side notes

Morning - I had a vague memory, BUT I remember parts of it.

I was an observer in this dream. I could see 2 space gunships heavily engaged in a battle. Mostly lopsided tho. The 1st ship was flanking around the 2nd ship which was stationary due to propulsion being compromised. As an observer I was also intercepting intercoms from the failing ship. The airwaves crackled with static and was flooded with panicked voices. Someone cut the chatter and silenced the coms to prioritize his message (or was it because I wanted to know what the heck was going on? or did I already know?). "We're being attacked by our own AI that has run rampant," is more or less what I remembered being said. Thats when I woke up.

Side note - "AI rampancy" is a phrase that I heard often mentioned in the Halo novels which I have been listening to via audiobooks recently.

Surprisingly the Halo Novels are pretty good. Suffice is to say, the Halo Novels are not at all what one could guess with a gander at the, deceptively shallow, run-n-gun, Halo Games.

Date: 4/1/2014 (Tue)
Total sleep: 6.75 hours
Daytime Techniques: RCs, Visualization, Text Search, Awareness
Lucid Techniques: Mantras, Meditative Visualization
Recall Techniques: Meditative Visualization Mantras
Fell Asleep: 10 pm
Dream 1 Title: Underground Railroad?
Dream 1: I am standing on the grass facing a small hill. There are old stairs, made of old railroad ties, leading up the hill to an old shack. The shack is run down and painted white. I see an old rusty cloths line (the kind that rotates) in the yard. My wife is with me. I know that this shack is her grandmother’s house. We walk up the stairs and into the yard. There is a dog run running from the house to a nearby pine tree. The grass under the run has been worn away leaving only dry dirt. I don’t see a dog. We walk in through the old screen door, which squeaks loudly. We are in a very old kitchen. There are counters and cabinets to our left and right. The kitchen has a 1940’s feel and everything looks very old. There is a plastic container, filled with sugar, on the counter to my right. My wife opens it, and for some reason puts dry cat food in with the sugar. She then puts the lid back on. Jen’s grandmother (who is dead in real life) comes into the room from a doorway at the far end of the kitchen. She is wearing a long white night gown. She goes to my wife and gives her a hug. Another elderly woman come into the room from the same doorway. I know she is the grandmother’s sister, but in RL she is unfamiliar to me. The woman picks up a cup of coffee from one of the counters, walks to the container of sugar and begins spooning some into her coffee. I can see the cat food mixed with the sugar as she puts it in the cup. I wonder when she will notice and now she will react (I assume she will be angry). Suddenly, I am afraid. I know my wife and I are being chased and we need to hide. We move across the room to a door. I open the door which leads to a dark basement. The stairs leading down are very old and don’t look very safe. We descend the steps anyway. The basement has a dirt floor. There are roughly constructed work tables one every wall (running completely around the perimeter) and a long work table in the middle of the room. (The basement is much bigger than the shake, but I don’t question this.) There are old dirty canvas tarps on all the tables that hang over the edge. We move to the nearest table to our left, duck under the tarp and lay on the dirt floor. We are trying to hide. I peek out from the tarp and can see an archway leading outside. It is now night and I can see many eyes reflected red by some unseen light source. My wife says “Oh my God! This is just like The Hills Have Eyes!” (I know she is referencing the movie.) Suddenly I notice a young black man hiding under the table directly to my left. He is dressed in an old white button down shirt with puffy sleeves, rust orange colored pants which only come a bit below his knees and are held up with a piece of rope tied around his waist. He looks like a stereo typical slave from the 1800’s. I now know that the people outside are searching for him. He is a runaway slave and this place is part of the underground railroad. Suddenly a large group of slaves, dressed in a similar fashion to the hiding man, come in through the archway. The move around the room lifting the tarps and searching under the tables. They come to where we are hiding, lift the tarp and find up. They completely ignore my wife and me. The hiding slave stands up and smiles at the other men. One of the men hugs him and I realize that they were just playing a game. They all leave together out through the archway. My wife and I get up and move to the far left corner of the basement. We find a small room. It has a low box with a hole cut in the top. I realize it is an indoor outhouse. There is an opening cut in the wall. I look out and see a street. There is a brand new, dark blue, Nissan Altima parked about 50 yards away. My nephew is standing near the car with two other people who I don’t recognize. I turn and my wife is gone. I know she has gone back up to the first floor. I walk out of the small room and I am in a paved basement that looks very similar to the one in my house. I know I have to bring some cat up with me. I find the bag of cat food and see two sets of stairs. I take the one to the left (there is another to the right). I climb to the top and it ends at the ceiling with not where else to go. There is white cloth hanging from the ceiling and I have to push it out of the way to descend the steps. I go to the other flight of stairs and begin to ascend. As I get close to the top a large smoke gray cat sticks is paw out from under a step, right in front of my face. I smile at his playfulness. The dream fades as the light from my alarm clock wakes me up.
Awake:: 4:45 am
Vividness: (scale of 1-15, 10 is waking life vividness) D1 = 11
Awareness: (1-10; or lucid) D1 = 7
Length: (how long it felt like! Because that matters) D1 = 15 min
Emotions: Happiness & fear
Dream Signs: In a place I don’t recognize, dead grandmother, cat food in the sugar, hiding, slaves, underground railroad, magically changing scenes, basement bigger than house
Notes: No supplements last night. I am doing to meditating along with my visualization and mantras and it is really improving my ability to fall asleep. I am very happy with the detailed recall I have of my last dream of the night. I really love my new alarm clock. It wakes me up with light which doesn’t ruin my recall of my dream. I don’t remember awaking after any previous dreams.
Text Search Experiment: I am still searching for text, and using it as a reality check, throughout my day. I didn’t notice any text in my dream.

