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Had another lucid dream this morning using the Here & Now technique. I actually got to the sleep paralysis stage. It was scary only because I was expecting some loud noises or demonic crap to happen based off of other user stories. None of that happened. Here's the thing, I couldn't move my body but I could open my eyes. I opened them, expecting a lucid dream, but my body reanimated and I wasn't fully asleep yet - just in a void.

I tried again and managed to pass the paralysis, the void, and eventually was able to move around in the lucid dream. It was probably 30 seconds of me walking around in the rain outside my house.

I managed to fly, though .

...

Ritual: I'm coming out of my longest dry spell yet, but it was clearly a problem of motivation. Even when I had the superficial motivation to LD (I always do), the deeper motivation that makes it actually work was thwarted. In time I came to recognize the reason for this. At the end of last semester I started talking to a colleague that I knew was very interested in dreams. Even though their interest had been shaped by Freudian principles, I ventured to reveal my interest in (and practice of) lucid dreaming in the hope that we might have an interesting dialogue across perspectives. Well, the colleague promptly stopped talking to me, and I was so annoyed and embarrassed that it took a terrible toll on my dreaming. Not just lucidity—even the quality of my NLDs and my ability to remember them faded drastically. And even after I finally diagnosed what was causing the problem, I couldn't seem to dismantle the emotional block. I would just get irritated whenever I thought about it. I think this combined with the natural cyclic tendencies of my dream practice—I have too many interests and hobbies so all of them seem to wax and wane at various points to make room for one another—but hopefully my dreaming is now on the verge of a comeback. I can't think of a better New Year's resolution.

I went to bed early last night (11pm) hoping that would help to get lucid, and for good measure spent some time browsing DV. I woke up a few times during the night and it seemed like it was going to be a bust, since I barely had any dream impressions. But the last dream I had before waking (at around 7:45am) was lucid and controlled and clear, if not ultimately successful in completing my intended task.

DILD, "Making Rainbows": I was in a warehouse-like space with tall shelves crammed with every imaginable object, though everything looked old and used. I was having a conversation with someone about the place, though I don't feel like there was anyone walking with me; I think I was speaking aloud, but the other person was answering in my mind. I was observing that many of my own dreams (the comparison suggests that I did not yet recognize this as my own dream) included environments just like this, crammed full of objects, often taking the form of stores, libraries, archives. I proposed the hypothesis that these kind of object-archives were a metaphor for the mind, for the way it stores impressions or information. I wondered if I could put that idea to the test. (This idea suggests that I did recognize that I was in a mentally-constructed environment. What did I think it was, if not my own dream? Maybe the dream of the person I was talking to.)

This next section is ambiguous in that I can't be sure if I had the name and was looking for the object or holding the object and was looking for its name or shelf location, but it was definitely a matching exercise between object and name. The object was a tool of some kind, flat strips of somewhat oxidized metal bent into a particular configuration with a short chain attaching some sort of polygonal fastener. It vaguely resembled one of those old metal spring traps, but not exactly, and its function was unclear. I had never seen or heard of such a thing, but I learned that it was called a "streng." I either got the name at the outset from the voice I was talking to and then found the object, or (and I think this is more likely since I have memories of holding the object as I walked), picked up a random object and then had to find out its name by looking for its shelf. But this is a false dichotomy... dreams don't always divide so neatly between what, in waking light, seem like the logical possibilities.

At any rate, I was putting the idea of this warehouse as a kind of memory archive to the test by trying to match an object with its name. The mental effort took, I reasoned, as long as it actually took me in the dream to find the shelf. Given that it sometimes takes me a day or more to recover some sought-after piece of information from memory, this doesn't seem too far-fetched. I'm sure my archives are, like my physicial spaces tend to become, terribly cluttered with extraneous matter, making it hard to find anything. I actually commented at one point, looking at all the crap on the shelves, "I can't stand to throw anything away." But the details that make this whole exercise less plausible as a valid hypothesis of mental functioning was the object itself: neither the name "streng" nor the metal object it described corresponded with anything in waking life. The whole process seems at best to have been metaphorical.

