Alyzarin

Well... this was an interesting night. The first thing I'd have to say I noticed was that all of my dreams took place at home. And not a home rendered wrongly or somewhere else perceived as home, just my regular old house. Doesn't seem like that happens too often with this many dreams, but it's probably just a coincidence.

Anyway, this time I took 50 mg of zinc at 9:30 and smoked some calea at ~10:00, and then I smoked more for technical WBTBs at 5:22 and 7:40, according to my phone log. This night actually started out very unpleasant.... I passed out with my laptop in bed and must have fallen asleep on my arm at a weird angle, because around like 2-3 in the morning I had this odd hypnagogia of orange dots in a grid setup expanding to orange circles with a weird hissing sound, and then I woke up with a high level of anxiety and very extreme right arm pain. I freaked out and ran to the bathroom to inspect myself and my whole perception was going hazy and getting really bright, and I ended up taking a couple Librium pills as well, which are chlordiazepoxide, a close relative of diazepam, or Valium, hoping to calm myself down. Like half an hour to an hour after that, I woke up again with a lot of stomach discomfort and had a very uncomfortable bathroom visit, which I blame on all the pizza I ate yesterday and the day before.

That was finally the end of the festivities though, and I hadn't had any actual dreams before all of that, so after I fell asleep again from that point on is where my night really began.

#1 - I wondered when this would happen again. [Non-Lucid]

I don't remember how exactly, but I met a girl and I want to say her name was Jessica (and I was looking up pictures of Jessica Rabbit cosplay last night, so maybe that had something to do with it?), and I invited her over to my house because I had some feelings for her. Once she came over, the dream continued on under the impression that we were already in a relationship together and this was the first time she was visiting my house. I can't remember exactly what it was we were doing... watching TV or playing games or something, but we were just cuddling and acting all cute with each other the whole time, and then later we were eating a meal and my dad and one of his friends were standing out on the back porch and he was peeking in to tell me some odd instructions for burying something in his room that my mom was purposely ignoring. Then I gave Jessica a tour of where our food was, the two fridges and the pantry, which were completely packed with all kinds of heavily-detailed food (influenced by the calea?), and she made some joke about the cereal that I can't recall now. I was really happy to be with her, she was really cool and collected and definitely my type, but then as we were headed to my room I woke up.

#2 - I get the reference, but... Butters? [Non-Lucid]

I believe I was waiting for a game to be delivered in the mail, when a group of policemen showed up at the front door. I barely cracked it open to talk to them, and after a little discussion they held up some chemistry glassware and told me that my dad and "my friend" (who I immediately perceived as Butters from South Park) are both hardcore cookers of random drugs and they were after them. This was very clearly influenced by the fact that I just started rewatching Breaking Bad with a friend of mine. They asked me to get him and tell him to go out back, and I went to tell him what was going on and then returned to the front door, and I started freaking out knowing that they were going to search the house because I didn't want them to find my stoner stuff too, but then I woke up.

#3 - Well this dream was pretty dark.... [DILD]

I was again in my house with my parents and a group of friends and there was some killer with a gun stalking us, she kept moving all around the house trying to get a good view of the inside through the windows so she could shoot us. My parents took my friends somewhere to hide safely while I just kept hiding around in the house in strategic places where I couldn't be seen, but where I could just barely peek out every now and then and continue to track the killer's movements. Eventually it seemed like she wasn't going to be able to get us easily, so I ran to my bathroom where there were no visible windows and met up with my parents there. I asked them where everyone was and they just laughed and told me that they weren't actually my parents, they were people that the killer payed to disguise themselves like that so they could get close to me undetected and take me out. My heart sank, and at least one of them pulled out a handgun. I had to wrestle with them until I could get one free, and then I managed to take them down and shot them both in the head multiple times to make sure that they were dead, because they kept moving. I headed back out and my memory gets a little blurry here, but somehow I managed to track the killer down from the inside and shot her too before she could shoot me.