Morning - Nothing to report =/

Side Note: My girlfriend had an excellent idea. Thanks to her, I will be integrating napping into my normal schedule again. I've shown on several occasions that afterwards, I'm able to recall bits and pieces. Knowing this, I should try using it to my advantage and help build my recall! So Imma give that a go. ^^

I reviewed my LD journal to find what triggered me to do a RC, or to just “know” I was dreaming. I broke the findings into 4 categories
1. “Felt Like a Dream”: In these cases I did a RC because the environment felt dreamlike, even though there was nothing out of the ordinary going on.
2. Emotion: In these cases I was having an emotional reaction to a situation in all instances it was one of the following that triggered the reaction: Surprise, Confusion, or a combination of the two.
a. Confusion can be viewed as an opposite to interest, and serves as a signal to the self to inform the viewer that they cannot comprehend what they are looking at, and confusion often necessitates a shift in action to remedy the lack of understanding. Confusion is thought to stem from uncertainty, and a lack of one's expectations and knowledge being met
b. Surprise functions as a disruption of current action to alert a viewer to a significant event. The emotion is centered around the experience of something new and unexpected, and can be ellicied by sensory incongruity.
3. RC Habit: In these cases I simply did a reality check out of habit.
4. Remembering being awake before the dream: All of these cases were WBTB occurrences.

I tracked every event where I became lucid, or did a RC and didn’t become lucid. (*Note: Technically I could put “Felt Like a Dream” and “Remembering being away before the dream” into the Emotion category because both of those would cause some level of surprise or confusion.)

*I should also note I have never been successful at using the WILD technique, nor can I regularly use WBTB because I have issues falling back to sleep after being awake for more than 10 minutes.*

So for someone who uses DILD techniques (RCs, Mantras, Visualization, Meditative Visualization, etc.) I have found the overwhelming majority of my LDs were triggered by a response to Confusion and/or Surprise. I believe that confusion and surprise tend to triggers a cognitive response which naturally initiates involvement of the conscious mind.

Example: I have many instances where my reflection in a mirror has triggered lucidity. So, in all of these cases I look at myself in mirror. Something is noticeably different with my appearance, of which I am intimately familiar. I am surprised, confused, or both by seeing something that is not what I expected. My conscious mind activates to try to figure out why my reflection doesn’t match my expectation of how it should appear. It tries to find a reason to explain the discrepancy. With my consciousness elevated in that moment, and my current understanding that I could be dreaming at any time (questioning reality during my waking hours), I ask myself if this is a dream and do a RC. I am now lucid.

To use this with my “Text Search” experiment I would have to have an emotional response to the lack of text in my dreams. So far my dream logic has gotten the best of me and I am not surprised by the lack to text. I know this is because 98+% of the time, in real life, I pay little attention to text unless it is in my current interest to read it. In my dreams I have little to no interest to read any text. This is similar to doing RCs out of habit. I have been doing RCs, out of habit in real life, for almost 10 years. Yet I have only had 4 instances where I have done a RC in a dream out of habit.

So, if it is the emotional reaction which triggers the rational mind to engage in an attempt to figure out why the current situation defies current expectation....how and I turn this to my advantage?

