non-lucid

I was with two characters, people I knew were fictional. Something happened (a guy "died" and fell into a "coffin" filled with liquid concrete in a doorway?) and the characters took it seriously. However, I knew it wasn't real and wanted to show them. I dig out the concrete, showing them the person who fell was just a cardboard cutout. Suddenly the atmosphere of the "scene" changes. I get scared. The two characters 'freeze', and their eyes turn black. They say I should not have done that. Their next few sentences make some sense, but then I realize they're talking Lovecraftian gibberish. I suddenly "know" they will soon shapeshift into horrific abominations, so I flee. I run through a corridor to the front door, but it's locked. I had no choice but to navigate the many corridors of the "mansion" I was now in, and avoid the monsters stalking them. At some point I was attacked by an older lady, also talking gibberish. I could barely push her off of me.

-1(L)-I did a nose plug RC, then became lucid. This was near a large, church-like school building surrounded by standard fence. There were a ton of DCs around, so I ran out through the open gate into the field to avoid distracting elements. While I ran, I started my routine. However, despite my efforts, DCs spawned in the field too and tried to talk to me. I eventually forgot I was dreaming. I think I was trying too hard to shun every character away without think about my situation. Since the focus was on characters, I eventually lost lucidity.

Then, a storylike emerged about Doctor Who and the same building from earlier, except now it was old and abandoned. I had to sprint back to the building from where I was in the field, so that I wouldn’t get taken over by a skydiving alien. It was hard to run normally, so I had to pull on the grass to increase my speed. (this has happened at least a hundred times. I’m not sure why it hasn’t clicked.) I don’t remember what my task was inside this building.

-2-I was watching Mumbo Jumbo play some Hermitcraft—he had taken on a challenge to build a vertical base entirely contained in a 10w x 256h x 10l volume. Not a bad idea, actually.
-3-I was on a Federation starship inside a hallway or sorts; there was a room-spanning window with controls all along it. Grant Imahara was at a control panel, talking about a rare wormhole in front of the ship. I replied,
“Oh sure wormholes are rare in Star Trek.” Something happened to him after I said that. Maybe he fell into the wormhole.
Time: 1-2 minutes

This is a non-lucid one but am posting here because I thought it was hilarious!

In the scene are two coworkers, one female and one male. The male is a tall black man who is the host of a corporate training on sexual harassment, and is also partially me somehow. The female is his coworker, Caucasian and very attractive, sitting on a kind of counter top in front of the guy wearing smart office wear, a blouse and a skirt.

The moderator says, "in the workplace you should not do things like this to your female coworkers". He lifts up off the womans blouse over her head to expose her naked breasts.

She doesnt attempt to cover up, and just sits there.

"Well," the moderator continues, "she seems to be okay with that. But you REALLY shouldn't do this either." He spreads apart her legs and rips off her skirt and panties, fully exposing her.

Again, she sits there in an open legged position, not attempting to cover up.

"Well, she seems to be okay with that too," the moderator continues. "But you DEFINITELY shouldn't do this next thing". He then whips out his dick and proceeds to masturbate in front of her.

Then the dream ends.

Morning of April 16, 2017. Sunday.



This dream has various disconnected scenes featuring snakes. Its vividness grows then lessens several times. In this dream, our house seems rotated in orientation as well as with a few other changes. For example, the wooden cupboard in the bathroom directly faces the bathroom door rather than being perpendicular to it. (Despite the fact of having carefully documented and studied tens of thousands of dreams for over fifty years, the same setting, regarding its layout and overall appearance, has never occurred more than once in a dream other than in resets during the same sleeping period though even then there are differences.)

There are a number of snakes that appear over time. It starts by me noticing one in the “living room”. The living room is ambiguous as there is a vague awareness of being indoors and outdoors at the same time (a very common perception in my dreams since early childhood). The floor, for example, is somewhat like dirt, and one snake crawls up out of it. I am aware of how dangerous the snake is.

There is a scene where I catch a snake and its head is close to my face. At this time, I suddenly become incorporeal but the “other me” (who is now a different unfamiliar male) is bitten on the face by the snake. The snake then apologizes (in a human male voice) to the man. I see that it has somehow removed its fangs (perhaps spit them to the floor). It tells the man it is going to remove the venom by sucking it out. Each area where the snake’s teeth were is somewhat like a sucker on an octopus tentacle and this will apparently aid in the sucking out of the poison. The man’s life is saved by the snake that bit him.

After catching a number of large deadly snakes, I put each one, apparently dead, into a small box (which is somewhat like a white gift box of the type that would hold a wristwatch). By this point, the snakes (only the ones in the box) are only the size of small earthworms. It seems I am sending them to a herpetologist for a special study, perhaps for payment. Each snake is different. I catch a white one with purple polka dots. There are layers of tissue in the small white box that separate the snakes. I look to see if any of them are still alive but I do not see movement.

I have a false memory as Zsuzsanna speaks. She “reminds” me of the time when a dangerous eastern brown snake (said to be the world’s second-most venomous land snake) was in our bed. I recall the event clearly (even though it never actually happened, either in my dream or real life).

I go into the bathroom and close the door. A large snake is behind me just outside the bathroom door. I feel that I have no choice but to crawl up onto the top of the wooden cupboard (which as described above in the first paragraph is in the wrong location). I see its head come out from under the door. I start throwing toothbrushes, razors, tubes of toothpaste, combs, bottles of shampoo, and anything I can get my hands on. Each time I throw a bunch of items, the snake backs away, sometimes going back behind the bottom of the door, but I soon see it appear again each time. I throw items at it at least ten times or more and it gets very annoying to see the snake coming back under the door each time. Finally, I decide to climb down and make a run for it. As I am leaving the bathroom, Zsuzsanna calls a different snake a “coral snake”. Apparently, it had also been in the bathroom (perhaps in the bottom part of the cupboard). It is banded red and black and another (unknown male) runs from it (though I do not question where the other male comes from).

I then start picking up all the razors, toothbrushes, and other items that I had thrown so that I can put them back on the top of the cupboard. There are some other scenes with crawling snakes and another scene where I climb up onto the top of a tall bookcase, but my dream fades. The bookcase seems to be in the living room of the Loomis Street house, facing directly out from the doorway of the northeast bedroom and blocking it. As usual, I do not regard the fact that the bathroom is from our present home in Australia (though altered) yet certain other rooms are from the Loomis Street house in America. I have decided this may be a form of sustained doorway waking symbolism. The snake is seen as crawling under the bathroom door (thus there may be a subliminal awareness of needing to wake and use the bathroom), but in the last scene a bookcase is blocking a bedroom door. (Books are associated with an increase in neural energy and emergence of more viable thinking skills.)

---

All my life, (regarding non-lucid dreams) I have contemplated why settings are always different and rarely based on any correct memory of a real location. Although the “subconscious” can never get anything right, even the most basic detail, my theory is that the setting is rendered from the concurrent dynamics of the dream based on economics and convenience. For example, if the incorrect layout of the bathroom had been correct, I would not have had the open view of the snake coming under the door and I would not have as easily been able to target it by throwing items directly at it. I would have had to fling them at an unusual angle down close to my left (while having to lean more over the edge). There have been many dreams where the incorrect nature of the setting seemed directly based on the flow of my dream’s situational dynamics. It makes perfect sense, as that is how waking thought works. (For example, when you have a particular new thought, the exact same sentences do not manifest each and every time forever afterward, or there would never be a new thought, thus dream settings are skewed by thought continuity, not based on static memories of real places.)

---

23-5
Fragments
-Small red spaceship orbits some planet. I watch it as a DO. Nothing happens, no sound or signs of life.

-Sex fantasy. I'll leave the details out.