After this improvised task was complete, I wondered what to do next and remembered, sinced I'd just browsed DV before bed, that I still had a couple unfinished TOTY. At this point it occurred to me that if I'm now taking conscious control of my intentions and the dream environment, I must be lucid, but it didn't feel like there had been any qualitative change in my mental state. Rather, the difference between being non-lucid and lucid seemed in this case to come down primarily to whether I was acting spontaneously within the structure of the dream (as in my former task) or whether I was accessing memories and intentions that I had earlier established with waking consciousness.

I wondered if I should try basilisk or leprechaun, and decided on the latter. Its no wonder that I'm stuck on these last two. I think I have a mental block against leprechauns because my mental imagery is composed primarily of cheesy cereal commercials; maybe that's why I have yet to actually meet one. Meanwhile I keep avoiding basilisk because it explicitly instructs killing DCs, which I am reluctant to do. I have no problem killing NPCs in RPGs and computer games, or experimenting with different ethical alignments in those environments, but dream feels different, like the stakes are higher. I'm not sure why. At any rate, given the options, I went with leprechaun again.

Would it be possible to create a rainbow indoors? I thought it over and figured that in dream, that should be entirely reasonable. And even though the shelves in this warehouse were only a bit over head-high, the ceiling itself was vastly higher overhead: the space was huge. So I started trying to conjure a rainbow. At first nothing happened. I put my hands together in front of me, touching at the sides with the palms up, and tried to use this as a focus to create a rainbow directly from my hands, arcing upward. I managed a weak one a few times, but they quickly fizzled out.

A young girl, maybe eight years old with blonde hair, noticed what I was doing and approached with an offer to help. "Sure," I said. I don't remember exactly what form her help took, she might have just added her concentration to my own, but with it my rainbows were getting better. I managed to make one finally that had bright colors, though there were only four of them and they were oddly separated into tube-like strips resembling neon lights, and shining with the same fluorescent intensity. Good enough for the task? I gazed at it critically, annoyed that there were only four colors. In response, the second tube from the left split down the middle and became two different colors. Good enough, I figured, and started looking for the end of the rainbow. But then that one flickered out, too.

Every time a rainbow failed, I regrouped and tried to improve my concentration. The four-color failure made me realize I needed to focus on what the colors of a rainbow actually were, so I started chanting them as I concentrated: "Red orange yellow blue indigo and violet...." I had a hard time keeping them in the right order, and after I woke up I realized that I had completely left out "green," an interesting difficulty given that while awake, I can easily and accurately recite the colors of the rainbow without a second thought.

The little girl continued in her role as my assistant, and now that I was working on the getting the colors straight we managed to produce a bright, very proper-looking rainbow. Best of all, it touched the floor right in front of us, so all we had to do was dig, presumably, to find the leprechaun and his gold. But no sooner had we rushed up to the spot than the rainbow disappeared again. This was getting annoying.

Just then I became aware of a commotion in the building. We were now standing outside one wide entrance to the warehouse, which opened onto what looked like an atrium of a shopping mall, still an enclosed space but walled with plate glass windows. People were rushing over to the windows in excitement, and through the windows I could see the people outside down below (we were around four storeys up) moving in the same direction.

The view through the glass looked out over an urban street and the row of buildings on the far side, beyond which the city ended at steep brown hills of nearly barren rock and earth. Everyone inside with us was pointing and staring at the hills, or hurrying outside to get closer to them, and the moment I looked out the window I could see why. An extraordinary rainbow had spontaneously appeared outside, and its end was clearly visible where it touched the side of one of the hills. The rainbow actually resembled the four-colour neon one that we had created earlier, but this one was exceedingly large and bright.