Date: 3/31/2014 (Mon)
Total sleep: 6.5 hrs
Daytime Techniques: RCs, Visualization, Text Search
Lucid Techniques: Mantras, Meditative Visualization
Recall Techniques: Meditative Visualization Mantras
Fell Asleep: 10:30 pm
Dream 1 Title: (Fragments)
Dream 1: I am standing in my back yard, near my house. There is about 2 inches of water surrounding my house from the cement of the basement to about 4 feet out. I can see a lot of brown leaves submerged under the water. My daughter is near me and I tell her we are going to have to rake those leaves out of the water. I feel very annoyed with having to rake and worried that we will get water in the basement. Later in the dream I am a federal agent. I am in some kind of government building with many large windows.
Dream 2 Title: Opening a new store
Dream 2: I am standing in the parking lot of a convenience store. It is very run down. I know my parents own this store. (It strongly reminds me of a store near a house where I used to live.) I go into the store and many of the shelves are bare. I am annoyed that my parents have not kept the store well stocked and they have let it get so run down. I walk up to the counter and see a box which contains books of matches. They have a price of “$.03” (It was text and I could read it). Again I am annoyed because I know they are losing money because they are selling the matches at cost. I walk out of the store and I am in a much larger parking lot (which reminds me of Lincoln Plaza before they updated a few years ago). There are many people standing around. I sit on a low wall and see my friend John sitting nearby (childhood friend). He is wearing a long black trench coat over a suit. I realize I am dressed in a similar fashion. I feel tugging at my jacket and look to see my mother standing next to me. She is trying to remove a box of Kraft macaroni and cheese from my coat pocket but it is stuck. Suddenly I remember she had asked me to bring her that box. I pull the box out of my pocket and hand it to her. I stand up and walk over to a crowd of people who are gathered around a billboard. I push through the crowd to get a better view. A man to my right (short pudgy man with a crew cut) gives me a dirty look, but I ignore him. I can see the sign. It is vividly colored with reds, yellows, whites, and blacks. I see a picture of a large cartoon dog wearing a red and white leather jacket. Below him are large words. I don’t read the words but I know they say “Big Dog Store”. I know that this is the name of my parents’ new store. I now have memories that my parents have shut down the old store and built a larger, much nicer, store and this is their new advertising billboard. There is a building to my right. I go in. It is a large lecture hall. I know that I am taking a class her. I sit down next to a very slim young woman. She has brown straight hair, a bit longer than should length, and is wearing a long yellow dress. She is an average looking woman but when she turns and smiles at me I suddenly find her very attractive. She asks me a question (I can’t recall what it was) and I reply (can’t remember this either). I loot to my right and my friend John is there. I poke his arm to get his attention and ask him if he has any gum. I want some mint gum to freshen my breath because I plan on kissing the young woman. He hands me a pack of gum in a blue package. The dream fades and I awake. My new alarm, which has a slowly brightening light 15 min prior to my actual alarm, woke me gently.
Vividness: (scale of 1-15, 10 is waking life vividness) D1 = 3; D2 = 9
Awareness: (1-10; or lucid) D1 = 2; D2 = 6
Length: (how long it felt like! Because that matters) D1 = ?; D2 = 10 min
Emotions: Annoyance, worry, more annoyance, general happiness
Dream Signs: Water doing damage, childhood friend, locations that remind me of past places, parents owning a new business, going to kiss a woman I don’t know
Notes: Took melatonin and magnesium last night. I am very happy with my new alarm clock. The gently brightening light awoke me about 4 minutes before the actual alarm (which is set to nature noises) went off. I had no issue with remember the dream. I am adding some meditation combined with visualization and mantras prior to sleep. I will see if this helps. During the day, yesterday, I actually attempted to take an afternoon nap, but just couldn’t fall asleep. I also attempted WBTB on Saturday & Sunday mornings, but just couldn’t fall back to sleep.
Text Search Experiment: (Day 8) Continue to search text daily. I am losing confidence in this method. I actually saw a bit of text in my dream last night and could read it clearly. I find that dream logic is preventing me from even noticing the lack of text in my dreams.

00:00 Monday 2014-03-31

00:30 bedtime a bit late

06:30

only vague impressions of dreaming about dreaming, not even a fragment, disappointed in this.

07:30

Well, I got back to sleep pretty quickly, yay

+ running down a hill (Cn. Blvd.) it is a dirt road. Wife as narrator says "the people here are only here for exercise" (I think as opposed to a spiritual purpose), I'm running fast, I pass a group of several men, I'm going high speed, I think they're chasing me, I skid around the big corner and almost fly off but keep to the road. I want to look behind me but don't because I'm going so fast I can't risk a look. Later I sneak up on the group with their leader, think about taking him out with super powers, maybe flying away

+ in a rest stop, trying to get a bottle of water from a little closet area lots of other people, I say "I'm just trying to get my bottle of water" so is everybody else. There are lots of people reaching, I see lots of bottles, I look for the one with my initials on it, I think I find it but I'm not sure. I see the letters but they're not 100% clear. Then there are two ice machines. I'm getting ice and water in my cup, they're up above my head.

I'm returning to sit at a table with some teen boys, I hear a comment they make as I'm approaching the table and they comment on it, saying I have super hearing, I say that's every parent's job.

+ Standing in line with family, next to some woman. My fingers keep getting entangled in her hair, over and over again. I'm apologetic. We're bumping up against each other. I don't engage since my wife is right there. The woman gives up and lies down next to her friends and says something about "missed opportunities."

+ FAs in room. First FA there's a woman there and lots and lots of garbage that needs to be cleaned up. Sleep again, FA and the room is clean, I'm glad I slept again as I didn't have to do the cleaning. Black guy is there I feel warmth and friendship with him, I reach to shake hands it turns into a hand-clasp, and we hold it for a long time, should I bring him in for a hug? I think we do.

Try to get back to sleep, distracted by noise, light, movements, daydreaming. Gathered my will and relaxed, got some images, alllllllllmost made it back to sleep, dozed lightly perhaps, but no dreams, checked time, 09:30, time to get up.

