side notes

No dream recall these past two nights 'cause I was on camp. Back to dreaming now. yay!

a
February 20, 2011

I walk into an area that has a lot of shelves with all kinds of stuff on them. I pick up a fake plastic tree that’s standing in the way and put it on a table and realize that I just knocked off the top half of the tree. I look around to see if it is laying somewhere and see a lot of other stuff. I look back at the tree only to see it is a dog now but this makes sense to me because it is half, like the tree. I feel really sorry for this half dog and can see inside his halved intestines and think about if the other half will still connect and if he will be OK. Then there is a girl there and she is upset at the dog being halved. She yells “this is all your fault!” Me: “He’ll be ok don’t worry so much.” “you don’t understand he’s just a DOG!” Me: “We’ll get his parts and he’ll be ok!” I then take the half body outside and put it down gently. I go back inside but no one is in there now, there was a guy around too but he didn’t say anything. I went outside again confused and the dog was walking around! He only had 3 legs but at least he was improving!

I see some similarities to other dreams I have been having. “be ok don’t worry so much” were the words from another dream a few days ago. I will heed my subconscious’ warning and not worry so much.

Edit: 2/25/2011
I walked inside a building the other day I heard a girl yell "It'll be OK don't worry so much" to her friend. I was shocked by this and hurriedly walked around a corner and did a RC! I have been hearing this statement so much lately, dreams and waking life.

Dream Lucid Sleep Paralysis Non-Dream/Side notes

This dream was scary and yet fun. I don't remember what took place when. I dreamt that I was joining a different school, Oakmead (this school does exist in real life, however I have no idea what it looks like). I was being shown around by some old guy and I remember two buildings kind of like the ones in the level of THPS2 called school II, and I remember at some point being in a classroom/office on a second, higher floor with huge crowds of people protesting against something.



The place that reminded me of school II from THPS2



The road to the school and the second floor.

The road to the school I also remember. The crowd stopped halfway down it. I remember being in a crowd of students entering the school too but it felt like I had been there for ages.

I was reminded of this dream by stumbling across the name of the school on facebook.

It really irritated me that I didn't reality check during this dream because what happened in it definitely isn't normal.

Update, 2016: I went in to their sixth form. It was nothing like the dream. Hilarious though, reading back on what my 13-year-old self dreamed about.

Note: The past two nights I've had dreams about red shirts. My old job dream two entries ago, I was wearing one particular red shirt I own. Tonight, and after I recorded this entry, my girlfriend came over. She brought with her the very shirt I had dreamed about. I had no idea she had taken in it, or that it wasn't in my laundry basket.

It's possible, even likely in this instance, that subconsciously I was aware it was missing.

I was modding my ps2

god my recall is rubbish

Dream Lucid Sleep Paralysis Non-Dream/Side notes

This dream was odd because even when I was awake I didn't realize that I remembered it as a dream. But then I did that thing where you think how you got there and realized it was all a dream.

I was sat with a group of friends in the school canteen (for any americans that read this, 'cafeteria'), with a row of chairs dividing us. My friend was on a table with a girl she hates (she has reason to) looking all stranded, and my other friend (her boyfriend) was sat on the table with her. On the other side of the wall of chairs was me, my friend's welsh half-brother (or some shit like that) and another friend of mine. There were various other people scattered around as well. I remember having a conversation with my friend's brother (I'm not typing half-brother all the time) about something or other and then I encouraged my friends to move to our side of the chair, away from the people that they hated. Skip forward a few minutes.

I dropped my food all over the floor and I think I burst out laughing and then some angry lunchlady came over and told me to get out of the canteen (cafeteria).

I stayed though, and got a second chance. Some more conversation went on (I forgot what was being said) between everybody, and then I dropped my iPod on the floor. I burst out laughing again (I think) and the lunchlady grew muscles or something (I vaguely recall) and dragged me out.

The sky turned dark, to nighttime. I walked in to a house which seemed to just pop up in the middle of the school and began suiting up or something and then walked back in to the canteen and sat down (it went to day again at this point).

I remember another dreamlet as well, which was bought on by my non-stop Scrubs marathon over the past few days. JD and elliot were in a banana farm with some rows of neatly cut bushes, and they walked down the banana farm with baskets full of bananas. I was watching it on my PC like I've been watching scrubs recently, which leads me to believe that if I keep trying, reality checks will flood through much like Scrubs has and I'll finally have a second lucid dream.

I've also added a dream goal in my dream journal to recreate the lunchlady and brutally murder her the next time I become lucid.

This was at least a week ago. It's a somewhat memorable dream from the last few weeks of my being lazy about journaling. Anyway, let's get on with it.

