non-lucid

As I went to sleep tonight, I recited a mantra, "I will stabilize". I also firmly fixed in my mind that as soon as I began dreaming, I would know that I was dreaming.

This worked. I spent some time drifting, and then a dream began. I was lying in bed, and the lights were on. I looked to my left. There were 3 tiny, glowing playing cards floating in the space above my head. I thought, "Yes, I'm dreaming," and snatched the playing cards from where they were floating. It's hard to explain, but the cards were a cue for me - it was specifically seeing the cards that made me lucid. I don't remember what suites the cards were, only that they were 1/4 the size of normal playing cards, they were glowing, and they immediately induced lucidity.

I got out of bed, and my bedroom was very different and not at all like my real bedroom. The carpet was worn out, and an ugly shade of tannish orangy brown. My "dream room" carpet is always this ugly color, for some reason. The door was in the wrong place, and led to a hallway that doesn't exist, and there was no furniture besides my bed. The bed was a twin, but in real life, I have a full. I said, "Stabilize!". I went to the door and tried to visualize that as soon as I went through it, I would be in a rainforest. I tried very hard to convince myself of this.

When I went through the door, everything was dark. I saw shadowy forms that hinted that I was in another room. I got frustrated and lost lucidity.

I woke up, grumbled, and tried WILD. I got past the initial wave and felt as if I was sinking into my bed. I sat up out of my body. I tried to open my eyes, but it was very hard, and I felt like I was opening my physical eyes. I was really tired and had work in the morning, so I gave up on it and lapsed back into unawareness. I dreamed that my head had made a huge dent in my pillow, so now my pillow had 2 lumps of stuffing on either side and nothing in the middle. I tossed and turned (in the dream) and tried to make it comfortable somehow.

I dreamed I was shopping at a store. I've never been there in my waking life. There was a desk on a top shelf that I was interested in - it was $50, and I thought it would make a good room divider. But my cell phone was malfunctioning badly. The screen came off (how?) and then it got hot to touch and melted. I got some of the melted screen on my finger, and it burned me. I kept thinking about how frustrated I was that all of my money now had to go toward buying a new phone. I needed a smartphone, too, so it was going to be expensive.

I woke up. I tried some visualizations. I visualized a room full of dolls, where each doll represented a DC I knew. I visualized putting a doll on the floor and making it grow to full size. (I was not asleep at this time). I began drifting off, but the visualization didn't completely take hold, and I didn't become lucid. Instead, the room became the room of a woman with a group of really odd friends. My dream followed their antics, but I don't recall any specifics on what they were.

Review:
Dream clues:
- Playing cards (instant lucidity)
- My pillow doesn't have stuffing. It's a memory foam pillow.
- Unfamiliar store, without recalling how I got there
- Malfunctioning phone (malfunctioning electronics)
- Spectator perspective

Edit: Believe it or not... I actually figured out the playing cards while I was riding the train home. In my dream, they were glowing like they were lit up LEDs. On the train ride home, there's an installation where LED playing cards flash by the train windows. I tend to stare out the window at them because I'm bored and they're something to look at... which means I'm also staring at my reflection. So, since mirrors instantly make me lucid (for some reason), apparently my brain linked the playing cards with my reflection strongly enough that just looking at a card makes me lucid.

Original journal entry dated Feb. 9th 2002:

I had another bizarre dream last night. In it, M and A were going to a college in California, and they were driving there. I was going to a college in Michigan, and bummed because I couldn't go with my friends. My mother and her boyfriend were going to a casino somewhere. Anyway, M and A, instead of using a map, rolled up a little ball of clay and gave it a face. It would shout directions at them and tell them how to get where they wanted. But it was EVIL. And its strength came from mirrors. So at one point, they smashed every mirror in the hotel room trying to kill it. But it WOULDN'T DIE! And they'd given my mother one of them, too. As for myself, I had stayed home trying to figure out how I could follow my friends, but they showed up at my house saying that they hadn't been able to get to California. And then my mother and her boyfriend came home.


