lucid

I don't remember exactly when this one was, but it was around early October 2015.

It's one of the lucid fragments I didn't bother to write down at the time.

I don't recall what I dreamed about before, unfortunately... I didn't write it down. Stupid, on my part.

However, right before I woke up, I gained awareness while standing on a cliff. I was surveying a landscape covered with sweeping grass, with the ocean in the distance. I could see the waves breaking on a pebbly shore as the grass rippled in the wind. The sun was rising over the ocean. I decided not to "do" anything but watch the sunrise and be satisfied by such a vivid, solid dream after a night full of dreaming, I mostly just remember very being pleased about it all, as if I had enjoyed my night. I still wish I had written those dreams down, but I know there was some flying involved.

I spent a while peacefully enjoying the ocean breeze while the sun slowly rose over the waves. The sunlight sparkled on the waves and tinged the grasses with a rosy golden glow. The sea wind was cool and salty, with a hint of fresh grass.

Eventually, my alarm clock went off and I had to get up for work.

Another lucid last night. Went in and out of full and semi lucidity, but maintained a thread of awareness throughout.

I became lucid while looking in a mirror in a hallway. That is a common thing for me. Mirrors always induce lucidity. They're one of the absolutely fool-proof things for me. The mirror turned out to be in the hallway of one of my home bases, so I started off with the advantage that I was already at least partially anchored. I don't really remember, I think the mirror was near the door to the outside, because I believe that's the door that I opened later on. I should have paid more attention.

Anyway, I immediately tested my suspicion that I was dreaming by attempting to push my arm through the surface of the mirror. There was slight resistance on the surface, and then my arm sank in. The mirror looked like quicksilver as I pushed my arm through it.

Satisfied with the knowledge that I was dreaming, I spent a while playing with my appearance and examining myself in the mirror. I eventually managed to turn myself into more of a caricature of myself than my actual appearance, which I found very entertaining. While I was playing around with my eyes - moving them around, changing the size and shape, etc - I could hear my brother's voice narrating in the background that he at least liked this current character design better than the last (implying that he really didn't like either). I waved it off and kept playing around.

I was really satisfied by my handiwork because I had trouble with this before. I then spent a little bit more time dressing myself up as a sort of elven-looking sorcerer. Just as fun as cosplay, and several hundred dollars cheaper!

After spending some time tweaking my heroic cloak/cape thing (I settled on something asymmetrical and held up on one side by a nice brooch that I own in real life), I decided to meet up with some friends at a tavern.

I opened the door to go outside, and The Blackness happened. Some people call it The Void. Instead of the outdoors or the tavern that I wanted, everything beyond the door was pitch black. I stepped through the door into The Blackness, hoping it would dissipate. Instead, it enveloped me, and everything went dark. I tried vividly imagining my hands and moving them around in front of me. I briefly saw them appear before they faded back into the darkness. Waving them around some more didn't make them reappear.

I decided to try something I have never tried before. Instead of trying to make it go away, I would condense The Darkness into a form where it could no longer impede me.

I held out my hands and tried drawing it into a form in my hands. It didn't work, possibly because I was unable to see my hands.

I then put my hands behind my back and focused on trying to summon it that way. I felt fur and a small warm body. The Darkness disappeared as it was channeled into the form of a cat.

I brought the cat around to the front. It was skinny, with soft shiny black fur and gold eyes. I petted it and set it on the ground, and it ran off.

Now I could see, through the open door, not blackness but the brightly lit inside of the tavern. It had polished wooden floors and brightly burning candles and torches.

I rushed to the booth everybody was sitting in and scooted in. The booths were tall, made of dark stained wood, and seats were made of leather. While we were waiting for our server, I lost the thread of lucidity and the dream faded.

I don't really remember the rest of what I dreamed about that night.

____

I'm pleased that I finally solved a long-standing problem and completed a successful completely-controlled scene change. I've felt so stupid about struggling with these basic things after even several years and the ability to WILD with regular success. I'm looking forward to honing my skills further, as this has been a serious road-block for me.

One thing I can say is that my ability to maintain dream stability and my thread of awareness has gotten SIGNIFICANTLY better.

I've had a lot of lucids, semi-lucids, etc. lately, and I'm so bad at recording them. I even forget some of them. When I first started practicing, I would have said that's crazy talk, but it's like remembering stuff from your day to day life. After you live enough days, the details of what happened during each one get hazy.

I'll record the one from last night, though.

In this particular one, I realized I was dreaming while I was waiting for a train on an elevated train platform that doesn't exist along that particular rail line.

It was dark and stormy at the time, just generally nasty weather, and it was extremely late (like 4 a.m. late/early) and I was thinking about how tired I was going to be... then I realized that this train platform doesn't exist, and I don't work at the job I was thinking about any more.

The weather immediately switched to daylight/dusk. I hopped off of the platform into the air and flew along the train tracks, exploring this new and different rail line. I ran my hands along the metal, along the weeds as I skimmed the ground, focused on the feeling of wind, so I could maintain my thread of awareness.

I flew down into a neighborhood I wanted to explore and found some apartments where there would normally be a metalworking shop. I decided to explore the inside. Inside of the apartment, the walls were sort of orange... everything was decorated like a grandmother might decorate. Sitting at the kitchen table sipping a cup of tea was a bipedal talking white tiger in a grey-brown trench coat and fedora. He was extremely tall, and he carried himself and spoke with a great deal of dignity.