Dream 1 - Zooming and Shooting
I'm in a game of Overwatch. I first play as Ana and switch to Tracer when an enemy Tracer kills me. I zoom around the map really fast and kill the other Tracer several times. We win the match. The dream shifts to another kind of shooter. The setting is now a dark WW2 battlefield. I have a sniper rifle and spot some enemies. I drop to the ground and take aim. Aiming is difficult. I miss three times. I start to suspect something at this point. I keep observing the target. He appears to be a doctor. In which case I shouldn't be shooting him. That's a war crime I forget that it's a war game and the doctor starts selling some meds to me.

WBTB, 5:45 - 7

Dream 2 - Showers
I suddenly find myself in a public sauna. I'm a little confused. I get out and see a large room with showers. Naked men and women walk by. There's only men in the showers and all of them are gay couples giving each other a BJ. Yeah, this place is definitely not for me. I don't want someone surprising me from behind, so I quietly navigate my way out of there.

I find some sort of changing room and meet two waking life friends. One of them asks my help with something, but I said I was looking private shower before I was leaving. My friend had a sleeping bag in the dressing room. He was apparently spending the night here.

Fragment
-Weird microwave oven. The bottom of it split in two and since the oven was raised up with some bricks, the bottom had split accidentally while my mom was heating something and the food was all over the table.

Dream 3 - Simpsons and stealing
In my apartment. There's a tv on my nightstand. I watch Simpsons. The scene suddenly changes. I'm stealing some candy from the backroom of some store. A large lady sees me and stops me. I go back in time. This time I buy the item and go get it from the backroom myself. I wait around for the fat lady to notice so I can have the satisfaction of her wrongly accusing me of stealing and then correcting her. By the end of the dream I'm unsure what I got. It was either candy or meds.

Another WBTB. 7:20 - 8:27

Dream 4 - Car ride Really inspired title, lol.

I'm in a car with two friends, mom and my brother. Brother is driving. We are in my hometown. I start telling them about the weird dreams I had this night. As I list things that happened, my brother starts talking over me and listing things that happened in my dreams. He actually lists what happened. It felt like my dreams are predictable and my brother was making fun of me. I was mad and just sat silently until I woke up.

Non Lucid

I was in my old house living room with my family having a good time talking and getting ready to eat a slice of pizza. But when I went to talk to my older brother he ignored me and kept quiet. After he took his slice and walked away I became furious. "Why won't you just talk to me!? What did I do!?". I followed him down the stairs and we now ended up in a beautiful rocky, sunny area where the bright green grass was lit up beside and around the gray temple walls and stairs. As my brother continued down the steps I begged him to tell me why he was ignoring me and he replied "It's what you said". I didn't feel like I said anything wrong by refusing to hang out with his friends but I felt sorry that he was offended by it so I said "Sorry, I sometimes say things that I don't really mean". I said it just in case I said something offensive too.

He turned around now accepting my apology. Next our childhood friend who is older than us appeared and so did other family members of mine. By mistake I threw a rope over my dad and had to release the rope quickly just in case it choked him. I also flew down while holding a pigeon somewhat aware it was a dream but it didn't last long. We laughed about the pigeon thing than I woke up.

"Lost His Patience"

I was non lucid at first and inside a Elementary school. There I thought I was an assistant but than I realized I was in a dream.Thinking some more a member of dreamviews,4199, Came to mind but than I thought of how I might want to try observing Dawn one more time because of the discussion I had with a member on OBE's and dream characters last night.I felt like Dawn was around but before I could find him the setting changed to my old house living room. There I looked at two Gray Old small phones on the couch and used one to send Dawn a message. Not really typing but telepathically. I did type two letters though to see the screen turn on.

The phone vibrated than I felt someone pick me up and sit on the couch. I thought it was Dawn than but he was barely visible. After the small hug he let me go and feeling kind of uncomfortable I decided to leave the house. But before I left I decided I would do my three step task for SpellBee competition. I remembered that first I planned on going through a big solid object so I went towards the window and pushed on it. I ended up just breaking the glass though. "No point on going through if its open" I thought than was about to go through the door but I felt heavy and like the dream would collapse. Opening the door I managed to get to the hall before the dream shifted.

I was now at my current house, on my bed and felt someone near me. "Dawn?"I asked. Suddenly he picked me up slowly, barely visible, just rippling again, than flew me slowly through the wall. We ended up on my old house front porch than he started flying me slightly above the sidewalk. "Why can't you just leave me alone? I'm tired of this. I hate you. Just leave me alone!" He said sounding desperate. Looking in front of us there was a black car on the sidewalk turned sideways. "If you hate me so much just smash me into that car" I told him. I thought he was going to do it but he flew me above the car than higher into the sky. The setting now became night and he flew me above a tall fence where i saw a area of small colorful houses and big trees."I wish I could just push you off!"he told me as we looked at the houses. "Than push me. "I replied but he just flew me further where we saw a truck stuck in the woods near a road."Hmm...He wants to get rid of me so much. I wouldn't be surprised if he drove me off the road with him" I thought after seeing the truck.

However, hearing him complain again I gave him a big hug. "I don't care if you hate me. Your still important to me" I said acknowledging his help despite him not being present as much. But he just moaned and flew in a different direction with me telling me to leave him alone. Seeing subway tracks above the street and a police officer roaming the sidewalk I pondered how interesting it would be to OBE around the world but than my attention was brought back to Dawn who was still annoyed. I flew him down to the ground now where he collapsed. He became more visible now but only a quarter of himself. I could tell his hands were very hairy too. At the last minute I told him I would leave him be and woke up.


Notes- I don't plan on calling him again but I'm glad we interacted for the start of the competition. It was kind of fun being flown around despite him being annoyed. ^^"


(Pic doesn't belong to me ^^)
Competition Points

First Dild of Night 10
Full Non lucid Dream 1
Don't think I should count step task
Cause I cant remember if I blink or not.
I think it went black for a sec.
Interact with a dream character 2
Super Strength 5
(I can not break window glass with my hands in reality)
Use Electronic Device 5
Basic Summoning 5 + 5
(Dream guide)
Fly 5
(We got pretty high but we didn't go to space xD )

38 Points Total

DILD #1-I felt my body being moved by a force in a dark room. It came to me that I was dreaming. I waited to see where the force would take me. I approached a door with a lighted sign that said "The End". The door opened to a sunny outdoor square in a town, where I was no longer being forced around. I looked for a large object to phase into an saw a large wooden black desk in the square with some papers and a laptop on it. I phased through to the middle of the desk to see if the papers had anything interesting on them, but there wasn't. I finished phasing through the desk. I faced my hand behind me to summon a dolphin and felt a beak. I looked to see if the spinner dolphin floating there was big enough for an advanced summon, but I estimated it wasn't because it was only about 6 feet long. I faced my hand behind me again to summon a T-Rex and I felt a mouth. The T-rex was definitely big enough at about 20 feet tall. I got on the T-Rex's back and chased some DCs who ran away screaming. I woke up in my bed. I noticed that there were several spiders above me. They started to drop towards me and which scared me. I woke up.

DILD #2-I woke up and noticed a middle aged lady who I could not recognize. I was pretty sure I was dreaming, but got out of bed and attempted to jump into the void to make sure. I jumped into the void. I fell and waited for a new dream scene to be formed. I landed in a dark building of a transit center. I saw that there was a street light outside so I went there so I could see. I put my hand behind me and called for a large fantasy creature. I heard heavy breathing and a sucking sound became surrounded by a large cloth. I could still hear the heavy breathing so I assumed the creature consumed me. I demanded that the creature go in front of me so I can see it. The clothed was removed as the creature did this. I got a good look at the creature. It was like a snow man, only it was made of dirty cotton. It had sticks for arms. I asked it what it was called but it did not answer. I woke up.