Original entry dated Feb. 1st, 2002:
Regarding several dreams taking place over a period of time:

Dream #1:
I dreamed about a vampire who was actually a large anthropomorphic lion, only he kept falling into lava and coming back to life. And I dreamed that I was at the Russian Olympic games, where one of the sports was to swing around a pole and see how far one could vault into the water. This feat was performed by 6 foot tall 8-year-olds. I sat in the bleachers, only I didn't have a ticket, so when they came around looking at peoples' tickets, I forged one and tried to remain inconspicuous.

Dream #2:
I dreamed that we were in a car trying to cross a bridge, which was actually a large ramp across a channel - you accelerated and then flew through the air and landed on the other side - but we kept crashing and dying.

Then I was on an ocean-liner with my aunt, and there was a murderer loose, and he would claim his next victim by slashing them on the thumb a day or two before he killed them. And my aunt got a slash on her thumb, so then she was really scared, and then my finger turned into a squid, so we all became vegetarians because we could no longer stand the sight of shrimp.

[COLOR="#800080"]This is one of the coolest dream I ever had, So I might as well type it down just in case I forget it.[/COLOR]

[SIZE=3][COLOR="#800080"]I'm in my apartment with my family and I suddenly have a heart attack(That was so damn random). I die and leave my body into this grey shadow.I look at my body laying on the ground in horror. I see my dad and my sister in those shadows so I realize they died too. I find out that my godmother died too so I started crying because she was one of the persons I always believed in, told all of my secrets and I also got very good advice from her. I cry desperately and I ask my mom when she will come to us because I wanted to be together with her, she said she couldn't come only in 20 years when she'll be old enough to die. I cry and get really depressed.I try to posses my own body and realize it's working.I get back to my shadow form(Whenever I switched from shadow to human form I felt like a jolt in my upper body) and I tell mom that there's no hell or heaven and that I was right when I told her that god doesn't exist(Last night I had a conversation with her about the existence of god and she refused to even think about it). I ask someone if I'm able to walk while possesing the body, I get no answer but I try to do it and it works.I then think about visiting my grandmother and my grandfather. I go into my grandmother's room and I look around when I notice some shadows and I ask them about my grandmother and grandfather.One of them says that they are busy and they will come later but I keep insisting on meeting because I really wanted to spend time with them.My grandmother appears and she seems like she doesn't want me to talk with her, she just tells me she's busy and smiles. I put her in a.... pokeball.... and throw her on the ground. [/COLOR][/SIZE]

Dream recall from today's WBTB/naps.

Dream 1(fragments):

I was going around streets then through an underground passage.

Dream 2(fragments):

I was playing hearthstone, but there was some weird system of numbers integrated for sending actions.

Dream 1(fragment):

I was on some island.

Dream 2(fragments):

There was a team of scientists that were making stealth suit designed especially for robbing banks, then some crazy black armored dude attacked the lab.

Dream 3(fragments):

I was in some kind of ancient temple/garden place and there was some dude that was jumping high.

Dream 4(fragment):

I was watching some anime.

Last night I had a dream that I was at my mate's friend's house, in his room (I'll call him CS), who I have met once in real life. He lives a little way down south from me. There was a few people there, including CS's Mum, and two kids who seemed familiar, but I can't remember who they were.
They were smoking weed, so I asked if I could join them and they said I could. I asked them if they'd smoked 'chop' before (weed with tobacco) and from what I can remember, the white kid said "no" (there was a white kid and a black kid). I asked if I could have a little bit of bud to chop up with some tobacco and the white kid was hesitant, but said "yep".
I kept sketching out that his Mum was going to come into the room and catch us smoking weed (apparently the White Kid's Mum was CS's Mum as well), so I walked out of CS's room and into the room on the opposite side of the hallway.
CS's Mum was in this room, with two other people I can remember. One of them seemed to be a friend I know in real life. I sat in there for a while and then went back into CS's room when I thought it was safe to start toking :p
I walked out and into another room down the hallway where one of my best friends
was using the toilet in the room next to it. I went into his bag and grabbed out some tobacco. For some reason I stole it instead of asking him, which I would usually do in real life.
I walked back down the hallway to the first room I was in, the two kids were already baked, after one 'cone' or 'bowl' (we were hitting the bong).
I grabbed a bowl off a drawer in the room and tipped the rubber bands that were in it out onto the drawer and put the tobacco under the bed. I started chopping up the weed with some scissors (the scissors I used just happened to be ones that I use regularly in real life). I said to the white kid "I can chop really fast haha" or something along those lines. He told me to stop chopping because he had a faster way to chop it up. I looked at the ground and there was a machine which looked like a smaller version of a tree shredder, it wasn't there when I had entered the room which confused me. Apparently you could put bud in it and it would grind it up for you.
I said "no thanks, I like the feeling of chopping bud up in my fingers" (I really do like doing that in real life). He said "alright" and I continued chopping.
Then I reached under the bed and grabbed some of the tobacco from earlier. For some reason, when I told the two kids I was getting the tobacco, they pulled out three big stones which were shaped like donuts, and said it was "old baccy" (as in tobacco they used to use in the old days before modern tobacco was invented - which doesn't even make sense! :p). I said "no thanks" feeling confused again, and chopped up the tobacco I had with the weed and then woke up.

