquid all over the lawn; I get some on my neighbor's fence.

      [D] After a longish dream, I find myself sleeping 9's garage. There are several pillows, and one of them is fancy but makes no sense (day residue from a stupid sweater one of the Property Brothers was wearing). It's made by George (the Walmart brand). It was very visually vivid (and mentally/perceptually clear) at this point, and I think if I didn't get involved with the dream drama I could've easily become lucid. I was in a sling chair but now I'm in some sort of giant furniture bucket looking at a late 90's desktop and monitor. My dad comes in and talks to me for a bit. I decide to go inside and sleep on the couch (worried about bugs). When I go to shut down my computer though, my C drive disappears! I think my hard drive somehow unmounted itself (in the dream I thought somehow it got disconnected/shaken loose). It's a weird mix of XP and Vista and 7 and when I open the start menu I can't search for anything in the search bar. I start freaking out about my computer, eventually I wake up.
    2. Nonlucids - September 17

      by
      ZAD
      , 09-17-2018 at 03:43 PM (ZAD's DJ)
      Sep 17 2018

      I color-coded again, but somehow still went out of order. Why is the order of ROY G BIV so hard for my just-awoken mind to remember?

      [F1] Red - I was in an open wooded area with about 6 others (family/friends), and we were being threatened. Possibly at gunpoint? The dream was long, vivid, and dramatic, but I don't remember much now.
      [D1] Yellow - I had a new boss, who looked like a soccer mom/high-powered woman from an episode of Undercover Boss I recently saw. She had serious botox face and bad red lipstick. We became close and trusted each other with secrets. In the office (dark interior, fading afternoon sun coming through huge windows, on a stairwell near a door to an auditorium) I see she's looking at her phone with a night-vision video playing, I understand it to be about my current manager (Y). Y is in the wrong. I ask for details but new boss can't share them. Next we're in a minivan riding down my old street. It's dark, and we drive up to my childhood home, but my dad has left a ~10x5 foot flatscreen TV on a box in the middle of the driveway.
      [D2] Orange - I'm in my childhood home with my new boss and family/friends for a barbeque/get-together. It's morning or overcast afternoon, and it has just rained/is about to rain again. I talk with my boss & family for a while and then I understand that my grandpa is coming in (he was dropped off in the backyard?). I go to help him in. I pass a bouncy castle in the back-left corner of the yard where a tree is with kids inside. It's raining and I'm wondering if they'll be okay in there. I hop around, dodging deep muddy ruts and footprints in the yard. Finally I get to my grandpa and help him inside, and I notice he didn't bring any drinks (he always brings soft drinks to social gatherings). When we get to the patio, I look in an oversized ice chest and there aren't any drinks there either. Suddenly the rain intensifies and I warn my dad because the grill is flaming and isn't under the patio.
      [F2] Green - This is a strange sequence of events and I'm not sure which came first. In Scene A, I'm downstairs in my WL living room which is brightly lit for a while with others, then the scene transitions and I'm in bed with the side-table lamp on, and there are three servants in the bed next to me. I clap our WL copper cooking tongs together and the servants take a strange formation. In Scene B, I'm in bed in the dark, and I have a close memory of being downstairs, so I focus on the difference between the location of my body in bed (which I can barely feel) and the location of my body downstairs in memory. I try to WILD and almost succeed, unsure if I did. There are three possibilities and I can't remember which is the actual case.
      Scenario 1: Scene A came before Scene B, and I was trying to DEILD and failed.
      Scenario 2: Scene B came before Scene A, and I successfully WILDed.
      Scenario 3: Scene B was an FA, because its memory has a dream-like quality.

      In any case these were pretty vivid. I just wish I got more sleep
    3. Lots of Lucids! And Some Really Cool NLs Too - September 16