Calling SO
Method DILD (spontaneous)
Lucidity C
Vividness C
Control D
I become lucid somehow, I don't recall. I think I'm in my living room. I'm waiting for someone? I'm impatiently pacing back and forth across the room. Maybe I'm not really lucid. It's hard to remember. It's was vivid enough to be memorable and what I do next is something I've done at least twice in past lucids.

I don't want to be kept waiting so I decide to call someone. Who? SO. I pull out my cell phone from my pocket. It's brightly colored with small icons that I can't make out. I confidently smash the keypad to hit a few random buttons. It's funny that I would expect that to work, but it does. Then I listen as it rings and rings with no answer.

So, what's interesting about this dream is that I've tried to call SO before in lucid dreams and she never answers. But oddly, I had an experience in real life when I was sleepwalking and called her and she did answer. Apparently, she and I had a conversation that I have no memory of. The next day, I pieced together most of what happened with her help but I have no direct memory of it. That experience often bothers me, so I suspect it's coming through in my dreams. I wonder if have those memories in my unconscious.

My Notes
Non-lucid
Lucid
Awake

The first dream began outside my friend's old house. I'm at the bottom of the hill, when I find an old and very rusty watch. It had a small key with it that went into the back. I bring it home and try to unlock it. It doesn't unlock, so I jam a screwdriver into the back.
I'm at school, outside my lockers again. The watch looks different. It now is shiny, and it glows. I show everyone how it has strange little mechanicals under the glass. I drop the key somewhere and can't find it. I look up to find my teacher, Mr T, passing it to me with a grin on his face.
I'm in a new building I've never been in before, still with the watch. It now has a large wide-screen on it which has a red button on it to the left. I press it to see what it does. Two people pop up on the screen, kissing. I then realise it's a porno button. "That's odd," I think, and do the nose-plug RC. For a moment, everything is in third person and I'm watching myself do the RC. The first few times my hands slip, but then I get it right, and I become lucid. Although I was lucid, it was a very low level of lucidity.
I turn around and see a window the size of the wall. The sky is completely blue, and there's a great big beach-city below me. I'm at least 100 floors up. I turn back around and see two people. One dares me to jump off. I say I'll parachute down. I think the dream ended either then and there, or a few moments later just as I jumped.

Second dream (this was one of those dreams that made no sense whatsoever): I'm in my bedroom. In my cupboard I have lots of board games in a black vertical board game rack. I really loved owning them all. A black tower, the same height and diameter as my board game stack, appears in the middle of my room. I'm concerned that it's going to replace my board games.

Third dream:I'm in my bed, but I'm in the top bunk instead of the bottom. I become lucid straight away. The first thing I notice is how dark it is (darkness is much more scary in dreams I think). I close my eyes and expect it to be day when I open them. This doesn't work. I try a second time and notice the the wall to my right has a very feint glow, but still there was no real light, so I decide to just leave it there.
I run out of my room, reminding myself to stay lucid. I run into the front room. My older brother is sitting in the main chair. I manage to say "Hi," before the dream ends.

Fourth dream: I'm on a computer, sitting next to some guy I don't know. I show him someone's youtube account. I notice that page has 31 dislikes. I didn't know you could even dislike a channel. I find out that I had accidentally gone into my channel. I notice he writes down my username. Embarrassed about him going on my channel, I contemplate deleting it.

Fifth dream (only a fragment): I see nothing but a page of a book. I know that my eyes are closed. I try to read it, but it eventually gets harder and harder to read. As I read it out loud, I notice that I'm barely paying attention to what I'm reading and won't remember it.
This may not have been a dream, but me seeing HI in a daze, just after waking up. It was most likely a dream though.

Sixth dream(also a fragment): I'm at the Year 9 Centre at my school. Some girl walks past with dark green hair. A person tells me how green is now an official hair colour now. What she meant by that was: people can now be born with green hair and have it in there genes. Even though it's different, I like the new colour.

Seventh dream:I'm in third person, watching two young Asian girls walk around an abandoned dock. The eldest one walks inside the building, which had walls that appeared to be made of a bright wood, and finds a switched-on laptop. She goes further down and discovers two more switched-on laptops. For some reason this gives her the impression that the owners of the laptops must be in danger, and she panics. They both climb the roof and start yelling and waving to a boat in the distance.

