side notes

NON-DREAM DREAM LUCID

10.28.2010

Escape Underground (Non-lucid)

My sister says something about my sleeping habits.

- I think around this time, there's a view of my dark room.

Mad, I run away and into a dark underground place. I think mom yells after me, maybe I'm even chased after.

- Me and my sister find a store there. I see a baby shirt, one with a Dragon Ball Z design on it. I find a bigger one, though still a bit too small. Me and her find similar shirts (different colors) and we hold them side by side, but I don't think she would agree that they were the same.

- I've picked up this big glass design and am trying to align the bottom part with the stand it was on. I'm being careful, but I still end up dropping it. It's so fragile that it shatters. The person who was watching me heads towards me.

- I see a security guard by the door has been knocked out. He was trying to help me? He has glass on him, I notice as I head over and pick him up from under the arms to take with me. I enter a new underground place. It's dark, and I don't know my way, but then suddenly I do - a voice in my head? There's a way you can go around and miss anyone coming in. I circle around the people who are after me.

- Earlier: In the store, a boy was sitting at a table playing this game. As he played, he explained to me that you knock down mini trees using a stick(?) by finding their weak spots, which were brown patches. At first he didn't do very well, but got better as he went along. His dad, sitting across from him, nodded. The boy joked about something - his dad knocking big trees over with an axe or something.

- Earlier in store: I was worried about money - I only had a few dollars. I offered to get my sister's money when I got mine, but she refused. We weren't getting along in this dream.

- Jump: At this airport-like place I'm ready to get away, but I pass my sister who's coming up the stairs. She's wearing a purple shirt. I look away to the side as we pass. The scene repeats and we're both putting up our hair as we pass (me to try and change my looks; my hair was down and I was going to braid it).

She sees me, asks "Think you can get away?". I immediately leap into action by jumping off the platform onto the one below. About here is where I feel deja vu for this place (I think I know which dream it came from). I leap onto the next platform below. This scene reminds me of the scene on the Narada in Star Trek 2009 where Kirk jumps platforms; I did rewatch the movie that night. Also had a Star Trek dream before this one.

I'm worried about getting away, because now that she's seen me, she must have sent someone after me.

I don't know if it's me going to bed earlier or what, but my recall has been uber high. Still want to get it a little better - I don't want just long and many dreams, I want to remember more details.

NON-DREAM DREAM LUCID

10.27.2010

Two Sides (Non-lucid)

Anime-style. There's a girl who has two sides. In teal-haired mode she can summon her minions. A boy (brown hair) is friends with the light pink-haired side of her.

The teal half wants the boy's soul or something and sends her minions after him. At one point he's hiding in a closet clutching the door shut as hard as possible.

- At one point he(?) is in a dark place like a chamber, blindly searching for pink girl. His hand touched a little lock on a grate on the floor.

Mmm, Donuts (Non-lucid)

I was in class. I stacked some books on my desk and put them under the chair. They were heavy and it hurt my hands, but I made sure not to show anything. An angel walked around the room and stopped at me. She came up close, clutched my fists in hers and said a special message to me - general uplifting things, and she healed my hands. It did seem to make the pain almost disappear.

Dad was at the front of the class ahead of me (I think I was on the second row to the right, three or four desks down). I believe some kids were talking about roleplaying games, and dad started talking about Nascar and the gestures to indicate driving. I followed him out of the room and glomped him. I told about him about the angel.

He ended up dragging me to the doctor's office in the school(?). We were sitting on a window-seat type area, me kind of hidden behind him. The doctor came in and dad made a joke about me, something about being dead that was supposed to mean that I was invisible. He asked if it was okay for me to be there. The doctor asked him to strip down, and he did, down to his gray boxers which he owns in real life.

Suddenly there's a kitchen area in front of us and people are making donuts in a big deep friar. She sees me eying them and gives me a tiny piece, saying that she 'can share her donuts'. As she gives me a bigger piece, dad leans over to the side and snags his own. The donuts are like glazed ones, but with chocolate on top.

- Jacob was sitting beside me in class.
- My hands began hurting again soon.
- When Dad was talking about Nascar, I turned to Jacob and said 'that's my dad', but he didn't seem impressed.

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

I woke up just before 5:00 A.M. last night and was disappointed that I'd slept through most of the night, couldn't remember any dreams, and wasn't going to have time for another full sleep cycle before the rest of the house started getting up at 5:30. I decided to try to go back to sleep anyway, focusing once again on MILD affirmations and visualizations. It worked.