      by
      ZAD
      , 09-16-2018 at 07:03 PM (ZAD's DJ)
      Sep 16 2018

      Pre-WBTB:
      [D1] I'm in a blue version of my childhood living room with F. She brings me a plastic rectangular package of writing utensils, and I tear it open and start looking at the different items (big fat sharpie, pencils, pens, an eyebrow brush). She looks mad at me for some reason. While I try to figure it out I fold a piece of paper in half along the middle. It's regular printer paper with one side watercolored blue, but not warped or anything. I keep prodding her as to why she's mad at me and she gives me the silent treatment, so I try to put back together the plastic box, but I can't fit all of the writing utensils back in. She's drawing a diagram of an isometric house, and I find out that she has a laminated piece of paper with different house diagrams on it that she wanted me to draw with her. It's blue and I think it might be the same one I folded, just machine-printed and laminated now. She angrily marks into the laminated paper with a pencil, but it barely shows up. I look at some of the different patterns, and while they look like they should be evenly isometric or orthographic, they're significantly skewed in multiple places. This makes me more aware of the dream state.
      [L1] The scene shifts and I'm on the other side of the room, which is now incandescent. F and I are now in chairs by the fireplace, and the room is decorated for Christmas. I ask her "Are you still mad at me from the last dream?" Asking this question either triggers or strengthens my lucidity. She replies no but is still a little standoffish. I start literally pulling her leg, lengthening and transforming it willfully to about six or seven feet long, and bendy. Suddenly she switches places with me, and I'm now on the floor near the piano. I nonverbally command "Show me a clear view of F's face" and the control of my vision is taken over. It zooms and pans mechanically over to her. My vision is clearer now, but I can sort of see black bars at the top and bottom of my vision. She looks stoic or angry, but is facing directly towards me (her face is a little different than IWL). I'm pretty impressed by the effectiveness of the "show me" command, so I try again: "Show me the most beautiful thing I can imagine". The camera pans over to the picture frames against the piano wall and I think "Oh no, not this Freudian shit". Then the cameras react to me and point towards the ceiling, at a mobile that's very Christmasy, with a twisted wreath and a stuffed simplistic angel in the middle.
      [D2] I'm in bed with F in an unfamiliar, dark blue place. She's trying to paste some text (a pop-up overlaid my vision). So I edit out the "http:/" and some other stuff and put into google (again via overlay) and I realize that it's the name of a reddit user? I say "oh I recognize this" but then I think maybe she'll be mad if she knows I know(?). After this she looks at me with a serious face and tells me that she's going to donate blood to A.L. (can't remember full name). When she says this, in the dream I remember an earlier NL (pre-pre-WBTB) but I don't write it down upon awakening. (4:50am)
      [WBTB]
      [L2.1] I'm NL in an open field, the sky is a faded blue and the earth all around me is dead and cracking. I think there's a treeline a couple of miles off in front of me and farther off to my far right. I see a huge explosion in the sky in front of me, it's bright blue in tint but not too intense to look at. I look off to the far right and see more of these, which are already shaping into crosses. The crosses are of varying sizes. I look back in front of me and the explosion has formed into a single, giant cross, with a couple of circles behind it. I realize I'm dreaming and immediately I think "I need to teleport to the bathhouse!". Because of this, my mind is preoccupied while I'm looking at my hands trying to stabilize the dream. The ground looks very clear, the detail is amazing on the cracks. But the dream feels paper-thin, and I start spinning prematurely thinking "bathhouse", and I wake up.
      [L2.2] I'm in bed with F and almost immediately become lucid. Details ommitted but I tried to exert nonverbal dream control over her, and it almost worked, but the idea/expectation of her in my mind is too strong-willed and resisted me.
      [L2.3] I'm a woman in a combination campsite/hotel, and again I'm almost immediately lucid. I'm situated all the way at the end of the row of rooms, and I see an older foreign-looking man with a crumpled brown leaf on his nose. He sort of reminds me of Eggman in retrospect, but friendlier in a way. I approach him because I either need something or was just looking for a DC. He's sort of ignoring me and my passage to him is blocked by a wall, so I look away and imagine a small gate. It appears and I go through. Scene shift and we're in his kitchen, he's reaching for the honey or sugar for some tea and I reach for it too. For some reason this is a grave offense, and I feel I should leave, but he forgives me. Scene shift and I'm in a gift shop, and there is a tribal african woman with body paint. Scene shift and I'm outside with the old man, and I pass by a tree with small blue scorpion creatures on its leaves. I then see down the road, a huge version of the scorpion creatures coming towards us and the cabins! I start running, but can't find my room (the layout is different now, with individual cabins). There's a man behind me so I let him pass and follow him to a small bunker. We drop in, and I feel unwelcome. One of the men has a strange-looking gun, and I make some military comment which he doesn't take kindly to. I'm still lucid so I actually offer to become another DC lol. The whole scene reminded me of FMJ for some reason. There's a fridge in the back of the bunker behind a sort of divide/cage. I'm handed some things to put in the fridge; one of them looks like ice cubes, and one of them looks like cheese or butter. I keep putting them in the wrong one, and the guys will just tell me "Fridge. Fridge. Freezer. Freezer". I keep insisting that the ice cubes need to go in the freezer but finally I look back down and they're diced carrots.
      [L2.n] Within this dream chain I had another one in my apartment, and then an uncaught FA where I was DJing in bed.
      [WBTB2]I woke again and had another lucid chain of (I believe) 3 different ones, but I couldn't find a pen so I didn't write them down, and got comfortable and forgot all about them!
      [F1] Extremely long NL. It was cinematic, and was a sort of mix between Wreck it Ralph and a royal wedding, plus maybe Treasure Planet? It was a dark city adventure where we had to save the city from an evil corporation, some sort of power plant that you can see from anywhere which has a huge orange skullface on its building. I vividly remember the end, but the beginning and middle are fuzzy with a few distinct impressions. I think it's possible that the WiR dream and the RW dream were separate at first, but merged towards the end. Towards the end, we (the posse) are turning the corner on a cyberpunky road where all of the lights have gone out (we've shut down a few power plants already). But now as we round the corner we can see the big orange skull and we're ready for business. We drive up on the dark interstate hi-rise-ish road and approach a crowd of shadow people with yellow eyes. I throw a "shovel knight" at them, which is a rolling ball that slashes the people and turns the shadow people into normal people. The street/city setup reminds me a bit of early Duke Nukem. We round the corner and see a ship, which we untie and board. We end up walking into a sidedoor to the wedding.
      Spoiler for unexpected romance:
      Totally unexpected but interesting and enjoyable dream; can't figure out what kind of day-residue or thoughts led to this.



