non-lucid

It’s blurry here, but ‘I’ and some other people are negotiating or something but it goes bad, and turns into a big fight. I’m stealthily moving northward around the action.

Huge golems are hurling rocks over to the left towards me. I as my dwarf Erde dodge them. As I pass the golems, I think about what I should be going after in the fight, but end up completely bypassing everything to go down the north corridor.

I’m looking through the rooms when my sister comes up and seems to be looking for something. From here on, I felt like I knew a step ahead what was going on. I knew she was looking for her child that I hadn’t known about before. I keep looking for the place the child would be hiding. I see a blanket seat in a closet at one point.

”Read the letter,” She says as she looks in a closet to the right in the room at the end, calling out the boy’s name (which I can’t remember). There’s a folded up white piece of paper on a pile of blankets(?) on the floor.

“This one?” I ask as I unfold it and glance over it. It doesn’t make much sense, but I know it’s supposed to be a letter telling me about the child.

Gap.

I’m looking at a blue box of corndogs, and there’s a quote on it from my sister and a friend about how they’d conceived the babies on accident. The friend’s name was something like ‘Gosh’ but I knew it really meant the red-headed friend Rane had long ago. I felt that something was kind of off with that.

Inspiration: Playing Dragon Age: Origins, just finished the Deep Roads stuff recently. My sister and her child might have come from the dwarf commoner’s sister Rica, or from my own sister and a previous dream. We did have a box of corndogs a few weeks ago that I thought about recently.

From November 3rd.

I’m at a pharmacy with a group of people to get medicine. We’re directed to another line to the left. I get mine but someone with me points out that he gave me the wrong one. I look at the carton box and see the brand name and ‘Energy’ under it. Mine isn’t supposed to have that.

I get back in line, and I think I skip ahead of someone to the right who’s leaning on the counter, and get it exchanged. I figure the Energy one must have been accidentally put in the wrong place.

Jump.

I climb the counter in a house’s kitchen and look in the medicine cabinet. I see different kinds of meds, one a being a clear bottle with purple energy medicine in it. I take a sip against my better judgment, because I know I’m about to go sleep.

In a room, I had my moved my bare blue small mattress (actually my old twin-sized one IWL) over to the left on the floor. I have a stereo playing. I realize one of the halves of the green curtain over the door fell. I fix it, then cover both sides with a yellow curtain. Part of me thinks this is weird.

I realize that I can’t even hear the stereo that’s on in the kitchen so I may as well turn it off and just keep mine going (even though I can’t see it).

I remember wondering if the energy stuff I took was affecting me.

Inspirations: I had a conversation with mom about not drinking the Energy flavored water anymore but I have one left so I put a tiny amount of that in my jug whenever I make up some flavored water. Meds part comes from being nervous about my doctor’s appointment mixed with the energy drink thing. We actually do have a yellow curtain at the bottom of the stairs. The stereo part comes from me having to turn off dad's iPod radio in the kitchen yet again because he’s got his headphones on in the other room and can’t hear it anyway.

From November 3rd.

1.
Something big is happening. A woman is looking to me for answers. I consult some kind of book in my hands, and say that ‘it wasn’t ‘supposed to happen like this’. Something about an illustration of a cloud of brown stuff.

Inspiration: It made me think of Orzammar (in Dragon Age: Origins) so it may’ve had something to do with dwarves.

2.
I’m offered one of three “legendary creatures” that I can pick from a plain-looking bag.

Gap.

It’s a black bird, like a crow in size but a bit smaller and lighter colored.

I use a special call to communicate with it by blowing down into my thumbnail.

I meet a guy who’s intrigued by it. The bird turns out to be his father but none of us know this. The guy’s mother makes an appearance at some point.

Fixing a shoe or something by putting it in another shoe?

Inspiration: The bag and creatures reminds me a lot of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and I was thinking about HP recently.

Black: Non-dream
Blue: Non-lucid
Red: Lucid

Note
WBTB at ~5, ate a banana, was pretty good. Did 7 short SSILD cycles followed by 2 long ones, then for every 5 minutes or so afterwards I did another 2 short SSILD cycles to maintain the awareness.

