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    CanisLucidus

    Clash at the Alamo

    by , 05-21-2013 at 04:06 AM (936 Views)
    The second of two LDs from the morning of 05/18/2013. This was a big, big dream, and this dream and I did not always get along. This was my first serious attempt at meeting NewArtemis for a dream sharing attempt.

    I also got into a big fight with a powerful DC that escalated into a me against the world situation. I could have handled this a lot better. My self-control wasn't what it should be... but it was still kinda awesome.

    Color legend: Non-dream Dream Lucid

    Lucid #96: Clash at the Alamo

    I'm Marty McFly from Back to the Future, driving my DeLorean on a set of rails that stand hundreds of feet over a bay. The DeLorean starts to shake as it picks up speed and before I can make a time jump, the rails end and the car goes plummeting toward the sparkling water.

    I brace for impact and the DeLorean flies to pieces as it strikes the bay. Miraculously, I'm unharmed, and I thrash about for something to hold on to so that I can get my bearings and figure out what to do. One long, fin-like piece of metal from the car bobs to the surface and I grab onto it. The moment that I do, an unseen engine roars to life and takes off like a jet ski.

    As I'm racing across the bay,
    I realize that this has to be a dream. After riding for a moment, I'm perhaps a hundred feet from shore. I leap off the impromptu "jet ski" and fly the remaining distance, landing in a stone plaza that stands at the water's edge.

    I remember that I'm planning to meet NewArtemis at the Alamo for a shared dreaming experiment. I turn toward the water, raise my hands up in the air, and make an announcement to all of the DCs. Most of the passerby stop and turn to look at me. "The Alamo is right behind me! That's right -- Alamo right behind me!" I imagine it in detail, rebuilding my mental map, forgetting and scrubbing out the buildings that were there before and replacing it with my image of everything that I remember about the Alamo. I continue this until I can think of nothing of what's behind me except for this image of the Alamo.



    I turn around, expecting to see the Alamo... and there it is! The stone's a little darker and the construction looks a little too new to be quite right, but it's more than close enough of a lookalike for me. I walk around past the front entrance to a courtyard. The geography is different in this dream from that of the real Alamo, and I come to a stone wall with a little alcove and a bench. There's a woman sitting on the bench and we look at each other immediately.

    She gets up and approaches me right away. She doesn't look like NewArtemis' DC has in the past, but I'm not sure of anything yet. She speaks first: "I'm here to meet someone. How about you?"

    "So am I," I say, studying her. She's roughly the same height as Art's DC but her skin is paler, her hair curlier, her build heavier, and her face is different -- broader, different nose, different shape... just different. "But you're not her, are you? I don't think you're [NewArtemis]."

    She smiles noncommitally, but I continue. "That's okay," I continue. "Let's still do the passphrases and gestures." I speak my chosen word to the DC and perform my chosen gesture. She doesn't bother speaking a passphrase in return but she does perform a gesture. (These have been reported to a 3rd party who is not NewArtemis just in case she's able to guess them.)

    "Well, I need to go!" the woman says. She walks out of the alcove and passes me. As she goes, she becomes a much older lady, blonde, mid-50s. She grows to an enormous height, probably close to 8 feet tall. She's wearing shorts and I see that her legs are covered with a crisscrossing patchwork of scars.

    I contemplate following, but I'm distracted by a man who's sitting at the top of a stone wall nearby, staring at me with a malicious grin on his face. He's in his late 30s with close-cropped reddish-blonde hair. The guy keeps staring at me with that joyless grin and I know that he's looking for trouble with me. I want no part of it, so I turn and walk away.



    He hops down from the wall and grips my right forearm with his right hand, twisting my arm around so that my hand is near my head. I try to pull my arm out of his grip but when I yank, it doesn't budge. He laughs, shaking his head as if he can't believe that I would bother trying to defy him. "You're never leaving here," he says. "I mean it. You are never leaving here." I yank my arm again but I feel as weak as a kitten.

    I know I have to turn this around fast. I grab him by the back of the head with my left hand and begin to imagine my adversary as frail and lethargic. "You're so weak and tired," I tell him, trying to sound compassionate, even though I'm boiling with rage. "There's just no strength left in you at all." And I gently move to lay him down on a nearby table. I think of him as totally weak and barely able to move. His grip slips from my arm and he flops backward onto the table.

    "And small," I say, pressing on his head with one hand and his feet with the other. He begins to shrink. His hair has turned jet black now, and his eyes close. I squeeze him together, thinking of him as so tiny, and soon he shrinks to the size of a child, then to the size of a baby, then disappears into his clothes entirely. My self-control cracks and I ball up his clothes, throw the bundle on the ground, and give it a vicious stomp. I wonder for a moment whether I've gone too far and hope for a moment that the bundle was empty. I walk through a nearby archway, not sticking around to find out more.