Eighth and final dream: I'm inside... somewhere. Two people are standing next to a narrow tunnel that goes up on a 45ish degree angle. One of them keeps throwing little stones up it. He says it's to distract someone who wants to steal an important orange stone. I remember thinking to myself how, in this strange and big world, police would never know how to deal with this, and these guys are right to deal with the situation themselves.
I climb the narrow tunnel. At the top is a dark blue ocean at night. There's a lone wooden boat with only one man on it. He looks a little bit like a demon. I get on board and wrestle him into a headlock. One of the guys instructed I drown him. For a moment, he turns into a purple book. He's now in his true form: a young looking man with blond hair, and light-brown body hair. He looks just like one of those half animal half human anime drawings you see all over the internet. I finally get him in a headlock and put my hand over his mouth. I see by the look on his face, he's no longer an evil person, just scared looking. As I have him in the headlock, I can feel all over my body his warmth. It was equivalent to leaning against your partner, only dream-amplified. Straight away I feel connected to him, then I feel sorry for him, as I now have to drown him.
I pull himself and I overboard. I watch him closely. I can't let him go till I know he's lost conscientiousness. I begin to struggle to hold my breath. I try to distract myself from the need to breath, and then I wake up.

Eight dreams... New personal record?

I tried to do a WILD in a nap because I had some spare time. I never experienced any of what people described as sleep paralysis or HI. There were two times that I nearly slipped into dreaming, but I suddenly pulled out again? There was one moment where I was counting... 166...167... A random thought (the beginning of a dream) began to unfold, then it went away... 168...169

I had gym this arvo so I thought I'd be tired enough to do it, obviously not

There is this little thing I remember, I'm not sure if I'm right, but I think I saw an orangey haired person standing behind a counter in a kitchen...

its was a WBTB and i knew i was dreaming before the dream started. i was looking at some pipes that had a control box above them. i flipped some switches to fix something and i was explaining something to a girl i know in reality. i got bored with that so i tried to change who the girl was. i told her to change into another girl i knew in reality. she did change, but into the wrong person. she changed to my mom. i got a little frustrated so i walked down some steps(away from her) to find other people to try and control. my mom followed me. i thought i'd try to change her again. i told her to change into the other girl. she tried but ended up becoming disfigured. it was like she was duplicating but stopped before separating. she had disgusting figure. her head was expanded in the back, and there were several veins. i was a little freaked and still aggravated so i walked away, and she didnt follow me. i walked towards a group of people and tried to vocally tell them to do something(cant remember) they didnt listen and my older brother came up behind me and grabbed my hands and put them behind me. i knew i was in control so i told myself that when i will try to break out of his hold i will be stronger than him. but as i tried to pull away, he was still stronger. he let go on his own, laughing, and walked away. i walked the other direction. after walking away i noticed that my senses were getting extremely dull. everything felt like it was made out of rock. even the people in my dreams.

notes:
didnt focus on my senses[VERY IMPORTANT]
i was very aware i was dreaming but forgot the important steps to keeping control

Awake, Non-lucid, Semi-lucid, Lucid, [Commentary made while awake]

[I had several different dreams last night, two of which were lucid.]

[Dream #1] I'm playing Neopets. [In this particular dream,] Neopia is a fully-realized, three-dimensional world, but it's still a computer game that I'm playing using a mouse. The art looks just like it does on the real site. The game is played from a first-person perspective, and there are lots of rooms and areas to explore [just like the plot adventures on the real Neopets Web site]. One such area is filled with Neopets who are dressed in vaguely Arabian-looking clothes; they all have their noses covered with veils, which strikes me as somewhat ridiculous, since they all have such different shapes and sizes of noses. This scene makes me think, So Neopia does have something resembling an Islamic culture. I click my way into a hidden area and receive a special reward for finding it.

[Dream #2] I walk into my family's house, which is big and spacious and has two stories [and looks nothing at all like any of our real ones. House #2, our only two-story house, was nowhere near that big and was laid out very differently]. Suddenly, there are several men in the house with me. They're there to challenge me to a martial-arts tournament. I had known in advance that this challenge was coming. In the course of my conversation with them [which I don't really remember now], one of them eventually says that there is no challenge. Having become semi-lucid at some point during the conversation, I say boldly and firmly, “I have better things to do.” I begin making my way out of the house.

Then, I hear my mom yelling from behind me that the house is on fire and I should get out. I do so, thinking, I know I should just get out without stopping to try and rescue other people. I go out the front door and walk down a front walk that leads to a fairly high, steep flight of concrete stairs, which leads down a steep embankment, at the bottom of which are the public sidewalk and the street. I jump off the top step to get down to the front sidewalk more quickly. I fall in a long, slow arc, taking several seconds to get down, and land softly and gently on my feet. I had kind of known I was going to fall that way; I always do in dreams.