Lucid Dream - Almost fought Goku...
Me and E are in the same house, we're looking for something, I think I remember where it is. She's in the lounge and I recall it being somewhere near the TV, so I head there and move towards the direction of the TV. She is in the centre of the room and kind of gasps at my sudden appearance in the room, and it felt like she was infatuated with me. Felt a bit weird because IWL we pretty much hate each other. I rustle around in the cabinets beneath the TV and there's a whole bunch of damn cables in the way. "Wait a minute... What am I doing here?" I kind of just realize that this is all a dream, I don't even bother doing a reality check.

"stabilize now...... stabilize now.... STABILIZE NOW!" The last one I yelled out and the world around me brightened a bit and became more clear, the echo of my shout rings around the room a bit. Oddly enough I noticed now that I was in a kitchen on the 1st floor of a 2 story house, opposed to being on the 2nd floor of a different 2 story house. E was gone now too. I feel like later I should try summon her back. To my left is a fridge, I approach it, the feel of my feet touching the ground is so real. I can see all the individual dust particles that have settled or were floating around the world. I head towards a some carpeted stairs and go up, I'm met by a typical baby-proof gate. I see a toddler walk out of his room rubbing his eyes, he looks at me and I realize he is me as a kid. I continue on, the baby-proof gate mysteriously gone now. I look around and see something I couldn't possibly describe accurately... It was Luffy's brother Ace (from the One Piece anime) and he was made of bubblegum, including his clothing and hat. He was there, then he wasn't. Then I saw a poster in a nearby room that had him and Luffy with there foreheads pressed against each other in an eye-glaring brotherly stare down. The thought that I could summon Luffy just blew me away, I'd be able to hang with him! Awesome. I think to myself that he's behind the door in that room with the poster, and then rush around. But nope, there's a pimply brown-haired 20 year old hipster dude just sitting on the edge of the bed texting. Then somehow I'm given this container of pills called "Black Elite Pills", which in the dream meant that they're what Goku uses to power-up to his Super Saiyan Black Elite level... Which doesn't exist, I know, but I thought it did in the dream . I see Goku in the room sitting at the computer playing games and I decide to pop open the container and eat a whole heap of them, "Hey Goku, let's do this." I throw him the container, and we're getting ready now to duke it out. But I'm awake now. Slowly the clarity of the dream must have been fading away, and I hadn't noticed.

Non-lucid Lucid

I sat on the floor, in a creepy, old house. It was cold, and I was freezing. I heard horrible sounds from outside.
I looked out the window and saw a scarecrow with white eyes. I freaked out at that moment, and tried to hide, but of course I couldnt. The scarecrow found me every time and it was laughing.
" You can't hide " it repeated while I was desperately trying to run away or hide, but for some reason, my hands popped up in front of me, and I knew I was dreaming. The scarecrow stood still and I imagined a bomb or something on it. I yelled out that the scarecrow had to disappear, and.. BOOM.. everything just exploded and I entered a new dream scene. But now, It wasn't a nightmare anymore. I was in the middle of a big beautiful field with yellow trees and like thousands of rainbows everywhere. Yes, that was amazing. The last thing I remember, is that I saw a friendly dinosaur..

I'm listening to a man die while I remain in hiding. I'm thinking that maybe I should have moved sooner and saved him, even though I'd have risked being seen - but I don't have any particular emotion about this, except maybe a little irritation at myself. I've been sent into this old stone ruin of a fortress, and I'd intended for only five particular men to be spared. Now I'm down to four. It's not ideal, but I'll have to live with it.

I couldn't hear her very clearly from my hiding place under their bed, but the woman who stabbed him said something to the effect that he should have recognized her. Some personal revenge thing - none of my business. Now I'm seeing the sort of smoke haze of colors passing before my eyes that I associate with life leaving a body. I watch it dissipate in the air, and I'm irritated at the waste. Waiting around is pointless now - and the woman should be directly above me. I stab up through the mattress.

