AstralVagabond

I presented an excerpt from this dream three days ago in the Task of The Month for March 2014 thread, which, if you're in the right month, you'll notice has won me my luxurious wings. (Though I don't plan on letting a month go by without completing at least one task-of-the-month from now on, so you should probably be seeing wings above my avatar regardless. ) But now, I've gotten around to posting the story of the entire dream from that night, starting from when I turned lucid.

I was in my bedroom. I've noticed that this is a recurring pattern - a lot of my lucid dreams are either triggered when I'm my dream bedroom or I'm immediately transported to my bedroom in the dream after becoming lucid. I never see my body in the bed; but then, I don't look there much. I also have a higher tendency to become lucid in areas in relative proximity to my bedroom and/or my apartment in general, which I suppose makes sense, with me performing reality checks in places I know in real life and spending most of my time and going to bed in my bedroom in general.

Also, most of the time when I become lucid in my bedroom, that bedroom is dark. Either lights-off-and-curtains-drawn-in-the daytime dark, lights-off-and-curtains-drawn-in-the-evening/twilight dark or lights-on-but-fairly-dim dark. In this dream, it was the former of these cases. I didn't bother to turn the lights on.

Side note: Another thing that I've noticed in my lucid dreams - the proper ones that are clear, fairly long and provide me with some degree of control - is that, without me directly thinking about it, my course of action in the given lucid dream will follow the sort of course of action I was thinking about and wanted to undertake that time before I went to sleep. Before 'Flight of the Oneironaut' (a previous dream journal entry of mine), I wanted to have a lucid dream where I explored different dream scenes and did cool things, in contrast to the lucid dream I'd previously had, where I felt that I hadn't done enough. And this is just what ended up happening. I suppose autosuggestion and dream incubation really are important in terms of thinking about how the dream will go!

Before this dream, I instead wanted to spend a long time in one dream scene, not going anywhere and instead just focusing on the lucid dream, working on making the scene as vivid as possible, entering as high a state of consciousness as possible, experimenting with the senses and just taking it all in. However, I also really wanted to complete a task-of-the-month before March 2014 was over. And that's just the course of action I took in this dream.

I looked around and in front of me, mainly to the left side of my room. I looked at the shelves of books that are present above the drawer in my real bedroom and that are the most detail-filled part of my room, hence my wanting to explore it. Another thing that I've noticed in the lucid dreams wherein I'm in my bedroom is that my bedroom is (probably) never actually structured just like my real bedroom and doesn't have the same things in it; but I never notice this until the dream is over. Looking over the books piled up on a low shelf, where my stacks of school notebooks and textbooks should have been instead (my literary works are on the shelf above), I noticed a series of books with imagery focused on blood and bone that were supposedly very grim, warlike and for mature audiences. I remembered that my father had gotten this series for me when I was quite young and the material was clearly too mature for me to handle at that age and that it was fortunate that I had never read that material.

My father had never actually bought me this particular series of books. This was not a literary series that existed in this world; it was a made-up concept by my subconscious. But, despite me being fairly conscious in this lucid dream, that is not something I realised until after I woke up. The dream provided me with false memories. In fact, the idea of this series was based on the fact that my father did provide me with books that were long and mature for my age when I was younger - just not that particular series. I read Ender's Game when I was eleven years old and a giant tome titled 'The Chronicles of Amber' sits upon my second-to-top shelf, untouched for years. This was probably a combination of the two concepts.

I looked around. I touched my surroundings. I touched the wall/closet and tried as well as I could to see what it felt like. The sensation felt quite real. Actually, I spent a lot of time in this dream touching my surroundings, though I don't write about it as thoroughly here. I was really focused on taking in the dream scene and making it as vivid as possible.

And for most of my time in my dream bedroom here, it looked very clear. The visuals looked as clear as real life when I have my glasses on. A bit later, I noticed that the scene was getting a bit less clear - not really blurry but instead about as clear as real life when I don't have my glasses on. So I did my best to ramp the vividness back up.