At that point a few of my friends and some family members came out from hiding and we all were celebrating. But then this TV show came on in the living room with lots of shooting going on and will still perceived it as people coming after us, so I pick up this big machine gun out nowhere and start shooting at them, but just one shot at a time. I managed to shoot one guy and felt good abot myself, but then my cousin A, who's birthday party we went to last night (and ate pizza), just rolls her eyes and takes the gun from me. Somehow (I'm not sure if I looked away and back at her or what) she had actually entered the TV show completely and was rapid-firing at everyone and easily takes down all of them. Around this time I randomly became lucid. I actually managed to remember that I had smoked all that calea, which is really a first for me, and I decided to try to jump into the TV screen as well which was now in the area of the living room where the corners of the couches meet for some reason. I just wanted to hug A, but as I jumped my perception just zoomed in and then floated around the room for a couple seconds before restabilizing, and a couple DCs (I want to say they were my parents?) just looked at me like I was weird. I looked over and the TV was now back in its proper place and there was some Star Wars game just sitting there on the startup screen. I decided to try again with entering that game, but just as I was about to go for it I woke up.

#4 - Why couldn't we have just watched it in person? ._. [Non-Lucid]

J and Z, this girl I just met recently, came over to watch some sort of Lincoln play that was going on somewhere in my house, but we were going to watch it through random TV screens around the house instead of just seeing the actual thing. I can't remember exactly what it was about, but I know that a lot of the speech Lincoln was giving was based on that clip from a show I really can't remember the name of right now, but it's the one where it starts with the girl asking a panel of politicians why America is the greatest country in the world and the one guy goes off on this long rant about how it isn't. Unfortunately we kept changing rooms trying to get a better reception or a bigger TV screen, and we basically missed all of it. Afterward everyone was leaving, because there were a lot of people here, and J hitched a ride back to his campus (in another state ) with some girls who were going to some bar or club called "88" that was supposedly right next to it. This other big group of girls was about to leave too, but some random guy came in the house and told them that their car got towed because they didn't have a parking permit to park on the street in front of my house when there were already so many cars there, and they would've known that would happen if they had just listened to him before instead of just brushing him off. One of the guys still at the house volunteered to drive a couple of them home, and I asked where the rest of them were headed, but before they could respond I woke up.

And that's it. All of these dreams were actually pretty vivid too, so I suppose the supplements did their job.

Alright, so this time I decided to take 500 mg of L-arginine before going to bed to see what the effect would be.... This one wasn't based so much on neurochemistry research so much as just going off of anecdotal evidence. Vivid dreams are not infrequently reported with L-arginine. My trial with it was interesting.... My first impression was that it had been unsuccessful. I awoke after roughly seven hours of sleep without memory of any other awakenings and no dream recall at all. You know, often even when you don't remember your dreams you can still remember that you experienced something, you just don't know what it was. Not so with this... I had a totally blank slate. I remembered thinking a couple things, but that's it. I wasn't even sure if those were actually parts of dreams or not. I also woke up very much "in the mood", another reported effect, so I figured that that would probably be the end of it and I wouldn't really get anything out of it because I generally have a hard time falling back to sleep in that case. Then I rolled over and passed out very quickly.

And here's... what I got.

Emotional Responses [Non-Lucid]

My memory first really steps in when I was locked in the bathroom in my house in the dark, lying in the bathtub. Probably related to the fact that I took a bath last night, but there was no water in it in the dream. The fact that it was almost pitch black makes this part of the dream a little hazy in my memory, but otherwise the dream was quite vivid. I had some memory of what exactly was going on.... Basically, there was this evil witch, or some other dark force, who was haunting our house, and she worked by using illusions to play with your emotions and lure you into her traps. I guess that's what was going on here, because there were bats flying all around the bathroom and I was freaking out. Likely inspired by the fact that I watched The Dark Knight Rises last night, too. I kept trying to imagine the bathroom door opening up hoping that it actually would somehow, and trying to get the bats to do things with my mind because I guess I realized that it was just another illusion, but it wasn't working. Finally I took a chance and overcame my fear and just ran for the door and made it out to the hallway. I met my mom there, and we both ran out to the main part of the house.