When she dies, my perspective shifts. I'm floating in the void, with this massive black slab of a door in front of me, as wide as it is tall, some kind of geometric symbol across it. It's standing on this sort of grid far below, like a chess board where all the squares are black, with the door as a line across the center of the board. There's a few gravestones occupying some of the squares of the grid - that's new. I realize immediately they represent the previous targets the door sent me after - one of them must represent that woman whose death brought me back here. The door's saying something in my head about bringing it wisdom for the dead.

I wasn't practicing seriously for the last couple weeks as I felt too busy with work to devote much time to journaling, so my motivation to LD was also low (because successful attempts commit me to hours of writing if I'm going to record them right). Last night I felt more motivated so instead of playing video games late at night I went to bed early (11:30pm, early for me anyway) and put in a solid WILD attempt, with a full two-hour WBTB (from 1:45am when I woke up naturally until 3:45) followed by 14 minutes seated meditation and the usual counting ritual on returning to bed.

The attempt felt promising as I didn't fall asleep too quickly but maintained liminal awareness for awhile, and it was around 4:15am when I finally went back to sleep. However I did not achieve a WILD, and experienced nothing but an extremely vague NLD (something about a shoot-out, I was a young man in Vietnam I think, maybe during the war, the guys on my side had a sort of built structure to take positions in but it was full of rats, and my character felt very uncomfortable about the rats).

I woke up again at 6:30am and was desperate enough to take galantamine, even though I hate the after-effects and it hardly works for me anymore. This was followed by another vaguely-recalled dream which involved distinct manifestations of dream control (elaborate flying and levitation, which felt like I was deliberately testing the limits of my abilities) but very little dream awareness. At the end I was having what felt like a very meaningful conversation with a DC, but I don't remember what we talked about. It felt like there was great complexity to this dream as well as the previous one but my recollection was not sufficient to preserve it.

At 8:30am I woke up again, realized I had another bust, and as a last resort tried my vibrating alarm. I felt it go off three times but each time it jostled me out of sleep and I didn't feel like there was much I could do dream-wise, nor did I remember any dreams of note. The last time I at least remembered to try to DEILD but the REM atonia was apparently already broken, so it didn't work. I've always been able to instinctively DEILD-chain my WILDs, even before I knew what it was called, but for some reason that is the only situation in which I've been able to pull it off. Woke up for the final time at 9:30am and now I'm frustrated enough to declare a dryspell. Writing a report anyway because it was a deliberate attempt and also so that my mind can't use the break from journaling as an excuse for not dreaming properly.

Hi everyone! I want to share with you a frightening (maybe not) dream I've had not last night, but the one before.

I was lyng on a surgical bed, while the doctor was preparing his instruments. Around us, only the purest darkness. He said the operation aim was to kill me in a slow and atrocious way. He took a little bisturi and cut my left hand's fingers with a diagonal line. I could see bone and blood. I was really scared while he was doing this, but I felt no pain, and so I accepted my coming death. He showed me two swords and asked me what was the one I liked most: one was a dark blue saber, full of reflections, the other one was yellow and a bit more opaque, and the edge was more straight. I preferred the second one, but I felt kinda of captured by the first, and I said it was my choice. He used it to pierce my heart, and blood scattered everyone. There was a still image showing the scene from my right, with me, the doctor and the objects which where nothing but shadows printed on a light brown background.
The doctor (surgeon/murderer) was angry because of my apathy.

I had this dream three times that night, one the doctor had yellow skin, and of the other one I remember nothing.