I decided to see where this was going and told the "detective" that I needed help finding my missing cousin. He was reluctant at first and basically said that he wasn't interested in helping. I was trying to talk him into helping me when my alarm clock went off.

I'll probably run into Mr. Tiger Detective again at some point. Some characters pop up more than once, and he seems like one who will.

I've gotten better at WILD, although it took... what... 4 years?

I've found I have much more control over the dream and don't run into the "stuck in the dark" issue that plagues my lucid dreams when I gain awareness during a dream.

I've been horrible about keeping a dream journal, and today I only remember my 2 WILD lucid dreams and not much else. Very lazy of me.

My favorite method for WILD is to explore a specific environment. I have two main fallbacks, two different "home bases". I know a lot of people really want to create a home base. It has been very difficult for me - I had no luck even managing to arrive in my home base for 2 solid years. I think part of it was that my "home" really wasn't a good one and didn't reflect my true personality or needs, and I had to spend a lot of time rearranging and rebuilding it in my head. I have two different ones right now, depending on what I want to accomplish. One is a whimsical home in what looks like the rainforest of the Pacific Northwest, perched on a cliff over the ocean. The other one is a fortress in a rugged landscape that looks a lot like the Grand Canyon, although much more mountainous.


LD #1: Woke up. Had to use the bathroom. Went back to bed.
Began my visualization of home #1... I was on the sandy beach below the cliff. I walked up and down the beach in my mind, focusing on all of the sensations that would go with it - the sound of the waves, the sound of the wind, the feel of the sand beneath my feet and even the slight whisper it made when I walked. How my footprints looked. The sky and horizon over the ocean, and the smell of salt on the breeze. Eventually, the sound of gulls over the water.

I looked back toward my house. There are steep stairs that lead up from the beach to the top of the cliff - they're made from the stones themselves. I walk across the beach to the steps and start climbing upward toward the house. The stones feel solid beneath my feet.

By the time I reach the top of the cliff, the dream has solidified into a lucid dream, although it still feels very fragile. I spend some time on the terrace at the top of the cliff looking out across the beach and ocean, and marvel at how beautiful it is.

I have a feeling that there are some friends nearby heading toward my house, so I move through the bedroom (which has a door leading to the terrace) and then the kitchen area. Things are fuzzy and I've made the mistake of not stabilizing very well because I'm anxious to greet my friends.

I open the front door. The rainforest outside is cool and misty. Wooden steps create a trail upward through the foliage. I can hear their voices in the distance, it sounds like two of them are arguing with each other.

Two of my friends appear at the top of the steps and start heading downward... I can still hear the others arguing with each other, although they're still out of sight somewhere further up the trail.

All of this is very distracting. The dream is too thin at this point, and it fades. I wake up.

LD #2:
I wake up naturally. It's early morning... light outside, but earlier than I'd like to get out of bed. I don't really remember the dreams I just had.

I lie back and begin another visualization; this time, I'm exploring the fortress. The fortress is a very new idea, interesting and a bit more grim. I wander around through some nondescript rooms... I haven't really developed the place much... and eventually become lucid in an area with ugly lemon yellow walls that really don't look very fortressy. I'm sort of irritated since I'd rather be somewhere more fitting for what I'd like, and more interesting. The hall I'm going down twists and turns but doesn't lead anywhere, and I'm becoming more irritated.

I run across a woman wearing a very old-fashioned maid outfit (not like a sexy French maid, think a traditional English maid) but she's very... zombielike. I think I said something to her, and she replied in a monotone. Her eyes were white and milky-looking. I don't like her and don't want to deal with zombies, so I destroy her (with a thought, she basically becomes a blood spatter across the walls and floor).

I run across one of the dream characters who'd normally inhabit this fort (he's a general) but everything is foggy so I don't recall any specifics about him... I need to work on him a little more... and complain about the zombie. He tells me that he and another dream character zombified all of the inhabitants and servants in the fortress when they took it over, so they wouldn't have to deal with any opposition by them but the fortress was kept running and in pretty decent repair. He doesn't care much about convenience and upkeep for himself - he doesn't need that stuff - but the way he sees it, it's more convenient for me. It's sort of evil and disturbing, but it IS something I'd expect that character to do, and he does have a good point.

This wasn't something I came up with myself... I was a little surprised by it, actually. I still don't really like the zombies, but I don't want to argue with that particular dream character very much - he's very stubborn - so I let the zombie thing slide.

As I head toward the main door that leads outside of the fortress, the dream falls apart and I wake up.

I had one of those nightmares where I'm back in high school again and have to repeat all of my old classes. It was only a few days in and I'd already made a habit of being late. The worst part was knowing I was repeating high school yet again. I had some level of awareness of it - I even made a "not again" comment in the dream - but still didn't gain self awareness.

I was renting an apartment with a room-mate - I hadn't met him prior to renting, but needed a place to stay. He turned out to be incredibly weird and borderline creepy, but I tried to stay on cordial terms with him. The apartment was supposed to be downtown in he city that I currently live in. I got into a brief argument with him about exactly where my rent check was going, since I was handing it to him instead of the landlord, and I'd prefer to give it to the landlord directly. When he gave me trouble over it, I asked him if his landlord knew he had a roommate. He didn't give me a direct answer.

The dream reused some locations from old dreams. For example, we went to a diner that was in a building along train tracks, that had multiple levels, and ordered cheese steaks. The cook, a stout slavic man in his late 30s, with thick black curly hair, actually remembered me. In fact, on the way there, I told the DC "room mate" that I'd take him to one of my favorite places to eat. Again, so close... but still didn't quite reach lucidity.