At some point between 5:00 and 6:40 [when I woke up for real], I have a false awakening where I'm in my current room and my bed is parallel to the closet doors [not perpendicular to them, as it is in reality]. I'm lying on the floor between the bed and the closet, all tangled up in my blankets. [I'm not sure when this happened relative to my other dreams, so I'm just sticking it here at the beginning.]

I'm looking at the results of a Google Image Search for something involving the terms “japan” and [I think] “front.” Almost all the photos that are coming up are of cherry blossoms, but one of them is of autumn leaves. I say something along the lines of, “There are about ten hundred billion pictures of cherry blossoms, but almost no pictures of the leaves.”

The next thing I know, I'm lying on my back in a wide expanse of grass. Several big, flat leaves in bright red, yellow, and green gently float down onto me from the nearest tree. The sky is blue and the weather is sunny, clear, and calm. There are trees spread out all over this grassy area, all with leaves that are turning autumn colors. Somewhere in here, I recognize that I'm dreaming, but there's no specific moment that triggers this realization. Saito is there with me, and I want to show him a seed pod from a magnolia tree. So, one comes rolling down the hill toward me, and I catch it. It's bigger than it would be in real life, and I say so when I show it to him. He says to me, “It's your mind.” Indeed; by now I'm not only aware that I'm dreaming, but I've caught on to the fact that this is my mind's rendering of what autumn is. I look around for an acorn, but find none. I say, “Of course there aren't any acorns – all my trees are are liquid-ambers.” [That's because that's what most of the trees in the neighborhood where I grew up were.]

This big, tall, flying guy in a blue costume with matching blue makeup, who looks like he came straight from a Cirque du Soleil production, comes and lifts me up in his arms and flies away with me. As I'm being lifted off the ground, the thought of hot-air balloons crosses my mind, and [for some inexplicable reason], I ask myself, “Which city in Canada is the balloon city?” The blue flying guy flies us through a series of very large, rectangular rooms with movie projection screens on all the walls and the ceiling. At first, the screens are showing immersive views of natural vistas in Canada, accompanied by some appropriately dramatic and inspiring music that I don't recognize. I'm not afraid, because I recognize that the movie screens and the guy flying me through them are all part of the Disney theme park attraction I'm now on. The attraction is kind of like Soarin' meets the CircleVision movie at Canada's pavilion in Epcot. The film footage is filmed in a style very much like that of Soarin'; it's obviously intended to make it look like you're flying, except that the shots are designed for the big rectangular screens. The film in the last room of the attraction shows the transition over the border into the U.S., and flies us over Mt. Rushmore and then under a waterfall projected on the back wall. We go under the waterfall by going through an opening in the wall.

Once I'm through the opening, I'm standing on the ground, and the blue flying guy is gone. I recognize the place where I'm standing as the interior of the Snow White's Scary Adventures attraction from Disneyland. There are no ride vehicles anywhere to be seen, though. The Evil Queen is just a little way in front of me. I approach her, and she turns around and says something scary [just like on the real ride]. I scream really loudly and high-pitched. For a few moments, terror completely overtakes all my awareness. While screaming, I think, Wake me up! Wake me up! hoping that the dream will end. [Remarkably,] It doesn't this time. I finish screaming, and observe that the dream hasn't ended, I'm still standing there, and the Evil Queen is also still standing there, turned to face the path where the ride vehicles should be, but is now motionless and silent, as she has finished saying her prerecorded phrase. So I start punching her in the face. I do this repeatedly, but I don't feel anything. While I'm beating her up, I shout at her: “You're an AAT*! I carry more complicated devices than you around on my back every day!” Which is true; she may be computer-controlled, but my laptop is much higher-tech. No longer afraid of her, I walk along the path and into the next scene of the attraction, where there is another AAT figure of the Evil Queen [this is the case in reality, too, but the track layout there is completely different]. This one turns around and starts to shriek something at me to try and scare me, but her words stop and peter out halfway through, because she can see that I'm not afraid of her. I continue walking through the scene. [*My personal shortening of “Audio-Animatronic™,” the robotic technology used to create characters in many attractions at Disney theme parks. I think I shouted more things than this, but this is all I remember shouting now.]

