side notes

Entry #1

I was walking down a sidewalk that lead all the way around a large circular bay. The area was an industrious kind, with average sized sky scrapers and corperation buildings. The immediate view made the dream what it turned out to be.
I knew I was in my head, but this place was too serene and beautiful to lose any surreal value. Lifting up in the air, I looked around to see a cruise ship docked in the water bellow me, and I decided to warm up with the simpler push and pull movements. I reached my hand towards the ship to direct of movement and it began to slide forward and gain speed- all until it crashed on the other side of the bay, shattering a wooden dock and part of the sidewalk it was connected to. So I flew over the clearest of layered waters I’ve seen first hand, towards a building that needed to be changed, all the while trying to figure how I was going to change it, and attempting to convince myself I already knew how to change it.
Because of the amplified thought process dreams bring, if you find a reason to believe that you are already capable of accomplishing a certain feat, you’ll be suprised at what revalations you might have in the mechanics of getting it done. Is that an answer to induction of revelation?- and is it the entrance to a unlocking a larger percentage of the brain mass we don’t consciously use?

Entry #1

I was walking down a sidewalk that lead all the way around a large circular bay. The area was an industrious kind, with average sized sky scrapers and corperation buildings. The immediate view made the dream what it turned out to be.
I knew I was in my head, but this place was too serene and beautiful to lose any surreal value. Lifting up in the air, I looked around to see a cruise ship docked in the water bellow me, and I decided to warm up with the simpler push and pull movements. I reached my hand towards the ship to direct of movement and it began to slide forward and gain speed- all until it crashed on the other side of the bay, shattering a wooden dock and part of the sidewalk it was connected to. So I flew over the clearest of layered waters I’ve seen first hand, towards a building that needed to be changed, all the while trying to figure how I was going to change it, and attempting to convince myself I already knew how to change it.
Because of the amplified thought process dreams bring, if you find a reason to believe that you are already capable of accomplishing a certain feat, you’ll be suprised at what revalations you might have in the mechanics of getting it done. Is that an answer to induction of revelation?- and is it the entrance to a unlocking a larger percentage of the brain mass we don’t consciously use?

Woke up on 8/17/12
*Only remember fragments of some dreams
*Before the following dreams I had other lucid dreams. However, since I can’t remember the old ones I will only count the ones I remember into my total.
*My lucidity carried over from previous dreams, so I tried to remember to do reality checks in the following dreams.

Successful WILD
Successful reality checks

In no particular order:

1) The first thing I can remember is that I was in some plain area with fencing around it (The floor was probably just dirt). I remember being lucid in previous dreams so I attempted to hold on to my lucidity. I did a hand reality check and my hand seemed normal but because I was already lucid I tried to force something to happen. Soon my hands attached to each other and I had four fingers on the left side and three on the right. I don’t understand why I was so determined to perform a reality check when I was already lucid. I probably just wanted reassurance. I attempted flying first by jumping a few times, and I got higher and higher like I expected. Somehow, gravity was pulling me down and though I tried to fight it by jumping over and over I was unable to overcome it. It was as if there was a height limit and I wasn’t able to pass it. I was back to where I began my flying attempt and this time I tried to swing my arms up as hard as I possibly could. I did this a few times and went up higher than I expected, but after a brief moment of floating I could feel gravity pulling me down again. Once again I was back where I started and I began jumping again, but instead I turned a little to the left so that I was looking at the corner of the fence and I jumped forward bouncing myself over the fence and over a few small pieces of scenery that I cannot remember clearly. There was one obstacle that I believe was a wall. It looked green and I remember thinking that I wasn’t going to make it over, but I don’t remember what happened. The dream must have ended.

2) Like the previous dream, I was lucid from dreams that happened early in my sleep and tried to hold on to that lucidity. I was in some building with gray was walls, though the mood wasn’t at all scary or depressing. I was standing in the middle of what I can best describe as a doorway without a door in it. It was simply an opening into another room. The opening was about 10 feet wide and the walls were about half a foot to a foot thick. I looked down at my hands once again, trying to assure myself that I was lucid. I tried to concentrate on something being wrong with them and I think that eventually they did become odd in some way (I think I just keep looking and eventually I could see another finger on my left hand). The dream faded before I knew it.