Then I thought of experimenting with some other senses. I instinctively turned to the air conditioner and tried to see if this would work. I wanted to change the temperature I felt in the dream. So I shouted at my subconscious, as well as I could, "Make the air cool!" Or something along those lines. I heard the air conditioner start working. At first, I didn't feel anything. I moved toward it and stretched my arms out. In a few seconds, I felt a mild rush of coolness touch my hands from that direction. But it wasn't perfect. So I shouted again. "MAKE THE AIR COOL!"

And surely, this time, the dream fully obeyed. The air suddenly felt cool from all directions. It felt. I felt. Genuinely cold. The sensation of cold. Even though my sleeping body wasn't undergoing any external circumstances causing it to be cold, I felt cold. That's the first time I've experimented with that sense in a lucid dream and it was... Well, what can I say? It was pretty cool.

Another thing I wanted to do before this lucid dream was to talk to/meet my subconscious in the form of a dream character (preferably a mirror image of myself). So I tried to go further with commanding my subconscious and shouted, "I want to talk to my subconscious!" Then I turned around to see if there was anyone there. There wasn't. So I turned back and tried again. "I WANT TO TALK TO MY SUBCONSCIOUS!" I turned around. There was still no-one. Nor had I gotten a reply of any kind. I suppose I wasn't well enough into my lucid dreaming yet. Though maybe if I'd persisted further...

After spending some time in my bedroom, I realised that I should do a Task of The Month. So I should get out of my bedroom and go somewhere where there are dream characters. Actually, I'd remembered my objective to do a Task of The Month before that, not long after I became lucid, but I kept putting it off. Yet, at some moment, I said to myself, 'Hey! You've got to do this soon! You don't want to wake up and not have done your lucid task in time, don't you?' So I changed locations. I actually don't remember what the original location that I saw in front of me then was, nor did I will or notice the transition as it happened. But soon into that, I was climbing a tree. As I was climbing it, I focused on how it felt - whether or not it really felt like a tree - and on how it looked and reminded myself that it was a dream and thought of the fact that doing certain things in a lucid dream can boost your consequent ability and/or self-confidence in waking life; and then I wondered about whether or not I was actually making myself more confident or physically capable or anything in waking life by climbing this tree.

When I finished climbing this tree, I stepped on a solid platform. I was in an elevator. One that was going down, I think. Standing in front of me, in the elevator, I saw a gang of thugs. At first it may have been one or two but then it became three. At least one of them was masked and armed and they were threatening my life. Confident in my dream control abilities, I tried to punch one but found that, as was often the case, it wasn't easy moving my body quickly and powerfully in the dream. So I decided to stop focusing on thrashing them through physical force and just imagine that they would die. I had a psychic power that could and would kill them without me needing to move a finger. As my hand was already in motion towards one, I used my fingers to dent his skull and take him through the head. Then I imagined the other two just getting holes in their heads and dropping to the ground. It worked. Everyone dropped to the ground but, as I had a little nib of doubt that I had been able to defeat them that easily, I looked down to the ground and saw one or two of their bodies, in suspended animation, partially projecting and jerking through the elevator floor. It looked extremely video-game-glitch-ish.

I tried to force them all the way down. Then I decided to ignore them. Remembering that I had a lucid task to complete, I decided to get out of the elevator. I escaped through an opening in the walls. It just sort of wound up existing there and it wasn't physically big enough for me to normally fit through it; but I was able to squeeze through with the power of dream control. As I was doing so, I thought of finding a character on the other side of the opening upon whom I could perform Basic Task ii - St. Patrick's Day: Pinch a DC who isn't wearing green. Report his or her reaction. On the other side, there was a well-lit room and I saw a sort of old-looking woman. She was dressed in pink. Nothing too colourful; just a plainly pink shirt and long skirt. She certainly wasn't wearing anything green, so she was the perfect candidate for this lucid task. I ran up to her, got close, hoping that she wouldn't move away, and pinched her in the arm. In response, she simply looked up at me and coldly said, "I don't feel comfortable with you doing that." 'Boy, who knew my dream characters were so chillingly uptight,' I thought? I may have expected her to run away or be angry or ask why I had done that; but this result felt exceedingly unsettling.

