AstralVagabond

This has been a rather strange night for me. Firstly, I had a mnemonically induced lucid dream, though I was still at a fairly low level of awareness. I soon consciously oversaw this dream collapse into blackness; but that was not the end of it. In retrospect, I'm not sure if I really retained memory and consciousness of my dreaming throughout the experience or if I inadvertently performed at least one DEILD or just a WBTB; but after I believed the dream to be gone, I became lucid again in the next dream - and, in a way, the same dream - several times. And becoming more and more aware each time.

In the first of these dreams, I was in my home, getting ready for school and my mother was packing my lunch for me. With apparent spontaneity, I then realised that I was dreaming. I tried to exercise my dream freedom and act with the truth in mind that nothing I said or did before a dream character had any real repercussions. So I approached my mother's dream character and, taking note of her complacent reaction, took her arm and, after a brief delay, passed my hand/finger through it, for no reason other than to check the power that I had. After this, the dream was broken.

I felt myself lying within my bed, remembering that I'd just had a lucid dream but now seeing naught but blackness. I wanted to go back to the lucid dream. I tried not moving in my current position and going back to where I had just been. In the next dream, I was already aware on some level that this was a dream, though I'm not sure if it was from the very beginning.

Upon performing some kind of reality check, I made sure that I was dreaming once again. Also, I saw this dream beginning in a similar way to last time, as if it was that dream happening all over again. This time, however, I decided to build on my previous, faulty experience. I tried transporting myself away from my current location, which was then in my own bedroom and with my mother’s dream character, in which I had no interest and who was inhibiting my ability to think freely without worry of consequences.

I thought of where a good place to transport myself inside my dream might be and, at least in part remembering the bonus task of the month that's in place right now on this website, I tried transporting myself to a mountain covered in snow. But instead of changing my environment, all my dream did was put me in front of my computer monitor, still in my bedroom, and turn it into a video game that was set atop a snowy mountain. It wasn't even that fun of a game but I went on to play it anyway, rather than protest or attempt to go bigger, because I imagined that I had myself made some sort of mistake and that that was the best my mind could be expected to do under the circumstances. This shows that I still didn't have the brightest level of dream awareness.

In what was either my next dream or a distant continuation of my current one, I endeavoured to truly go to the snowy mountain once again and shouted at my subconscious, as a dream control method I'd learned, to turn my scene into that. However, I could only partially manage the transformation. When I looked around, there were still my mother's dream character and some pieces of furniture from my own house standing there. Soon, I lost my grip on the dream again.

These times when the dreams kept fading were not something that felt like they could be stopped. I don’t remember seeing any warning signals before they fell apart to keep my grasp on the dream; at some point, sooner or later, I simply saw my dream environments disappear and be replaced by blackness, followed by an apparent realisation that I was lying in my bed. Yet every time, I retained that light of dream lucidity.

Every next lucid dream I had, I seemed to gain more and more lucidity and dream awareness - though it still wasn’t as impressive as I’d have endeavoured for in the end. In my next dream, however, after performing a reality check by observing the anomalous face of a clock, I remembered the goals I'd formed long before to use in-dream techniques to increase my dream’s lucidity as much as possible. I was in my living room, where I saw a couple of superheroes hanging out (without finding it strange) and I rubbed my hands together. As I did this, my dream really did come to look more vivid. This was the first time I've ever used this hand-rubbing technique, along with a direct shout to my mind to increase the lucidity, in one of my lucid dreams.

This technique turned out to be successful. The scene before me had become clear and vibrant; but then, for some reason, I kept seeing momentary interludes of blackness in my vision, as if I had been blinking very rapidly or as if frames in the dream movie were breaking up. One of the dream characters who sat before me noted this. The dream then broke again.

In my next dream, I started back at my bedroom and looked at the clock, as I remembered having done last time. The numbers were wonky and the hands were off-centre, which was well enough to clue me into the fact that I was dreaming yet again. My mother's dream character actually came along and helped show me how strange it looked, now aiding me with the reality check. I picked myself up where I left off, with rubbing my hands to increase lucidity (which eventually faded if not cared for enough) in the living room, with superheroes on my couch.