Spoiler for another really long side notes:

Motivation and Goal Setting

Motivation was always a funny thing when it came to lucid dreaming. I always found it sort of strange that people complain about being unmotivated to lucid dream, but when I think about it, it sometimes starts to make sense. Lucid dreaming is at least in some ways like most skills in where you practice and improve over time.

I’d be inclined to compare it to exercise and getting in shape, since it often seems to me like stretches of consistent practice produce the best results and stretches of inactivity result in you gradually slowing down. And like exercise people always want the results, the flat belly and toned arms, but nobody ever wants to do the work to get there. I’ve always made an effort to make the work of attaining lucidity fun but rarely had much success.

I sometimes wonder if it’s even possible to be unmotivated for something that you to some degree want to do. Somebody who plans on going to the gym but decides not to is doing so through the economic principle opportunity cost, only we’re dealing in the person’s time, rather than their money. They want to go to the gym, but they want to do something else more. Work on lucid dreaming is much the same way. I want to go to bed at 10 and have a really long and satisfying lucid dream, but I also want to stay up until midnight and play video games. And given that even if I go to bed on time and say mantras while I’m falling asleep, I only have a partial chance of actually having a lucid dream as I’ve had many experiences in where I attempt to undertake something like this only to wake up at 7:00am without a shred of dream recall to show for it.

So simple risk analysis takes over and I figure I have a 100% chance of making use of my free time and enjoying it by playing a game, or a 25% chance of enjoying it on the off chance I lucid dream. It’s pretty easy for the rug to be pulled out from underneath lucid dreamers in that regard, especially ones attempting regular nightly practice, and perhaps this is why so many people find themselves unmotivated. It’s not that they’re unmotivated to lucid dream, it’s that other things are more motivating. Though I would argue that reviewing one’s goals from time to time can be a very good way to keep focused on priorities.

Now of course say one was locked in solitary confinement without any games, or really any distractions whatsoever, most anyone who was familiar with even just the basics of lucid dreaming would probably become pretty proficient pretty quick, given they had no alternative usage of their time other than to commit their energy to perfecting their lucid dreaming technique.

Regardless, one of the things I wanted to do here was list all of the goals that I have set for myself since forever. Now this is not an exhaustive list, because some of the goals are very personal.

So obviously the goal was nightly lucidity to start with. Now I actually made this goal only about a few weeks after I became invested in LD. One funny specific about the goal that I have adhered to is that it only needs to be one lucid dream per night. When I set this goal I was relatively unfamiliar with chained lucid dreaming and the idea that you could have multiple lucid dreams in one night, and when I did learn about it, I decided to refine the goal to say that lucid dreaming every night but only once per night was my goal; with more lucid dreams being considered just “frosting on the cake.”


After that I would say my goals fairly cleanly subdivide into two categories; goals that would relate to self betterment and have a more serious tone, and things that I wanted to embark upon simply for the enjoyment of experiencing them within the dream world. Since the self-betterment goals will Segway nicely into my next topic, I will list my more superficial goals first.

I mentioned this on chat with MadMonkey a few nights ago; but I’ve always imagined wanting to go to some kind of dream-rave or music concert. I’m not a very auditory person and visuals are often what drive my dreams forward, but I’ve heard some fairly interesting dream-music in the past and would like to study it via a musical concert.

Upon hearing of the discovery of the trappist-1 system, I had the idea of flying to the system and checking out all seven of the planets for myself. I’ve flown at FTL speeds before in dreams, so this goal would be pretty easy to accomplish.

Development of dream spells is another one. When I came up with the idea, I made a short list of spell words that I wanted to try and utilize in the dream. As of today, every spell I originally created. (Semper Stabelem, Tesseractus, Feminosa, Mascusona, Cohete Bombad, Cohete Pyrosa, Ageionirus, and Vestimente, with a few others that I made up on the fly) have all been tested and the three-pronged approach to dream control. This overlaps with some other dream control oriented goals such as learning the last two elements, Air and Earth.

I once had a fantasy that upon learning some secret holy grail of lucid dreaming I would begin regularly doing the dreamviews Task of the Months. If I ever ran out of things to do I could start working backwards doing every single task of the month ever posted. Granted somebody who had attained nightly lucidity and was as lucid as I am envisioning could probably tank through the entirety of dreamviews TOTMs and TOTYs since 2004 comfortably in a year, given they completed each month’s worth of tasks in one night. TOTYs are generally multi parters. This would not be something that would be done all at once, obviously. Really I’ve always just kept such a ludicrous idea in consideration in the back of my head whenever I try and argue with myself that I would quickly become bored should I attain this level of lucidity.

Progression of narrative. In having knowledge of my dreams, they follow a narrative through the main characters. It’s not a very original or cohesive narrative, but there is one there. One I might find satisfaction in progressing and improving upon with new dream characters and storylines. Writing down a cohesive version of this narrative is one of my goals for an upcoming rant of this nature.

Shared dreaming. I always felt as though this concept could only be truly explored by somebody who had attained this level of nightly lucidity. I’m somewhat of a skeptic of shared dreaming but I remain open to the idea that it is a possibility. Regardless if I had limitless nightly lucidity at my disposal, I might find this an interesting subject matter to explore.

Though honestly that’s about it for the list. In my years of intermittent lucidity, I have taken care of most of these more superficial, wish fufillment type goals hence why I have difficulty fully fleshing out the list.

The second half of my goals are largely personal and I do not feel comfortable discussing them on this forum. Therefore these goals will be censored and kept to my private copy of this document, except for one, for the sake of example. This of course being my habit of finger biting. This is equal parts goal and hypothesis. I have had this habit since I was a toddler/baby and never really broken out of it, no matter what I tried. (I’ve even tried using that stuff that makes your fingernails taste bad, and still the habit persisted.) I envisioned that I could somehow dive into a dream and deprogram the habit subconsciously. How exactly this would manifest would vary. (I seem to recall one user suggesting that I manifest the habit as an opponent and defeat it in combat, given my propensity for dream combat.)

Regardless these are the goals that I have had more difficulty reaching; mainly because they require more focus and a higher level of lucidity than I am currently attaining on a semi-regular basis.

Semi Lucidity

Something that I noticed that I believe I pointed out in my previous rant without going into too much detail about was my instances of semi lucidity and how dreams are continually blurring the line between lucid and non-lucid and somehow it seems that I am both lucid and non-lucid at the same time. Last night’s dream provides an excellent example of this. Notice how from moment to moment my actions can be attributed to lucidity, non-lucidity and evidence unclear, impractical thinking.

I also cannot recall if I talked about feeling like I’m always subconciously lucid but not always choosing to act upon that knowledge and having the fortitude to bring that lucid into the forefront.

*checks previous rant*

Yeah, I did talk about this. In fact, I’m not really sure how to expand upon it.

Anyways, more ranblings from the back of my brain.

I am at my college campus crossed with a beach/coastal environment. Across the bay is the skyline of a large, modern city with glass skyscrapers. I am sitting at a cafe with Marcus. He explains to me that he is going to divide himself into two and put a portion of himself in a small robot orb that will follow me around. He explains how his purpose is to gather and analyze data and being able to have a portion of himself with me at all times will allow him to gather data, and in return the device can offer ways of assisting me. Of course I agree on the terms that I can disband the orb if I need privacy.

I learn that the orb is something like the ghosts from destiny, at least in functionality. I think in dream, it even works similarly to where I hold out my hand and with some expectation can summon the device into existence and communicate with it. Supposedly its data gathering functionality is only active when I summon the device. The dream begins to change gears. My old astronomy professor wants me to meet him at the top of the science building on my college campus so that I can help him to catch a rare pokemon in Pokemon Go.