Dreams from previous nights:
I was in an airport. I got a box off of the baggage carousel and opened it. It was full of cockatoos, packed neatly in rows. They were sleeping. I got one out of the box, and it woke up and flapped its way up to the top of my head, and then pooped there. I was really irritated by this. I couldn't figure out what to do with the rest of the cockatoos.

I become lucid while looking in a mirror (this happens a lot). The light is pretty dim (which also happens a lot and is a source of frustration). I don't recall any sort of prior dream, I may have been lucid from the start. I examine my reflection. I'm still trying to figure out if I'm dreaming or not, so I try to put my arm through the mirror. I just bump it away. Ha, I think, not so fast. I know I'm dreaming, I just want to prove it. I push at the mirror again, and put my arm through it. It ripples like water.
I decide to change my appearance. I close my eyes and open them, and my hair is in a long braid. I close my eyes and open them again, and now I am wearing a green cloak.
Unfortunately, the dream fades (I doubt I could have prolonged it) and I wake up (real, not FA).

It's been a while since I posted anything.

I dreamed I was trying to fit my cell phone into a side pocket on my purse and it wouldn't fit.

I dreamed I got up to check my phone (which I had, at one point in the very early morning, when it went off) but for some reason I went to sleep on the couch. When I 'got up', it was pitch black inside the apartment even though I knew it was morning. That didn't really clue me in, though, I just accepted it. Then, I tried to turn the light in the kitchen on. It didn't work. I then tried to turn the bedroom light on - it also didn't work. I realized that this probably wasn't due to the fact that both lightbulbs weren't working, but probably because I was dreaming. I shouted "It's too dark!" to try to create some light, but it didn't work.

I wound up back on the couch, trying to get up, and realizing I was still dreaming. I actually wanted to wake up for real, since I knew it was probably getting late in the morning and I didn't want to sleep in too late, but found myself in another false awakening. Frustrated, I tried to rouse my sleeping body and managed to turn over in my physical bed, waking myself up (for real).

I had a headache. I got out of bed and made some coffee.

I wake up from my usual night's sleep in order to go to the restroom. Don't recall my dreams. When I get back, I settle in, noting in my mind that this would be a good time for a lucid attempt, and then I allow myself to drift off.

One of the ways I initiate lucid dreaming is visualization. My particular mode is exploring an environment in my head, in detail. I know I'm entering the dream when the environment becomes easier to explore and more unpredictable. Sometimes there is a sense of "breaking the tension" and moving into lucidity. Sometimes it's more gentle. Sometimes I feel like things are still fuzzy and don't get the clarity I want. Like all lucid techniques, it's a mixed bag.

I grab onto the first location that drifts into my mind - an old apartment I used to live in. I am outside on the front lawn. I walk down the lawn and across the street and head for a stream that is on the other side of the complex. It is lined on either side by thick trees that were simply never knocked down by the developer.

When I reach the stream, I begin my explorations. I decide to do something I did there a lot as a child - look for rocks that would look good once they had been through a rock tumbler. I pick up a few rocks and examine them, but don't see anything I like. I continue walking down the stream, splashing my feet in the water.

The stream becomes larger and deeper. I have reached a part of the stream that no longer looks familiar. I note that my visualization has become more intense. I walk from the center of the stream to the bank on the side, which has become muddy. As I continue walking, the stream becomes deeper and more turbulent, and has cut deeper into the banks. The banks have gone from the soft dark brown of midwestern soil to a burnt sienna color, and are gaining more of a texture of clay. If anybody has been to Georgia, they may know the color of soil I'm talking about.

The stream has become closer to a river. I imagine that a "duck" style vehicle could probably float down it now. For some reason, a roller coaster is now running along the side of the bank, but it isn't full scale. I take note of it. I try to assess my dream state, but it still feels "thin". There's not really much clarity, and I feel like trying to exert direct influence right now may cause it to fall apart.

The roller coaster has disappeared. I now see a pristine snow drift and a snow-covered hill leading upward from the river bank. I decide to see where the snow leads.

I begin walking through the snowy area. The snow becomes deeper, and as I continue forward, I start having trouble walking through it. I am heading up a steep hill, struggling through the snow. I look up the hill, and realize it leads up a mountain. I look down and I can see the path I've made through the snow. The stream is nowhere in sight - I'm now on a mountain in a mountain range. This is the tallest mountain. It's daytime, and the sky is very blue against the sparkling white snow.

I decide to continue heading upward to see what is up there. The sky becomes darker. The snow is almost up to my chest, and the way up is still very steep. I have no climbing equipment, so I flounder and climb the best I can. At this point, I feel like I am "deep" enough in the dream to start changing things, but I'm genuinely curious as to where this all leads.

Upward, in the distance, wind is picking snow up off the drifts and driving it in swirls across the mountainside. Through the wind and snow, nestled under a massive overhang in the rock of the mountain, I see... a fortress? Castle? It's made of stone. There are no lights; even though it is aesthetically beautiful, in a cold way, all of the openings look defense-oriented - places for archers or people with spears. The only place I see a dim light is what I assume is the entrance.

I reach the door. There is a flat area of stone that forms sort of a "landing", a level area carved out of the rock and laid with decorative stonework. A large, wooden door leads to what I assume is the interior of the fortress. The aesthetic is quite Gothic (but think of something in the style of Rheinstein Castle, not something like Cologne Cathedral). There are lights on either sides of the door, but interestingly, they seem more like gaslights than torches. The wood is stained a warm brown color and the fittings look like they are made of bronze.