The hills were probably at least a mile away and too steep to climb by foot, so I knew I would have to fly. I started pushing out the large square glass panes in the wall above me, wondering if this was the most efficient way to leave the building, or if I should just walk the thirty yards or so to the exit everyone else was taking. (The exit occupied the space to our right that had formerly led into the warehouse, which was no longer visible.) The exit led onto a sort of sky bridge that crossed the road, so it would also be a fine place to take off from. I chastised myself for wasting mental energy deciding between trivialities and decided to just continue with the window.

After pushing out four panes to make a larger square, I grabbed the girl's hand and asked, "Have you ever flown before?" She shook her head. "Well, hold on tight." I levitated both of us up and through the space I had made. I did not feel physically obstructed by the metal frame that criss-crossed between the four panes of glass I had removed, though I felt a bit annoyed by the way I had so blithely floated through it. It felt careless. I mean, why bother taking out the glass at all if I was just going to pass ghost-like through the frame? I realized that again, I was letting myself getting bogged down with unnecessary and unhelpful mental baggage, but I've never felt comfortable "cheating," even in dream.

We flew high over the street and buildings bordering the city, and I realized how startling the experience of flight must be to someone who was unaccustomed to it. Indeed, the girl felt very tense at my side, and murmured plaintively, "I want to sit down." I felt it would be cruel to ignore her terror, so as soon as we cleared the city, I aimed for a flat outcropping of rock at the base of the hills. We came down fast and landed hard, much harder than I had ever landed when flying on my own, so I attributed it to her fear weakening my own buoyancy. As soon as we landed, I asked her, "Are you alright continuing?" She shook her head and I prepared to take off on my own, but even as my feet left the ground I felt myself waking up and was unable to forestall it.

INT. CHURCH - DAY

A breakfast of pastries, cheesecakes, and cobblers on two right-angled tables with white tablecloths invites a crowd of diners. They mill about indecisively while women stand ready to dish out the food with plastic spatulas.

A white inclined plane appears in space. I rest on it. Suddenly it turns on a hinge. My astral body falls with that familiar jolt. Still conscious enough to self observe, i smile in my half sleep, recognizing what just happened: "Ah yes, that might have been an OBE!"

1. I was running in a race of some kind but it wasn't here because there were mountains. I am not used to running any kind of elevation. I knew I was dreaming but it felt so good to be in the mountains that I wanted to enjoy the run. I didn't notice many people and I felt I was really gliding up the steep hill. I noticed a tree on the right side of the mountain with a large nest. I was drawn to it. I saw a HUGE eagle perched on a branch at the far end of the tree, not on the nest. I noticed it staring at me as it flew away. It was beautiful and I thought I want to become an eagle to see how it feels. I really wanted to. I felt myself vibrating and all of a sudden I was sitting up in the tree looking down on the runners. My vision was so good, I could see so much clearer. I looked down and saw two eggs beneath me. I felt a real sense of love and my instinct was very protective. I could see the other eagle flying around as it darted down and grabbed a squirrel. He was brought it up to the tree and he was banging the squirrel against the tree very hard. This was going to be the meal. I could see out of the eagles eyes but I still did not want to eat the squirrels bloody meat so decided this was not a good idea. With my partner close I decided to take flight. I left my nest knowing he would take good care of it and I flew above the runners enjoying my view much more, the wind was calm and I could feel my wings. It was different than flying as a dove, I felt so massive. I could dive with great speed and then change direction quickly, it was awesome, but I felt the need to return to my nest, and I immediately went back. I had no problem finding it, it felt very instinctive. I landed beside the other eagle, assuming he was the male, all I knew was that was my partner and that was all that mattered. There lie the dead mangled squirrel and I watched him tearing it apart. I woke up as I leaned down for my taste.
2. Riding on bus around tight winding roads up steep steep narrow roads afraid of falling off the edge but knowing if I felt the bus went over the edge it would I tried very hard to keep that out of my mind. I was afraid but closed my eyes and woke up.