I go to the top of the observatory. Upon getting to the top floor of the building I see a huge cavernous and messy room with many very flimsy wooden walkways suspended around the room, going up inside the empty telescope dome. Some are built up on rotting scaffoldings and others hang from rusty chains or old ropes from the ceiling. I begin making my way up until I eventually climb all the way up to another stable level where there is a large fountain being installed on the topmost level of the building. I manage to get up there and talk to the professor only for him to be let down by the fact that I have never played Pokemon Go. In my semi lucidity I said to him.

"Kerbal space program, I like it better than constantly getting punched in the pokeballs."

I have a false memory that upon completing one of the older gamebody pokemon games through cheating, I am taken to a secret area, a long canyon with pale white rocks strewn about and pink flowers everywhere. I have to face a number of difficult trainers that I have faced before in the game who have even stronger pokemon now, but with no healing items or breaks in-between. At the end I get to this computer terminal and get to enter my name on the leaderboards but choose not to do it because I got here through cheating.

When I finish telling the story and visualizing it, my professor tells me that he will raise my grade from a C- to a B-. He then tells me that it will be dark soon and if I want to I can go up to the observatory with him and look at the planets. This entails climbing more rickety wooden walkways. We eventually get up in the observatory that looks the same as it does IWL. There are a number of tables with small telescopes and optical instruments arrayed on them. My high school crush is there wearing nothing but an unbuttoned shirt sticking one of the telescopes up her *ahem* and really enjoying it.

I bring up the Marcus orb and ask it to analyze this entity and figure out how to remove it. He says that the threat level is very low but he knows her composition and can remove her if I can get her to come close. I signal for her to come to me and she walks over. I can see her acting like a sex zombie and I only need one look to tell she's going to start undressing me the moment she gets in reach. But a white painted plywood trapdoor opens underneath her and she falls into the room of wooden walkways and other junk below. When I look down there nobody is there, however.

...

The dream cuts to a portion in where I am floating on the ocean near the campus on a floating log. I bring up the orb again and ask it:

"How do I get to shore?"

"Yoga is the heaviest element on the periodic table."

"That's comprehensive."

I then see that the orb has gotten wet and think that it might be malfunctioning. I eventually float up to a sandbar and decide I need to head back to the college campus. I decide to attempt the teleportation command.

"Tesseractus!"

It works, I'm back on campus. But I want to get to another part of campus and there are fire ants crawling all over the sidewalk. I think to myself that I will want to wear shoes to get across this part of campus.

"Take me to a place where I can find shoes! Tesseractus!" (Being awake and fully aware now I'm not at all certain why I didn't just teleport past the area with the fire ants.) Regardless I found myself on a beach on Manei's island and she was swimming in the ocean and had left her sandals on the beach. I'm sure she really appreciated me warping in, taking her shoes, and warping away. I got back to the same area but her shoes were sandals and they were too big. I was able to with a fair amount of focus, shrink them to fit me but I couldn't convert them to another type of shoes.

I started running through the area with fire ants but they were crawling on me anyway. I got through the area to this cafe by the side of the ocean and started picking off the fire ants that were all over my legs and arms. I kept thinking I had gotten them all but would feel one more bite me somewhere, and each time I found one they were getting larger until I was finding ants the size of house mice climbing up my leg. Eventually I wound up jumping back into the ocean to get them off.

...

I was back in the college astronomy/science building. I was walking with two friends who I have never known before. One was a very short girl with black hair and freckles and the other was a tall, skinny, almost bald boy. I saw the Jack/Jonathan fusion character walking upstairs but when he saw the three of us he ran at us and grabbed the tall friend and began smearing his face on the bricks in a very gruesome fashion.

The black haired girl suggested we run and don't get involved but I said that was cowardly and we needed to get someone who would help. We ran outside and saw three people in blue military uniforms with guns and shouted help. They started coming in but when we got back in the tall friend was gone along with the blood on the wall and he was acting innocent. The military people left and the Jackathan character came after me.

I became semi lucid once more and realized I had to fight. Jackathan throws a punch and I block but there is an absurd amount of power behind his strikes and even being increasingly lucid I'm not able to take him on directly. I attempt to teleport without the voice command and visualize myself sliding behind him. It works. I appear behind him and elbow him in the back. This seemed to actually do some damage. He turns around and with some effort I'm able to teleport above him and lock my legs around his neck and twist to break his neck. He falls over and I get up, though I sense the dream is ending. I look at the fallen character and see it slowly morphs into Jack and Jonathan inside of larger clothes. The two wake up and they are embarrassed that they are naked inside of one large outfit.

I have to write my second long post on dream goals and motivation, so I might update this DJ with it or just have it come out with the next one.

Dream 1 - Fireworks

It's night and I'm out partying with school friends. My mental map tells me I'm around the area where my university is, but the buildings are different. The party is moving, people leave with bikes and cars. I just arrived from a gym and left my bike there. One of my old friends asks why I did that and calls me stupid. I don't mind, I start running to the bridge going across the lake. People with bikes and cars can't take this short cut, so I might even arrive before them. I notice I don't tire from running and I can run really fast. While running over the bridge I notice a massive explosion in the sky, like a meteor split into hundreds of orange shards that continued to fall in every direction. I stop to admire it. I look around to see if anyone was following me and saw this amazing display, but I'm alone. I look back up and see several more explosions and realize they are fireworks. Incredibly beautiful looking though, and massive. They light up the whole night sky.

After a while I continue to the location where the party was supposed to continue. It's not a party at all, it's a mandatory church ceremony. (We used to have on at the beginning of every school year. Involves preaching, singing etc.) At the doors we are supposed to also donate some money. I have no cash on me and panic.

Panic leads to waking up, so I WBTB.

Dream 2 - Kids of the Slums

I'm a DO and see slums next to an odd looking frozen river. The ice is light blue, but isn't reflective or transparent like it should. TotalBiscuit is looking after the boys of the slums. There's a radio playing music. One of the kids led TotalBiscuit to the river. There was a spot with some hardhats stuck in the ice and a few small rocks sticking out. The kid took TB to a dangerous spot on purpose. TB slips and hits his head into a rock. His skull cracked, he's dead. The kids go back. One of the boys goes to the group of girls that were playing in the slums and asks one of them to help with something. A girl in a green dress with flowers comes back with him. She asks what it's about. The boys don't say anything other than they need her help. The group starts walking somewhere and the dream ends.

Dream 3 - I teach history?
I'm in a school. Dumbledore is the headmaster and I teach history. Dumbledore tells me I'm going to speak in front of the whole school. We are in a big dining hall. I have nothing prepared and panic. Students arrive, I recognize a few of them. The students want to eat first. That buys me some time. I get the dessert, which is a piece of pie with some purple jam. I have a chat with one of the student I know from waking life. Pie tastes good. I start thinking about my lecture, while eating. Stuff of nightmares, this dream

I still feel really behind on sleep which hopefully means I will hit REM rebound tonight. I had two dreams that connected together after waking up for a short moment. It was clearly inspired by watching the davinci code last night. I knew it was a weird situation but I sort of reacted sarcastically and went with it.

04.14.2017
10:00 AM

The Fibonacci Code (Non-Lucid)

I have been summoned to a museum by a catholic bishop and priest who need me to decipher a code for them. "Isn't this basically just the plot to the davinci code?", I ask. "Yes, but this time it's real.
There is this sequence of numbers at the top that we have never seen before. Thats as far as we could get." They show me a piece of paper with the first fibonacci sequence followed by about five lines of cryptic riddles.
"Have you guys even seen the movie? This is clearly the fibonacci sequence. Can I go home now?" I honestly got really bored with this dream pretty quickly but for some reason I kept following them around this museum solving basic riddles for like an hour. I eventually woke up laughed about it with my girlfriend yet fell back into the same dream for another hour without becoming lucid.