ALSO: For some reason, my fingers really hurt when I was chopping up the bud, it felt almost real.
I don't understand why I didn't go lucid when so many strange things happened in my dream.

Original Journal Entry - Feb. 1st, 2002:


Santa Claus was actually an evil overlord who derived his power from people giving him pennies (thus granting him control over them). He caused storms and floods that destroyed entire villages. But we robbed him of his power, and he became a decrepit old man who traveled around with a family in a station-wagon. One of the little girls in the family learned his power, that is, to clap her hands and cause thunderstorms. The station-wagon then floated magestically across the ocean, into the sunset.

Original journal entry dated Jan. 31, 2002:

#1:
I had a dream that I was in a grade school fighting demons with an iron, and was afraid to stand still too long because they would come up through the floor. It had the Gundam pilots in it, for whatever reason. Then there was something about a woman being a train on train tracks going through a flooded city, and meanwhile I was a juvenile delinquent trying to set myself straight and failing miserably.

#2:
I lived in an apartment with the old dude from Men In Black. And then I was taking care of my pet rabbit, and for some reason the radiator was in the bathroom. I was cleaning her cage and set it next to the radiator, and somehow she got out of the cage and into the radiator. I managed to get her out but she was VERY badly burned, and really cut up, so I was flipping out and my mother (who was suddenly there for some reason) was telling me to cut it out because the burns were only third degree (?!) and she wasn't missing THAT much skin. Then mom woke me up (in real life) to tell me that she had let my rabbit run around on the deck for another hour or so. Then I went and checked on my rabbit (this is awake, in real life) who was remarkably unburnt and had all of her skin. *shudder*

Non-Lucid

Was at a concert in Melfort (Or a small town), and AC/DC was performing. I was worried, because the show was far from sold out (The crowd looked big at first, but at a second glance, showed only like 9 people). I was worried because AC/DC might not come back after this. I was standing off to the side of the stage, and the band came out. I screamed in excitement, and gave Angus the Devi horns sign. He flashed the sign back, and hi-fived me. Angus had a grape sucker hanging out of his mouth, as well as a toothpick with a pickle slice at the end (apparently this was his signature look). He was a young version of Angus (1970s). When I was screaming at the concert, I was sorta trying to keep it quiet, because nobody else was screaming and I felt embarrassed being the only one screaming.

Non- lucid

My Chemical Romance was coming to Melfort. I was going to be able to meet them as well. I promised Chevy I'd get something signed for him.I was going to bring a copy of The Black Parade, as well as a book Gerard wrote. I could NOT find the book. I was looking in shopping bags (full of copies of Conan the Barbarian), under couches, and in stacks of books. There was a group of guys in the room watching me search.
During the searching process, I met a girl (do NOT remember her name) and she gave me her name & number to put in my phone. She was going to MCR too (I think), and I developed a big crush on her(I was single in my dream). I eventually went back to the house, looked under a couch, and found the book. I started on my way to the concert (worried I might be late due to all the searching)

Journal Entry Non-Lucid #1 Dream, non-dream)

Background: I was having a conversation with my dad. I asked him if he has ever quieted his mind. He asked me, "what do I mean?" I said, "Have you ever went to a point in which you have less and less thoughts ? He then responded negatively, telling me that it wasn't good to do that kind of meditation and it's demonic. He told me about his "astral journey" and that it nearly made him crazy. I told him that whether or not the information came from a Buddhist monk, a scientist, or mystic's you have to analyze the information, not have a bias based on where it is coming from that is considered a fallacy. He didn't agree with me and I didn't agree with him about the astral part, but he did agree with me with the mindful meditation. He honestly made me scared about astral projection, but I that I wanted to do this more than anything else.