Another sludgy dream last night. The clarity is picking up a little, but not much. I'm sort of on a dry spell. I was driving with S to my college and I pulled over and made S get out because we were running low on gas.
I then drove about half a mile to a gas station, and pulled up. I was ready to pump the gas and realized that I had to go pee. I was also thinking that I should go back and get S where I left him, by the side of the road.
I went into the gas station and in the bathroom, for some reason, there was no toilet, just a large PVC pipe sticking out of the floor. The gas station was doing maintenance or something, and I figured It was where the toilet was supposed to attach, and that I could just do my business in it.
So I'm doing my thing and I realize that this situation is actually rather absurd, so I start reality checking. For some reason it takes two nose pinches and a host mental questions for me to properly become lucid. When I became lucid, I realized that if I was having dreams about peeing, that I might have to get up and go to the bathroom, otherwise I could wet the bed. So, I simply woke myself up.

Well I didn't have to go to the bathroom in WL. Kind of wasted a lucid there.

I was thinking about something on the drive to college. When I started lucid dreaming, three and a half years ago, my goal was nightly lucidity. I would sometimes say to myself that I wanted to 'become' a natural lucid dreamer. To be honest that is still my goal, and I getting closer. I have about one lucid dream a week now, and no shortage of close calls and partially lucid moments in-between. I'm really not that far off from my goal, but there is still work to be done.
Late October was a good time for me, and now I seem to be in a bit of a slump. Probably due to stress in WL. I was thinking about holding off on lucid dreaming a little bit this next week or so, letting the dry spell blow over and focusing more on issues in waking life. Because for me to be truly happy, both my waking life and my dream life have to exist harmoniously. So I might be a little less active in this next week or two. By no means will I stop posting, but I might only log on once a day to lay out a quick nonlucid DJ entry.
Back on the topic of my nightly lucidity goal. I was thinking about how all too often I forget that I shouldn't just be focused on the end result, but perhaps the journey along the way, too. This hasn't always been an easy mindset to have for lucid dreaming. To me, I always thought of 'completing one level before moving onto the next'. By that I mean, attaining nightly recall before I started practicing lucid techniques. Then, attaining nightly lucidity before practicing stabilization techniques. Then, I with a consistent means to lucid dream, I could learn stabilization and dream control with no shortage of windows to practice. But that isn't the way it's happened for me, or anybody else. I've been developing all of those skills little by little. So I'm going to try and change my mindset; lucid dreaming is an adventure to be had, in all of its stages.

11.4.14

Last night bed at 9pm - 2:30am

also slept a lot yesterday from 9am to 2pm, coz I wasn't feeling well last few days, and I'm still not good

DR:

I'm at some kind of a family compound. Outside in the very large yard, or field. It's surrounded by a fence, but inside is just dirt or dry grass, as if it was fall or winter.

Somebody is trying to come in in a homemade helicopter. I realize something and I get him to take me home from there to my mom. It's far away, another country or even continent.

Now I'm at home. I'm heading to the restroom when my mom is calling me. I go to see and she has some pyjamas on the bed, asking me if I want to take some with me when I'll return back to where I came from. They are very cool looking, gray and black and white, and soooo soft. But I don't want to take hers away, as I did last time. And I feel sorry now for not bringing those back to her now, since I could have had, having a ride and all.

Now my dad is there too. We have the courtains opened and I'm looking outside at some dark cloud, which has a "leg". I think I see it getting longer, and another cloud has a part that is also protruding down and getting longer and bigger. I say "wow, you guys we are getting a tornado". The hanging parts are now in shape of a tornado and spinning wildly.

By the time I grab my camera, they are so close that all I see is blackness. I ran to doors and close them, yelling at everybody to do the same. In case some window opens, it won't suck us all out.

It goes right over the house. I am excited. I go out on the kitchen balcony. My aunt is there and I ask her how they protected themselves from tornado. But she is busy. Her daughter (my cousin K) is in wedding gown, getting married. She says we should hurry, coz they are starting to gather.

My mom says she has no dress for a wedding, coz they didn't tell her on time. I also don't have anything, since i only grabbed one bag when I was going there.

I ask about my friend who came with me yesterday and was sleeping over, and mom tells me she went home already. I remember she has family in town.

I'm looking out the living room window again. I tell my mom "you won't believe how often I have a dream about me looking out this window". And I see the tennis courts across the street.