Evil Lair on Acid Planet
I'm on another planet. The bad guy is explaining my situation. His lair is surrounded by an ocean of acid. As he says that, I have a flashback of the facility falling from the sky, into the green ocean of acid. Small islands of red stone provide a nice contrast. The main bad guy disappears and removes the roof of the room I'm in. The alien minions in the room start fighting me as acid starts pouring into the room. The top of the room is just a bit under the surface, so I have some time, but I need to find higher ground.

I suddenly have a futuristic gun. I'm not entirely sure what the gun does. It's a small white pistol that shoots an orange ball of electricity. So the ideas of it's function pop into my head "It makes enemies dance." I see this happen, the small alien men dance towards the orb. "No! It attracts enemies like a black hole!" Then I see this happen, the aliens are violently pulled towards the orb and the orb disappears. Then I settle on it's function: "The orb amplifies momentum." I wait for the right moment. The aliens are running towards me, I shoot the orb in front of them and use telekinesis to submerge my end of the room into the acid. The aliens were running towards me and the orb amplifies that momentum, so they all fly over me into the acid.

I use telekinesis to lift the room out of the acid. More aliens arrive to the room and are confused what's going on. They are ignoring me. I notice a large duffel bag full of my clothes. I grab what I can into my backpack and start looking for a way out of the facility.

Fragments
-A hidden school, forest, pretty girls. Most people had mystical, supernatural abilities. The girls were evil?

-Driving across country with two guys. Picked up people on the way.

After 6.5h of sleep, 40 min WBTB. Stomach pain.

Fragment
-After a shower my hair was incredibly blond and shining brightly. I kept staring into the mirror. This was not normal.

Morty's Room
I'm in a weird three story house. I'm eating and talking with my roommate. We had a disagreement regarding food, I think. I have no interest in arguments, so I leave. Every corridor and staircase in this wooden building is too small and uneven. The walls are crooked too. Reminds me of Harry Potter.

I find a couple S.H.I.E.L.D. agents with a plastic bag. There's a portal of some sort in the bag. Hey! That's how I got to the frozen planet the first time! I stepped into a large plastic bag and I was instantly teleported. One of the agents steps into the bag and disappears. He's dead. There's dangerous white insect-like aliens through the portal. I have a plan and lead the agents to another house.

We make our way to Morty's room in another three story house. Morty from Rick and Morty. I tell people to remove all furniture, we are turning the room into an alien altar and tricking the aliens out through the portal. I see Morty being real confused about this sudden invasion into his room. I notice my dream journal on the floor. My dream journal? I block out everything else happening in the room.

My vision zooms to the open journal page. There's a colored drawing on it. The scene is in the style of Futurama. I dive into the artwork. It's the view from inside a green flying car. I'm sitting on the backseat and looking up through the purple tinted sunroof. I see another flying car through the sunroof. Calvin and Hobbes are in that car and another tiger similar to Hobbes, but with different colors is driving/flying. We are high above the city and time stands still.

Island

A strange dream where I was on a small flat island covered in grass with a couple people. I have to make salads for them. I prep the ingredients and have to put them into boxes. One guy says he wants a double salad. I remember ripping open a bag of cous cous and pouring it onto the salad.

Work

Dream that I had to work in a different store for the day. K from my store was there and he didn't seem to happy i was working at the other place.

Lucid

I remember becoming lucid in some scenario that I can remember. I Did my time dilation, and almost felt the dream fall apart but it snapped back with a clarity I've never had before after I jumped. again I couldn't remember the exact place or scenario, apparently there was some fighting training going on as referenced in later conversation.

What I do remember is emerging from a grove of trees at night time into an area reminiscent of a small trailer park, but instead of trailers were a small number of lit up houses. Most of them were small but there was also a big one that had very bright Christmas lights.

"I wonder who lives in that one?" I asked a quiet man who I was walking with. He just sort of grunted. "I've always wanted to go in there!" I seemed to be excited and talking his ear off but he wasn't saying much.

We went into one of the small houses. Inside there was a small kitchen where A woman i also seemed to know was preparing for a meal. He said some words to her but I wasn't paying attention. She said, "It should be done by the time you guys finish practicing shape shifting."

I thought, "Oh boy! Shapeshifting." The man sat down in a living room and pointed to a TV and a PS2 console and handed me a disc as if indicating the lesson was on the disc. I opened the PS2 tray and placed the disc in, but I wasn't sure if the disc went down all the way, the tray went in by itself and I pushed the eject button right away. "Ah why'd you do that?" said the man sounding a bit angry. I told him I just wanted to make sure the disc was going in properly.

I sat down in a chair beside his couch where he was seated. I said, "I can't wait to learn more about shapeshifting! I'm really eager to learn."

As if I had ADD i thought I should try Time dilation again. I remember placing my hand on the ground and counting the spaces between my fingers. The spaces between my fingers began to look like other fingers... that was trippy. Then I saw something like cardboard lines around the shapes of my fingers. I kept counting a number of different spaces each time. i made it to 60. I lifted my head up and the room was spinning. then I woke.

Nightmare. I was in a dark, snowy place - staying at a cabin in the middle of nowhere with some others. I was supposed to give a businessman a ride on the snowmobile (for fun), while my colleague (we both worked for a boss who stayed in the cabin) took the other on his snowmobile. While riding, I suddenly got a really bad gut feeling. I headed back inside, but was suddenly confronted by one of the men we were giving a ride. I could tell it "wasn't him anymore". His face was emotionless to an inhuman degree. As if he had been bodysnatched by something. He attacked me. It was absolutely terrifying. I had no choice but to defend myself. I stabbed him several times in the face and neck with a pen (I think it was a pen, anyway). He seemed dead. I closed the door and headed inside, wanting to warn the others that there were two people still outside, perhaps also bodysnatched. I had a rotten feeling the people in the cabin had disappeared leaving me alone... surrounded by horrors.

Lots of sex scenes. They've been quite common these past few days.

Invading the country side

I was flying out in some country side farm land. I spotted a house and landed there. I walked into the house like I owned the place. There were some kids in a living room watching TV. They didn't know who I was and I summoned a guitar and started playing. The kids didn't seem to care. They're parents walked out and didn't know who I was. Apparently I had to leave so I asked them for a ride into town.


Hall

I was in a town hall or something with a bunch of people for some lame arts and crafts event. Asuka is a blond girl who walks by t random times and gives me a hug. The third time she gives me a cupcake and I tell her I love her. She walks away again to make her rounds of... not sure what. For some reason I have to leave.

Did he wake up?

I was in the back of Jame's truck from work. I guess he is driving me home. He says he knows a quick detour. He then drives up to a KFC or something and the lobby doors open and he literally drives through the restaurant. I look at the other customers dining but they take no notice of the strangeness of a pickup truck driving through the restaurant.

As the truck is about to exit the place it halts and stops. I get out and there is no one in the driver's seat and later the truck vanishes.

I become lucid while walking home after a missing segment. I realize I'm in chilliwack walking near my old house. I try and ignore the hand counting thing and summon a cup to hold in my hands. I keep walking but the dream goes blurry about a block away from home and I wake up.

Spoiler for REALLY long side notes:

Well today is lucid dreaming day, and unfortunately, due to time differences and class scheduling I will be unable to catch the live-stream, live, though I still am considering watching it in post. But I see it a very appropriate day to address the elephant in the room. My lucid dreaming career has been on hold since late February, and this was due to the horrendous failure of my previous lucid dreaming method, my meditation and chart method.