3A) I was in my taekwondo class and people were practicing with nunchucks. I don’t remember many details besides the people who were there. When we were done my mom gave my friend a ride to our house. I went to the bathroom while he used our computer, but the view was of him at the computer.

*The following dream is somehow connected to the previous dream. It may be an alternate series of events starting from getting in the car.

3B) I am outside of a supermarket (I assume it is a Wal-Mart. This is explained in the dream notes in Section 3.1B). I get in my mom’s car and we are about to take someone home (Instead of being the friend from taekwondo he is a guy who used to go to my school). He gets out of the car and starts talking to his friends. While we are waiting he turns into a female dream character without me realizing it. I ask if she is coming and she waves us off. My mom begins driving and as the dream went on, I went from traveling in a car to pushing a shopping cart on foot. At one point, I push the shopping cart into a thin wooden board that was resting on a wire fence at a steep angle hoping to drive it over the wire fence by using the board (I don’t realize how odd my attempt is. The board was almost parallel to the fence). It doesn’t work, so I decided to back up to get more momentum. I run faster attempting to push the cart over the fence once again. It goes higher, but I am still unsuccessful. I leave the cart behind and easily climb over the fence. Behind it is a type of junkyard area with tan-colored dirt and a couple of tall huts made of some material of the same color (maybe even the same dirt) surrounding the area. The huts rest on a wall of dirt that surrounds the small area. I find it boring and proceed to different areas. As I explore I see elaborate playgrounds in different directions. One was in the distance in a wooded area. The playground was made of tall logs and had pointy roofs. I kept exploring and the biomes changed very quickly (in a way very similar to how biomes change in Minecraft. I’m in a grassy area one moment and ahead I would see a circular area of sand connecting to the beach; once I’m off the sand, there would suddenly be grass again. I eventually make it to some playground for a short period of time then start traveling again. For some reason, I’m looking for my school at one point. I reach it and the dream gets gray; it looks like it does on a cloudy afternoon. I go down one hallway and walk inside the office, though it looks nothing like the office in my school. I see two soda machines and two snack machines and I end up with wet paper towels in my hand which I try to stuff up the change compartment of the vending machines (This is explained in the dream notes in section 3.2B). A student next to me is doing the same and I make a comment about how I am surprised that he has also heard of the trick. I then say that I heard about it yesterday from a guy I knew. Behind us was a room with glass windows surrounding it. There were thin support beams in between the windows. My mom was sitting at a table in the room with two sodas.

Dream Notes:

General: The previous day, I performed more reality checks than I have ever done in one day. This contributed immensely to my lucidity and high level of awareness.

3.0B) I watched an episode of Wildest Police Videos the day before this dream. In one clip a man and his son were pulled over, but shot the cop and drove away. The police surrounded their car outside of a Wal-Mart and shot them. The scene in my dream was exactly the same as the scene in the clip (aside from the violence, cop cars, and guns of course).

3.1B) I volunteer at Habitat for Humanity. A guy I know there who is doing community service was getting a soda the day before this dream. He started talking to us about how he used to stuff paper towels up the change compartment to catch the change and take it out at the end of the day to see how much money would come out. This is what I was doing in the dream.

I've been using LaBerge's audios all this time. First, the one about MILD, but somewhere along the way, I changed to dream lotus and flame technique. After that, I used trance induction, at night and in the morning. Then it's just for the night induction. I think I had very minimal results when using ONLY the night trance induction.

Okay, let's see how much of this I can still remember... I haven't really had the chance to type up this entry until now.

I was at home, in the living room. The keyboard was there, right where it used to be (it's been in my room for ages now, though). For the purpose of having more space for the crowd of people, I'm assuming, the one couch not facing the TV was missing, and the room was slightly bigger.