I appeared on the balcony of my home and decided to fly off. As I was flying past one of the tall buildings in my neighbourhood, I detected supervillain activity inside of it (to the superheroes on my couch?) and resolved to confront it. I also detected some kind of note from the villain - like a ransom note. But, since reading tends to be so difficult in dreams, I struggled to make any sense of it. I paid so much attention to trying to read the note, not taking this important detail into mind, that I must have been losing awareness points by now. And my dream broke once again.

Next time, I knew right away that I was dreaming and I became extra-wary to preserve my dream and my awareness and to avoid confusing situations that I couldn’t control. Also, this was the first time when I started off in a different setting. I was in a school environment, one that was in chaos. There were people running around in the classroom and there was a teacher standing in front of me, who clearly was not happy. On the desk beside her were test papers and each one seemed to have a bad score on it - as well as vastly varying score denominators. One of them had a score of only 5 of an unrealistically large number, with too many zeroes to count. This, the teacher, was the score I had gotten on her last test. I was trying to not let this dream get to me and retain my lucidity; but it wasn't always easy. This scene was particularly dark and intimidating.

I remember having other dreams that succeeded this one; but I doubt any more of them were lucid. I don't have much recollection of these dreams anyway, so there isn't much more to say.

Although I'd looked forward to lucid dreaming as this night began, by the end of it, I was feeling kind of drained - even a little turned off to lucid dreaming the following day. Hopefully, as I gain knowledge and experience, dream control and retaining awareness will be easier in DILDs that I experience in the future.

This is a non-lucid dream that I had four days ago. I had recalled and recorded other dreams from that day; but this seemed like the most interesting to me.

I was in a large, tall building, sealed off without windows and multiple levels of giant rooms, which I knew to regard as a great kindergarten. That’s what I thought of it as, although it was more like a giant playground, as there were no teachers or supervising adults there - nor were there any other children. I can’t remember my surroundings in good detail but I know that the lighting was fairly bright and the walls were a gold or gold-ish colour. In contrast, imagined play equipment was painted in varying and vibrant colours.

I don't recall actually spending any time playing here; instead, I remember meeting my mum and agreeing with her to go somewhere else in the playground. I didn’t actually realise until just then that there were multiple levels, when we went down the stairs one floor (I think I'd been at the top floor initially) and then looked down and saw that there were still several floors beneath. The structure of the building was such that every floor was built at the edges of the room, with railings at the edges and a hole in the centre of each floor.

Then, I believe we jumped off the ledge, as we skipped all the levels and dropped down to the bottom floor, but with no expectation or reception of injury. The bottom floor was an empty one, save perhaps one piece of furniture and one or two doors. Then I found that I was looking to leave, so I asked my mum where we could leave the kindergarten, even though I already had an idea of where it could be. I thought it was the door – or one of them, as I simply knew which one – in that same room. My mum confirmed that it was the door I was thinking of.

I started walking to the door and going to open it; but as I did so and as it was opened by my mother instead and I saw the outside of the kindergarten palace and she walked out there, I felt taken aback and no longer wanted to leave. The kindergarten as I was there previously felt so warm and safe and insular and childish, reinforced in this sense by the quality that there were no windows to the outside world and nothing existent except a lot of indoor playground rooms.

I saw that leaving this place, I would not return. Not ever. It was as if I had spent my life in this kindergarten previously. And leaving it felt like it represented leaving childhood, as a child lives so heavily insulated from the dynamics of the real world by his own home and school and wherever his parents take him, knowing hardly anything of it but play... to maturity, which was full of difficult and confusing ideas and choices that would never end, after which I could never go back.

I thought that this was just like something that had happened to me in real life, when I was a child and I physically left a more realistic but still literal place in just the same way for the life that I am living now. Even though, of course, no singular, literal event like this truly ever happened.