9 days dry now. Need to somehow change attitude.

29th
Morning - I had a flash of SOMETHING but I couldn't quite make it out.

Evening Nap - IWL I had just watched "Gravity." GREAT movie; I highly recommend watching it. Most certainly had an affect on my dream but don't let the following keep you from experiencing the movie.

I was flipping end over end in space with no way to stop my rotation. The blood was rushing to my head, wreaking havoc on my equilibrium. I was flailing my arms around cause that was the most I could do, panic. and BAAM I woke up jolting backwards. Startled my Girlfriend :/ .. SORRY.

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30th
Morning - Nothing to report

I presented an excerpt from this dream three days ago in the Task of The Month for March 2014 thread, which, if you're in the right month, you'll notice has won me my luxurious wings. (Though I don't plan on letting a month go by without completing at least one task-of-the-month from now on, so you should probably be seeing wings above my avatar regardless. ) But now, I've gotten around to posting the story of the entire dream from that night, starting from when I turned lucid.

I was in my bedroom. I've noticed that this is a recurring pattern - a lot of my lucid dreams are either triggered when I'm my dream bedroom or I'm immediately transported to my bedroom in the dream after becoming lucid. I never see my body in the bed; but then, I don't look there much. I also have a higher tendency to become lucid in areas in relative proximity to my bedroom and/or my apartment in general, which I suppose makes sense, with me performing reality checks in places I know in real life and spending most of my time and going to bed in my bedroom in general.

Also, most of the time when I become lucid in my bedroom, that bedroom is dark. Either lights-off-and-curtains-drawn-in-the daytime dark, lights-off-and-curtains-drawn-in-the-evening/twilight dark or lights-on-but-fairly-dim dark. In this dream, it was the former of these cases. I didn't bother to turn the lights on.

Side note: Another thing that I've noticed in my lucid dreams - the proper ones that are clear, fairly long and provide me with some degree of control - is that, without me directly thinking about it, my course of action in the given lucid dream will follow the sort of course of action I was thinking about and wanted to undertake that time before I went to sleep. Before 'Flight of the Oneironaut' (a previous dream journal entry of mine), I wanted to have a lucid dream where I explored different dream scenes and did cool things, in contrast to the lucid dream I'd previously had, where I felt that I hadn't done enough. And this is just what ended up happening. I suppose autosuggestion and dream incubation really are important in terms of thinking about how the dream will go!

Before this dream, I instead wanted to spend a long time in one dream scene, not going anywhere and instead just focusing on the lucid dream, working on making the scene as vivid as possible, entering as high a state of consciousness as possible, experimenting with the senses and just taking it all in. However, I also really wanted to complete a task-of-the-month before March 2014 was over. And that's just the course of action I took in this dream.

I looked around and in front of me, mainly to the left side of my room. I looked at the shelves of books that are present above the drawer in my real bedroom and that are the most detail-filled part of my room, hence my wanting to explore it. Another thing that I've noticed in the lucid dreams wherein I'm in my bedroom is that my bedroom is (probably) never actually structured just like my real bedroom and doesn't have the same things in it; but I never notice this until the dream is over. Looking over the books piled up on a low shelf, where my stacks of school notebooks and textbooks should have been instead (my literary works are on the shelf above), I noticed a series of books with imagery focused on blood and bone that were supposedly very grim, warlike and for mature audiences. I remembered that my father had gotten this series for me when I was quite young and the material was clearly too mature for me to handle at that age and that it was fortunate that I had never read that material.

My father had never actually bought me this particular series of books. This was not a literary series that existed in this world; it was a made-up concept by my subconscious. But, despite me being fairly conscious in this lucid dream, that is not something I realised until after I woke up. The dream provided me with false memories. In fact, the idea of this series was based on the fact that my father did provide me with books that were long and mature for my age when I was younger - just not that particular series. I read Ender's Game when I was eleven years old and a giant tome titled 'The Chronicles of Amber' sits upon my second-to-top shelf, untouched for years. This was probably a combination of the two concepts.

I looked around. I touched my surroundings. I touched the wall/closet and tried as well as I could to see what it felt like. The sensation felt quite real. Actually, I spent a lot of time in this dream touching my surroundings, though I don't write about it as thoroughly here. I was really focused on taking in the dream scene and making it as vivid as possible.

And for most of my time in my dream bedroom here, it looked very clear. The visuals looked as clear as real life when I have my glasses on. A bit later, I noticed that the scene was getting a bit less clear - not really blurry but instead about as clear as real life when I don't have my glasses on. So I did my best to ramp the vividness back up.

Then I thought of experimenting with some other senses. I instinctively turned to the air conditioner and tried to see if this would work. I wanted to change the temperature I felt in the dream. So I shouted at my subconscious, as well as I could, "Make the air cool!" Or something along those lines. I heard the air conditioner start working. At first, I didn't feel anything. I moved toward it and stretched my arms out. In a few seconds, I felt a mild rush of coolness touch my hands from that direction. But it wasn't perfect. So I shouted again. "MAKE THE AIR COOL!"