I suppose calling this a dreaming ‘Restart’ is not really an appropriate title, outside of matching up with that of my art thread, that title is somewhat inappropriate. I do not plan on simply discarding 6 years of lucid dreaming experience but rather doing what I told myself I would do on the off chance that my meditation failed; that being to step back, analyze what went wrong and come up with a new approach. Since meditation has proven itself a very poor means of self improvement in my case (though perhaps my particular techniques and lack of experience were to blame.) this is to be my means of analysis and composition of thoughts and coordination of how I shall carry on. That is to say that thisis much more for my own sake and self help than it is for any of you to read into it, though it is available to anyone who is faced with similar dilemmas might find merit in this writing. Though do expect it to get a bit dense and rambling, as I will break a lot of things down and describe in detail a lot of things that may not necessarily be particularly important.

My Previous Attempt(s)

I suppose to figure out what went wrong with my previous attempt I must break down what exactly it was that I did in my efforts to lucid dream. The self-derived technique worked on the principles of DILD and meditation. The first thing I recognize is that this technique is self-derived. Generally techniques taught on this forum are taught to a general audience and designed to work for most people. This only became self-derived as I began to take what I had learned from others on the forums and morph it into something that I thought would better suit me. Whether or not contorting a tried-and-true technique just because you think your modifications will suit your particular psyche and thought patterns will improve or lessen your results in lucid dreaming is up for debate, and probably varies.

Regardless, the technique, at least in its final incarnation set three main goals to occur every day:

Two meditation sessions, one in the morning and one in the evening. I broke this down more in my post on the meditation thread but the key detail was that each meditation had two distinct parts, a portion in where I cleared my mind and a portion in where I would either attempt to focus on maintaining a stillness of mind or focus on analyzing and finding solutions to a particular problem. Generally I focused on problems or ideas centric to waking life in the mornings and things related to lucid dreaming in the evenings, on the probably correct notion that meditation could benefit me both in waking and dreaming life.

Documentation of reality checks, with the aim of improving awareness. I would carry a small notebook and document each reality check. Generally this was done in a quantity over quality mentality, attempting a few very thorough reality checks that would help to raise my awareness and thoroughly confirm my reality rather than just clipping a clothesline pin to my nose and hoping for the best.

And the third being a rather straightforward consistent sleep schedule with it never ceasing to amaze me how much better I can recall dreams and how much easier I can become lucid when I go to bed at a reasonable hour.

These three focal points of my technique came together in a chart that documented my own work ethic along with a column for a star ranking system that would rank the results of each night on a loose scale from one to five, with one star being brief non-lucid recall, and five stars being an ideal night of a long lucid dream or a chain of shorter ones. I always found lucid dreams difficult to quantify because dreams are by their very nature an almost purely qualitative experience, so ranking in the system is generally based on my own judgement rather than a hard rubric or set of rules.

Before that there were earlier evolutions of this technique that involved a chart. At one point I attempted progressing (or regressing) as the case may be to a written dream journal having heard some say that writing your dreams by hand helps you to think more about what you’re writing. The dreams were documented along with basic information like listed above, star rankings, and a chart was kept in the back of the dream journal. But I honestly find that I can type about 80 words a minute, and my dreams often have complex scenarios or details that require explaining for the dream to make sense. The ability for text on a computer to be cut, pasted and moved around is also helpful when you don’t recall the dream linearly; you don’t have to rewrite everything.

And before that, the previous six or years were spent with my interest moving in and out of lucid dreaming, following to some extent a pattern. I was always striving to achieve a vague end goal of living a dream life, having adventures and completing some rather lofty lucid goals. With each attempt I would have some epiphany believing I had finally figured out what was holding me back, go in full force, learn a thing or two but eventually get frustrated and/or burned out and step away from it for awhile before being drawn back to it again, a little bit wiser and more mature but with the same determination and vaguely defined goals. I want to make a note of how vague my goals in lucid dreaming really are most of the time as I think this might be important to cracking the problem at hand.

What makes this unique is it seems for the first time the cycle has broken. For the first time I have no idea what direction or drive to give myself that might convince myself that my goals are attainable. (Last time, my big epiphany was that hard work and dedication were more important than a refined and complicated technique. I was frustrated with five and a half years of failure and decided I wanted a technique that was a blunt instrument of force and change rather than a sharpened and precise blade.

I feel as though it might have been the chart itself that led me to fail. The chart gave a grizzly and honest insight into how poor and scattered my efforts into lucid dreaming really were and how much shorter term cycles of waxing and waining interest had an effect, but never fulfilled its goal of motivating me to clean up my act and showing me how my effort nets positive results. The fact that on the nights that I did see lucidity or at the very least heightened recall were often not correlated with the days that I had the most success in completing my three daily goals wasn’t helping me to stay motivated.

Learning Skills

It always seemed to me like lucid dreaming was like learning any other skill. I’ve developed other skills alongside lucid dreaming. (In fact I began my Taekwondo lessons within a month of learning of the basics of lucid dreaming, and I sometimes suspect this caused the two skills to become all mixed up in my brain and resulted in my dreams involving a lot of martial arts sequences.) After all with other skills I’ve been able to, with a fair bit of self discipline, get myself to a respectable level.

In the six years since I began lucid dreaming I’ve been in Taekwondo classes, and I am now preparing to test for a black belt. Though in Taekwondo I get enjoyment out of going to almost every class, except the odd day where I’m really distracted or focused on something completely different, and the progression of belt ranks has not been my focus so much as simply becoming more disciplined and developing fitness.

More recently, upon starting the first incarnation of the chart and meditation method I began a jogging routine. I wanted to develop better cardio (and lose the baby fat that taekwondo had did a number on, but not yet managed to finish off.) And while I saw myself improve in cardio very quickly with my running routine, lucid dreaming stayed stagnant, even though it was getting daily effort and focus on my part. I began to enjoy so much going out jogging, seeing myself improve. It became a sort of self-powering positive force. You realize you are improving and then get more motivated and keep pushing yourself to work at it.

But lucid dreaming, at least in my case, has not been improving like learning a normal skill. If anything, I would say my ability to lucid dream has depreciated in the six years since I began lucid dreaming. I can recall my first lucid dream. (The one involving meeting Manei on the beach.) More clearly than I can recall any dream in recent memory. Now I realize that is basically trapping me in a negative loop in where I recognize that my ability to lucid dream is depreciating and therefore is reflected with even more muddy dreams. This might be what sets it apart; lucid dreaming’s dependence on your mental state and focus on it. I can go for a run when I’m angry or emotional and still improve; I just focus my anger into running and I still see improvement, but, at least in my case, non-positive emotions of anger and self frustration cannot be put in any useful way towards lucid dreaming.

I remember seeing a post on another forum in where they talk about Jedi and Sith meditation in the Star Wars cannon in where Jedi meditation is all about letting go and being at peace in everything you do, and Sith meditation is more about using emotions (generally anger) to motivate you toward your goals. When I’m developing an athletic skill, being focused on anger is great, much better than being peaceful. The problem of course being that in lucid dreaming, you can’t be emotional, or your dreams will reflect that emotion.

I know I’m leaving a vacuum as to what exactly motivated my lucid dreaming efforts as far as emotions go. This is important and I’ll come back to it.

Learning from the past

As I introduced this post, I am not discarding past knowledge, but rather de-programming and deconstructing my ways of thinking and attempting to troubleshoot the problems. There already seems to be a lack of motivation and proper goals set. In my other pursuits, my goals have always been clear cut. Jogging? Run a 5k in 22 mins. Taekwondo? Get a black belt. Art? Senior gallery show at my college, and start a webcomic. I don’t want to say that setting a very clear cut goal for myself will magically fix everything, seeing as none of my past “epiphanies” really seemed to do that. Now I recognize I’m about to dive headfirst into a mental minefield of schemas that will probably destroy my ability to lucid dream in the near future, but I feel that doing so is necessary in the long run for fixing the problems that lay ahead.

I will call these epiphanies since they seemed like such things at the time, they seemed like such massive revelations that would quickly resolve everything and tie up all loose ends, allowing me to attain the level of lucid dreaming that I had always wanted.