I apologised awkwardly to the woman and somehow ended up having dinner with her family - her, her husband and their teenage daughter. I hadn't tasted any of the food and decided to leave the dream scene, as I was no longer getting anything out of it. (If only I'd remembered Basic Task i - Middle Name Pride Day: Ask a DC what his or her middle name is... and that I could have done it on those same people as well...) I got up and went to walk my way to another scene. However, at that moment, my alarm woke me up.

I heard the sound of the alarm going off a moment before the dream ended and I opened my eyes. With the speed and immediacy at which I normally did so, I jumped out of bed and shut it off. Then I made sure to muster as much dream recall as possible and got ready to take on my day at school.

Last night, I had what was probably the best, most lucid dream I've had so far in my journey as an oneironaut. It was visually vivid, I was at a pretty good level of consciousness and I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to do. If only I had been able to carry it on for longer!

I became lucid after having dreamt of having been in a terrible fight with my mother. This is something that, to my appreciation, has been a recurring element in my lucid dreams recently - my lucidity having been triggered by something so unusually negative happening that I couldn't believe how it ever could have happened and then realising that it was literally too bad to be true. (Sort of even makes me want to have more bad dreams than I do now, when I think about it. ) When it happened, I was alone in my bedroom. And so, when I started to suspect that I was actually dreaming, I took the same route as I had once before in the same situation - I checked the clock that's normally by the side of my computer. When I look back on it, I recall that it was a different form and colour from my real one; but these details were not necessary for me to have my suspicions confirmed by this reality check. In the upper-right quarter of the clock face, which is easier to inspect than the whole clock in a dream state, just for a moment, the numbers only stretched from 12 to 2 instead of 12 to 3. Then, they went to normal. Then, it stretched from 12 to 4. Then, the 2 and 1 switched places. It was enough for me to catch on.

I don't think I ever got so excited by the realisation that I'm dreaming that I immediately woke up or anything of the sort. All the more so, I wasted no time after coming to this revelation. Withdrawing from the clock, I could see that I was still in my bedroom; but this time, the lights were off and it was dark, as if it'd probably be evening-time outside as well. (Shame I didn't think to try flipping the light switch to see if it would work.) From then on, I would be playing a game called 'Let's See If This Dream Control Wish Works Or Not Depending On A Seemingly Random Probability of Success.' I wanted to change the dream scene to something more interesting so I decided to try imagining something different behind the bedroom door and opening it. I opened the door but only saw the rest of my apartment out there, in correct order. It was dark in there as well. I tried closing the door and opening it again. Received the same results. So I decided to try it again with the front door of the apartment. Since I didn't really have a particular scene in mind with the door portal spell I'd just tried, this time, I decided to try coming up with something specific. For no particularly superior reason, I thought of a plane in the Mario universe in first-person, 3D view. (I just wanted to get the scene change to work.) I looked around for a moment to check how vivid my surroundings looked. I made the evaluation that things looked pretty good. I opened the front door of my apartment. Unfortunately, I failed again and saw the gated community in which my apartment is located in real life. Again, in the right order; and with the door gate that was there in real life as well. It was evening-time, predictably dark outside as well.

I walked through the gate. Phasing straight through the gate, that is. I knew that this was normally easy and even effortless to do in dreams but I was still happy to see it worked. I jumped onto the guardrail and then jumped off it, having decided to fly my way to a new dream scene instead. I flew over the street and past the other buildings. Standing beside one, I noticed two disproportionately large people, one of whom was almost half as tall as the (six-story) building and the other being a bit more than half as tall as the first. I successfully flew over them without interference. They never really seemed like giants despite how close I got to them, since a dream is like a work of abstract art, but I still noticed that it was strange. I landed on the wall around my compound's swimming pool, taking a moment to look over it. There were a bunch of people there. I took off again. A bit later, after flying through my building compound, I landed on a plane of grass behind one of the buildings and resolved to try taking off again; but at a powerful, kryptonian-like super-speed. But instead, I only took off at my normal speed of flight - a kind of relatively swift and direct floating.