There was this rope hanging from the ceiling, and I guess the part about people pulling it was fairly important, but I can't remember much of that now.

What I do remember is Andrea, a girl I sort of work with over the summer, running up the stairs and saying to me, "I thought you were going to be tighter."

As with many a strange thing a DC has said, I understood her meaning perfectly, despite her rather odd choice of words. She was referring to me resolving to be stricter with my reward system for LDing.

Apparently, she wasn't referring exclusively to my reward system, but also LDing techniques in general, as I replied, "I am; I write down my dreams every morning."

There's a small gap here that I can't quite remember now, but I do remember seeing my friend Giana shortly afterwards. I looked down at my hand as an RC, took note of the extra finger, then told her I'd be right back because I had to go to the bathroom. Clearly, my subconscious still had control over dream-me.

I went into the bathroom and closed the door. I'd heard that touch was a sense that was often overlooked in dreams, so I decided to pay attention to how things felt - the door handle, the floor (I had bare feet), the light switch, even my jeans as I pulled them down; they all felt just as they would IWL, and the door handle and floor even felt somewhat cold.

I got so carried away with paying attention to tactile sensations that I unintentionally closed my eyes so I could focus more on this sense. Almost as soon as I did, I realized my mistake, and sort of freaked out a little, as my previous experiences with closing my eyes had almost always resulted in me waking up.

Well, I didn't exactly wake up right away. The dream abruptly changed to a weird post on some forum that doesn't exist... and THEN I woke up.

I know I said in my first DJ entry starting on 5-11-12 that I will be posting all my DJ entries from May to August but that is just too much. So I will be posting a couple of dreams from each month that I feel are worth posting.

So I was having a school dream, which I have had about 3 or 4 in the last few weeks, and they have all been based around the same schedule and been going through the days of school. Yesterday I was supposed to go to my 2nd period, but I was forgetting which class was my 2nd class. I went to my first period class first which was Spanish, but it obviously wasn't my class and I didn't recognize anyone. I had to ask my girlfriend what class I was supposed to be in and she told me, so I went down the hall to my AP Lit class.
I went inside, and somebody told me they had a bug infestation but we were staying in there anyways. We were watching a documentary on bees, and the bugs that were in there were bees, spiders, and one more thing I don't remember. They were in designated areas across the room. At one point my dream was about to transform into another dream. There was some guy that said he could mess with the bees, hop on a motorcycle and get away from them. He tried it and EVERY bee chased after him and ended up killing him, but the bee infestation was gone. So that was a step up.
But then the dream began to change and I was on a boat I believe? I was with many people I had never seen and this part is pretty hazy. There were areas for each age group, up to 18 I believe. You were supposed to watch over the age group below you, so 17 - 18 watches over the 15-16 year olds. Which I am a part of. They would mess with us pretty often though. But it wasn't too big a deal. I don't remember much else, but a bunch of people were saying they saw a person that looked like Bruce Wayne, from Batman, but I didn't see it, but I did see that it was just my friend Trent. And he does not look much like him at all.

Apparently I got lucid last night but all I wrote down was this:

Lucid in old burned down basement. Keep having to lick walls to stay lucid. Trying to solve why it's burned down. Have a FA, mess around with powers and focus.

Too bad I don't remember the dream nor writing that down. It doesn't sound too awesome though

Sing me to sleep
Sing me to sleep
I'm tired and I
I want to go to bed

Sing me to sleep
Sing me to sleep
And then leave me alone
Don't try to wake me in the morning
'Cause I will be gone
Don't feel bad for me
I want you to know
Deep in the cell of my heart
I will feel so glad to go

Sing me to sleep
Sing me to sleep
I don't want to wake up
On my own anymore

Sing to me
Sing to me
I don't want to wake up
On my own anymore

Don't feel bad for me
I want you to know
Deep in the cell of my heart
I really want to go

There is another world
There is a better world
Well, there must be
Well, there must be
Well, there must be
Well, there must be
Well ...

Bye

Asleep -- The Smiths

Long time since I wrote here, but I still kept an offline dream journal. Internet problems.