There is a lever to open the door in front of it. I ponder how that really isn't very, you know, secure, but I get the feeling that not everybody is actually able to pull it. Only certain people can. I pull it with no problem, though. The door opens.

I walk into a gallery with an extremely high ceiling. There are massive chandeliers lit with huge candles, I count about 8 of them, and each one looks like it is the size of a small room. They look a little... Victorian. The whole thing seems cathedral-esque, but when I examine the gallery, I see that there are actually walkways high up on either side where archers could perch. Anybody trying to march through here could be easily sniped.

I'm not sure what I'm expecting. There are 2 doors at the very end of the gallery. The one to the right is open, and in the room there is a small screen, and it seems to be a bedroom of some sort, which I think is kind of weird. Then I realize it's a place for guards to rest, where they could easily access the gallery, so this might be an area that also leads to barracks. I still think it's a really weird layout. I go through the door that is right in front of me, though.

It leads to a dark room with stone walls and outlets to a hallway on either side. I'm not sure what I expected, but it wasn't this. The scenery still feels blurry and not 100% real, which is also a bit frustrating.

I walk through the door directly across me. I am in another room with high ceilings and a large chandelier. Things are getting blurry and kind of falling apart. The architecture is getting weird and I feel like it's getting "wrong". I begin to feel frustrated. I'm still trying to look for a throne room, or something, but I keep encountering weird rooms like this that just don't seem to fit the layout right. I'm looking for a dream character of any sort of significance, at this point, since I haven't really seen anybody.

There's another screen with someone behind it... I look around for a person. I'm actually looking around for what my dreamscape would consider to be the "leader" of this place, but instead, a woman who looks like a nanny appears. I don't know what small children she'd be minding, I assumed the ones of the head of the castle. At the time, I assumed there would be some, but now that I think about it there don't seem to be any. I think they might be around, but I don't see any. I should have talked to her, and asked what was up, but I didn't. I have an irritating tendency to stay silent during these dreams.

I can't get the DC I want to appear. I wake up.

The castle is cool, though. Once I've been to a dream-location, it seems like it can be a little easier getting there again (cottage is still hard, though). I wish I had spent more time examining individual parts of the fortress, rather than just pressing onward. If I end up there again, I probably will.

So, I haven't been keeping very good track of dreams.

Helicopter:
About a week ago - had a dream I was in a helicopter with someone. I looked down and there was fog rolling across a field, rolling in waves like an ocean. There was a storm in the distance, I could see it across several farm fields, but it was beautiful. On the edge of the fields there was a forest. The helicopter flew down until it was only a few feet above the ground, and we flew through a forest. I had a vague idea I was dreaming, and I wanted to share this with one of my friends, so I tried to turn the helicopter pilot into one of my friends. I looked away and looked back. When I looked back, her face was blurred out, but she hadn't fully changed. When this stuff happens, you'd think it would be super creepy in a Silent Hill sort of way, but when I am dreaming it's just a "this didn't completely work" sort of thing and doesn't bother me. I woke up.

I've had a few lucid dreams over the past 2 weeks but I've also been bad about recording those, so I'll just record last night:


Lucid:
Woke up ~8 am. Got up to use the bathroom. Went back to bed with the idea that it would probably be easy to transition to a lucid dream at this point.

Fell asleep, as normal. At some point, I became semi-aware while I was in the grey fog. I am familiar with the fog, by now. I knew that because I didn't "have a body" at the moment, I wouldn't be able to enter a dream (this is something it took a while to figure out, and it's just the way it works for me). I decided to do my technique of "walking" forward until my feet took form I could see my feet. I looked down at where my feet would be and began "walking". After spending a while doing it, suddenly my feet came into being. Once they came into being, I decided to try to bring an environment into being. Suddenly, the world popped into place. It startled me so much that I fell on my butt.

I was now sitting in a yard in front of a house. It was very clear. There was a house behind me that I didn't notice very much, and trees all around me. The grass I was sitting on was vibrantly green and soft. I saw some little flowers growing in it (like little daisies) and thought about picking one. Before I did that, though, I decided to look around. Everything was crystal clear, no "dream fuzziness" at all.

I heard a car in the distance. It stopped at the curb next to me. Curious, I stood up to take a look. I could see the driver inside, his features were quite clear without the "dream fuzzies" that sometimes happen when I see a dream character. He opened the door and stepped out and suddenly everything became fuzzy and gray again.

My body had disappeared again. I began to rub my hands together. After a while of rubbing, they suddenly appeared in front of me. I was pleased and tried to cause the landscape to reappear. Unfortunately, I guess I hadn't stabilized enough because my hands disappeared again and I woke up a little bit.

I settled back down and tried to imagine walking while looking at my feet again, and holding the hand of a friend to try to make them appear with me once I "existed" again, as sort of an anchor (I am holding onto them and they are in the environment that we are both in, so they stabilize me and vice versa). It doesn't really work and I feel like I can feel my feet shuffling in my bed (I'm never completely sure if they actually are or it is an illusion that they are).

It doesn't really work. I give up and drift into deeper sleep.

Kitten:
I dream I am robbing banks as an accomplice with a dream character (Caucasian guy with dark shaggy hair, thin and generally unhealthy and unreliable looking). At one point we end up in a production room where people are packing up cocaine for distribution. I have a tiny orange tabby kitten and I am worried about its welfare. I carry it with me at all times. We are going to go rob a bank and crash at a motel and my fellow bank-robber tells me to just leave the kitten outside and it will be fine. I start to leave it there but panic and come back and bring it with me. It's a huge inconvenience, but I cannot bring myself to leave my kitten alone outside where something may happen to it.

