side notes

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

I'm taking a shower at my current house, getting my hair wet [I actually had short hair in a dream for once! I think that may be a first], when I notice that the shower curtain has these white mold florets (they look kind of like broccoli florets, except with an open space in the middle) growing out of it, in addition to the flat, green mold that was already there. I say, “Pretty!” when I see the white ones.

I woke up and remembered my dream. I thought briefly of going to check the actual shower curtain to see if it was moldy, but then said to myself, “That would require getting up, now wouldn't it?” I didn't want to get up yet.

I'm in my old neighborhood, the one where Houses #1 and #2 are located. I'm on a short, connecting street that slopes slightly downhill [it does that in real life as well as in the dream]. I'm hopping up and down on one foot. I observe that this action feels the same and produces the same results as it would in reality. [Though, in retrospect, I was hopping at least two feet off the ground and falling back down really slowly, or at least I perceived the falling as happening really slowly.] All at once, when I realize what I'm doing and how strange this situation is, I realize that I'm dreaming, and I say, “Oh, g**d*****.”

I decide to walk around and explore. All the streets are laid out just as they are in reality. I walk up the short, connecting street I was on, turn right, and follow the curve of one of the big, main streets until I get to the corner where another main street branches off from it. From there, I look off into the distance to the southeast, and see a panorama of lots and lots of houses reaching far into the distance on a gentle downhill slope. I also see random images on the horizon, such as a guy who might have been a hockey player. “Wow, you can see really far here!” I remark. The sky is blue-gray and filled with gray storm clouds.

I rub my hands together to keep this dream going. It feels normal to me [at the time; I realize now that it felt different from what it feels like in reality], but when I look at them, they look multiplied, like I'm looking at them from several angles at the same time. I say softly to myself, “Increase clarity,” but it doesn't seem to do anything.

A bunch of cars have stopped on the sides of the main street I'm on, to the north of me, and a bunch of people are getting out of them. I know not to trust them, so I turn and start walking away from them. Then the dream faded and I woke up.

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Side notes:
It's been an interesting week. A lot has been going on in real life (don't worry, it's good stuff), and I've learned that I have many other things to do with my time that are more important than keeping up this journal. I'll still post when I have something new to post, just not as frequently as I did in the fall.

Fragment 1

A strange dream about people just sitting in their highchair like things, facing me, touching their index fingers together like my 9 month old does.
Something falls down from a tray in front of one of them... Is that my son?

Fragment 2

A woman trying to park her car in a steep parkade. It's a tiny parkade, very tightly parked cars. She pulls in too close to the wall on the right side and pushes back (and squishes) her side mirror

Yet Another Wedding

Now I'm shopping for wedding dresses. I don't know what possesses me to try on the one with banana print, I think it's cheap and I have a feeling I am on a really tight budget. I'm horrified at how ugly it is, and how ugly it looks on me. I am even more horrified and upset when I get something on it! I try to get it off, but when I scratch the stain with my nail it turns darker. Panic!

I'm in a taxi and going to a club with a friend and her boyfriend. We're talking. When we arrive he goes up to get drinks from the bar during our conversation about going out. He says as he's walking away from us that when he's upset or angry with his girlfriend, he goes out to the club. He smiles as he stops for a second and says "When I'm upset you know I'm not so Bo-Bo". Then he continues to the bar for the drinks. I know what he means by the statement. Bo-Bo is his name (but not as in the clown), and he means when he's angry or upset he turns into a bit of a sleaze bag, but usually he's a nice guy. I notice his girlfriend has no expression concerning this statement.

He and I are talking. He is slow dancing with his girlfriend in front of me while I sit on a couch. I tell him I go out when I'm upset too, but that it doesn't matter, I don't get into trouble because I'm so average looking. He asks me something which I don't really remember, then makes a comment, something like "Your boyfriend loves you for who you are, which is not average. If wanted or lusted after rake thin girls, he could go f**k something with sharp edges, like a book." - He gave two other examples of things with sharp edges but I can't remember them.

Fragment 3

Random flash of a some guy - sales guy or bartender? He has a tattoo on his neck, it's a year.. 1100 something. I tell him it's a funny that my son was born that year too.

Side notes:
I think that the Mugwort is helping me remember my dreams. Glad I ordered more of it.
Perhaps one of my dream signs is Weddings, that's two this week. I'm not getting married nor engaged so it's not like it's on my mind.
I think one other dream sign may be Bars or Clubs. I have had a few set in a Bar/Club now.