I had a whole night of nightmares about Mike. I didn't get much sleep at all. When I went to bed I had a raging headache & it was making me not lay still so I felt queezy too. Mike said I was saying "Don't tell Mike" while I was sleeping, lol. I told him yup that would be me telling a cab driver that you were acting insane. I only remember fragments & I didn't want to ruin Mike's day so I just talked to him when I woke up instead of writing it down. He's on vacation & he didn't need little crazy me to interrupt his vacation by saying "hey I have to go write down all my creepy nightmares I had about you last night". I just told him why I had them. He was w/ my while I was Christmas shopping & he doesn't really like to shop for Christmas especially on his vacation so both of us were stressed out. I'll just be glad for it to be over this year. I have a better plan for next year after some success w/ some online shopping this year.

I had a whole night of nightmares about Mike. I didn't get much sleep at all. When I went to bed I had a raging headache & it was making me not lay still so I felt queezy too. Mike said I was saying "Don't tell Mike" while I was sleeping, lol. I told him yup that would be me telling a cab driver that you were acting insane. I only remember fragments & I didn't want to ruin Mike's day so I just talked to him when I woke up instead of writing it down. He's on vacation & he didn't need little crazy me to interrupt his vacation by saying "hey I have to go write down all my creepy nightmares I had about you last night". I just told him why I had them. He was w/ my while I was Christmas shopping & he doesn't really like to shop for Christmas especially on his vacation so both of us were stressed out. I'll just be glad for it to be over this year. I have a better plan for next year after some success w/ some online shopping this year.

-The Steven universe's crystal gems tried fighting me because I didn't follow the rules. I became lucid and fought them back. However, I forgot the rest of the dream because I had multiple dreams that night. I also didn't bother trying to remember after I woke up.

- I was on a white table and avoiding two flies floating towards me.I than got off and I think I met with one of my dream guides.
But I forgot what happened.

INT. HALL IN CHILDHOOD HOME - DAY

I am Donald Trump's choice for Secretary of State (the Exxon-Mobil exec). I'm at the cork board discussing a list of other candidates for Cabinet posts with my future boss. We point and gesture at the list. I see my sleeve cuffs. The shirt i wear under my blazer is dark blue, almost black (like an SS uniform?!?!?!)

I am on a train through the Arctic. At some point the driver tries to crash the train, but fails. I spend some time at the pole, and I am offered a last tour. I refuse, but I quickly regret that.

EXT. HALIFAX - NIGHT

I watch the snowfall in a vivid city street scene--in full, overcast daylight...but it's 12 AM ADT (Atlantic Dream Time). First Halifax dream since moving here.

Bed @ 2300
Woke @ 0440

Cooler cleanup
I'm at home, looking at the street, watching as strange garbage trucks drive along my road. They've got some kind of water cannon on top near the back of the truck, and they're spraying out the trash cans they pass. Now I'm out at the street, having just brought out our large styrofoam cooler, hoping they can clean it out. Sure enough, they turn down the water cannon's pressure and spray it out well, getting into all the places I have trouble with.

Unknown test
I'm walking through a town, looking at the buildings around me. Most are fairly normal houses, but there are a couple of odd ones. Just after passing through a gate, I see a small, bright red, corregated metal dome which is maybe 5 feet across and 3 high. A couple of houses later I see another odd metal building, this one house-sized. I'm confident that "The Tower" is responsible for building them. I don't see any way in or out of either one, but I do find a switch which causes them both to rotate. I suspect there's a puzzle to be solved here, but I don't know if it's actually solvable yet, so I leave it and keep walking. Now I'm looking at three small tunnels - they're large enough for a couple of people to walk next to each other. Two of them are somehow "collapsed" and only one is open. People on strange little carts are zipping out of it. I suspect that only one tunnel can be open at any time, and that when another one is opened the current one will collapse. I don't know what would happen to the people inside, but I guess they're zipping through quickly to reduce the chances of it happening to them.