Date: 11/07/13
Time: 10:30 PM - 4:00 PM

Dream: So, in this dream, I was in my bed just sleeping. I then got out of my body and started to fly. It was night time and I saw the beautiful city lights. I then landed at a store, my father was there. It looked like day time by now. I said to him, "look I am astral projecting and it's not dangerous". He looked at me, and didn't say anything. I then went underground and flew back up to the sky.

Problems faced: Remembering dream, mostly because of stress (school).

I dreamed that I was part of a crew that was going to ride in a rocket to the moon. The capsule we were going in looked very old, like 1960s era Soviet technology, and it was very tiny. It had one circular room. 2 men were operating the actual controls, and I was supposed to navigate. For some reason, I did this with old-fashioned looking blueprints. Our first mission was successful.

Things went a little wrong during the 2nd mission. There was another woman, Sophia, who was training to be a navigator. They assigned both of us to the capsule for the next mission, but it was far too cramped for 4 people to fit inside... when all 4 people got in, I didn't have enough space to actually do my job. Finally, it was decided that Sophia would stay behind.

Eventually, we docked at a tiny space station with a room with several beds built into the wall.

Then, a perspective shift. I'm now a spectator, and Captain Kirk is leading an old-fashioned-looking starship. He's only doing it temporarily, until they pick up the "real" captain. They run into a very strange colony/organism, it's a giant, translucent, organic bag of liquid with worms and snake-like creatures inside of it. It reminds me a lot of looking through a microscope at a slide full of tiny creatures. Anyway, it engulfs the ship. Kirk leaves the ship and floats into a little air sac/bubble in order to try negotiating with the creatures, but they're sort of evil. Eventually, he decides it can't be done, so he punches a hole in the side of the sac and all of the fluid drains off into space.

Then I dream that my mother gave me 2 bowls of popcorn. One is smaller than the other. I sit and pet an orange kitten, and we both eat popcorn.

Review:
Dream clues:
- I do not normally operate rockets
- It is not the 1960s
- "Spectator" perspective
- My mother is 2000 miles away
- I don't own a kitten

Side-note | Third-person

Driving to church
I'm driving early in the morning. It's still dark and there are very few cars on the road. I'm waiting to make a left turn onto the Interstate near my house. I've got a red arrow, and I'm annoyed because no other cars are around and it'll be minutes before I can go. Now I'm on the on-ramp. I can't believe I just ran the red - I never do that! - and I'm trying to think back to think if saw any police around. I try to think if there was a red light camera, but I don't think there was - I've never noticed them, and I didn't see a flash.

Now I'm merging onto the Interstate. Again, it's completely deserted. I make a wide sweep on, going left a couple of lanes before coming back right into my normal lane. I wonder at my doing this, and I'm glad no other cars were around for me to hit. Now I'm driving straight in my lane, but I'm having trouble seeing the road ahead of me. My headlights are on, but they're barely illuminating the lines on the road. I can't see anything up ahead of me. I risk turning on my brights. I don't see any other cars, so I'm OK, and it helps a little with the illumination, but everything is still very dark. I look at my speedometer and realize I'm going 50 in a 65. As I accelerate, everything gets brighter, and I realize that, just like braking makes the front of the car go down, when I was going slowly my car was angled forwards so the headlights were pointing down.

Now I'm going under an overpass, sweeping to the right, and preparing to merge onto a road with some traffic on it. It's early dawn. On this new road, I can see a large purple church off to my left.
Now I'm meeting with my pastor in the purple church's belltower. Everything is purple, even the bell.