The next thing I know, I'm outside again, but surrounded by buildings this time. I decide to rub my hands together, only to discover that they're really hot. I realize that that's because my real hands are really hot under my blankets. That's the last thing I remember from that dream, but it seemed to take me a little longer to wake up fully. When I did, my face broke into a smile and then a laugh when I remembered the encounter with the Evil Queen. In reality, I had been pretty scared of those moments on that ride when I was a kid, and I still dislike them now. I'm really, really proud of this dream. I think facing something/someone you've been afraid of for a long time and standing up to it is quite an achievement, and a good, worthwhile use of the ability to lucid dream.

I woke up...Thought about my dream for a little while. Had to get up to get ready for school. I came back in to type up my dream journal and the dream was gone. This keeps happening. Hopefully I'll remember by the end of the day like I did yesterday. Also, I don't know why but for the first time in a long time I tossed and turned... No more trying to get Lucid on school nights >.< It makes me to damn tired.

Changed my colors. Also, only one page left in my dream journal! Then I move onto a new one. This one is starting to look beat up anyway, from being in my bed. Plus the cats trampling all over it. I've had it since June 2008. I hope that the next one will go faster - because it has longer entries in it, not just a bunch of fragments!

NON-DREAM DREAM LUCID

10.25.2010

Darkness (Non-lucid)

I think it was completely dark. A creature made of dark substance was attacking me over and over again, and it couldn't be killed.

Bugs? (Non-lucid)

Star Trek like world. A guy wearing a Trek uniform took out something from it that was covered with black dots. He looked to the doorway were a woman was standing, giving her a questioning look as he held it up.

A Book Lover's Habit (Non-lucid)

We either went to a bookshop or walked through one. As we were leaving, I got distracted by looking at book titles and then the two people in the room. I said something to them and started to leave, and again, and the last time I started to leave I really got distracted. I think we talked about a previous transaction I had with them, and then we talked about these two forms, green and red, and something about one or both of them being my consultant.

I started to fill out the green form hurriedly, and my writing was messy. I accidentally signed my name (looking really bold, like I'd embellished it) in Japanese, as ケイトリン, and the woman pointed it out to me. I said it was an accident and wrote my real first name under it.

She said it was okay, and then started talking in Spanish about how someone she knew said some phrase sometimes. She repeated the phrase twice, and it was short. Might have had 'que' in it.

I knew mom was going to be mad, because she was outside in the car waiting. I took the red form with me to fill out later.

I got in the car and yep, mom was mad. I'm pretty sure there was someone else in there too. I was apologizing, and as I gestured, a half-eaten green sucker I had in my hand flew off the stick and landed somewhere in her direction. That actually eased the tension and we laughed a bit.

- Earlier: 'Bike', paint, my sister

- Might have taken place in this dream: masturbation in my mom's bathroom.

Fragments (Non-lucid)

~ My sister told me that she liked 'BL/yaoi'. She explained that gay relationships were more complex and interesting than the relationships you normally see in shows (which is actually my reason). I believe this took place in her living room, and her boyfriend was in the room.

- Mom, mad, my friend, pix?

~ I believe I(?) was in this room full of people. There was this game where you have to kiss someone or you're killed. Me and a boy shared a (bad) kiss. Then we had sex. Most explicit sex dream I've had in a while, and I think most detailed.

Bladder Desperation (Non-lucid)

Deja vu dream, as if I'd gone through the ordeals in it before.

Takes place in a school-like place.

I have to use the bathroom, but every one I come to has too many people around, and it's mixed. At one point I start to go in one but a guy comes in!

I pass a food court and a girl calls out to me, saying something like 'you're sitting with us, right?'. I look and the people at the table don't particularly seem familiar. I get the feeling she doesn't want someone else to take the seat. I pass on.

I see a girl, possibly with short dirty-blonde hair (I think she works there) and ask her if she knows of a private bathroom I could use. She takes me with her and we go to the staff area, where the counter is. We squeeze past them (I think the manager guy is there) as the girl explains that I really have to go. The guy and a few others tease me, saying something about bladder desperation and how it can be hot.

- Somewhere around here, I look at my finger and it has salt on it. I lick it off, and the guy says I should eat it with ice cream (I think this was inspired by me wanting to try french fries with ice cream in real life).

He (and a few others?) end up coming along with us, leading me through some very weird obstacles, one being having to wait for just the right moment for these yellow bed foam pads to swing away before you dived onto this other slippery, squeezing material and dug your way through. It was extremely hard and I didn't think I was ever going to claw my way out.

When we finally get there, it's a small space with netted areas off to the side. People are sitting at a table on one side, and on the other there's a guy playing with a kid on some more foam I believe.