I see on the news that I am being listed as an accomplice for murders, but I haven't murdered anybody, and I didn't know that my bank-robbing buddy has been killing people. I decide I need to get away now, that even if I'm on the hook for robberies I'm definitely innocent of killing people. I can't leave my kitten behind, though, I am too worried about it. I'm also worried something will happen to it if my bank-robbing accomplice or the police catch up to me. I run through the woods (I don't have the van/car) and come upon a house there. I know that one of my IRL friends, James, lives in it, and that it would be safe to leave the kitten with him because I trust him. He opens the door and is friendly, as if he doesn't know I've been robbing banks (or doesn't care), and happily agrees to take care of my kitten.

The first dream of the night that I recall involves a very, very tall skyscraper. It's so incredibly tall that planes fly around it rather than over it.

I am on my way to the skyscraper. Instead of flying in a plane, I am in something like a swing-set seat, suspended from some sort of flying device. It's just a plastic seat with cables on either side, no sort of safety restraints or anything. The sky is clear, but it's a sort of washed-out blue with no clouds. I'm terrified of heights, so I have my eyes closed and a death grip on the cables. I'm trying to explain to my mother (who is neither next to me, nor on the phone, but she can hear me anyway) that I'm incredibly afraid of heights, and this is terrifying. She doesn't understand why it's so scary. "But you're not afraid of being in a plane," she says. "Planes are solid metal," I explain. "There's something surrounding me. Right now, I'm just sitting on a seat, without anything around me."

As I approach the incredibly thin, super tall building, I recall a dim memory in being in one before and how unsafe it felt. I tell my mother, "Last time I was in one of these buildings, I was terrified and clung to the walls. They're too high. I don't feel safe in them."

As I make my final approach to the building, everything goes black. It's sort of like a scene change would be in a non-lucid dream, if I was paying attention. And when it happens, I do notice this time, and realize that I was dreaming.

The world suddenly pops back into existence around me. I am in what looks like a hotel room. I understand that this is sort of like my brain trying to create my bedroom, but I've been focusing hard on being somewhere different, so it pulls up something that is supposed to be my bedroom, without it being my actual bedroom.

The whole thing is very... "four stars"? Not quite a five star hotel room, but not cheap. But a little tacky, like it's trying too hard. This environment is much clearer than the past few I have found myself in.

Side note: I still don't spend enough time really examining and exploring my surroundings, but I did pay a little more attention this time. I really need to pay more attention to what is around me at first, rather than doing some half-assed stabilization and immediately diving into whatever I am doing. I feel like the more attention I pay to where I am at first, the more successful my attempts to manipulate the dream are.

There is a gilded oval mirror on the wall. I decide to jump into it to see if I can do a scene change. I dive into the mirror, and I am standing in front of it again. I dive into it again, and I am standing in front of it again. I dive into it again, and I am standing in front of it again. I stop and inspect my reflection for a moment to stabilize the dream again. For some reason, my hair is very short.

I try not to let it bother or frustrate me too much, and it really doesn't. I decide that if I can't do a full scene change, I'll start manipulating my environment into what I want.

The hotel bed is very cushy, with nice accent pillows and bedding. The bedding is off-white with very thin red pin-stripes. I don't want red. I want purple. Without even closing my eyes, the pinstripes are suddenly purple, and the colors of the furniture and wallpaper and other decorations have shifted to match the new color scheme.

There is an end table with a small piece of carved driftwood on it. The wood is old-looking and grayish. It has been carved a little bit, but I still can't tell what it was meant to be. I inspect and feel the wood, to solidify things a bit.

I look around. The room has a very nice door, but it's not what I want. I decide that I want something more rustic, and more rounded. I cover my eyes and uncover them. The door has morphed a little bit, but it's halfway between the original (red, then purple) door and what I want. I cover my eyes and uncover them, and it is the shape that I want, but not wooden. I do it again, and I am satisfied with my nice, wooden door.

I look around the room. The furniture has changed a little bit. It's not the frilly, floofy stuff that I didn't like. The chair is more worn, softer, and comfortable-looking. The end table is now made of what looks like old, "reclaimed" wood that was rescued from an old barn or something and crafted into a table.

I turn my attention to the windows, and do the same thing I did with the door. After a few tries, they are close to the windows I want.

Unfortunately, on my last try, I open my eyes and wake up. I do a quick reality check (try to put one hand through another hand) and I can't pass my hands through each other. I'm still not sure if I was really awake, but I roll over and fall back asleep.

I have a vague dream of two women in the hotel room, arguing about something. Then, I dream that I have bought a bouquet of fresh cut flowers, but when I bring them home and try to arrange them, I realize that I have no vase.

Then I am playing a video game with extremely simple Atari-style graphics. There are several characters that you can unlock, and they all have their own individual stats.

I don't recall my dreams prior to waking up. Maybe not noteworthy, or I've just gotten out of the habit, which isn't good.

I also vaguely recall being lucid, but the dream was so fuzzy that I'm not sure. I wish I'd written down my other lucid before I "lost" it, but it may come back again. You might think "How could you forget it?" but it happens from time to time.

I woke up. Decided to lie back down and try a WILD... I would say it was maybe 7 in the morning. I haven't gotten to sleep in for a long time.

As I lay in my bed, I let myself drift. It's true that WILD gets easier and easier the more you do it... these days, it is, anyway. I've been struggling with it for years, though, and it's literally taken years to get to this point.