That's right. I thought that this was identical to something that had happened to me 'in real life.' However, despite imagining such a thought, I didn't even think to couple it with the thought that I was dreaming. It was as if I was operating on an extremely low level of lucidity; or I had very closely, almost entered a lucid dream but not quite. (Not to mention that the event I imagined happening in real life never actually happened, which further shows how unaware I was of reality in this matter.)

I saw, in this imagined event, me being in my motherland, where I had lived up until I was six but no longer do, and the place I entered as I exited through this doorway was a street from that country. In fact, it may have been the street where my old home there was situated. For a moment, that's also what I saw outside the doorway where I was just then. Immediately after this, though, I saw a Western front porch, with some potted plants and a bench on a swing, where my mother went before I could catch up with her.

I wanted to tell her, without going outside myself, without setting foot through that doorway, about how I was feeling in order to garner sympathy from her. This is a childish endeavor; and the reason for which I was so avoidant of stepping through that doorway was that it felt like it would force me to surrender my childish ways. In retrospect, I think this may have been symbolic of when I left my homeland when I was 6 years old - and, at the same time, graduated from kindergarten and went on to begin school in the country where I currently reside.

In my journey as an oneironaut, which has been going on for about 3 to 4 weeks now, this is the first lucid dream I've had that I've been able or thought to exert control over. It happened on the night between the 8th and 9th of this February.
This lucid dream was a DILD, as well as a MILD. In the dream, lucidity was triggered by a hand-based reality check. I had just finished up some classes in my school that confused me and was standing outside in a long queue of students whose purpose I didn't understand. The yard outside was similar to the one from my previous school, rather than my current one; but in this entry, I'm focusing on what happened afterwards.
Suddenly and out of nowhere, I decided to look at my hands. They were white, as is the colour of my real hands; but when I counted the fingers, I had trouble with counting five on one hand. At first, I wondered if I'd miscounted; and tried counting up the fingers on my left hand a couple more times. There was no mistake. I had six fingers.
I recalled what this meant. I wasn't near full dream consciousness, so I doubt I remembered the significance of the event and I didn't remembered what I'd intended to do if I achieved dream lucidity this night. But I did think to control my dream as a result of this realisation; and naturally, my first thought was to fly. I found it fairly easy. I ran a few steps down the ground, kicked off it and took off. I soared high and fast above the heads of my dream characters, who now looked to be in my school's P.E. class.
With a bit of a challenge, I lowered to the ground incompletely, without dropping, and then heightened again. I flew over something that was like a tall wall or hedge or mini-mountain. (Since I wasn't at full consciousness, there were still a lot of things I didn't think to question.) I flew to the top of a giant basketball hoop on the other side and sort of stood on it for a moment before taking off again. My schoolmates still see me perform all these feats at this point. Finally, I decided to give flying a rest and try something different.
I lowered to the ground and attempted running at super-fast speed. I wanted to run as fast as I had been able to fly. Alas, I was not so fortunate in this endeavour, as running in a dream seems to often be frustratingly problematic. Once I was grounded, I struggled through a few steps and fell over. There, I saw a dark-skinned man who was a competitive runner and I wanted to pick myself back up and challenge him to a race, at which I confidently planned to annihilate him with my dream control. (I later discovered that this dream character was supposedly the fastest runner in the world, which indicates that he may have been based on Usain Bolt.)
But this time, I failed as terribly as the last. The man, who now had a crowd of supporters with him, mocked me from above. I tried to pick myself back up and race him again. On the starting line, he blatantly stood ahead of me before it was time to start. I got upset but let him do it in the end because I thought that if I was going to win this race, I would do it regardless of the difference of a metre or two. As we began running, I was still behind; but steadily so. Though I still struggled to run, I felt like I was doing it better than before. And we were running at both the same speed – which wasn’t actually saying much. I found myself wondering then how this character could be the fastest runner in the world. But before any official finish line was crossed, he was gone and I’d crossed into a new territory – the actual yard of my current school. By this time, I had been too immersed in the race to remember that it was just a dream. My lucidity was lost and I went on to dream about classmates and a broken water fountain.