Next, I flew over to the pool again; but this time, I had landed right inside the pool, surrounded by dream NPCs. (I know dream characters are called 'DCs' for short themselves but I like using the term, 'NPC.' :3) I have no memory of the pool feeling wet. Although I know that confidence is the key to making it work out and things don't have to go badly, I have a natural apprehension in lucid dreams of dream characters surrounding me, being a bit concerned that they're going to mess things up and preferring to stay away from them until the situation is opportune. So as I caught myself thinking these thoughts in the pool, I went on to think that I was now making it more likely for the dream characters to turn on my with every progressing second. In a bit of a fuss, I then decided to deliberately keep thinking of the dream characters turning on me and wait for them to do so, seeing how it'd go and planning to defend myself with the retained knowledge that they couldn't do anything to hurt me. However, as there weren't any/many signs that they were going to do this in the next few moments, I resolved to take the opportunity to avoid that situation altogether and fly out of the pool. I did so.

I don't recall how the transition happened; but the next thing I knew, I had changed my dream scene. Of course, since dreams are so shifty and lucid dreams are normally still at a lower level of consciousness, all it really takes for the dream circumstances to change is for one to stop paying attention to them for just a moment. I was still flying, headed into a house I'd never seen before through the window. I phased through the window, either floated or landed on something to keep me close to the ceiling and observed from above the stranger's room that I had just entered. It was a messy room that seemed to be full of things cluttering it. Fairly broad in area. The room was deserted and the lights were off, as they had been in my own home, but there was a television set on a stand that was on at the end of the room. It was broadcasting something between football and commercials. This was another time when I stopped to just pay attention to the dream scene around me, enjoying the details and apparent vividness and whatever was happening on the TV screen that lit up the room and enjoying the fact that my brain had created all of this imagery for me, which I was now in a position to learn to control.

Still, I was just a bit concerned that the dream character who resided in this house could come in at any moment and cause conflict - as I have a schema that houses are usually owned by people and people are usually in their houses, especially when electronic devices are on (though less frequently when the lights are off), and people are usually unhappy and react aggressively to finding people whom they don't know in their houses. So I flew out of this house and on to another one.

As I was approaching the windows of the next house, I reaffirmed to myself that I was still dreaming, as I recalled that one should do that every once in a while to retain lucidity (especially novices like me). I also remembered BillyBob's dream control tutorial that I'd read earlier on DreamViews. I remembered that BillyBob had said that it was better to avoid using too many super-powers and reality-warping independently of a rational storyline in lucid dreams if one wanted the lucid dream to be stable and last longer and instead to use rationalisations for anything crazy that one may want to do. Therefore, as I was approaching the window, I decided to crash through it and break the glass instead of phasing through it like a ghost. I did this successfully but without any hindrance to my movement.

I landed in a room on a high floor of someone's house - a second floor, at least. I could sense that this was a big house. This time, the lights were on. The room seemed to be broad and clearer than the last one; but I didn't pay much attention to it this time. Instead, I had a thought. While I was having a good, clear lucid dream and didn't seem to have much to do at the moment, I could finally fulfill one of DreamViews' current tasks-of-the-month as I'd been meaning to do for a while now! Naturally, at this point in my lucid dreaming journey, I'd go for one of the basic tasks first. I resolved to find someone who wasn't wearing green and pinch him/her.