Now I'm sitting with my wife in a cafeteria, with the tunnels behind me. Sitting across from us is a man who's arranging some testing for us. He can't give us any information at all about the tests, but we have to make some choices anyway. The first choice is which of two of the tunnels to go down. My wife and I have to choose different tunnels. I ask my wife if she wants to choose, and she doesn't, so I choose the one on the right. Now, he asks me to choose either "3" or "8," and I choose 8. He tells me that, because of my choices, I'm going to be getting the paper towel test. As it happens, I've heard some rumors about this one. Someone said that it's really important not to get your paper towel wet, since you do poorly if it tears.

I kiss my wife, stand up, and head off towards a much larger central room. The testing guy is standing by the door and comments appreciatively that I must really love my wife. I tell him that Mom is British, then head into the main room. Before finding the testing area, I decide to relieve myself and head for the bathrooms. Now I'm in the bathroom, which is long and skinny, and I realize that I'm the only man in here. None of the women seem to notice me, so I don't think I could have stumbled into the wrong bathroom by mistake, but I head outside to check. Sure enough, I was in the women's bathroom, and I see there's a closed gate in front of the men's, saying that because men taking such-and-such a test are required to have full bladders, no men are currently allowed in the bathroom. I'm not pleased, but there's not much I can do about it. I realize I don't have my paper towel and head off to find the testing guy. After wandering through a couple of packed rooms (one of which is full of only young adults) and despairing about ever finding him, I finally track him down. He apologizes for forgetting to give it to me (though I wonder if even this is part of the test) and gives me a stack of supplies. It ranges from sheets of cardboard (which are each a few square feet) down to tiny somethings, along with some tools. I can't hold it as presented, so I try to put it down to reorganize it; but people keep coming up trying to help me. I finally shoo them away, get it organized, and pick it up.

Now I overhear people talking about my test. One says that it's dangerous, that some people have died, and the speaker took the 'easy' way out - something involving a knife covered in spikes - the moment it became an option. I have no idea what any of that means. Now I'm in a girls' bedroom somewhere along with a handful of kids. There's an attached bathroom, and I excuse myself to it. I hope this isn't considered cheating - but it was closed for a different test, and it's been a long time, and I still haven't started my test, and I really need to go. I try to close the door but it's not wide enough for the doorway and is inches away from latching. I look around to see if I'm missing anything, but I'm not. The kids seem to be distracted, so I decide to go ahead and relieve myself. Suddenly I get a chill/goosebumps down my left arm. I start, trying to figure out what caused it, but I can't figure anything out. My arm actually feels kind of numb - what's going on? I wake up.

BTB @ 0500
Woke @ 0715

Fragments:
A girl who wants to do something and is complaining about gender inequality.

A quick view of a place where police lineups are held: they're making stripes on the back wall using masking tape.

We're meeting Megan in a parking lot. We've pulled in, and I'm waving at her, getting her attention. Now we're in a store, and her son is causing problems (as usual).

Points: 5.5

...

So after a few days of failing to pay attention to my dream journal due to finals stress + traveling stress + attempting to recover from this stress, I unexpectedly had a lucid nightmare last night. Good times!

Dream
The basic premise was that I was watching a scary R-rated movie. Or maybe I was just hearing about it from friends who actually were into that kinda thing. I knew for sure that this wasn't something I wanted to watch.

The movie's plot went something like: a random doe in the forest was given a choice of two plants by a forest god, one of which would unleash a disease that would kill all but one creature, and the other that would... maybe not do that? Maybe kill everyone and leave not even a single survivor?

The doe, being a doe of average deer intelligence, happened to eat the first one, and thereby unleashed the plague upon herself, her nearby deer husband, and the world!!! Smashcut to the plague infecting college kids.

The plague was pretty much tailored to be horror movie material, killing indiscriminately and in various horrible ways (like one dude's eyes fell out of his face cuz of his eye sockets warping and that was pretty average), and it was basically just a bunch of friends watching each other die. So it was a lot like the typical horror/serial killer story, where characters are killed off one by one and the focus is on whoever is currently dying or whoever is in danger of dying next.