    I emerge in a cafeteria. A table of 6 or 7 teenagers immediately looks up from their meals at me. "It's him," one of them says, and they all get to their feet and come after me. I fly through a nearby doorway and emerge in a large, empty room with a skylight. I fly up to the skylight, intending to phase through it, but something seems to restrain me from getting high enough. I run through a doorway into a drugstore that dead-ends in a frosted glass window. I vault toward it, phasing through onto a street scene.

    There are police everywhere on the street. I know that they're looking for me. There are strange little ball-shaped hoverbots scanning the streets with cameras, also trying to track me down. I sprint up to one and kick it against a nearby wall. With a pop, it breaks into two smoking, fizzling halves.

    Everything seems to be happening too fast for me to control. I run down the street, looking for some way out of this fear. I want to buy time to calm down, so I phase through the door of a nearby house. Cops are turning the place over while the family, a husband and wife and their little girl of about 8 are glued to the TV. One cop notices me as I walk in, but I swoop in on him, grab him from behind, and choke him unconscious. The other two cops don't seem to notice any of this, and the little family stares obliviously into their TV sets.

    I watch the TV for a moment. It's some sort of political propaganda which claims that the moral code of their "great society" is built upon a foundation of classic arcade games like Centipede, Pac-Man, and Donkey Kong. I'm torn -- on one hand, I find top-down, statist morality codes repugnant. On the other hand, I sure do love classic arcade games.

    I phase out through the back of the house into the yard. The cops yell at me as I pass and I hear them calling for backup. The back yard is peaceful for a moment before the wail of what sounds like an air raid siren fills the air. I look up at the sky, feeling helpless, trying to find peace for a moment. But all I can think is They're coming for me.
    The dream ends...

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    Comments

    1. Iokheira's Avatar
      How much fun would it be to live in a society that has it's moral codes based on video games? Answer: A ton.

      So I met you too that night, and I'm going to record here what I saw in case I never write my entry. You definitely said "itchy" and may have said "eggs", but I was thinking about raising chickens so that could have been me. I don't remember any gestures, but I gotta say I'm worried about what gesture I gave you - I had another flip-off-athon last night. So if I gave you the bird, I apologize.

      Considering how often and well you avoid fights, I think a little self-control snapping is ok! Good for you!
      Ctharlhie and CanisLucidus like this.
    2. Ctharlhie's Avatar
      You're just on a roll at the moment

      What induction techniques are you practising ATM? I noticed you and Xanous have had success with SSILD. I initially it wrote off as another snake oil technique, but seeing as people like you have used it to great effect it would be wrong to ignore it. so I'm experimenting with it a bit as a technique to replace DEILD/MILD. (I need a technique where I ideally don't need to get up in the night, as I will be sharing a room next year at uni, can't WBTB and piss off my roommate).
      CanisLucidus likes this.
      Updated 05-21-2013 at 12:21 PM by Ctharlhie
    3. CanisLucidus's Avatar
      Quote Originally Posted by NewArtemis
      How much fun would it be to live in a society that has it's moral codes based on video games? Answer: A ton.
      Ha ha, so true. I wish that I'd been able to calm down a little bit and explore this further. I'd love to know how Centipede informed the society's moral codes. Don't you feel like Orcs Must Die has enhanced your views on personal injury liability and public safety? That Age of Empires has helped you understand the value of mercy? (That value being "none".)

      Quote Originally Posted by NewArtemis
      So I met you too that night, and I'm going to record here what I saw in case I never write my entry. You definitely said "itchy" and may have said "eggs", but I was thinking about raising chickens so that could have been me. I don't remember any gestures, but I gotta say I'm worried about what gesture I gave you - I had another flip-off-athon last night. So if I gave you the bird, I apologize.
      LOL. That's awesome. Dang, now I'm regretting not going with my initial passphrase choice of "itchy yolk". If you gave me the bird, it didn't show up in any dream content. Just as when you give me the bird in waking life, I remain totally ignorant that anything has happened. (Except that one you did just now! Totally saw that one!)

      Quote Originally Posted by NewArtemis
      Considering how often and well you avoid fights, I think a little self-control snapping is ok! Good for you!
      Thanks, that's nice of you to say! Even though I wish I'd stayed frosty, it did feel good to win. That DC was nasty. I'm still not sure why he showed up when he did.