And surely, this time, the dream fully obeyed. The air suddenly felt cool from all directions. It felt. I felt. Genuinely cold. The sensation of cold. Even though my sleeping body wasn't undergoing any external circumstances causing it to be cold, I felt cold. That's the first time I've experimented with that sense in a lucid dream and it was... Well, what can I say? It was pretty cool.

Another thing I wanted to do before this lucid dream was to talk to/meet my subconscious in the form of a dream character (preferably a mirror image of myself). So I tried to go further with commanding my subconscious and shouted, "I want to talk to my subconscious!" Then I turned around to see if there was anyone there. There wasn't. So I turned back and tried again. "I WANT TO TALK TO MY SUBCONSCIOUS!" I turned around. There was still no-one. Nor had I gotten a reply of any kind. I suppose I wasn't well enough into my lucid dreaming yet. Though maybe if I'd persisted further...

After spending some time in my bedroom, I realised that I should do a Task of The Month. So I should get out of my bedroom and go somewhere where there are dream characters. Actually, I'd remembered my objective to do a Task of The Month before that, not long after I became lucid, but I kept putting it off. Yet, at some moment, I said to myself, 'Hey! You've got to do this soon! You don't want to wake up and not have done your lucid task in time, don't you?' So I changed locations. I actually don't remember what the original location that I saw in front of me then was, nor did I will or notice the transition as it happened. But soon into that, I was climbing a tree. As I was climbing it, I focused on how it felt - whether or not it really felt like a tree - and on how it looked and reminded myself that it was a dream and thought of the fact that doing certain things in a lucid dream can boost your consequent ability and/or self-confidence in waking life; and then I wondered about whether or not I was actually making myself more confident or physically capable or anything in waking life by climbing this tree.

When I finished climbing this tree, I stepped on a solid platform. I was in an elevator. One that was going down, I think. Standing in front of me, in the elevator, I saw a gang of thugs. At first it may have been one or two but then it became three. At least one of them was masked and armed and they were threatening my life. Confident in my dream control abilities, I tried to punch one but found that, as was often the case, it wasn't easy moving my body quickly and powerfully in the dream. So I decided to stop focusing on thrashing them through physical force and just imagine that they would die. I had a psychic power that could and would kill them without me needing to move a finger. As my hand was already in motion towards one, I used my fingers to dent his skull and take him through the head. Then I imagined the other two just getting holes in their heads and dropping to the ground. It worked. Everyone dropped to the ground but, as I had a little nib of doubt that I had been able to defeat them that easily, I looked down to the ground and saw one or two of their bodies, in suspended animation, partially projecting and jerking through the elevator floor. It looked extremely video-game-glitch-ish.

I tried to force them all the way down. Then I decided to ignore them. Remembering that I had a lucid task to complete, I decided to get out of the elevator. I escaped through an opening in the walls. It just sort of wound up existing there and it wasn't physically big enough for me to normally fit through it; but I was able to squeeze through with the power of dream control. As I was doing so, I thought of finding a character on the other side of the opening upon whom I could perform Basic Task ii - St. Patrick's Day: Pinch a DC who isn't wearing green. Report his or her reaction. On the other side, there was a well-lit room and I saw a sort of old-looking woman. She was dressed in pink. Nothing too colourful; just a plainly pink shirt and long skirt. She certainly wasn't wearing anything green, so she was the perfect candidate for this lucid task. I ran up to her, got close, hoping that she wouldn't move away, and pinched her in the arm. In response, she simply looked up at me and coldly said, "I don't feel comfortable with you doing that." 'Boy, who knew my dream characters were so chillingly uptight,' I thought? I may have expected her to run away or be angry or ask why I had done that; but this result felt exceedingly unsettling.

I apologised awkwardly to the woman and somehow ended up having dinner with her family - her, her husband and their teenage daughter. I hadn't tasted any of the food and decided to leave the dream scene, as I was no longer getting anything out of it. (If only I'd remembered Basic Task i - Middle Name Pride Day: Ask a DC what his or her middle name is... and that I could have done it on those same people as well...) I got up and went to walk my way to another scene. However, at that moment, my alarm woke me up.

I heard the sound of the alarm going off a moment before the dream ended and I opened my eyes. With the speed and immediacy at which I normally did so, I jumped out of bed and shut it off. Then I made sure to muster as much dream recall as possible and got ready to take on my day at school.