In learning to lucid dream I’ve programmed myself to think that certain things will greatly effect my odds of lucid dreaming; in where they probably will since I think that. I begin to think that having or not having one particular technique or thought process is a make-or break for lucid dreaming, and that not having it will mean I’m screwed. Really, what I just wanted to do was break down my previous epiphanies and see what merits or faults I think they hold with my present state of mind. I’ve already broken down that most recent epiphany that “There is no secret technique, only hard work and dedication.” and why it ran into problems.

Henceforth I present my previous epiphanies and realizations in roughly reverse chronological order.

-“It’s all in your head”

I recall coming up with and subscribing to the notion that lucid dreaming was something that was all in my head, and that to be good at it, all I simply had to do was believe that I was good at it and choose to do it, since there was no skill curve, and it really was just all in my head. Though this didn’t seem to work and was actually built upon by my hard work philosophy believing that with concentrated and regimented applied effort I could attain regular lucidity.

Continuing on this, my though process was very centric on the idea that lucidity is not a goal but more like a choice. I began feeling this way because at the time, I was having a lot of semi-lucid dreams and beginning to develop an underlying feeling that I was constantly lucid, but simply not choosing to bring that lucidity to the front of my mind. I still feel like this logic is present in my dreams; that I always have the potential to become lucid yet sometimes lack the mental fortitude to think clearly enough to bring that lucidity to the forefront, and that I need some kind of enhanced willpower and awareness to actually beak through from subconscious lucidity into true lucidity. The feeling and situation I am in when these dreams arise is somewhat difficult to describe, but I could somewhat equate it to sitting in a really long boring high school math class and daydreaming. You’re not really mindful of your reality and probably not really mindful about what you’re daydreaming about. You’re just daydreaming and allowing said daydream to go wherever seems most interesting.

I remember being in this state of mind often equating lucid dreaming to breathing rather than a learned skill like I would later on. I thought to myself that breathing is something people do all the time, but most of us don’t really keep ourselves aware of it; just like dreaming. But you can very easily become aware of your breathing to where it becomes a conscious action (You, reading this, probably just became aware of your breathing.) But you can’t be mindful of breathing all the time, it takes your focus away from tasks at hand, and to focus on another task as well as being mindful of your breathing takes a lot of focus. That perhaps best describes how I felt I was grasping at lucidity.

-Creativity and Happiness vs Logic and Reasoning

This epiphany is unique in that it was the only one that actually came to me within a dream, in where a dream character told me to focus on creativity and happiness rather than approaching dreaming logically.

I came up with several interpretations of how to apply this notion. One was to begin drawing dream related artwork. Another was to write “fake dream journal entries” as an applied visualization exercise and to be utilized for motivation. Another was just simply to remain optimistic in the face of adversities like garbage dream recall and muddy or nonexistent lucidity. Needless to say none of these philosophies or techniques helped as much as one might have expected.

Obviously this notion was reconsidered by the time I got to my chart and meditation method, a decidedly logic and quantitative focused way of focusing on lucid dreaming.

-Something in the dream is holding me back

Generally when there is some kind of problem or issue people like to have a scapegoat. Someone or something they can peg the problem on. In this case I began thinking that there was some barrier or entity within the dream world that was holding me back.

This first manifested itself as a complex series of dream plots involving my dream guide requiring me to complete some trial in where upon completion a “weighted belt” that had been steadily mounting would be removed and I would be able to lucid dream to my full potential. Of course once this extremely contrived dream plot concluded and the weighted belt was supposedly removed, I saw no long-term effect to my ability to lucid dream.

Later I would engage in a second dream plot in where some entity had to be defeated in order for me to be able to lucid dream at my full potential, but that had a similar result; no long term effect on my ability to lucid dream.

-Engagement and active thinking is the key

I once built my lucid dreaming routines and goals around the idea that being actively aware and trying new things would hold the key to attaining regular lucidity. This was one of the times that I was arguably way more active and social on the forums, and most active in learning about lucid dreaming in general.

I subscribed to the notion that dreams generally reflect what you are actively thinking about at the time, getting the idea that when you are learning or interested in some new knowledge you tend to dream about it. I remember when I was first becoming invested in things like a new TV series or video game and finding it overtaking my dreams. Yet older media that I am already familiar with tends not to make many appearances in lucid dreaming. Given that, if I could continue to steadily engage myself with new lucid dreaming concepts and keep fresh material flowing, I could continually lucid dream.

-WBTB/WeeBTB is the key

There was a time that I was very successful at lucid dreaming and closer to my goal than I had ever been before. This was when I became heavily invested in using the WBTB and WeeBTB techniques. People talk a lot about WBTB and DEILD being great, and they are, but the were not what I was looking for to achieve nightly lucidity, simply because it’s very easy for me to get burned out on these techniques. One can only wake themselves up at 4:00am on so many mornings before they become burnt out or their sleep schedule begins to alter so that a 4:00am awakening results in you being awake and staying that way.

-The Symbol

Remember this? This was my attempt to cheat at lucid dreaming. This project was a titanic failure. The premise of this was simple. To engrain this symbol into my mind as a trigger for lucidity and a reminder to reality check by placing it around in the waking world. This meshed nicely with at the time I was living in the dormitories at college and needed a means to mark what was my property.

Though disappointingly the symbol only appeared in my dream once after about three months of the project, and that was only because in the dream I was semi-lucidly making an effort to explain the nature of the project to my dream guide.

-MILD is the key

The first time I cycled out of lucid dreaming, I came back in with a renewed interest in MILD, thinking that autosuggestion would help. Like my symbol method, this meshed nicely with something new that had been introduced into my lifestyle at the time; Driving. Driving afforded me long stretches of time in where I was alone in the car, and these were perfect for reciting mantras as nobody else was around to judge me repeating “I am a good lucid dreamer; lucid dreaming is easy.” a dozen times, and the time was hardly useful for any other pursuit.

-+-

So by stepping back and observing this what do I recognize? The first thing is that there is a cycle of waxing and waning interest in lucid dreaming that is something I do not experience with my other interests and hobbies.

I am very reluctant to jump to conclusions as that may just mean another cycle of attempting something only to find my results and motivation diminished and slide into another low point, but I am tempted to say that regulating my motivation and applied effort to attempt to stretch from cycles of high and low activity to a continuous ongoing regimen of moderate activity might be a potential solution, though the option is on the table?

The second thing that I recognize is that these repeated attempts all entail increasingly complex and muddied philosophies, and means to achieve them. This would correlate nicely with the increasingly muddy lucidity, and blurry line between lucid and non-lucid dreams that has developed over time.

And the third thing that I recognize is that I am closed - mindedly regarding all of these as failures. Though I still tend to carry over and consider strong suits from previous attempts at lucid dreaming and attempt to bring them into a new light. Whether this means I am learning from my past mistakes or just repeating them over and over with minor variation is difficult to say. Sometimes I mourn the fact that for so long I have struggled with this goal of achieving nightly lucidity, and feel as though if I were to be able to start over today, knowing everything I know now that I would easily succeed, given how much effort I am applying, and I’m tempted to blame my past failures as building a very powerful and engrained negative schema around myself in all directions.

In essence what I feel I am doing is giving up and quarantining techniques because of a failure. Once I’ve seen that a technique can fail, it’s all that I focus on, and therefore the technique becomes useless, and slowly but surely I’m losing confidence in every conceivable lucid dreaming technique, and constantly raising the bar for myself in terms of the amount of effort I feel as though i need to put in in order to be successful without actually increasing in skill or drawing any closer to my original goal.

So what is the goal and why?

So I think thus far I’ve done a pretty good job of outlining the issues that I’ve had over the past six years with attaining nightly lucidity. It’s not the most through direction and there are places I could go into more detail if I had the patience.