Since I decided to start trying to lucid dream I have significantly improved my dream recall. Before when I would wake up I would only remember black. No dreams, I was thinking maybe I am some weirdo that doesn't dream or something... But now I am having dreams and recall them vividly. There have been a couple of times when I almost achieved lucidity but I woke up as I was realizing I was dreaming. So that was a little frustrated with that but I know that it cannot always be helped.

I haven't been as good about keeping my dream journal as I should be, but I also have incredibly busy and keeping weird sleep schedules so I was waiting until my schedule calmed down. Now as things return to normal I will work even harder on dream lucidity and will continue to put entries here (and hopefully soon one of those will be a lucid dream ^_^)

Night 0 - not valid test night, emotions - content going into sleep, content coming out of sleep. Images - old house, possibly cabin at SAS. Remember - nothing of actual dream just pictures and speech. progress to becoming lucid - 3%

More notes for myself:

- Attempted a WILD by visualizing a landscape (a forest) then I visualized myself looking down at my feet as I walked and recreated the sound of footsteps.
- A minutes or so into it I was dreaming but I had no control of the dream or even a body, it was like watching a movie.
- I had to follow two girls, I couldn't turn away when I tried.
- I could read the mind of one (who turned out to be my dream guide, Catie) but not the other (her name was never mentioned so I'll call her DC2).
- Catie seemed to know this was a dream, which struck me as odd since most other DCs never seem to. DC2 didn't.
- Catie was like the "main character" of the dream, DC2 was just there to tag along.
- Catie did several reality checks and then start looking for someone.
- DC2 pointed at something and Catie turned to look.
- It was me, or at least a projection of me. Since I had no body and was simply observing the dream, I had no conscious connection with this "other me."
- They tried to get the attention of the "other me" but it didn't see them. It looked like it was looking for something.
- I tried to project myself into the "other me" but it didn't work.
- The "other me" teleported away (several teleportations a few feet apart, the way I usually travel in dreams).
- DC2 swore and said something about "him fading away again."
- I woke up.

Don't exactly beleive in "shared dreaming" but given the experience, this might be as close to one as I've gotten. Maybe. Idk. Probably not.

my mother in law has been dead for 13 years. i married my wife 8 months after my mother in law died.
i dreamed that my father in law knock on my door and he told me to go buy 4 Chinese statues because his wife was coming to my house [in reality she had 4 Chinese statues but 2 of them were stolen] we went to buy them and then my mother in law came. she told me that my house [which is her house] is beautiful but is too small for us because i have 4 children. all of a sudden the door knocked and as she knew that it was his husband she shouted that she didn't want him to come inside and as he hear these words he left. then she told me not to help him and we don't need him and we should leave him alone. she even told us she is going to tell us some words but she was in a hurry and she had to go



p.s i really want to know what all this dream means please

I don't know why some night I have good dream recall and other nights I barely remember anything. I can't figure out what the variables are.
Last night I tried Mascot's "Dreaming Potion" before bed, as directed in this thread.
In the first half of the night I had some strange and unusual dreams, but I don't remember them. In the second half of the night I only remember a couple of fragments of average type dreams.
I will try the dreaming juice again tonight. Maybe I should drink it after five or six hours of sleep.

I don't know why, but this first week of studies after Christmas holidays, I'm having the worst recall that I've in years. Normally, I remember clearly 1-2 dreams each night, with some intense feelings and vivid things, but now, this is empty of feelings.
Every night I only remember some "moments" of each dream, but all are about the same thing, my school. I remember that i'm studying or doing some work in my class, but anything else, study study and more study (this iss boring... u_u).
Sometimes I remember that in these dreams i feel a bit overwhelmed, nothing more...

NOTE: I know that this isn't a real DJ post, but with the start of the MILD-1 classes, I want to start the DJ too ^_^

Last night I woke up at 3am and 5am, to only just a few fleeting ghosts of fragments. Pretty disappointing after the vivid non lucid dream I had the night before. Tried a WILD after the 3am wake up, but ended up falling asleep.

That leads me to believe that it might have been the Mugwort that helped me remember. Will give it another try tonight... It's a blessing it doesn't taste vile. I've ordered some dream herb, which apparently does taste like shite. Whheeeee!
If only I could get my hands on some Galantamine Sadly, it's perscription only here in Germany. BAH, I say!