I'm pretty worried, because the whole reason I couldn't go before is because I have a shy bladder, but there's people here too, and in a closed space.

I think they realize I can't go there when they see the people. One guy suggests that there's a place outside I could go - think he had before. I think I considered that I'd need toilet paper then.

- Earlier?: I'm singing on a show (with Lizzie McGuire?). We're sitting in a classroom.
- There was a girl sitting beside me and I mistook her for someone I knew who looked just like her, only she had one eye (I watched a Futurama episode night about Leela). I believe it's the two-eyed girl who tells me I sing well, even though I thought I wasn't singing my best because we weren't actual recording. We sung more than once.

Note: The whole reason for this dream was because I went to bed having to go, and every time I woke up after that I ignored it. Just before this dream my bladder was definitely started to get annoyed with me, but once more I ignored it. It was actually really interesting to see the dream that resulted from it.

All I remember is all my friends were dressed up like clowns, and I was the ringmaster in the center of the stage, shouting orders and holding a whip.

Also, my goal for tonight was to attempt to have a conversation while dreaming. While I was reading some guides that Queen Zukin was nice enough to send me, I realized that conversations are important in dreams, and I've had yet to have a full fledged conversation that I can remember. So my goal for the night was to attempt to say at least 3 lines, and I think I did it. I remember waking up going "YEAH! I HAD A CONVERSATON!" But I forgot to write the conversation down, so I forgot it

Awake, Non-lucid, Lucid, Half-awake, half-dream state, [Commentary made while awake]

While out of the house somewhere, I put on a navy-blue, stretchy headband [that I have in real life], and make some kind of wish. This causes me to suddenly have long hair again [I cut my real hair short at the beginning of this month]. My hair is down to my shoulder blades, which is still a little shorter than it was when I cut it, and seems thinner and wavier than it used to be when it was long. I don't want my mom to see me with my hair long again, because if she did, I would have to explain to her about the magical headband. So, when I return home, I do my best to avoid letting her see me.

I consider re-cutting my hair myself, but decide I don't want to, because it wouldn't come out very neat. I decide instead to go back and find the stretchy headband and make another wish to reverse the effects of the first one. I ask my mom if I can use the car to run an errand. She asks what it is, and I answer that I'm going to a vacant lot to look for something I lost. This is true, but it's not the whole truth.

I get into the brown car, and someone is in the front passenger seat. [My dad, I think.] I say to him, “Watch the street signs. I don't even know my own neighborhood in these dreams.” And they'll probably change, I think. I back the car out of the garage, turn it to my left, and continue backing in that direction all the way down to the corner, where the street turns 90 degrees. [In this dream, this corner is now a 90-degree turn like it is in reality, not a four-way intersection like it was in the first dream described in my dream journal entry dated 10/08/10.] Sure enough, as we drive down the street backwards and then back up the street going forward, each street sign says something different the second time we pass it than it did the first time we passed it. The street signs are all blue with white letters [not green with white letters, as they are in reality]. Eventually, I find the street I'm looking for and turn left onto it.

The next scene seems to take place in a fast-food restaurant. I find the headband I was looking for and restore my short haircut. [For this part of the dream, I was in “video-game-controller” mode again, as I described in my dream journal entry dated 10/21/10. I was kind of removed from the action and aware that it was all going on in my mind/imagination, and at the same time, I was fully aware of my real body.]

Woke up at 1:36 A.M., took some notes on my dream, went back to bed.

My parents and I are attending a wedding at the estate of some really rich people. The estate has a little re-creation of a neighborhood from old-timey New York, and the little church in that neighborhood is being used for the ceremony. In one room, an old man, the father or grandfather of the groom, I think, is lying on a hospital bed, all dressed up for the ceremony and being included in the festivities. After the ceremony, they make everyone attending the wedding pose for a group picture. My dad wants to put some sand in containers to use it to stabilize some photography equipment, so he gets out a bunch of sand toys, and I help him shovel sand into buckets. The people who own the estate are originally from Thailand, and they've recreated the beaches of Thailand on their estate. The sand we're shoveling is filled with beautiful blue-and-white seashells, colorful stones and jewels, and gold dust.

Woke up at 3:36 A.M., took some notes, went back to bed.

I'm at my old high school, walking across campus, looking for the classroom of one of my old teachers. I get to the western edge of campus, where the furthest-out portable classrooms used to be, and discover that there's a sort of ravine there, with concrete stairs leading down the near side and up the far side. On the far side of the ravine stand the furthest-out portables. I'm not really surprised that so much has changed in the years since I've been away.