Date: 3/30/2014 (Sat)
Total sleep: 7.5 hours
Daytime Techniques: RCs, visualization, Text Search
Lucid Techniques: Mantras, visualization
Recall Techniques: Mantras
Fell Asleep: 11:15 pm
Dream 1 Title: Fragment
Dream 1: I was having a work related conversation with an African American woman.
Vividness: (scale of 1-15, 10 is waking life vividness) D1 = 2
Awareness: (1-10; or lucid) D1 = 2
Length: (how long it felt like! Because that matters) D1 = ?
Emotions: None
Dream Signs: None
Notes: This has been a bad weekend for dream recall. I have just been too exhausted. I got my new alarm clock yesterday. I managed to add a red filter to the display to greatly reduce the brightness. This helps me when I look at the clock in the middle of the night. Tomorrow I will be waking up to light and nature sounds. Hopefully that will help with dream recall.
Text Search Experiment: (Day 7) I paid close attention to text all day yesterday.

Date: 3/29/2014 (Fri)
Total sleep: 6 hours
Daytime Techniques: RCs, visualization, Text Search
Lucid Techniques: Mantra
Recall Techniques: Mantra
Fell Asleep: 1:30 am
Dream 1 Title: Just fragments
Dream 1: I remember my wife finding a baby bird and wanting to take care of it. I remember seeing a bush with white Christmas lights on it. I remember Leonardo DiCaprio talking to a bunch of people and saying, “We must be prepared!” (Watched “Wolf of Wall Street” last night)
Vividness: (scale of 1-15, 10 is waking life vividness) D1 = 2
Awareness: (1-10; or lucid) D1 = 2
Length: (how long it felt like! Because that matters) D1 = ?
Emotions: ?
Dream Signs: Celebrity
Notes: No supplements last night. I got to bed late (1:30 am). I have been running on too little sleep for 3 days (6 to 6.5 per night). I know this is having a negative impact on my chances for lucidity and for my dream recall. Last night I was so exhausted I just couldn’t spend time trying to recall my dreams (I did wake up after 2, but dozed off immediately).
Text Search Experiment: (Day 6) I was very sleep deprived yesterday and didn’t have good focus. I tried to pay as much attention to text as possible.