This night i tried to drink some apple juice before going to bed to increase the vividness of the dream(s). This morning when i tried to recall as i have done the last 5 days i got notthing. Notthing at all. This was kinda sad but anywho - im gonna try go with the applejuice once again tonight!

I'm in an open-air theatre play and I know there are bullies in the audience from when I went to public school. I have to be dressed as an antebellum Southern belle and skip in, climbing up a hill near a pier, and then somehow blithely run down the rickety steps onto the pier where a handsome gentleman is waiting, without getting my shoes caught in the boards. We haven't had a dress rehearsal (think of this as the classic Exam Nightmare for actors). It's the Fringe, and the whole cast keeps saying that as one might say, "Meh - it's only a rental car." I have: the dress, my hat, my hair to keep done up, an umbrella, and a Bo-Peep cane to keep track of while skipping down those stairs!

The audience is filling up with rampantly patriotic Americans and I'm not even confident I know all the words to their national anthem! I'm in the dressing room trying to get my hat and hair on straight, let alone prepare for the scene, when a bell rings and someone cues me to just go. I do, grasping my hat, umbrella and cane, and I discover I have to jump over a bunch of nets to get to the performance space. A bunch of animated Disney characters pop up in my path, so I improvise: "Oh, hello, little piggy! Isn't it a fine day?" and such, in a comically exaggerated Southern drawl.

I come to a net attached to a rope at the end of which is the American flag. I try to cross it, and get my shoe caught in it. The audience is getting restless and I have to go now! I rip the shoe out. A tough-looking female Homeland Security officer follows me and gives me a hard time: But this is broken, ma'am, we can't fix it, it's the flag, ma'am, someone's going to have to pay for that, etc., as long as I don't move out of her sight.

I have to go. I just run. I get to the pier, and there's my leading man, but the lights are blinding me and I can't see him to playfully poke him with my cane and then act all nonchalant as the opening gag. The music for "My Old Kentucky Home" is playing and I'm supposed to sing along. I don't know the second line, so it comes out, "...and the caissons go rolling along." Then it turns into that song about the flag, not America the Beautiful but the other one that they sang very frequently after 9/11, the one the heavy lady is famous for - Kate Somebody. I don't know it!

I wake up trying to remember it. It's been 25 minutes with this iPad beside my pillow and I still can't.

I know one trigger is that I saw the musical "The Parade" the other day - the one about Leo Frank. I thought I might play Lucille in the future. My coloring often gets me cast as Jewish, Italian, Greek or Middle Eastern women.

Day 1 - 13th of january 2011
This is my first day of training to become a lucid dreamer. I found myself a little notebook and a good pen to be at my bed side. I am going to try remembering my dreams in more detail.

This first night didnt give me much and i only got fragments of one dream:
- Was doing some math assignments and i had some trouble doing them
- i was fustrated
- My good mate came and helped me

Notes to self:
- Search the internet for more tips for new lucid dreamers (found this forum - yey!)

[This is a catch-up post. This dream is from the night of December 30-31, 2010.]

I'm in a classroom in Britain. We're playing a game that involves the chalkboard, and walking in between two desks.

I'm in a room (possibly a hotel room; there's a bed in it, anyway) with Q [from Star Trek: The Next Generation]. I attempt to walk through one of the walls of the room, but get stuck halfway through it, and yell at him for messing with me. He manifests a bouncy ball made out of water, and we both bounce it back and forth.

[Dreamskip.] I'm still in that same room, but now I'm lying down on the floor under the bed. I'm stuck there somehow and can't get up. Q and some random (apparently) human woman are having sex on the bed. It's way too hot and stuffy in the room, and I'm starting to feel like there's no air in there. I get up and open the door. There's a screen door behind it. Later, I explain to Q why I did that. I say, “Did you forget that I needed oxygen to breathe?” He doesn't seem to mind that I opened the door.

I'm at a party with my mom and a bunch of her teacher friends. We're all on an outdoor patio of a restaurant at first, and then we all get into a rectangular ride vehicle that [somehow] works as a Gravitron. We all strap ourselves into our seats, and the vehicle starts moving forward. While it's moving, I look at a door on the side of the vehicle, labeled Door #6. I don't think it's closed all the way, so I reach over and try to close it, but I end up opening it. This makes the ride shut down, since I've just depressurized the cabin, and makes everyone else on the ride angry at me. A voice over the loudspeaker says, “Next time, the useless will have no reason to be here.” I defend myself by saying, “I didn't know how to close it!” An alarm is going off. I woke up at this point.