And as far as goals go, it’s a pretty vague one, since a lucid dream, as I’ve stated is difficult to define and the line has become a bit grayed with time. Early in my lucid dreaming career, I found it very easy to determine if I was lucid or non-lucid. But that line has slowly become very blurred. Many of my non-lucid dreams feel vaguely lucid and many of my more lucid dreams are muddied with non-lucidity.

For the sake of argument let’s say that nightly lucidity entails a more clear lucid dream. But that goal is kind of empty. It’s like saying that you want to be fit enough to run a mile every day, and not have to be in recovery so long as to you can run that same mile at the same pace the next day.

I’ve always stated that I would focus on attaining nightly lucidity before I began seriously turning to a list of lucid dreaming goals that has frankly become a bit monstrous over the years, for I did not want to dedicate an extended stretch of time to getting myself to a very high level of lucid dreaming only to run out of things to do a few weeks after attaining nightly lucidity, but my goals have become lofty and also muddied and that is why I find it very important for me to “restart” and set all of these goals aside. Obviously I’m going to take the time to outline and list them here at some point so as to not forget them, but I have to recognize that as of right now I am not actively attempting to attain any of them.

Moreover attaining nightly lucidity or at the very least coming close to it would offer me a much more scientific means to explore the intricacies of the impacts of techniques. I had planned to do this once I had achieved a stable schedule with my chart and meditation method, that after perhaps about a month of preforming the routine regularly I could scientifically introduce variations (over a two week time period) and possibly refine the routine overtime, with the problem being that the base routine netted detrimental results.

Once again, on the vague and muddy nature of things, I maintain a self awareness of how long and rambling this post is. This speaks as a testament to how complex and difficult I view this problem (if you could even describe it as a problem.) as. If I could describe things more simply, then I would. Simple problems need simple solutions, but as a problem grows increasingly complex, as this one has, and there is no clear or definite answer in sight.

In the next few posts, I would like to break down my goals and motivations, as they are something that I do not have the time or patience to cover right now. Goals are key to understanding why nightly lucidity is so desirable and motivation is a talking point that I would also like to cover since, not to add to this already messy and complex parable that I have laid out, but I believe it is pertinent.

You know it's bad when you can't do much more than array your problems and discuss what happened.

Random dreams from the past couple of weeks.

I was in the show Naruto (An anime I have not watched and hold very little interest in watching.) Now I've seen somewhere IWL that there are two Narutos that exist at the same time, an old one and a young one, and both of them were attending school, albeit at different grade levels. The focus was on the young one who constantly got bullied by the other students because his hair was yellow and apparently that was an unlucky color. He was standing under a large oak tree outside of a building that looked like a small elementary school, maybe only big enough for three or four classrooms on the inside, with the other kids around him.

I went over to one of the students who was causing the bullying, who happened to have black hair. I tried to talk him out of it, asking him how he would like it if he was the only student who had black hair and everyone picked on him for it. He then started crying because I made him feel guilty, and hitting my leg and I told him to stop or I would tell the principal. At this point I became aware that I was supposed to be the teacher and was responsible for all of these kids.

Of course as soon as the anxiety about my responsibility kicked in the dream went haywire. One of the kids got stung by a bee and started crying, and I had to administer her epi-pen but she was kicking me because she didn't want the shot. Another kid stole cookies out of several kids lunches and got a sick stomach, and started crying. Once the other kids realized their deserts were gone, they all started crying as well. The kids reduced in age and kept finding more and more reasons to cry, and before I knew it I was surrounded by ~20 waling babies.

I became lucid as the anxiety was about to climax and realized that this wasn't my responsibility, or anybody and acknowledged that it was just a dream about an anxiety. I started to walk away as the dream faded out, not wanting to be bothered to acknowledge each of the children's individual needs. I thought the crying children would vanish as I walked away and recognized my anxiety but they didn't. The older Naruto jumped in front of my path and confronted me for leaving them behind.

-+-

I was with Marcus. I think we were at his house and he was playing Spore and I was watching. He had heavily modded the game to be better in many ways, explaining some of the dreamlike and nonexistent features of the game that I did not recall from playing the game back in high school. He started a new game as a cell, but didn't name the planet he was on the right thing, so he had to start over on another planet.

When he did, I noticed the planet was around a binary star system. (Starting a game around a binary star is not something you can do in regular Spore, I recall that much.) Most of the mods he had created revolved around making the game cooler, more realistic and more in depth that the original.

He showed me the creature stage where he was playing as this six legged monster. He was talking about how plants around different stars would need to be different colors to absorb the different wavelengths of light, and that planets around red dwarfs would have plants with black leaves because they could catch all available light. He then showed adding in this fern-like plant with black leaves.

He then cheated his game to space stage where he had made the most mods. He showed me how the home solar system he was in now had asteroids and comets that you could visit and set up small bases to mine and research, planets could become tidally locked, and could have multiple moons. You could 'colonize' gas giants and harvest resources there.

He started flying through space and went to a solar system around a small red star and colonized it, then zoomed out and showed me the galaxy. He showed me how there were some endgame items you could now unlock for your ship that allowed you to create custom stars and planets.

-+-

I was playing airsoft with Jack but somebody on the other team was using a gun with real bullets and shot him in the head. Somehow even though there was a big bloody hole in his forehead he got back up like it was only a minor injury.

-+-

I got a text from Manei and became semi lucid. She said that she saw a stray cat get hit by a car and that she needed my help to take care of her kittens until they could get into proper foster care. I drove over to her house which in the dream was in the same neighborhood as my friend A's house, and very close to it, but was only one story. In the hazy semi lucid dream logic I remember wondering to myself why I didn't visit Manei more often even though I always wanted to have more lucid dreams.

I don't recall the remainder of the dream's plot because outside of her showing me how to bottle-feed kittens nothing else really happened.

-+-

A very lengthy dream about me accidentally hitting a guy's car and making a dent it, and the other guy drove away.

-+-

A long dream about installing a Kerbal space program mod that added a planet in orbit around the homeworld with an atmosphere.

-+-

This was the dream from two nights ago that motivated me to get back into this.

I had a dream that started of somewhat similarly to my very first lucid dream. I dropped from several stories up and landed on a beach, already reasonably lucid. Some false memory details about the dream came back to me in where Manei and I were going to the beach, and we had swimsuits, towels, a beach umbrella and the likes. Marcus was there too wearing a Hawaiian shirt and he brought a folding table and chairs.

The beach was different though, it seemed completely original to the dream and didn't resemble any beach I've ever been on in waking life. I felt disoriented and looked only to find a small parking lot with some cars in it and notice that there were a few dream characters scattered about, though the beach was by no means crowded. I studied the dreamworld briefly reflecting upon how much I liked the fact that the dream had constructed an original environment rather than re-using my house or my college for the bazilyionth time.

Manei turned to me and said in the voice of one of my old friends from grade school. "Aww man, I wanted to go skinny dipping, but there's a fat guy in the water." (she gestures to a man standing waist deep in the water who looked a lot like my maternal grandfather but fatter.)

I said back to her, fully lucid "Skinny dipping isn't about your weight. It means you go swimming naked."

The dream went into some scenes that I cannot recall particularly well of surfing on the water and using my fire jets to propel myself. I recall later on Marcus set up the card table to where it was so close to the shore that in sitting on the chairs around the table the waves would wash over our feet. The three of us began discussing why my lucid dreaming effort has dropped off since my meditation stopped. When I brought up the meditation,

Marcus replied "Meditation has created 1,011 faulty dreams. Deficiency of applied effort 403 times pi percent."

I entered into a virtual reality simulation where everything was neon green cubes and black, and things looked like the movie Tron, but I don't recall much else of what happened.