Date: 3/28/2014 (Thu)
Total sleep: 6.5 hours
Daytime Techniques: Text Search, RCs, Visualization, Mantras
Lucid Techniques: Mantras, Visualization
Recall Techniques: Mantras
Fell Asleep: 10:00 pm
Dream 1 Title: Weird South Park Cartoon
Dream 1: I am in a strange house with my wife. She is very upset. We had a contractor cut an area in the floor and install a set of stairs to the basement. To do this they had to cut a large hole in our hardwood floor. He cut it unevenly so there is an area with exposed brickwork that is very old and ugly. I can’t blame her for being upset, it looks horrible. **Jump** (3rd person perspective) I am watching a South Park style cartoon. There are three characters (Brad Pitt, my wife, and another one who I didn’t recognize) and they are dancing around in a cartoon apple orchard. Suddenly Scionox’s (From DV) avatar (a black dragon) comes onto the screen and starts chasing the characters. They act comically scared and run around the orchard. Then they all run off the screen. I wake up.
Dream 2 Title: Breakup in Hawaii (**Lucid**)
Dream 2: I am in a hotel room with several women I used to work with 10 years ago; Judy, Coleen, & Cindy. My long term girlfriend is also there (whom I don’t know in real life). Everyone is sitting on the floor and we are having a pie tasting party. In front of me are several pieces of different types of pie on white paper plates, with white plastic forks. I am handing out the pieces to people. I am hoping there won’t be any pie left when I’m done passing them out because I am trying to not eat sugar (this is a RL habit). When I am done passing them out there is one piece left for me. It is a large piece of apple pie. The crust is golden brown and I am dying to have some, but I resist. Coleen says, “Come on! You need to have at least a bite.” I just shake my head no. My girlfriend brings in a pot of hot cider and we start handing out styrafoam cups filled with cider, with a red plastic coffee stirrer in each. After a short time the women decide to leave and I am very happy because I want to have some intimate time with my girlfriend. I lay down on the bed, which is in a corner of the room. My girlfriend, who is a slim woman with brown shoulder length hair, (I don’t know her name, but I know that we have been dating for years) comes out of the bathroom. She is wearing blue jeans, a brown leather jacket, white t-shirt, and has a large brown leather bad hung over her shoulder (I know it is her overnight bag). She has her car keys in her hand, and I know she is leaving to go sleep with another man. I say to her, “If you leave it is over.” She replies, “Fine.” and walks out the door. I am devastated. I can’t describe how horrible I felt. It was just too real. I actually felt like a happy long term relationship had just ended because she wanted to be with someone else. I get up off the bed, walk to the dresser, and grab my car keys and my hotel key card. I just want to get out of this room. I need to just walk. Go out the door, which leads directly onto a city street. There are tall buildings on both sides of the road, and many cars parked along the street. I am lost in my despair and not paying attention to anything. I turn left and begin walking down the sidewalk, with my eyes down. I can feel the keys in my left hand and the key card in my right. Suddenly I decide to turn around and walk the other way. I look up, and directly in front of me at the end of this seemingly endless perfectly straight street, is a beautiful sunset. For the first time I also notice there are palm trees along the street. I realize that I am in Hawaii. Then something clicks in my mind! I remember being awake, at home, in my own bed, just a little while ago. I can’t actually be in Hawaii if I was just home sleeping. I am lucid without doing a reality check. The despair I was feeling moments before is completely washed away by overwhelming joy and excitement. I remind myself to stay calm. I look down at the keys in my left hand and am amazed at how realistic they look. It is like the level of vividness has increased one thousand fold. I look back to the sunset, and the vividness has amplified dramatically. It is indescribably beautiful. The sun has just slipped below the horizon. There are thin clouds reflecting brilliant hues of orange, mixing with the oranges are shades of purples and pinks. All of this is reflected brilliantly off of the buildings, which are now all made of mirrored glass. I think, “My God I wish I could take a picture of this and bring it back to real life!” I pull my eyes away from this amazing site and turn around to look down the street in the other direction. The building end about 100 yards away, where the street ends at an amazing beach. There are palm trees to the right and left of the last buildings and a long expanse of beautiful white sand ending at a perfect ocean extending to the horizon. I have completely forgotten about my goals. I want to experience swimming in the ocean. I jog down to the beach. I slip my keys and key card into the pocket of my swimsuit (which I am now wearing) as I run. I can feel the warm sand between my toes. I run straight into the water, which is as warm as a nice bath. A large wave is heading right for me as I reach waist deep. It washes over me and feels amazing. I swim deeper under the water and can see with complete clarity and just continue to breath as normal (no fear of drowning in a dream). I see a small school of angelfish . They are vibrant orange with vertical purple stripes. The vividness is amazing. They begin to shift colors from orange with purple stripes to purple with orange stripe and back again. I laugh under the water. I am filled with such joy. I swim to surface. As I come out of the water I find it is late dusk. I am back into waist deep water. I see two beautiful women walking out of the water, both are wearing wet white t-shirts with bikinis underneath. The urge for sex takes over. I walk up to one of them. She is in her 20’s. She is tall (about 5’ 8”), with long wet blonde hair. I take her hand and we walk out of the water onto the beach. Her friend just walks away from us. I take hold of the bottom of the t-shirt , pull it over her head, and toss it onto the sand. Her bikini is a brilliant sapphire blue. She has an amazing voluptuous body and very large breasts. I reach around to untie her bikini top, and with a seductive smile she says playfully, “No, no, no.” I respond, “Yes, yes, yes.” The dream quickly fades away and I awake. I do a RC by looking at my clock…but I am actually awake.
Awake: 4:30 am
Vividness: (scale of 1-15, 10 is waking life vividness) D1 = 7; D2 = 15
Awareness: (1-10; or lucid) D1 = 6; D2 = Lucid
Length: (how long it felt like! Because that matters) D1 = 3 min; D2 = 6 min
Emotions: General happiness, Utter Devastation, Indescribable Joy
Dream Signs: Cartoons, my wife is a cartoon, someone cutting holes in our floor, people I worked with 10 years ago, a girlfriend who I didn’t know (didn’t even know her name), not text anywhere.
Notes: I didn’t take any supplements last night. I purchased “Creative Visualization” by Shakti Gawain and started reading it last night. I used my typical visualizations, mantras, RCs, and text searches during the day and before I fell asleep. I awoke from Dream 1 and lay in bed trying to recall as much of the dream as I could. When I looked at the clock it was 3:35 am. I worked on recalling the dream for around 10 – 15 min. I then ran my mantras through my mind several times as I fell back to sleep. So, essentially, I did a short WBTB. Also, just prior to becoming lucid I was in a heightened emotional state (despair). I have found in the past that heightened emotional states contribute. Also, I was sleep deprived from the previous night. I awoke from Dream 2 at 4:28 am, and felt so high I wasn’t going to be able to go back to sleep. So that means this is 2 nights in a row of sleep deprivation. However, I don’t feel tired at all because I’m still riding the high from the lucid dream. . I am a bit disappointed that I didn’t remember my goals, but it still was a great LD.
Text Search Experiment: (Day 5) I paid close attention to text all day yesterday. I repeated my mantras as well. I didn’t notice text in either of the 2 dreams recalled from last night.

Dreams lately have been heavily influenced by whatever television/film I've watched before heading to bed. I'll often find myself dreaming with the characters who I've watched onscreen making themselves present in my dreams. Why? I'm not sure --- other than the fact that I would've recently seen them --- but it's like I've been implanted into their world.

Stupidly enough, I watched Keeping Up with the Kardashian's the other night and ended up dreaming that I was apart of their chaotic family. They had "taken me in" and I instantly became one of them.

Furthermore, recently other dreams have been becoming more real and real. I've dreamed that I've been horrifyingly late to work, or that I keep trying and trying to get there and I don't make it. That I'm supposed to start at 3:30, and I don't wake up until 3:45. It's a nightmare that feels all too real.