I have mostly been working with Stephen LaBerge's audio, particularly the one about progressive relaxation, spiral staircase and butterfly. It was helpful in remembering dreams, but most of the time, I'm already asleep before I reach the butterfly state, or I'm too carried away by the hypnagogic images to listen to the audio.

On the other hand, fairly recently, I downloaded Ninja9578's audio, Subliminal Lucid 1.0, and listened to it. I listened to it several months ago, but it was a salad case. I.e., I was listening to several others, and doing various techniques at a time. It was the ultimate of shiny object syndrome in LD.

Anyway, I wanted to isolate which one is effective for me, coz I did have good results back then. I returned to LaBerge's, but after a few weeks, it shows very, very minimal results, even in remembering dreams. On the other hand, it's only been a few days since I experimented with Ninja's audio, and already I had MUCH CLEARER dreams. I can also remember more of my dreams than before. Then again, in one case I drank Jasmine tea, so I'm not sure if that had anything to do with it. I also encountered a freaky sleep paralysis, although it wasn't as scary as my first one some months back.

I'm also planning with experimenting with Mugwort. Not tea, coz I heard it tastes awful. I'll probably just do a smudging of my room or something.

I'll transfer my dreams here soon. It's a good time to read them all again and find out if I can see any pattern.

Two dreams again ._.

Casually watching youtube on the microwave

I remember watching on the microwave, specifically 2-3 videos on Nintendo 64 best games countdowns. I watch the last video, and my dad comes out to the kitchen, and I start talking to him about the Nintendo 64. He recognizes some game I have never heard of, then I remember the countdown hitting #2, then the dream ends.

I then see my dream friend wake up, and he is a bit depressed that he remembers none of his dreams the previous night. I then tell him what precisely happened in his dream, like I was a bystander or something.

"Epic" house fight

Okay, so me, my brother, and my mom are at my grandparents' house, and I either have my psp, or my yo-yo with me. If it was my psp, it was dead, if it was my yo-yo, it had no string. Either way, I could not use either one, so I just had it in my pocket. Due to boredom my grandma suggests we go digging for something of which I can not remember. So we grab two quite heavy chairs, three small shovels, go into a van, and take off. We go up a mountain, but on the way up, we go around three corners, all of which have a lake next to them, you have to drive a bit into the water to get around and up.(Deja vu moment. Not sure if I dreamed of this place before, or what.) We end up at the top, and we see about 3 homes, and a lot of land. We put the 3 shovels in a soft spot in the dirt in someone's front yard, and I am sitting there wondering why we were doing this, and if one of us owned this land or something. My mom and I sit down in the heavy chairs, and wait two to three minutes, then grandma grabs one shovel and says "they need to be taken out like this, one jerk to the back, to knock the dirt out, but keep the ___(...Something. Don't remember what) in." So what is left on the shovel is what looks like granola bars, but I assume it is some vegetable. We do the same to the other shovels, and next thing I know we are back at my grandparent's home(Dream home, doesn't have the same appearance as the real one).

I look in the street and there are archers and swordsmen standing there, after something of which I do not know. They all sort of stand down, so we think we are safe, but as they start dispersing, one man who looks like Boromir from Lord of the Rings keeps his bow fired straight at me. He shoots it, and I dodge, running to the backyard.
A huge fight ensues, and I try to gather reinforcements. I see two cats with about 6 six kittens, and somehow know they will help. Oddly they were located behind a fence in the backyard, which had another fence behind it. I keep walking, and see some pigeons, I see them, say that we are in danger, they all fly off, but I think they are on our side. I think see a huge tree get up and start gathering bushes and other trees to help. The big tree reminded me of an ent. I see a pigeon, and hold on to it, it brings me way into the air, and drops me, I grab onto a nearby tree, and climb down. Then the dream sort of ended.

I do not think either of these as being fragment dreams, they were both pretty entertaining, I'd say my dream recall is getting much better

In the first dream, I was on a snowy mountain with my family. There was one gap that we had to jump across. My brother tried to jump across. I thought he was going to fall, but he didn't. I decided I wanted to go back anyway because I didn't want to have to jump across.