Let me give a quick description here.... At the end of this hall, immediately to the front and left is a little walkway after the front door, and just beyond that is the living room. If you go right and follow the walkway to its end you get to the kitchen and eventually the laundry room, and just beyond the kitchen in the same direction as the living room is the den. Finally, there's a bar in its own little square design placed directly in the four corners of these rooms, so you can continuously walk through all four of them without changing direction if you just walk around the bar over and over again. Got it? Alright, so basically, my mom and I went right into the kitchen and my mom started frantically searching for things on the counter. All of the lights in the house were still out except for the distant one in the laundry room, and she started telling me to look for the "seven-fruited" something.... I can't remember exactly what it was, but the point was that it would hold seven souls, or seven fragments of the witch's soul, or something like that that would basically mean that she was somehow weakened without it, and it would be actually be just some basic household object we wouldn't just have immediately suspected. My mom ended up running through the den into the living room and searching through presents or something beneath a tree that didn't look like a Christmas tree but was exactly where ours always was, and I followed her because I was afraid that she was going to get caught in an illusion somehow since she was freaking out. I started looking around the house to make sure nothing was going on since she was lost in her own world.

I stepped back on the walkway where the hall ends and looked down into the kitchen again. That's when I saw him.... My cat that just died in waking life was sitting on one of the machines in the laundry room and just staring right at me. Somewhere in the back of my mind I knew this was wrong, but I was struck with an overwhelming desire to run up to him, and I called out to him as I did so. (Yup, I'm the dumb girl that dies in this horror movie.) As I was looking at him this weird phantom double of his face kind of burst out at me and made me feel kind of like this trance state blip, and then the scene had changed. We were in some creepy kitchen that I was unfamiliar with and I was a little nervous, but I didn't care. He was sitting on the kitchen counter now, and I ran up to him and started holding him and petting him, but something was wrong.... He felt real but he was totally still and lifeless, and his head was really turned or twisted to the side in a bizarre way. He didn't try to move or respond to anything that I did and I was becoming emotional, and then I felt this ominous feeling starting to creep up on me... but then I woke up.

I'm not sure if I'll be trying this supplement again yet.

So just for the record, I've gotten lucid three times in the past four days. >.> But I haven't felt like recording them because the one from Tuesday just totally disappeared from memory, and the one from yesterday I remember basically nothing of either, but I remember all of the non-lucid bits both before and after it. I guess I might add that one in here.... But the first one, I want to say that nothing important happened. But I might just want that to be the case. ._. There's really no way to say for sure. The second one... I'm pretty certain that the only thing I did was phasing, which is of course nothing new for me. I remember experiencing it and everything, I just don't really remember the experience itself. Oh well, the one from last night very much made up for it....

Oh, and for the last few days I've been taking 400 mg of L-theanine a day, divided into two doses of 200 mg with one in the morning and one in the late afternoon or early evening, usually.

Yesterday

#1 - But why are we in a skyscraper to begin with? [Non-Lucid]

I was in some school class in a huge skyscraper in some downtown area, and there were random people I graduated from high school with, this girl who sits behind me in my speech class I'm taking this semester at college, and my parents, for some reason. There was a massive storm coming our way with tornadoes visible through the windows and everything, and I was holding my mom's hand as we were all scared. There's a flashforward and things get hazy, but I remember seeing people evacuate but thinking that it wasn't on the same day but it was the same "windy season"....

#2 - Who would build a bathroom like this!? >_< [DILD]

The details of this have gotten hazier since I didn't care to write it down at first, but there was some gigantic computer mouse whose cord stretched all the way across some city streets, and it got pulled away and I tried to chase it but lost track of it. I remember seeing my old high school friend AB's car, but then things get blurry.... This is around where I became lucid and phased but then my next memory picks again at the non-lucid point. :T I was spending the night somewhere with AB, M, and these guys J and Ma who I met through M. The next morning, I woke up and started blasting some really heavy club music and M got excited, and her boyfriend D, who's suddenly there, turns to me and says something like "We can catch up later." I then realized that I needed to go change my clothes so I went to the bathroom to do so, but there were big windows all over the door so it was very easy to see inside. Everyone was oriented in the direction of the windows, but just not looking directly into them, but of course it was making me very uncomfortable at the thought of starting to change. J was saying maybe they should turn in a different direction, but then I woke up.

Today

Last night, I took 250 mg of choline bitartrate immediately before going to bed. I'm fairly certain this had an effect, particularly on the lucid.