Two weeks ago while on vacation, I had a dream that my dog ran away and we couldn't find her. She was gone forever. When I returned home, we found out she was ill and we had to put her down. Some instances like these (which have been happening very often, where I'll have a dream and then something similar or relevant occurs a short while later) are frightening to me; the coincidence is almost too much to process these days.

As for lucid dreaming, not much exciting. Typical "happy" places; the other night I dreamed of being back in California. That was about it.

Brief notes/journal entry

So, not really much into manga these days, but Naruto Shippuden was on sale a few weeks ago and I decided to buy it to possibly enhance my dream powers. Only had time to play 3-4 hrs so far (last played two weeks ago).

Why am I giving all of these details? Well, with only this amount of exposure to the game I got 3 Naruto related dreams - Naruto on the cover of a mag, Naruto manga books and today a cool Naruto battle.

I recall only a frag of this non-ld but it really cool. I was watching something game-like at the same time participating as in a normal dream, made some moves with my hands and several times produced this (animated?) fire that reduced the opponent's hit points. Don't think it was a full match to a particular move from the game, but really amazed with the ease my subcon picked the whole thing up. Must do more experiments.

Total sleep: 5 hours
Daytime Techniques: Reality Checks. Asking myself whether or not this is a dream whenever something felt weird or randomly through out the day.

I went to bed around 10:30 expecting to wake up at 6:45 to write in my journal. I also set an alarm for 6am to try RILD.

Dream Title: Supernatural - fragment

Spoiler for for full analysis:

Dream: Something about Sam and Dean or something based on the show Supernatural.
Vividness: (scale of 1-15, 10 is waking life vividness) 0
Awareness: (1-10; or lucid) 0
Length: NA
Emotions: NA
Dream Signs: TV show, night

Woke up around 2am. Didn’t try to remember this supernatural dream because I was too excited to try RILD, which requires you to wake up right before your REM cycle and go to sleep immediately. Throughout the day I tried clapping my hands in order to establish a rhythm. To be honest I’ve done it only a few times because I thought I didn’t need to practice clapping. I knew if that didn’t work I could always just pretend i’m walking or snapping my fingers, whatever. Focusing too much on doing the clapping made me not sleepy and as a result I ended up staying up until about 3:30 am.

Dream Title: Grandfather death threat

Spoiler for for full dream:

Dream: Don’t recall how it all started, but I was in the same place as my mom and my grandfather. Possibly some other characters. It was time to go to bed and I retired to the bedroom. I was watching something on my iPad as my mom opened the door and said that she has terrible news for me. There were death threats to my grandfather. And he had to leave the country. I ran out into the main room and hugged him.
Vividness: (scale of 1-15, 10 is waking life vividness) 2
Awareness: (1-10; or lucid) 2
Length: 1 hour
Emotions: Sadness, scared
Dream Signs: Night, relative’s death

Dream Title: Beer run

Spoiler for for full dream:

Dream: I am driving up my apartment complex road. It is winter. Something seems to be blocking the path. May be snow. I am forced to park substantially earlier. I get out of the car and hear a couple of guys discussing how they need to go to the liquor store. I don’t remember why but I get back inside my car and they get in with me. I look at them and think “Ok, fuck it I’ll give you guys a ride.” The liquor store is very lit. It reminds me of how apple stores are in the mall. Also instead of selling alcohol in bulk they sell them by the bottle and a bunch of people are just standing around drinking. In order to enter I have to give my credit card and my ID. I take out my wallet to order and it is see through and inside of it is all water and ice. For some reason my wallet goes back to normal by the time I have to give my credit card. “But I gave it at the entrance! How stupid and frustrating.” - I say to myself.
Vividness: (scale of 1-15, 10 is waking life vividness) 3
Awareness: (1-10; or lucid) 2
Length: 30 mins
Emotions: Frustration
Dream Signs: Night, Bar

My alarm wakes me at 6am. I try RILD only to run in the same problem as before. Any sort of motion I try to imagine just makes me more awake. Am I not ready to try this? Is it just one bad experience since my sleep wasn’t that strong anyway? Apparently I snoozed instead of shutting the alarm off, so it rings again at 6:09. Then my girlfriend’s alarm finishes off any hopes of salvaging another dream at 6:30.

Being able to recall multiple dreams is definitely an improvement.

I was crunching some numbers from my lucid dream records and just wanted to keep a record so far. Chart above shows the total of my LDs so far.

The day of the week is the morning I woke up. Typically, my LDs take place in the early morning hours.
The "Yes" column indicates I did not have work that day, so I had potential for more sleep.
The "No" column indicates I had to work that day, so I had potential for less sleep and being woken up by my alarm.

One interesting thing I noticed is that the highest number of LDs took place on Monday's. I was surprised by this because I typically get my worst night sleep on Sunday night to Monday morning. I was not surprised to see the next highest numbers were Saturday and Sunday, when I have the opportunity to stay in bed later. The lowest nights were Tue, Wed, Thu & Fri which are all work days.

I also note that 40% of my LDs took place on mornings where I could sleep later and 60% took place on mornings I had to wake up at a specific time.