      *Note: Counting L2.* as one dream together as they were a mostly uninterrupted chain.
      **Note: I think I WILDed (or at least DEILDed) for some of the entries in L2; I distinctly remember that feeling of "crossing over" and how it sort of rushes through you and throws you off-balance. Very cool.
    4. First Ever Successful WILD! - September 15

      by
      ZAD
      , 09-15-2018 at 07:18 PM (ZAD's DJ)
      Sep 15 2018

      First a summary of the pre-WBTB NLs:
      It's morning on a sunny hilltop, just outside the twon, blue skies. (fragment)
      I'm in a version of my childhood home which is an apartment or hotel, 4ish stories up. I'm with my fiancee.
      Spoiler for lewdness:
      The lighting/mood was incandescent (I seem to have incandescent dreams and fluorescent ones, and there's a clear distinction of feeling between the two). There was another longer segment before this. (dream)
      I'm talking to Adam and Tom (two random DCs). It's a public place, maybe a grocery store in a small town or a town hall (this is a reach) and they're arguing about the fidelity of Adam's wife, who used to be Tom's wife. (fragment)
      I'm watching Jack Nicholson, Pheobe from Friends, and some other celebrities corroborate their story in a fluorescent courtroom. (fragment)
      FA where I'm writing detailed notes in my DJ, even drawing pictures (I'm an amazing artist in dreams). Very convincing and thorough. (dream)
      Pen went out and I didn't write hard enough to leave marks, so I lost some. But one mentions noises, my fiancee, and my dog. It makes me think it was another intruder FA or variation of it (my dog barked a lot last night so I was afraid of having one), but I always remember those, so it wasn't that.

      Wake 5am. Fiancee (I'll call her F from now on) has work at 5:30 so I don't try to fall back asleep and just half-meditate while reflecting on dreams. Get up with her and walk my dog (calling him D from now on) and look at the stars, getting a strong feeling that I'll become lucid. I end up going back to bed at 6:30 or 6:40, I wear a sleep mask because there's some light entering into the room now. D's being loud and shaking the bed with his scratching so I threaten to kick him out. I end up trying something strange, I put two of the pillows over the sides of my face and my ears to block out noise, and I sort of side-hug them like the ten commandments.

      As I'm falling asleep, I have the tranpsarent eyelids effect a couple of times. The first time, I can see D, and I try to latch on to the visuals as a dream, but they pop out of existance. I have this with a few other visuals: a long stalk of grass or leaves, and a pillow or blanket with a tag and words I could clearly read ("english", "c.o.t.r."). A couple of times I feel like I'm going to WILD. I fall asleep and fully wake at 7:24am.