#1 - This would have been great to become lucid for!! [Non-Lucid]

I was playing some bizarre new PSP game the whole time, and there actually was something going on in the rest of the dream too but I pretty much missed it all because I was so focused on playing, so I don't really remember the plot anymore. What I remember about the game was that it had a setup where you had a team of playable characters that reminded me of the structure of NIS games, but it was mixed with a simulated life raising element like chao from the Sonic Adventure and Sonic Advance games, and the actual creature and level designs were sort of Pikmin-like. I really wish I could've played more of it because it seemed really interesting, but that's about all I can recall of it, and I remember walking up stairs or something maybe to see my speech professor... but no more solid details than that.

I woke up from this dream with a very strong headache. I'm fairly certain that my head was smashed into this part of the backboard of my bed and that's what caused it, because the pain slowly went away in a way that I can only relate to when you wake up with a numb arm and it slowly returns to normal, but it was my first time having that type of thing happen so I can only guess. But I really hope that that's what happened because otherwise it would mean I woke up with a severe unexplained headache. >___>

#2 - I could've told them this would happen... somehow. [Non-Lucid]

I was in a high school PE class (though I think the setting might actually have been my elementary school, sort of?) with O and people kept trying to give him balls that corresponded to different sports, but I remember equating these to video game weapons in my mind and thinking that they were doing it wrong because they didn't realize that "his growth charts are unique". Eventually he decided to play what I think was registered as either baseball or golf... but it's really just a bunch of balls bouncing around and people chasing after them with no clear goals. He makes the "winning play" I believe when at least one of the teams is "frozen" at 23 seconds left on the timer, but it switches to this weird TV view for it that only shows symbols to represent the player. He was excited that they run, but due to the odd way I saw it play out I asked him for verification that he actually was the reason they won, claiming that "they only showed the overhead", or some such nonsense. Suddenly he got all depressed at the thought because he didn't realize that he had won it, he thought he was just a part of it, so we asked some other guy and he said that that was the case. Suddenly O sank into despair, and this guy PR who I've known since elementary school tries to ask him what's wrong and cheer him up or something, but he proclaims that he may never play that sport again, and then walks out of the gym all dejected as class ends. On the way out I was trying to think of a way to explain his reaction to PR, but I couldn't really think of a good way to phrase it before I woke up.

#3 - I think it might have been inspired by Buffy? [DILD]

This was an odd driving dream, and I'm fairly certain I've had something like this happen before.... Basically, I was driving home in the snow at night, and I was stuck driving from the back seat where there was an accelerator but no breaks. As a result, I was forced to drive very slowly and frequently take my foot off the gas so that I wouldn't gain too much momentum. I have no idea why I didn't think to just climb up to the front seat, but I know that there was a car driving behind me too, so maybe I just didn't want to mess with the situation and cause any trouble. We came over this bridge in my neighborhood, and then when I turned on to my street it was suddenly daytime. Somehow I managed to go too far beyond my house though, and then this car started coming down the street in the other direction right for me, and I perceived someone else as being in the car with me at this point too, but I don't recall ever seeing anyone.... I started thinking "shit shit shit" because I couldn't stop the car or change the direction it was going in very easily, and then we ended up headbutting the other car. This is all unbelievably vivid... perhaps a mix of the supplements and the adrenaline boost? I started trying to rationalize this situation because I didn't want to have to actually be in a car crash again, and then I thought to myself "Wait, could this be a dream? This whole thing is pretty odd...." I climbed into the front seat and by then I had a feel for my state of mind and was sure of it, so I became lucid.

At this point I looked around at the street and the sky and just stared. This was one of those lucids that leaves you completely in awe from start to finish as you repeatedly tell yourself "There's no way a dream could be this real." As I looked over the neighborhood, there was no distribution of focus as in a regular dream, it was all fully rendered as a single image. It seemed exactly as if I was seeing it in waking life in every way, minus the snow. I ended up driving back down to where my house was (and I think it was using my first car which is long gone), and when I got there my house was pretty different. It was tall and thin, spanning multiple floors, whereas the real one has only one floor and is much more wide than tall. There were also large windows spanning most of the front face, and it had some kind of Greek-esque architectural design for what looked almost like a tomb on the ground floor, and it was covered in plant vines and everything. There was some large inscription at the top of this part, which was totally made out of stone, and I didn't get a good look at all of it but I do remember seeing the word "SOUL" in large print. Again, this was all extremely vivid. I wanted to go inside and check it out, as the front door was still right there where it should have been in the middle of that framework, but about that time I started feeling a headache again and woke up.