Anyway, I began drifting. When I say "drift", I do mean it... I sometimes feel like I'm floating on gentle waves. My attempts at WILD used to be unpleasant and frustrating. The "wind tunnel" is no longer really an issue, even though it used to be an extremely unpleasant part of the experience. My ears don't pop and my eardrums don't spasm any more.

I drifted gently on the "waves" and decided to let dreamlets come and go until one of them stuck. I was now floating in the gray fog I've become familiar with. Sort of a 3 dimensional fog.

The first thing I saw was... sort of a motel. An old and run down one, sort of like one we would have stayed in
near the casino when I was a child, except it had 2 levels instead of the one I remember. It was hazy and distant, and quickly faded away.

More drifting and fog. Some glimmers of things, but they didn't turn into anything.

Then, I was standing on a beach facing the ocean. The environment was semi-tropical... not really fully tropical, but warm. The ocean was very calm.

The sun was setting on it, and had become a bright ball of light sitting right on the rim of the horizon. It sparkled and glimmered on the waves. The clouds were ablaze with light from the sunset. For some reason, as I watched it, a series of chills ran down my body from head to toe. I was lucid, but it was beautiful, and I was content to watch the sunset.

The sunset faded. Eventually, a hazy scene began to materialize out of the fog. I was back at work again - ugh. I was standing in front of a shelf full of medicine, sort of in the pharmacy.

I decided that if I kept ending up back at work, maybe this time I ought to just roll with it and let off some steam. I decided to do everything I would normally never get to do. I began running from the pharmacy to the clothing department, running my hands along the shelves and knocking all of the bottles to the floor.

Everything was still foggy, but got slightly more solid as I ran into the womenswear. The whole dream mostly stayed foggy, despite my efforts to make clearer. As I ran past some racks of clothing, I saw that the lingerie section wasn't where it should be. "This isn't what would normally be here!" I exclaimed.

I grabbed a green polo shirt off of the shirt displays - instead of womens' shirts, the displays had mens' polos. I scrunched the fabric up in my hands and tried to make the woven fabric of the shirt look clearer and more vibrant. Then I rubbed it all over my face. It smelled sort of like mothballs or stale cigarette smoke. I decided that I was sick of things smelling like they ought to smell, and that these shirts smelled like strawberries.

I tossed the suddenly strawberry-scented polo away, and began grabbing armfuls of shirts and throwing them all over the floor and other displays, then ran toward the jewelry rack, knocking as many dresses off of the racks as I could on my way there.I remembered that I almost never speak out loud in my dreams, and I decided to change that. And instead of simply talking, I decided to sing. I grabbed jewelry off of the jewelry rack and began putting on as many necklaces, bracelets, and rings as I could grab.

"ALL OF THE JEWELRY!" I sang, and began tossing necklaces and bracelets into the air. "And only DIAMONDS for me!" I held up my hands, and all of the rings on my fingers now had gigantic sparkling diamonds on them.
I guess I was mostly satisfied with the damage I was done, because I decided to change the scenery. My scene changes almost never work, but I decided to

try a variant of "closing your eyes". I closed my eyes and felt around for what I wanted to find - the bed in my cottage. I found it and opened my eyes. The bed was semi-solid, but was surrounded by the gray fog. I tried to see the room's windows through the fog. I saw some window-shaped blobs of light, but the dream began fading and going dark. I tried to hold onto it, but the sound of the garbage truck outside was leaking through as it faded, so I let it go.

As I fall asleep, I practice visualizing and mentally exploring my "base". It has gotten more detailed as it has grown organically over time. I've only managed to reach it in one lucid dream, which was blurry and short, but... well, time and patience. I think part of my problem is that I tend to think of it as 'home', but when my dreaming mind goes "home" I end up in old apartments and bedrooms. I may need to rename/reframe it as something else, like Focal Point, or simply the Cottage. It will be a good springboard, once I manage to make it into a stable setting.

I've worked on visualizing it as I fall asleep at first not because I expect to have my first lucid dream there (there's a great deal of NREM before your first dream) but because I want visualizing that setting to become automatic for my V-WILDs later at night.

I've had a lot more success with V-WILD than anything else, although the dreams tend to be "fuzzier" - not sure why. They tend to fade quickly. I suppose it's something I'll need to work on.

My first few dreams... I don't recall them. I wake up. It's 7-8 in the morning and I don't need to get up any time soon, so I let myself start drifting off to sleep. I decide to try a WILD but I'm too sleepy to want to put much effort into it, so I decide to drift and latch onto the first setting that presents itself.

That setting is the store that I work in. It is a dreamlet that I am standing behind the row of cash registers. I am still mostly awake at this point, but I decide to go with it. I mentally "walk" out from behind the counter and start walking toward the market section of the store.

As I "walk", the visualization gains vividness and clarity. It begins to become more than merely a visualization, although it is not yet a dream. In the past, I may have tried to "push" it into a full blown lucid dream, but that mistake can cause the dream to collapse. I have learned to simply let it gently glide into a dream.

By the time I reach the center of the market, it has become a full blown dream. It's still "thin", though (hard to explain). I am standing in market. The layout has changed, though, and it's not the store I recognize. I'm standing next to an open refrigerated section with several shelves lined with cartons of fruit - strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, etc. The dream begins to fade a little bit. I run my hands over the fruit, trying to stabilize it. It doesn't seem to work very well. I remember that I need to engage more than one sense, and one of those senses is taste. I grab a strawberry and try to shove it into my mouth, but there is something like a force-field in front of my mouth, preventing me from doing so. I can't seem to put it in my mouth with my hand, so I toss it into the air and catch it in my mouth. It tastes how I would expect a strawberry to taste. I begin walking down the aisle, and the dream fades.