In the second, there was a little boy who was crying. He looked to be around eight or nine years old. I was trying to comfort him. I can't remember why he was upset, though. There were a bunch of other people around, and we were all trying to cheer him up. I don't remember what they were saying.

In my third dream from last night, I was playing Petz 5. I could tell almost right away that things were wrong. First of all, when I started the game, it was outside the Adoption Center with several dogs running around and deep snow on the ground. This isn't what seemed wrong, though, even though adopted pets can't come out at the Adoption Center and there is only ever snow on the ground in the Snow Scene (however, this I assumed was because it was winter, so everywhere outdoors should be snow-covered).

I looked through the list of pets and saw several weird names I didn't recognize. I thought that was weird but figured maybe it was because one of my dogs had had puppies since last time I'd played. I clicked on one of the puppies, and, sure enough, the scene changed to the Nursery, and the puppies all came out with the... father? I thought this was odd, since only mothers and their offspring are allowed in the Nursery, and especially since I didn't even recognize the name of the father, Luminoso, a black dog.

When I checked the list of playscenes, I could tell that something was definitely wrong. There were some I didn't recognize. I clicked on the one above the Backyard with a long, weird name. It looked similar to the Backyard, yet slightly different. I then went to the Backyard, which was now very different. I realized that the other playscene must have been the Garden (which doesn't exist in-game IWL). Suddenly, a dragon rose out of the sky!

Fearing I may have to uninstall and re-install my game, I went to the Petz website, hoping to find an easy fix. It was around this point that I noticed the computer screen was on the freezer door, in place of the ice dispenser, which seemed... perfectly normal, of course.

Anyway, I couldn't find the solution on their website, so I decided to check Google, just in case, but I woke up before I could, thankful that my game still works normally!

Okay, here's what I remember from last night...

The first one I remember was at my house. In my room, in front of my TV, there was a box full of VHS tapes and DVDs. These were in the "library", so they would come and go as people "checked out" and "returned" them (people didn't actually come into my room; they would go to the library, where checking out a video would cause it to disappear from my room, while returning one would cause it to reappear).

One of the videos was The Minish Cap (a movie based off of the Zelda game, I'm guessing); I decided I'd come back for it later so I could watch it with my friend Lizz. It was on a VHS tape, by the way.

When I came back later (I can't remember any parts of the dream in between), it had been checked out already. However, it was available on DVD, but I didn't want that one because I wanted to watch it in my room (which doesn't really make sense, since I have a DVD player AND a VCR in my room, so either would work).

After waking up from that, I decided to attempt DEILD again. I was barely awake when I woke up, which I figured was good for DEILD. I decided I wanted to enter a Zelda-related dream, so I pictured the first Zelda-related thing I could think of: the Spirit Train. I probably could've come up with something better, like a specific location, but keep in mind that my mind was far from fully awake at the time.

Anyway, I quickly slipped into a dream, but, instead of a lucid dream, I entered a false lucid dream instead (i.e., I had control but didn't know I was dreaming). When I woke up from it, it actually took me a moment to actually figure out if that had been a dream or if I'd just imagined it while still partially awake (like in hypnagogia), but I concluded that it was definitely a dream because, although the actual memory of it was really fuzzy (making it harder to tell), I could definitely remember being able to see everything (as opposed to just knowing it's there without actually seeing it, like in daydreaming or visualization).

Anyway, shortly after entering the dream, the Spirit Train disappeared. I quickly concluded that it had disappeared because there were no tracks, so I made the Spirit Tracks appear and summoned the Spirit Train again. I did this by just wanting it to appear, which caused it to appear right before my eyes (I'm assuming this worked because I knew it was supposed to be there and had been there just moments before). The rest of the dream consisted of me making the Spirit Train reappear a few more times (since it kept disappearing) before waking up.