*sigh* That would've been cool to explore. That headache, too... not the real one, but this one in the lucid. It felt like the ones I get when I smoke too much or the last few times I tripped. I'm really starting to wonder if it's hippocampal in origin, and if the choline brought it out.... I guess this break from smoking will probably help in more ways than I thought, because it's going to be annoying if that headache keeps making an appearance in lucids. :/ Hopefully it was just a one-time thing though, and overall I still consider this dream very successful.

At approximately 12:45 PM I decided to ingest 30 mg of a Rauvolfia serpentina extract, reportedly standardized to contain 30% rauwolscine. I followed this up with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, potato chips, and two trefoil cookies. (Girl scout cookies! ) Shortly after I finished eating, I decided to go on a walk.

The walk was overall uneventful. My anxious mind payed attention to a few mild things that were likely placebo, such as slightly increased heart rate and stimulation. Once I moved beyond those thoughts they seemed to mostly disappear. One thing maybe worth noting is that I yawned a lot, which I guess is a good sign if I intend to take something before bed. I didn't like how it made me feel like my chest was a little tight though, but again, this disappeared when I stopped letting myself worry about it. It's only been about an hour and a half now and that symptom isn't noticeable, and I'm guessing it was just a gas bubble, since I get those a lot. So far the only thing that's really stood out to me is increased appreciation of food, since it's the one thing I didn't think about beforehand. The fruit on the counter and some more trefoils tasted better than they did before I dosed. I wonder if it's linked to rauwolscine's 5-HT2A antagonism? This is said to increase appetite, after all. Hmm....

Final decision? So far, it doesn't seem like it'd be too bad before bed. I was afraid of the potential stimulation, but if there even really was any then it wasn't any more significant than caffeine with tolerance. The only thought that really comes to mind is that this is probably best to avoid on days where you don't feel at your most physically fit, but I say that about stimulants in general. This may be worth experimenting with....

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I guess I'll include this really quick, too. I smoked myself to sleep with a friend last night so my recall sucked, but I did get this one fragment down.

Dream Fragment [Non-Lucid]

I remember being at the bottom of a mountain range and watching people climb up this big wall, and at the top there was a door just sitting there. Beyond that, I just remember that Gajeel (I think it was him...) from Fairy Tail was on the opponent team, but that's it.

Yesterday

#1 - He's really a nice guy, just trying to make a living.... [Non-Lucid]

At first I was at a family party in this dream, and I was playing a Legend of Zelda game with my cousin K. I remember seeing Link wearing some kind of crazy golden armor (maybe based on the one in Twilight Princess? I can't remember what it's called right now...), but then the TV screen started to envelope us and the game plot was actually happening to me instead of me controlling Link. K, the grim reaper, and I were at some kind of odd opening up to an ocean located under a building of some kind, there was no shore or anything like that. I believe there was some kind of ship visible off in the distance, and the grim reaper had given me a fishing pole and was trying to get me to use it to catch a test target he had placed in the water a bit further out from us. I almost got it but not quite, but then I decided to get up and go explore the area behind us instead, and when I didn't find much I logged off and my perspective zoomed back out to being at the party. This next part I have no idea about because I can't remember what it means, this is just what I wrote down in my notes when I woke up:

"Also, I misinterpreted some weird rules about reality thinking that any wrong move reverted you to a past state, but it turned out I was a little wrong about it and it wasn't quite so bad, but I can't remember exactly how...."

Your guess is as good as mine, but it sounds intense lol. After that, I woke up.

#2 - What if it is all a game? [Non-Lucid]

I was again playing as Link, this time specifically from Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, but the perspective was different than either in the previous dream. It was that effect where the TV screen takes up your entire field of vision... so you're really just moving the character with your mind and perceiving them as yourself, but you still see them from behind in third-person and perceive it like you're using a controller on some level. What's odd about this dream is that I started out in a Super Mario 64-like map, and I was even looking for stars to collect, but at one point I got stuck at the edge of a map and ended up clipping through the ground. And I fell down into a N64-eqsue rendered version of my house and backyard, and specifically into the corner of the swimming pool.