      It was interesting being fully lucid while also having lost control of my emotions (fear and paranoia in particular.) I still had lots of personal dream control, but dream content became more and more like a "bad dream". It was hard to remember that if I would just stop and think, I could bring the dream world back in line. The dreaming brain is a funny thing.
      Ctharlhie and NewArtemis like this.
    4. CanisLucidus's Avatar
      Quote Originally Posted by Ctharlhie
      You're just on a roll at the moment

      What induction techniques are you practising ATM? I noticed you and Xanous have had success with SSILD. I initially it wrote off as another snake oil technique, but seeing as people like you have used it to great effect it would be wrong to ignore it. so I'm experimenting with it a bit as a technique to replace DEILD/MILD. (I need a technique where I ideally don't need to get up in the night, as I will be sharing a room next year at uni, can't WBTB and piss off my roommate).
      Thanks, Ctharlhie, I appreciate it! Right now, my primary tech is MILD, virtually always with a WBTB. I did actually manage one lucid early in the night before a WBTB this month but it's a bit of a rarity for me. My secondary tech is WILD, which I use any time I'm taking galantamine or huperzine-A or any time that I feel like I'm generating enough hypnagogic imagery that I can enter the dream directly. I also do a lot of DEILDing, particularly when I feel like there's more juice left in an LD.

      I'm a married guy, so I can totally appreciate the concerns about not wanting WBTB to bother the people you share a room with. Since alarms aren't an option for me (Wife would kill me), I trained myself to WBTB naturally and I just slip quietly into another room to read/study/meditate/surf DV/whatever. At first I drank a lot of water before bed until I got in the habit of getting up in the early morning to pee. Now it's just something I do. If I don't want to WBTB, I just fall back asleep.

      SSILD was my first tech, and I had a ton of success with it. I think there's definitely something there. The only downside is that it's so exotic that I had no clear idea on how to "debug" it when I'd go dry. I didn't understand its mechanism all that well so my tweaks felt a bit uneducated. It does call for a WBTB, though, so if that's what you're trying to get away from, I'm not sure it'll be able to help you. Xanous had some luck SSILDing at the beginning of the night, but it's not something the tech was really designed to do.

      What do you currently do for WBTB? Do you set an alarm?
      Ctharlhie and NewArtemis like this.
    5. Ctharlhie's Avatar
      Micro-awakenings through auto-suggestion is hit and miss for me, I may train myself to wake through drinking water like you. I've been experimenting with phone on vibrate but sometimes I don't remember waking from that.

      MILD was my first tech and I've had well over 100 'lucid events' with it. I say lucid events as these would often be semi or even false lucid affairs, leading to slipping back into NLD, where I wouldn't remember to stabilise or to carry out goals. I had to drop it because I started wondering whether I was just instilling expectations of lucidity that were then played out in a semi-lucid dream and got in a mental block about 'doing it right', and it's never good to attach efficacy to a technique over the fundamentals. Still for all that I consider MILD to be the most powerful DILD technique, at one point I was having a couple of good lucid dreams pretty much nightly.

      I think SSILD works by heightening sensory awareness before entering REM sleep. Mzzkc called it a 'super-MILD' in the SSILD thread, rather than affirmation or visualisation as the basis for awareness, awareness itself is the object of focus. I'm hoping to use it alongside natural micro-awakenings.
      CanisLucidus likes this.
    6. PennyRoyal's Avatar
      Awesome CL! Intention and visualization, that teleportation technique to the Alamo was great.

      Sorry that it turned into Dreamworld vs. CanisLucidus, but it made for a really interesting read
      CanisLucidus likes this.
    7. NyxCC's Avatar
      Great dream despite the difficulties! Maybe next time they are after you can try digging your way to South pole?
      CanisLucidus likes this.
    8. CanisLucidus's Avatar
      Quote Originally Posted by Ctharlhie
      Micro-awakenings through auto-suggestion is hit and miss for me, I may train myself to wake through drinking water like you. I've been experimenting with phone on vibrate but sometimes I don't remember waking from that.
      Good luck! In the end, the biggest thing seemed to be just forming that habit of getting up in the early morning and the water helps to reinforce that, I think. So I imagine that there are still elements of auto-suggestion (and definitely expectation), and the water kinda helped nudge me in the right direction. Of course, now it's just become this weird thing that I do.

      Quote Originally Posted by Ctharlhie
      MILD was my first tech and I've had well over 100 'lucid events' with it. I say lucid events as these would often be semi or even false lucid affairs, leading to slipping back into NLD, where I wouldn't remember to stabilise or to carry out goals. I had to drop it because I started wondering whether I was just instilling expectations of lucidity that were then played out in a semi-lucid dream and got in a mental block about 'doing it right', and it's never good to attach efficacy to a technique over the fundamentals.
      Outstanding! That's a very impressive MILD pedigree. You've got a really nice depth of experience there with MILD.