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Side notes:
I realized after I woke up from this dream that, for the second time since I've been keeping a regular dream journal, sense data from my real body came through into my dream. In this case, it was so cold on this night that I slept with all the blankets pulled up over my head. I really was trying to breathe hot, stuffy air in reality, so that became true in my dream, too. I think that's a pretty cool phenomenon.

Jan 14-15*
Well to understand this dream...you need to know a little about me. I was in ministry school for 2 years. I am 2 classes away from having my bachelor of arts in church ministries. I dropped out of the school right before i finished the classes. I have been working a (great) normal job for 2 years now.
So to the dream...My mom, dad and other members of my family have come to me with this plan that is already in the process. They show m there plans to build a huge church out on the west coast. (I actually believe it was Arizona) They showed me an overhead holograhm view of the church and it's location. It was a grey building that was taller than wide...it was located in a hill betwen two bautiful houses. I remember taking a look at it and crying telling then please let me move with them. I basically begged to move and to do anything I could at this church. I even asked to be the janitor! I just remember I would have done anything to move to this great opportunity...I then woke up.

Just pinch yourself. As a prospect lucid dreamer I find my days becoming full of these Reality checks like this; I look twice at a digital clock to ensure the numbers have not changed to symbols, and the reassurance of a working light switch is enough to send me on my way knowing that what was happening around me was apart of my “reality.” I do these Reality checks in hopes that when I am dreaming I will remember to check for signs of Reality and in doing so realize that I am asleep and everything surrounding me is only a projection of my subconscious. But the questionable “reality” of our dreams raises another question in itself. How do we know what is real and what is false? For dreams feel real when you’re in them, its only when you wake up that you realize something was actually odd. This paper will be an investigation into finding Reality and if one can do so with absolute certainty.
When I first began exploring the topic my immediate reaction was one of disbelief. I thought back to the simple act of doing Reality checks and surmised that that was sufficient to determine the validity of the woken state. However on further examination I found the term “Reality check” was in itself and oxymoron. It relied on the assumption that the woken state is in fact Reality, as all checks designed to determine Reality essentially boil down to finding out how much our current state relates to the woken state. Which my preconceptions out of the way I was able to isolate the one process at our dispense for determining what is real: the senses. It seemed the most logical place to start as all Reality checks revolve around the senses and without them there is no other viable method. So I then was able to narrow this essay into a discussion of the validity of the senses.
In determining the validity of ones senses it is critical to understand their origin. Each one of the five senses is created through the process of outside stimuli sending signals through the body’s receptors (tongue, eyes, ears, nose, nervous system) that reach the brain cortex which then reproduces a response in a split second which forms one of the five senses. However this process raises the question of the validity of dreams; how is it that in so called “unreality” we can reproduce the senses without outside stimuli? While the stimulus that forms the dream senses seems organic it is actually a reproduction created absent outside influence and transmitted to the brain. In this way one can surmise that one determines real things by he recognition between outside and internal sensory stimuli. This narrows the debate to one question: how do we determine that stimuli are real. The lucid dream experience is best summarized by my friend Jon Sussman who has been a lucid dreamer for most of his life: “Waking up from smelling a rose to the smell of bread cooking in your kitchen is a revelation in and of itself, but shortly afterwards you are still asking yourself if the rose was more real than the bread,” (Jon Sussman). In his experience Sussman has been unable to distinguish between his senses in the dream and the senses of waking consciousness. Through this one is forced to come to the conclusion that the senses cannot determine between dreams and Reality as it is impossible to distinguish senses created though outside and internal stimuli.
So what conclusion can we come to? If we cannot determine between dreams and waking consciousness than how do we know that waking consciousness is real and not a series of internal stimuli created by an alternate state? The short answer is that we can’t; at our current level of knowledge our only method of determining reality is by its inter-subjective legitimacy. Thus I propose a redefinition of the word “reality:” reality n. – a state of mind believed to be valid and without fabrication. In arriving at this definition I do not require that waking consciousness is in fact entirely fabricated, just that it is impossible to tell if it is not. As Edgar Allen Poe put it: “All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream,” (Poe A Dream Within A Dream). In this way we can hope to approach the world with a thoughtfulness that is not bound by the limitations of woken consciousness, but transcends this state and searches for answers beyond our current comprehension. It is in this way that we are truly able to search for what’s real.