Suddenly its pitch dark outside. I see an anourmous cloud of large, black birds flying by. They are mostly or all crows, flying in neat formation, all same speed. Some of them look at me. I once again scramble for my camera to take pictures, coz it's an incredible sight.

Now from the other direction, from south to north, there are people flying in the air. They are standing up as if walking. Most if not all are male, all dressed in business attire. I regnize one of them as an american actor. He has a bloody lip. I look at others and most of them have some sign of trauma. They are all somber, not talking, not looking around.

I ask a question and one that looks like the actor answers "time". I ask to clarify and he says "we are running out of time".

I was at this weird school which slightly resembled my own in the way that all the buildings were re-arranged and there was a lot more forest like growth around and a few animals too, it looked pretty rad. At one stage I was filming something with a few friends behind a building. Everyone started going home after that and getting a ride from other friends so I asked my sister and she said yes. We hopped in her car, she was sipping on a drink, she started to vomit a little bit and then went into full projectile vomiting all over the car, when she hopped out she had this weird green face although she pulled it off and her normal face.

We ended up driving to a house and I just sat there for the rest of the dream.

Dreams from November 2nd.

1.
I’m talking to a girl, I ask her something like “What do you think about this?’ as I point (to a bookshelf?). She ignores me, her face almost slack, and I realize ‘I’m not dreaming anymore’(??). I come to realize I’m sitting up in bed, awake.

2.
Outside (out back at grandma’s house?), there’s a little girl to the left jumping on the pad of a really tall, green flower. For a split second I think how dangerous that is, and then she slips off. On the ground, she says something about how she should have known that would happen.

Directly ahead, a younger girl is playing in a square patch of grass the size of a dinner table.

Something about me walking out of a room and seeing a young boy. He says something about ‘you saw, didn’t you’. Suddenly I ‘knew’ he was talking about how he hadn’t flushed the toilet.

I’m not sure if I was sleeping in the dream or what, but I jump out of bed(?) because of some noise I hear. It’s police sirens. They were there for the boy next door. I hear them talking to him through the wall. They’re prescribing him some medicine for whatever issue he has that caused the problem.

Just as me and Rane are about to discuss something, she says something about wanting to help the boy with something. I tell her that we’ll finish this conversation later, and she agrees.

Side-note: There was definitely more bits to this but I convinced myself I had already woken up too much/was too tired to type up more dreams. By the time I got myself to sit up the details and order of events were gone.

Inspirations: A similar-ish scene happened at my sister’s where she hadn’t flushed the toilet when I went to go, and there was a pregnancy test in the trash – she asked me if I’d seen, afterwards. Once, the police actually did come here because a young boy getting in trouble. And there was one time the police did come at night because our neighbor was driving drunk… Medicine most likely comes from me being nervous about my appointment to check my thyroid levels and up my dosage.

Date: 30 Oct

I woke up before my scheduled wbtb and had heavy insomnia. Used it as an unavoidable wbtb and concentrated on ld thoughts in the midst of all other unnecessary for this time of the night thoughts. I was super tired and my recall is rather bad.

As I am in bed, waiting for sleep, I get a few strong flash dream scenes that look promisingly engaging but those interrupt. I am very tired at this point to follow any transitions and just want to sleep.

A brief fragment where I emerge on a balcony fully entering the scene. There is an inviting flat roof nearby and I want to cross over, but it's far away. I lean forward and move in its direction and the distance shortens which enables me to do it. Memory about this happening a lot in nlds (yes). I also notice that I automatically continue walking on all fours, something which I recall also happens during nlds.

Memory gap.

A nld in some place that feels like ours. An uninvited guest makes an appearance and I wonder about that. Could it be a dream? It'd better be. I abandon the whole situation and spend some mostly unmemorable time walking around the place, just going from room to room, opening doors, etc. This helps me acquire a bit of clarity of mind and to hold the dream at the same time.