When another dream begins, I am no longer lucid, although I still have an instinctive feeling that what is happening is not "real", although I am not sure why.

I am riding in a small, worn wooden boat across a gunmetal gray lake, toward a barren shore. The sky is overcast and gray, and the lake is very flat and still. There is a man waiting for me on the shore. He is very tall and thin - almost gaunt - and dressed in odd-looking dull gray leather armor. There is a thick red woolen scarf wound around his shoulders, neck, and the bottom half of his face. He has messy black hair. I think of him as my cousin, even though he is nothing like any of my cousins in real life except for being very tall. I reach the shore and step out of the boat. The dream shifts and fades.

I later had other dreams, but they were fragmented and I can't recall them.

My dream starts as sort of a nightmare. The nightmare itself is jumbled and confused - there's not a clean narrative. It's mostly short, quick clips of action strung together and viewed from a 3rd person POV. Mud and rain; earth sliding into a river, pulling people down with it... switch to what seems like a motel and some sequences that seem like they're out of a slasher horror flick, people running in fear, and severed limbs and blood everywhere. It mostly seems like it's just my brain tossing up whatever seems disturbing and frightening at the moment.

Because of how disjointed it is, it's failing to really frighten or disturb me. My mind starts to get more and more distanced from what's going on, and starts paying less attention to it. I gain lucidity in one of the motel/dorm rooms while two women are arguing with each other. They look straight out of the 80s - one has bleached hair teased up a mile high and fake orange tanner, and the other is a brunette with a ponytail and teased bangs. As soon as I realize this is a dream, I am no longer a disembodied observer. There's an oval mirror on the wall - I run up to it and look at myself in the mirror in order to reaffirm that I now have a physical presence.

I immediately crouch on the floor and start running my fingers through the carpet in order to solidify my surroundings. Things seem to be fading, so I stand up and produce a hand mirror from behind myself and examine myself in it. The two women have stopped arguing and are looking at me. I feel embarrassed about them potentially thinking that I'm just extremely vain (despite the fact that they're just dream characters), so I shrug and tell them, "I'm just making sure I still exist."

They lose interest in me, and I lose interest in them, because I've decided that since my scene changes haven't gone so well lately, maybe I'll just mold my current surroundings into what I want. I pull up the software interface for 3D Studio Max and start modeling furniture for the room. Despite being a motel room, it has no bed, so I decide to experiment with creating one. I begin working on it as if it's a 3D model for a video game.

The two women have faded away. I minimize the "software" I'm working with to check and see if the bed has appeared. It has, and looks very solid, but it's the plain solid white of a 3D model that has been imported into some engines but doesn't have a texture linked to it (or the texture isn't loading).

I decide I'll texture it later, once I've gotten the hang of this, and decide to start working on one of the windows. I "import" it into my software and begin tweaking it. The window is a little bit tougher - it resists conforming to what I want.

The dream fades. Eventually, another one starts, but it's non-lucid. I'm watching a bunch of characters in a video game and "piloting" some of them, and the game is sort of Harvest Moon-y but instead everybody is little Lego people and they're going to classes at a university. One of the landslide scenes from the prior nightmare replays, but with little Lego people instead of realistic people. The character I'm piloting is supposed to get a date for a festival coming up and has until 5 a.m. the day of the festival, but because of the landslide, I don't manage to complete the objective and watch the festival play out without a date. The characters go to class, and the professor is very boring. The textbook is 900 pages long, but the professor is focusing on a 4 page section of it. The students have smuggled some pot edibles into class, and when the professor goes to another room for a few minutes, they all leave class to get high. The character I'm piloting stays in class. When the prof gets back, he seems bummed that nobody cares about the lecture.

Fell asleep meditating on the idea of lucidity, and a particular location ("Home Base"). I don't generally expect to attain lucidity during my first few periods of REM, nor do I really want to. Zoning out and just letting sleep happen is nice, in and of itself.

I had some new forms of success and ran into some familiar problems...

Had dreams. Don't recall them. I need to get better about writing stuff down, but don't want to disturb my boyfriend, either. I still don't feel like they were particularly vivid, coherent, or noteworthy... dreams from the first few hours of the night generally aren't.

Settled back to sleep meditating on home base. Slipped into gray fog. At some point, attained lucidity... had the sense that it was near the very beginning of a dream because I have no recollection of a dream up until that point, but suddenly I was sitting at a table with a pile of colorful alphabet-letter magnets on it. I touched and examined them, and then the grey fog reclaimed the dream. I slowly woke up.

Settled back down and began meditating again. Body slowly settled back into sleep; my limbs became numb and I felt like I was drifting.

This is normally the point I'd have trouble with a WILD. At this point, I would normally try to start moving, sit up out of my body, and feel a way that I can only really describe as feeling "tangled in a blanket" - mentally flailing around but unable to really get anywhere or do anything, still stuck in the fog. Sometimes, it's instinctive, so it's been hard to shake the habit, but last night I was actually able to remain mindful and stay still.

I felt as if I was drifting in a river. My body was numb and the idea of being attached to or "in" it was going away. I tried to sink into the river even more... I felt my head sink through the pillow and my body sink through the bed, and sank down into the gray fog.