I had another dream last night, in which a bunch of girls were using my laptop to look at pictures of Martin Luther King, Jr. for some reason. I went outside to the backyard (my backyard). I could the local elementary school next door, which, for some reason, seemed perfectly normal. Anyway, there were these guys outside, and they used some weird handheld device to fire an electromagnetic pulse into the air, which caused a pulsating ball of light to appear in the sky.

I had one final dream, in which I was watching Doctor Who. The episode started with a dream that Amy Pond was having. It was rather surreal and... not like a dream. It would show an image of her against a white background, then switch to a quick scene from her dream (the background never changed, though), then back to the first image, then onto another dream, and so on. One of the scenes was the Doctor kissing her...

Anyway, shortly after she woke up, I woke up.

[CENTER][SIZE="7"][COLOR="red"][FONT="Impact"]PLAN OF ACTION[/FONT][/COLOR][/SIZE][/CENTER]

[FONT="Courier New"]My first goal in my lucid dreaming practice was to find a way to easily induce at least one lucid moment each week. I have noticed that I have fulfilled that goal now and I have learned what makes that possible and what's not.

Dream recall is the first priority because that is first of all required to remember any lucid experience at all and second of all it makes the dreamer more aware, the dream more vivid and therefore more easier to become lucid in.
So keep a pen and a piece of paper by the bed and write down any dreams that you remember in the morning, after some time you will be so aware that you start to notice your micro-awakenings in the night after each dream and can record it in better detail and with a fresher memory.

The second priority is the bedtime. If I go to bed too late, my dream recall will be low, harder to be aware of, and therefore harder to become lucid in. Going to bed at an regular or earlier time gives the opposite effect:
high dream recall, easier to be aware of and easier to become lucid in.

The third priority is the mindset. A stressed out or worried mind mind is as bad as a late bedtime and therefore very important. That's why aiming for general higher awareness of the dream is better than aiming for the lucidity itself.
Easier to imagine and easier to fulfill. If one doesn't succeed one night you got to have the mindset of there's always another night.

These three simple steps is what have helped me induce lucid dreams every week frequently. I wrote this mini guide to remind myself of the power behind these factors and to help people who needs it learn from my experience.

Even though I get lucid often, it doesn't mean that they last for long. Usually 10 seconds to one minutes.
And I have tried all sorts of different stabilization techniques from spinning, hand rubbing, engaging the other senses etc. They work from time to time, but it's far from frequent.

So that is my new goal. Find away to easily stabilize the dream. I have been to focused on the lucid induction part so I have completely ignored the stabilization as can been seen in this Dream Journal. I have always trusted that my dreaming mind will become more clear automatically at some point and that I could figure out a way to stabilize at the spot.
And it did happen sometimes, but I was always to focused on the thoughts I had before I got lucid and focused on unnecessary things like trying to convince a dream character that they were dreaming, learning to fly when I am barely lucid, hitting on hot girls... You get the idea. So now I am going to have a plan of action, something that should be the first thing that comes to mind while I am lucid and doing it instantly. I will cycle through all the different stabilization techniques again to really see the effects of each one.

But that's the first priority in the goal of stabilization, a plan of action.
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I've done alot of reading up on it and I've been telling myself to master DILDs first. But after this month I've had a change of heart. I'm going to master both WILDs and DILDs I need more control over my sleeping pattern and I'm truthfully (and regrettably) becoming impatient with the results that DILD is producing alone. I would either have an LD and then lose all of the minimal control that I already have by doing something stupid and extravagant (Like a Kamehameha wave). I'd rush the LD, or I'd become too exited and go into a free falling tailspin and get knocked so hard that i'm in twilight. And I have no say about what happens because of my excitement. So I'm going to preform and try WILDs every night before sleep (which I know is a no no; it should be 4 to 5 hours into sleep) until I get it. I already have some knowledge of what a partial WILD is because I've been up to the hallucination level more than once. But I used to get freaked out and wonder if I was going crazy because I'd hear voices so many times. So if anyone has any comments, criticisms, questions, concerns, let me know because I'm going into this head first, and I'm not stopping. Until I can do both or at least one of them.