At that moment, I saw a child enter the room in his (not green) underwear. Upon seeing me, I think he cried and ran away. Probably downstairs, I thought. 'Well,' I thought, 'I was thinking the person I'd pinch would be someone more mature. But if I run into the kid again, whatever gets the job done!' So I made my way downstairs to check out what was going on there. I imagined there would be parents down there to whom the child had been running but I hadn't expected what I saw next. Hanging onto a white grate outside the room I was looking into, looking but hiding, I saw a couple of green-skinned, big-headed aliens populating the downstairs region. (I'm looking at you, Xanous.) I decided it was best to avoid them and get out of the house, moving onto another location with a dream character to pinch, but to play it cool if I ran into one of them on the way.* Which was good because I ended up having a passive encounter with one. Avoiding interaction, I willed myself to lift off the ground and phase through the second floor and ceiling, directly ascending out of the house. But as I did this, the alien followed me, staying on the exactly same level as I was. Yes, it all looked very video-game-glitch-ish. I was in a hurry. Also, as I moved through two ceilings expecting to wind up atop the house, I instead ended up on another, high floor, like the basement, still not having escaped the physically archetypical alien. I went on to phase through the ceiling of that room as well and wound up in another, higher room. I then phased through the ceiling of that room and successfully ascended out of the house and evaded the alien.

Another transition. At first, I may have been flying through the low skies or a wide-open room; or running into another building. But as I looked back and then again looked ahead, before I knew it, I was moving in a dim, wide-open tunnel space through/to a network of glowing, floating cubes, arranged with four forms opposite to each other, as if to connect a square, with the same pattern repeated forward, as if to connect a cuboid. I think this may have been reminiscent of the battle room in Ender's Game movie adaptation that I watched a week or two ago. (I noticed that this was strange and different, though.) I continued to fly through into a wide-open, indoor location, giant in all dimentions, where I landed and ran into the wall. Placed against the wall were four or five large cardboard boxes that were packed with something. So, to find a direction to fly further in, again I decided to play the form-a-portal game. I imagined that there was, behind the middle of these boxes, a hole in the wall. A doorway or window or tunnel. Which would make itself visible once I removed one of the middle boxes (or two, where one was stacked upon the other). I lifted the box and moved it out of the way. It felt heavy, though I knew it shouldn't have to. At first, I didn't see what I'd intended to. Just a wall behind the box. But, not to lost or swayed that easily, I put the box back and tried it again. The second time, it worked. I saw a black, rectangular hole shaped something like an open vent. It didn't look like it was big enough for me to fit through; but I knew that didn't matter and jumped through it.

Unfortunately, once I'd jumped through the hole, I found there was a problem. Again, I hadn't specified a location to which I wanted the hole to lead; and it wasn't a recognisable place leading to another predictable, recognisable place that I already had a map of in my mind, as it had been in the beginning of the dream. In the hole, from outside, I'd only seen blackness. And that's all I saw when I jumped into it as well. Suddenly, I was struck by dream blindness. And thoughts started popping into my mind of where I had gone - that I had jumped, through the rabbit hole, for no particular reason, to a webpage on a site that I used to frequent very long ago. I thought about whether or not this made sense. I knew that I should probably clear this darkness up and set a visual dream scene for myself. But alas, it was too late. For suddenly, out of the blackness...

I woke up. Jolted back into my waking body, in my bed, back at home. The darkness had been the bard of doom, the herald of the end. I felt my body profusely sweating for some reason, wrapped up in my bedsheets. With immediate memory and understanding of what had just happened, I only wished I could pop back in; but I have no successful experience with DEILDing whatsoever, so that was not the case. At first, I kept my eyes closed. But as I realised nothing was going to happen, I opened them, did a simple reality check and settled down, focusing on thinking about the dream I'd just had, knowing that I wanted to salvage as much recall from this as I could. After a few minutes or maybe half an hour, my morning alarm went off and I had to be off to get ready for school. So, although I hadn't gotten up to check the clock before that, I presume it hadn't been too long before my forced awakening anyway.

*Hold on. Could this... have possibly been... my mind unconsciously feeding my desire to also eventually fulfill the bonus task of the month for March of 2014 - be abducted by aliens and report what they do to you - without me ever realising it?? Wow. Now there is an idea. And, imagining that I would have had the right amount of dream control and stability to go through with it, what an opportunity missed! And I only just realised it. What a fascinating thing the subconscious mind is.