      This time I turn on my side but still use the pillow similar to how I did before. I go back to sleep. I wake up around 8:30, although I'm barely awake; I use this time to try and WILD as my body's still in REM atonia. I finally can fully focus on an image/scene, and at some point everything blacks out and I "pop" into the scene! It full materializes around me! I have awareness of my waking body and the fact that I was awake less than a second ago. I was surprised at the blackout before it happened though, I always assumed (and when I've had DEILDs I've experienced) that you go directly from waking to the dream with no visual discontinuity. Anyway, I'm in a tan carpeted room with white walls and a staircase. The stairs are the same as in my WL apartment, tannish carpet and white rails; however the room they open up into is bigger. I'm at the bottom of the staircase sitting on one of the stairs, looking through the rails. I am sort of a point of perception rather than a body; I try to spin but can't use my body to do it, so I think "bathhouse" and will myself to spin. It works! My perception point starts spinning, but I don't go anywhere or transition to another scene, the visuals just intensify. I look closely at the stairs and the room around me, the light coming in from the kitchen window, the layout of furniture in the living room. Suddenly I wake up. (Lucid)

      After this, I decided to keep trying to WILD. I kept on the edge of sleep and let myself fall into visuals another time! This time, I went directly into the dream scene with no blackout (it felt more like a DEILD). I find myself in a living room type area, near a sliding glass door. I put my finger through my thumb to stabilize it works with a little resistance. I pick up a small box or something similar and throw it through the glass, which doesn't loudly shatter but sort of just breaks and disappears. I go through the opening and it's a tight fit because the balcony railing is right against where the sliding glass door was, and it's high. I climb up and get my torso over it, then I jump from the balcony to a tree (the trunk looks like a palm but it's twisted). As I jump down onto it, I experience some sort of anti-gravity or limited gravity, which is cool. I land on the tree and grasp the trunk. At first it had branches, but when I look around and notice they're in my way, they disappear and it's all trunk. The trunk is kind of twisted. I decide to thoroughly experience the texture of the tree, so I rub my hands over it, bite it, lick it (it tasted sort of sweet with a bitter aftertaste and rough texture). Some seriously weird stuff omitted.

      This dream starts a chain of DEILDs and DILDs that last a while*. In the first, I'm in bed with F. I look at my hands and become lucid. After a bit I get up and ask her to come with me but she's gone. I go to the dark hallway and turn into a bathroom with the light on (sort of reminded me of my best friend from childhood's bathroom). I feel around in the cabinet expecting a few things and although I hit a wall, I say "Oh right, wasn't there a secret compartment there?" and that part of the cabinet pivots away and I find the object I was looking for! Was pretty cool, I did this with some drawers too. I read some vivid words that I don't remember (some tags on towels, labels on some circular plastic packaging). I believe I walked down the hallway too but then it ended.

      Again I found myself in a dark room, fingerpalmed, walked over to a table and grabbed a box, then threw it through a sliding glass door. The glass didn't break, so I walked up to it and punched it. I walk outside and it's night in a cyberpunkish or maybe Coruscant-like city. As I walk out onto a large circular balcony, I see that to my right there are three guys leaving theirs as well. I think to myself "I should lock up because they'll break into my apartment", but then I remember that a) it's a dream, and b) I punched through the sliding glass door. I realize that one of the guys is B, a coworker. The two guys with B are wearing old-time diving masks and carrying spears. He's wearing some sort of Rita Repulsa outfit with the big shoulders, but mostly black. I end up with a large stick (a branch from the tree before?) with a thin metal spearhead sticking out the top of it. Then another DILD which again I'll omit.

      Woke again, didn't record time but I think around 9:30 or 9:45. Went back to bed and had an FA where my grandpa came up the stairs into my room and handed me something he said was a CD (I was sleeping naked so he didn't want to intrude). The package wasn't a CD though, it was a tight grouping of multicolored beads with a small gamecube-sized disk deep inside of it that I couldn't get to. (fragment) Had a lot of other NLs and I think a few more LDs during the dream chain, but it's really hard to read my writing...I'll edit my post sometime when I have time to decipher them.



      *For the September Competition (and my LD Count) I'll count this dream chain as one lucid since they were all basically back-to-back, and then count the first one as its own (since there was a period of longer wake in between them), so two total.