By this point, I'm definitely lucid. From the street, I take off and fly up over the neighborhood. Once again, it takes me two tries to take off. After the first time, I realize, I messed up – I wasn't concentrating right. I try again, kicking off with my right ankle and thinking about becoming airborne, as I always do, and this time it works. Flight feels like it always does, too.

I fly up and observe the neighborhood from above. I can see a little bit of the fire coming from the house I just left. After a minute or two, I land back on the street and see a little model of a single-story house standing on a table. I examine the model, concentrating on it, and succeed in making tiles blow off the roof with my mind. This action is directly inspired by the scene in Inception where they're at the cafe and the dream starts collapsing when Ariadne first realizes that they're dreaming. While I'm making the model blow itself to pieces, I think about how, when the characters from the movie are dreaming, they might use Michael Caine's name [*see Side Notes at end] in exclamations of surprise/anger/frustration, etc., as if he were their deity, because he was the inventor of the dream-sharing technology. I immediately dismiss this as a silly idea, though. I keep up what I'm doing, and eventually blow away all the broken-up pieces of the roof, exposing the interior of the model. It has separate rooms inside. There's a small, light brown, flea-like insect inside, with a sort of sail on its back. I know that the insect is my dad. [I don't even know.] I let it crawl onto my finger, rescuing it from the destruction of the model and setting it down gently outside the model.

This scene is immediately followed by an animated sequence of two foxes romping around in a grassy field and falling in love. I know that this means that both of my parents are still alive and got out of the burning house all right.

[Dream #3] I'm outside, in the daytime, on a series of tiled walkways, terraces, and stairways, elevated and built into the side of a hill. Some boy is following me around, singing a creepy version of some children's song at me, changing the words all around to suggest that he would like to do something sexual with me. At the end of the second or third repetition of the short song, I stop, sing the end of the verse for him, then smack him in the face. Then, a passing man helps me throw the offending boy over a wall and down a long flight of stairs. I see him get up after he reaches the bottom, and am glad to see that he can still get up and that nothing's broken.

The scene shifts slightly, and now I'm on the surface-level streets, walking around a city that I remember visiting in a dream before. [Except now I don't – false memory, apparently.] The city is bright and clean and filled with big trees. There is a train station across the street from where I'm walking. On my side of the street, there is an enlarged replica of one of the stores on Main St. at Disneyland. Upon seeing the prominent train station, I remark that my dream city doesn't necessarily have to be in the States; it could just as easily be in the UK. [This, despite the fact that said train station had a sign on the outside that very clearly read “Amtrak.”]

I walk in the main entrance to the store that replicates the one from Disneyland, and find myself in a shop that is part of a mall. I walk through that first shop and into a second one that resembles a Hot Topic (all the walls are painted black), only it's girlier (there are a lot more dresses). This store also has living mannequins that look exactly like the ones they have at Old Navy. One of these mannequins tells me that she wants to try on the dress I'm wearing, which I had gotten from that store earlier. It's a strapless, knee-length black sundress with little pink polka dots, pink lace decorating the top of the bodice, and a pink tulle underskirt part that makes the skirt puff out. There are lots of similar dresses on the racks in the store. [For some strange reason,] I'm wearing mine over the T-shirt and shorts I was already wearing. I'm really enjoying just walking around, exploring this dream. I exclaim aloud, “My mind is so awesome!”

I walk out of that store and around a corner, through one of the hallways that form the connecting core of the mall. I find myself wishing I could change out of the shorts I'm wearing under my dress, and just wear the dress. I go into another store, this one a Sephora. While I was in there, the dream ended.

---------------------------------------
Side notes:

*Michael Caine's character's name is Stephen Miles (per the shooting script); that's what the other characters would say if they were to do that. I forgot that while dreaming, though.

Last night, when doing mental affirmations while falling asleep, I focused more on recalling the memory of what it feels like to be in a lucid dream, recalling past lucid dreams, and visualizing and imagining what it would have been like if I had become lucid in one of my memorable non-lucids. It worked really well.

As I was taught when I first tried to ski, people who are right-handed are generally right-footed as well, and are instinctively inclined to lead with their right foot and do most of their controlling of their movement with their right foot when skiing or snowboarding. I'm very pleased and not at all surprised to discover that this principle applies to my flying in dreams as well. I'm right-handed (and right-footed) in real life, and from the beginning, I've always instinctively used my right foot and ankle to kick off from the ground and launch myself into a takeoff.

a
2/18/2011

Mall Hospital

All one long dreaming marathon, I'd conservatively guess at an hour in duration.

