AstralVagabond

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.