I actually did have an early morning prayer meeting at the church. Driving over there, I had a real sense of deja-vu.
Also, I don't think I actually ran the red in my dream. Instead, I think my mind noticed the discontinuity and rationalized it as "One moment I was waiting at a red - now I'm on the ramp - I never saw the green - I must have run it!"


DS9 weirdness
I'm watching Sisko and Dax walking around brightly lit starship corridors - probably on the Enterprise. They're talking about Bashir. Sisko is a little annoyed, but Dax is just amused. Now Sisko and Bashir are walking through the corridors. Sisko is annoyed and trying to hide it. I realize something else must be going on. Now Sisko and Garak are walking, and Sisko isn't even trying to hide his annoyance any more, getting somewhat hostile with Garak. In the middle of their conversation, they come to transporter pads (5, in an X pattern) set right into the middle of the hallway. Some of the other pads are already taken; Sisko steps on one and totally ignores Garak as the team beams away.

I'm watching DS9 with an older woman, a relative of some sort. She asks me how they did that (beaming away), and I realize she must never have seen Star Trek before.

Now I see the team in a cave. Sisko is wearing ceremonial robes, and I realize he's there for some Bajoran religious ceremony - that explains why he was so stressed out earlier.
My memory gets fuzzy here. There's something about a large pool of white stuff that gets sucked out by a pair of pipes, then replaced by water. Someone comments that usually they only use one pipe, that two pipes is reserved for special occasions. There's something about Kira dressed in civilian clothes after escaping from something. She's really unhappy because they've tattooed the back of her neck.


My new forum
I'm in my home office, at my computer. I've just opened a new forum to talk about games. It's almost a direct clone of an existing one, both on topics covered and software used. For some reason, a bunch of people didn't like the old one, so I took it upon myself to set this one up for people to bail to. So far, there's only a handful of users and very few threads. One of my friends has the most popular thread; it's already up to over 30 posts.

One of my coworkers is here with me. I let him use my computer to do something on the forum, but he can't type since my keyboard layout is still Dvorak. I hit the hot key to switch back to qwerty (pausing for a moment to wonder why I have that hotkey set up on my accounts) and let him do his thing. I switch back to my layout and account to sticky a thread.

Date: 08.11.13
Total sleep: Good question..
Daytime Techniques: hm..
Lucid Techniques: Repeating my mantras but without conviction and expectation
Recall Techniques: bad, bad, bad
Fell Asleep: Good question

Fragment One: Problems With My Mother
Dream:
...edited..

Fragment Two - Being Hunted By a Lunatic and Dead Animals
Dream
I was being on a journey with a bus and people I didn´t know.
We took bicycles and went into the woods with them. There was a story and a reason, why we - and esp. me, who lost the others - were hunted by somebody wanting to kill us.
I forgot, though.
Later there were zombie animals (farm-animals - cows, horses, pigs..) and somehow I had to find a living animal of the right species for each one of them to - don´t know - redeem them?
This finally worked out - I found those in the woods with my bike and paired them up on the bus-platform.
They just stood there and were happy then - half of them dead and decomposing.

We entered the bus and had sort of a picnic in there - then back on the bikes and it was the way from Munich to Tegernsee and the bikes were almost flying so fast did we go.

Somehow that guy later was completely friendly and took me home to his family and showed me, how to make traditional jewellery (see snippet).

Awake: two or three times in between dreams - got up at 11 am
Vividness: (scale of 1-15, 10 is waking life vividness) 8
Awareness: (1-10; or lucid) maybe 6, non lucid
Length: (how long it felt like! Because that matters) the dream with the second fragment - one day
Emotions: ..edited..
Dream Signs: Bavaria - again, my mother and me in my late teens

..

Dream recall from today"s WBTB/nap.

i was at home, watching some video, someone was distracting me and i told him that there's 15 min left on video, then after a while i woke up, twice.

Dream 1(fragments):

I was playing some video game and there was some volcanic area.

Dream 2(fragments):

A team of heroes was fighting a team of elite enemies on some kind of stadium. One of elites was weird guy that was really good at getting behind and snapping necks.

Dream 3(fragments):

Something about a tower and alchemy.