From this point on I also had a permanent walk-through-walls effect, along with a slightly increased and slightly unrealistic-looking walking speed. I walked around my house a bit and just had fun moving through walls and admiring how surreal this all was (because it was REALLY well done and very video gamey) and I saw a NPC incarnation of a younger version of my friend M walking to the backyard in a one-piece bathing suit. I walked around her for a bit, and then I went back to the pool. I walked into it and it was much deeper than normal, and there was this guy fish thing (don't ask me, it's in the notes lol) and a weird three-pointed Mario star that was made up to sort of resemble a fish, and then somehow this all became an American Dad! episode.

I believe it showed Avery Bullock, and he had payed for these freaky fish tattoos on his eyes and he was able to do this creepy stare with them and transform into a huge fish himself, the whole thing was very psychedelic. I remember this surprising at least Stan, Francine, and Steve. Then the whole thing just turned into a still third-person view of scrolling through bottom of a wiki page and seeing some Pokémon pictures, with the only one really standing out being some unidentifiable red thing and a Marill.

Today

#1 - So who the hell was he, anyway? [Non-Lucid]

I was again at a family party, and I had barricaded myself in my room for some reason, though it wasn't my actual room. I had a ton of stuff shoved against the door to keep it closed, but then (probably based on watching too many comedy shows), my cousin P just opened the door easily, because it opened in the other direction, and pushed it all aside and walked in. Cue a "Well... shit." As P walked in, so did some guy who I'm not sure was a real person, because he's just as a blurry and impossible to remember the look of as any other random non-lucid DC is for me. But at the time, I was convinced that this was someone who I hadn't seen since we were kids, like he and my cousin were childhood friends or something and I just stopped seeing him when they stopped hanging out as much or something like that, and we were both doing the whole "wow, you've really grown up" thing. We seemed pretty friendly with each other, so I guess in the context of the dream we had been close in the past. The three of us just kept hanging out in my room, and at one point P became my friend M when I wasn't paying attention, I think not long after we all looked out the window and saw a lot of snow on the ground and in the streets (and we were in the second floor, which my house doesn't have).

The whole time the guy and I were getting pretty involved in our conversation and starting to get pretty touchy-feely. He was talking about how he'd gotten out of a relationship recently, and he was noticeably very horny. He kept getting really close and personal with me, hugging me from behind, leaning up against me, and etc. I was getting pretty worked up myself, and the tension was getting really thick. We weren't saying anything but it was really obvious, and I remember M seeming kind of annoyed about it and thinking that there was a reason, but I can't remember what it was now. After a while the party was starting to wind down and everyone was leaving and M pulled me aside to ask me not to do anything, but the guy overheard her and suddenly pulled out this video recording of him telling some kind of sob story. I think the video was saying something about how he used to be married, or at least something similar to that... and I remember it including the line "I wasn't always in high school.", but that's about it. M felt bad after that, and she was getting ready to leave. I was thinking that I had to go stay at my aunt's house overnight for some reason so I was going to say something, but then I just randomly realized that I actually wouldn't have to, so I forgot about it. When M left, everyone but the guy was gone, so we locked ourselves in my room and I could feel the tension increasing to a breaking point... and then I woke up.

God damn it.

#2 - If only real matches were as intense as this! [Non-Lucid]

I was playing some kind of Super Smash Bros. kind of game with M and her boyfriend D. We played some normal rounds first, and then somehow I managed to pick Axel from Disgaea 2 as my character. I also managed to get us to play on some intense demon altar stage. I don't remember exactly who they were playing as (I want to say that M was playing as maybe Princess Zelda or Peach, and that maybe D was playing as a character on a horse?), but I think it might have changed over time, too. The sucky part about this dream is that it was actually really vivid and intense, but the action was so crazy and fast that I still barely remember any of it. I remember I was riding a horse at one point as well, and we had the capability to use some incredibly cheap tricks like hypnosis to win the battle. It was crazy! As the dream started falling apart, the scene became a third-person view of a cartoon show and Axel had become Popeye. He was saying something weird or trippy, but I can't remember what it was now, and then I woke up.