side notes

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.