Drifted for a while. I watched the fog so that I didn't end up drifting out of lucidity. I waited for shapes to appear in the fog. Sometimes shadowy shapes would appear. This is normally where I might have trouble again - trying to will them to BE something, without anything really coalescing... wanting them to BE something... getting frustrated and exerting myself too much mentally and waking up as a result. This time, I just let them fade in and out. I still paid attention to them and tried to examine them, but I tried to remain as objective as possible - trying to see patterns and shapes in them without trying to force them to "be" anything. I knew that if I kept doing this, eventually I could coax one of them into reality.

Eventually a shadowy room came into being, and became reality. I was standing in the living-room of my mother's old apartment in Florida. It didn't have any furniture and was fairly empty. The alphabet magnets from before were scattered on an end table in the center of the room. It felt pretty "solid". I examined the brown carpet and patted the wall. I walked through the room, toward the hallway, running my hand along the wall so that I didn't lose lucidity. I wanted to do a scene change - this place wasn't where I wanted to be, and it was boring. I walked up to the door and willed it to open to a location I actually wanted to be in (again, home base).

I opened the door, and there was... another door? I opened that door, and behind it was another door. I felt irritated and opened that door, willing it to be the location that I wanted, but it opened into the apartment atrium.

I walked across the atrium and opened one of the doors to another apartment. That door led back into the atrium. I got an idea - something told me to try to dive through a door and use it like a portal. I dove through a door and opened my eyes to my actual bedroom. I should have known that this was potentially a false awakening, but instead I just went back to sleep.

I dreamed I was hanging out with a few of my friends. We were going to Full Throttle Bottles, but in the dream, Full Throttle was not the store I was familiar with, and it was not in the location where it would have normally been. Instead, we were all walking down a street full of nothing but liquor stores. We went into one of them and a friend bought a bottle of vodka that was in a bottle like a soda bottle and tasted like orange-flavored cream soda. I liked it, so I bought one myself. I kept thinking that it was odd that the store clerk hadn't carded any of us, but didn't manage to figure out that it was because this was a dream.

We walked up to a place that looked kind of like a castle. It had brown, smooth bricks. I jumped down a wall and my friend grabbed my arm and jumped down with me. I remember thinking it was a very long way to jump and was surprised I hadn't hurt myself a lot, but reasoned that it was because my friend was taller and had held me up kind of like a balloon.

I then dreamed about a flying cartoon skunk whose super power was smelling so bad that the odor killed evil things.

I am in a library. I'm not aware that I'm dreaming at the moment. The library is very odd, not much like the sort of library most people are accustomed to. It's very open and airy, almost more like a gigantic greenhouse or atrium than a library. I'm looking through one of the shelves. Instead of books, it holds cubes and rectangles of light. There's a young woman near me, and I think I vaguely know her. We may have come to the library together.

Someone taps me on my shoulder. I turn around to look at them. The person is an older man, probably in his 60s or so. He has ash blond hair with some grey mixed in. I immediately know that this is The Doctor. He tells me that I'm dreaming. I suddenly realize that I am dreaming, and begin to wonder what I should do next.

He points out one of the massive (4 story high) glass double doors, toward a dock on the edge of the tropical-looking bay, and tells me that a ship is coming into port. The edge of the horizon shimmers, and a cruise ship materializes and sails out of the shimmering portal. It's one of the largest ships I've ever seen, far larger than the largest existing cruise ships, so large that there is an actual city full of glass buildings atop it. I know that it's sailing on the water right now, but is also a space ship.

"Why don't you explore a little bit?" he suggests. "Go on a cruise." The cruise ship is becoming clearer and more in-focus now. I decide that sounds like a fun idea.

I jog to the dock and lift off into the air, then teleport to the deck of the ship. The tropical sun is very warm and bright, and all of the colors are intense. I'm amazed by how intense and realistic it is.

I shade my eyes and look around. There's a large Olympic sized pool, and a woman in a straw hat and turquoise bikini sunning herself next to it. There are various tables and chairs, set up for outdoor dining. It's so bright that I have to squint, so I walk under the shade of a beach umbrella. The difference in brightness and temperature is startling.

I feel the dream beginning to fade. I grab a towel and squeeze it in my hands, running my fingers over it. I drop to the ground and lick the deck (yes it's weird, but it works) but it just tastes like concrete. I'm irritated; why doesn't anything in my dreams taste like anything but what it actually is? I lick the concrete again, trying to make it taste like something else, but it still just tastes like concrete.

The dream stabilizes again. A nearby table has a bowl of fruit on it. I grab a green-skinned apple and bite into it. It doesn't taste like an apple - it tastes like a ripe, juicy peach. It's extremely juicy and very good, so I continue eating it. I toss the core aside and decide to try to explore and see what's below deck. A door appears in the deck, and I open it and try to float downstairs, but everything goes dim and the dream falls apart.

I dreamed that C lived here, and I was living with him. My mother had also moved here. The place C had was pretty nice, but I was irritated because he was ignoring me. I was thinking of moving in with Mom, but my brother was already living with her, and the place was pretty crowded. At first, Mom lived somewhere niceish, with cool painted/tiled ceilings, but then she moved somewhere less nice with more rooms. It had ugly leaves painted on the walls and ceilings (the walls were a gross yellow, the paintings were brown). I couldn't live alone, because I didn't have enough money to.

At some point, I was riding the train downtown, and I realized I was dreaming. I tried to fly through the ceiling but got "stuck" and had what I believe was a FA. Then the apartment dream (from above) started up again from where it left off.