True to the forest god's promise, there was one girl who, though she was infected, wasn't torn apart from the inside by the disease the way the others were. And the dream/movie got increasingly ridiculous with its plot until the last girl was flying a small biplane for some reason under the direction of her professor and with the oversight of one of her few surviving friends, and I have zero idea how this could possibly have helped anything but maybe my brain was just out of ideas at that point.

Next, the dream/movie started over, except now I was very much in it or watching it or basically put in a position where I couldn't avoid it. It felt like I was right in there with everyone else, but there was no danger of me being infected, so it didn't exactly feel like I was part of their world. I was just trying not to watch people die despite it happening right in front of me.

I think what triggered my lucidity was the whole "being in a horrible situation and wanting to escape" thing, because next I knew I was lucid and trying to figure out what I could do about this awful dream. I was already on a rooftop by that point, now recognizing my surroundings as the 1319 area, and everything was creepy and dark and people were still dying below me (sidenote: lately I don't even remember physically flying up to rooftops when I'm lucid? it's like my brain takes that bit for granted and it just kinda gets cut out, which sucks. I used to struggle with flying and not know whether or not I could make it, but lately I don't even remember it...). Trying to fix the darkness, I said something like, "It's bright out! It's daytime!" not expecting this to work. To my surprise, light appeared instantly, followed by a glorious sunrise that bathed the street in orange. Soon it really was daytime. I was quite surprised that this had worked instantly and effortlessly, but though it made things a tiny bit cheerier the horror story was still going on in the streets below.

I think the movie played out the same way as before, and I hadn't become lucid enough to try to find a way to wake up, so pretty much the main cool thing that happened was me magically making daytime happen. Nice!

Today's dreamsign is: wanting to escape the situation being stuck in a time loop.

Went to sleep and dreamt of being in a bunk bed like when I was a kid. It was incredibly vivid.
It felt very oppressive in the pitch dark, closed in by darkness and silence in the room.
(When I was a kid and lived in the countryside it was silent and pitch dark at night).
I could then see myself 3rd person view from above, looking stark white in the dark of the room, huddled up.
In my head I was thinking "come on bring it on, do you worst!" whatever you are. And tensed for something to strike me. Nothing happened.
It was all so vivid and intense that when I woke, my mind was awake but i was still half a sleep.

So when I went straight back to sleep I was lucid.

I was inside a broken down school, there was a dark corridor with a pipe broken spraying water everywhere and broken masonery. Two boys in green school uniform were heading towards me, hands in pockets.
I thought to myself last time I was lucid I couldn't control much, so I took direct action.
Grabbing the first boy that came towards me by the face, I said take me to see the person I want to see, now!
He didn't have much say in the matter,looking at me wide eyed, he complied. We moved on and through some double doors met a giant man about 8 to 9 feet tall, wearing a blue medical gown. We were now in a hospital. He was blind and I could see wounds where his eyes had been. He was very strong, I could feel power pouring from him and without speaking I went with him (there was no need to speak).
We went along a corridor which which led into the front reception area of a large hospital.
There a large number of patients were sat in wheelchairs, in front of a row of glass doors to the exit.
The sun was shinning brightly into the entrance foyer.
The person I wanted to see was there in the closest wheelchair, her hair was fine and blonde hanging straight, she wore a silky white robe.
She got up from the wheelchair and took my hand. The giant took my other hand and we left the hospital and went out into the sun.
The site before me I will never forget. The sky , a beautiful greek blue, and the sun dazzling.
Above was the most amazing site, towering dizzily high above me was an immense floating castle.
The highest towers were in the shape of gigantic eagles. All parts of the tower were so black that it was almost hypnotic to look at them. I don't know if they were black because of the shadow from the bright sun or something else.
We flew together up, higher and higher with a feeling of great power, security and happiness washing over me. The giant was in the lead pulling me higher, then me, then she.
We went higher and higher, this bit went on for a long time, hard to describe but it was wonderful

Had two false awakenings where I tried to write dream up in journal, but was only dreaming it lol