      And as far as fundamentals over technique, well said. I completely agree. Things like specific techniques, lucid aids, etc. build on the foundations of awareness and intent but they can never replace them. IMO.

      I think SSILD works by heightening sensory awareness before entering REM sleep. Mzzkc called it a 'super-MILD' in the SSILD thread, rather than affirmation or visualisation as the basis for awareness, awareness itself is the object of focus. I'm hoping to use it alongside natural micro-awakenings.
      That explanation does make a lot of sense. It always felt to me like a "super WBTB" that worked like a bit of an awareness booster. I always like seeing how very experienced people do with an exotic tech like SSILD. When I used SSILD, I had only two very, very hard-won and mostly lucky LDs. It was the first thing that got me really going.
      Ctharlhie likes this.
    9. CanisLucidus's Avatar
      Quote Originally Posted by PennyRoyal
      Awesome CL! Intention and visualization, that teleportation technique to the Alamo was great.

      Sorry that it turned into Dreamworld vs. CanisLucidus, but it made for a really interesting read
      Thanks, man! I was excited by how well it worked. Some variation of "don't look at it, rebuild it in your mind, now look at it again!" seems to be what does the trick best for me. I'm going to be working on this a lot. Could be just what I need to finally crack a Task of the Year item, something that has eluded me for an embarrassingly long time.

      Having the dream world turn on me definitely made for an exciting experience. Once my mind started racing, things got really crazy. I know that if I can remain calm in the future I should be able to keep my persection complex under control. In the end, real cool... as long as it doesn't start happening in every dream!

      Quote Originally Posted by NyxCC
      Great dream despite the difficulties! Maybe next time they are after you can try digging your way to South pole?
      Hey, great idea! I love it! If things go bad (dare I say, go south ) what better escape plan can there be than to burrow to another part of the world and start Task of the Year? I think I'd then need to burrow back to the North Pole from there, but come on... once you've burrowed to the south pole, you pretty much know what you're doing.
      NyxCC and PennyRoyal like this.
    10. Xanous's Avatar
      Very cool dude. I love the teleport, how you talked how the DC, and the running. That sounds like a lot of action and fun. Awesome!

      I'll have to try that method of travel out in my next lucid.
      CanisLucidus likes this.
    11. CanisLucidus's Avatar
      Thanks, Xanous, I'm glad you liked it! Yeah, I'd love to hear whether you have success with this teleport method. It's the kind of thing that's so basic that it's almost always available to you if you just have enough time to engage it. I hope it works as well in the future because it could really help us out. And by "us" I mean "those of us that still haven't completed any Tasks of the Year".
      Xanous and Ctharlhie like this.
    12. Ctharlhie's Avatar
      Outstanding! That's a very impressive MILD pedigree. You've got a really nice depth of experience there with MILD.

      And as far as fundamentals over technique, well said. I completely agree. Things like specific techniques, lucid aids, etc. build on the foundations of awareness and intent but they can never replace them. IMO.
      Thanks, I'm trying to build back up to that level, stress and motivation have been major issues, but I'm starting to get that old excitement back

      And in regards to fundamentals, yep, couldn't have said it better.

      That explanation does make a lot of sense. It always felt to me like a "super WBTB" that worked like a bit of an awareness booster. I always like seeing how very experienced people do with an exotic tech like SSILD. When I used SSILD, I had only two very, very hard-won and mostly lucky LDs. It was the first thing that got me really going.
      Got lucid FAs last night, I may just make it my bread-and-butter, it's so damn easy (and I'm so damn lazy).

      Keep doing whatever you're doing, it's working!
      CanisLucidus likes this.
    13. CanisLucidus's Avatar
      Thanks, I'm trying to build back up to that level, stress and motivation have been major issues, but I'm starting to get that old excitement back
      Sweet, man, that's great to hear! I love that. Yeah, stress is rough stuff, but if it's something that's subsiding (thanks to summer?) this is probably the perfect time to come roaring back.

      Got lucid FAs last night, I may just make it my bread-and-butter, it's so damn easy (and I'm so damn lazy).

      Keep doing whatever you're doing, it's working!
      That's great! It sounds like it's working really well already! False awakenings were (for me) signature SSILD. Yeah, if you have a combination of strong fundamentals and strong laziness, you might find SSILD to be ideal.

      And thank you! April was a little slower for me, so I've been really pleased with how well May has gone.