Its night and I am flying around over some highways. [I find myself doing this often, I fly following the highway, this often turns into a driving dream.] I see a shipping port off to left and for some reason think that Superman's evil friends are coming into town. Then they are supposed to be in the car I am in. Then I imagine they are shooting lasers out their eyes at the under part of the over pass but I know they aren’t really here at all.

I am exploring in a building. There is no one in there but imagine there is and I am fighting them, almost like how a kid imagines that his action figures are real. I hide behind this and that and throw a flask of exploding oil. I feel that I would have won at this point and leave through the double doors.
I am in a mall like place with a lot of different people, hundreds, of all ages. I walk around and see some places that look like hospital rooms and those hospital desks where the professionals sit and do their work.

This huge mall hospital had a children’s section which I found after much walking. I saw one boy looking up at a hanging mobile. It was a colorful fish I thought. I saw water dripping from it and thought it might be the air conditioner moisture dripping down or the boy has a secret stash of liquid explosives up there dripping because of a leak! I liked the second idea and started looking around for a bomb. Bored, I walked outside after a little walking around looking in potted plants and stuff.

There was a large parking lot out here. I walked onto a grassy median and saw a penny on the ground and being a penny collector I bent to pick it up when I saw 2 more, then 2 more. They were covered in dirt and I could feel the grains of dirt between the pennies and thought I could clean them later. There were some teens boy and girl talking and flirting by their car who were caught off guard by me. I hoped I didn’t look like a dork picking up pennies off the ground.

Dreamy Feelings
Napping

I closed my eyes to rest a bit but did not want to become fooled by the deception of dreaming. Each time I would start to dream I'd catch it and come back to just being in darkness. I came to see that I really liked the feeling of letting go and letting my dreaming entertain me. This became the feeling I was fighting. It would be like being in a really good movie and trying to avoid it dragging you in. After about ten minutes of this I woke up surprisingly refreshed.

I am feeling there is a big entertainment quality to our dreams, that we need to some extent, this may be what is so refreshing about sleeping. It felt like my consciousness was a heavy load that I could put down and rest from. This feeling is in opposition to the euphoria of LDing. Its like saying you can't enjoy the play if you're its director. Still I will find a way to reliably become the regular director on a regular basis. It may just take denial of the seductive pleasures of letting go and letting the dreamy feeling entertain you.

My Notes
Non-lucid
Lucid
Awake

I remember dreaming I was having a lucid dream. I was having fun driving around in circles in a car. I kept fiddling with the gear lever, which only went up and down, wondering why it didn't work.

Oh. and I'm also going to be trying out the "Instant-WILD technique by Michael Raduga. Check out this thread.

I was moving up the main cross street to my house. The hill gets very steep at one point, and this is a point I'm very familiar with and had many dreams near in the past. As I reached the stop sign, I noticed a car spinning out of control two houses down on a cross street. It slammed into a house and destroyed the front of it with a crashing noise.

I (oddly) immediately went looking for people walking nearby to show what happened. I assembled a small group, all within about 50-ft. I insisted they come take a look at what happened. When we passed the steep part of the street, I noticed it was no longer a street. It was painted red and not wide enough to fit cars. I brushed off the weirdness of that - and walked to the location of the accident. There instead, was a showroom with an awesome looking gray sports car. Press agents were around it taking pictures.

One of the people in my crowd, a blond woman says (in a frustrated tone) "Hey, I thought you said there was an accident!?" To which I replied: "I guess it was a dream."

Another throw away dream but again displays my newly fragmented dreamscape...

This journal will serve as a record of my experimentation with Lucid Dreaming, and will be supplemented with another (unpublished) journal to keep track all lucid and non-lucid dreams. Currently, there are 3 different experiments I will be running:


Using Lucid Dreaming to Create False Memories

Using Meditation During a Lucid Dream to Extend Perceived Dream-Time

Using Lucid Dream to Accurate Observe the Waking Reality

Spoiler for More Details:

There will be a total of 20 trials, and each trial will consist of the following routine:

1.) I will be using a single multi-colored cube in a sealed plastic globe. The cube is 2" x 2" x 2" and the globe is 6" in diameter.



2.) Without looking (or with the assistance my of my wife) the globe will be shaken 10 times, allowing the cube to settle on a color unknown to me (of 6 possible colors).



3.) I will proceed to induce an LD.

4.) While dreaming, I will observe the color of the upper-most face of the cube.

5.) After coming to, I will note the color I observed while dreaming, and then note the actual color of the cube in the globe.

6.) I will then record the data here and in my unpublished journal.

7.) I shall repeat this sequence of steps until all 20 trials have been completed

8.) After step 7 is satisfied, I will then calculate the Binomal Distribution (probability) of my results.