Bf is also here and after a while of room wandering, I stop and face his DC. I have a brief moment of conscious thought about doing anything with him. We start kissing but then I recall I really wanted to do the pumpkin task. The bathroom is right ahead and I go there picturing a pumpkin, which I see just below a chair or a crate of some sort. Initially it is a normal pumpkin, but then it turns into one made of paper. I rip open the top and peek to see what's inside - a number of halloween chocolate treats in different colors. I feel satisfied with the task, make a mental note and walk back to the other room. (Without trying any). Then I come back to make sure I got the details right, the treats are still there.

I think the dream must have ended soon after that, it seems I went into much deeper sleep that messed up my recall.

Black: Non-dream
Blue: Non-lucid
Red: Lucid

Couldn't write this up yesterday, had trouble getting onto DV.

The whole night of dreaming felt stressful, like there was just some part of each dream that made me stressed out.

Dream 1 - Poetic Racing
Intensely sporadic images of random animated over-the-top car racing, similar to the movie 'Redline' (which I had watched before going to bed). Insanely nonsensical, there was poetry too that felt unfinished. Like the sentences had been started but were left hanging.

Dream 2 - Geology Field Camp
Out in the paddock there's something like 50+ tents full of students. We're camping out on farmland for the 2 week field trip as part of a university paper. I get up during the night to go take a leak, but I just couldn't find a good place to go. I ended up going further than I needed to, and I must have woken some of the other students up. They came up to me and asked me where I was going and I told them I was looking for a good place to go, they joked around a bit saying stuff like 'why'd you walk out so far man' and I agreed, since I thought it was dumb and odd too (possibly an inkling of the feeling I may be dreaming). I then head back to find a closer place to go, they kick a shovel my way that I can use to dig a hole or something, and I whistle back in thanks. Unfortunately, my whistling triggers a super loud alarm which wakes everyone up! "Oh come on Alex! Jesus what the hell man", I just feel super stressed out, like 'oh god...' I just knew it was going to piss everyone off and they'd be talking shit about be for ages.

Dream Fragment
Somewhere at school, my friends showed up but it was really awkward due to an old 'love triangle' we used to have. The guy was dating the girl and we nearly had a fight because of the history.

Dream 3 - Airport
Me and my mum are driving to the airport, crazy random stuff starts happening to some of stuff the in the scenery, it just changes each time I look. The planes at the airport change into words, the change into vibrant colours, they stretch out, shrink, flatten, enlarge, and move to random places. The then change into beautiful retarded white horses, one of which was walking backwards with its head on the ground. We arrive at the airport and try to find a parking space, but they're all taken. We see a car back out and move in to try take the space, but we're outside the car now and the car has shrunken to the size of a book. I position it in the parking space which just feels to narrow, and there is an Indian man with his daughter sitting in a trolley, he's texting and is oblivious to our efforts of parking. He also happens to be quite close and when I finally manage to re-enlarge the car (first I had tried to wet it by rubbing saliva on it. Weird. Then I threw it on the ground) it nearly clipped the daughter in the trolley. The Indian man had a rant off at me and I had to remind him it was his fault, since he was texting and should have being paying attention (Sounds pretty harsh, but he wasn't very nice). Me and my mum continue into the airport, which appears to be more like a supermarket. I tell my mum that we should check out the horses and see if its safe to show to my daughter, we head over there but now they've changed AGAIN. One of them looks like a unicorn, one of them has a rhino horn. Some of them have long blonde flowing hair. Some of them look like rhinos, one had a fake rhino nose and long blonde hair. There was also a pygmy horse with stumpy little legs galloping around, all of the horses + rhinos had white fur. My dad shows up with my daughter and she's had her hair done, my mum is impressed and asks if he did it but he said no, it was her other grandma that did it.

Very short dream, i know.

We were sitting in the mathclass. Suddenly, the teacher said that we had to do "our dance".
(It was so vivid, and i thought it was happening IRL, ha ha.)
I jumped off my chair and went to my "dance partner". She asked if i remembered the dance. I nodded.
Then, the teacher played "Tip Toe Thru' The Tulips With Me" on a stereo and I automatically started dance.

Weird.