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An aside:

When I cut my hair short in reality, it was after many years of having long hair. I've been wondering for a while whether or not my dream self (if I may steal some jargon from the Matrix universe, my residual self-image) would still have long hair. Not surprisingly, thinking about this over a period of time caused me to dream about it. I find it interesting, and reassuring, that after only three weeks of having short hair in reality, even my dream self apparently feels that that's the norm, and that having long hair feels wrong.

Also, I'm pleased with the increasing frequency of my lucid dreams, but disappointed with my lack of control. I keep realizing that I'm dreaming and either not trying to do or change anything at all, or trying and failing. I will continue trying to improve.

Well, it's been two weeks since I posted my last dreams. I've been travelling in Japan and mostly wrote nothing on my DJ. Mainly because I wasn't sleeping much and when I was, I could just recall dreams that had to do with day events and not interesting at all. Japan took over me and didn't let anything else more interesting to take place. I basically lost focus from dream practice because waken life was so much more exciting. Also, jet lag for days didn't help.
But I'm back and will post the stuff I did write down, including a few lucids.

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

Last night, my WBTB went on for nearly fifteen minutes, due to my trying (and failing) to figure out what it was that had gone thump and woken me up. I think it helped me attain lucidity. I should do WBTBs that last that long more often.

I'm bicycling along a sidewalk that winds through grass along the side of a street. Every so often, the sidewalk rises up and becomes a little bridge that allows water to go under it. It goes up-and-down and side-to-side so much that it's a little difficult to bicycle on.

I'm in a building with a group of my Literacy AmeriCorps friends. We're in an open, interior space that runs through several stories of the multi-story building, and has lots of staircases and landings in it. My LAC friends are standing around on the staircases and landings. We're talking about the party that's going on in a room upstairs. One of my friends says that, in order to get in, you have to bribe the guy watching the door in a “touchy-feely” way, e.g., by touching him in a sexual way. I absolutely refuse to do this. At some point during this conversation, I realize, “This is a dream. I can't really be talking to these people.” [I haven't seen any of them in reality since the program ended; we don't even live in the same state anymore.] Then, a bunch of unidentified guys come up a flight of stairs from deeper in the building and start trying to molest me and the other girls with their hands. As they begin to surround me like a flood, I realize this is turning into a nightmare, and try to leave the scene by closing my eyes and turning around. Once again, it does absolutely nothing. The guys start getting their hands on me, and achieve their goal of discovering where my erogenous zones are. I'm scared and shocked and I wish it would end, so it does. I wake up, and go back to sleep shortly afterward.

I'm in a room where I and three of my LAC friends, one other girl and two guys, have been staying. I find a guitar in the closet. A tall guy I don't recognize is also in the room. One of us asks, “Who in this room plays guitar?” and the other answers with “Lisa C.” and one or two other names. [I can't remember now who said what, or what the other two names were.]

I'm in a giant, room-sized aquarium. It's rectangular and about twelve feet from floor to ceiling, and all but the top three feet are filled with fresh water. One wall of the rectangular room is covered with small, enclosed plastic boxes, each containing a different kind of fish. You can open up the doors on the front of each box to let the fish out into the larger aquarium. I'm swimming in the water and can apparently breathe under it. I'm playing with the fish that are out in the larger aquarium, trying to get them to act out some scenario, but it isn't working out too well because there's this one carnivorous fish with big, pointy teeth that keeps eating most of the smaller fish. Eventually, it even starts eating another fish that's bigger than itself. I swim up to the very top row of little boxes, one of which contains a Blue Tang. I think about letting it out, but decide not to because I'm not sure if this one is a freshwater fish or not, and because I don't have very many of that kind. At this point, I discover that I suddenly can't breathe as easily under the water, and I realize that it's because the top three feet of the room are now filled with water, too. [Yes, I realize that doesn't make much sense. No, I didn't realize this during the dream, nor did I realize I was dreaming.] I go to the end of the room and start trying to get the door open so I can breathe the air outside the room. It has a wheel on it that you turn to open the door. While I'm still trying to open the door, before I can either drown or get it open, I wake up. [Dude. That was pretty cool. I wanna go back and play in the aquarium room again sometime.]

Yes, dodobird,

from my experience these supplements are really _the_ best WILD supplement I know.

I made a series of experiments with Galantamine and Choline myself over the past few weeks. What can I tell you?

I made 10 attempts on 10 nights. Got lucid on every one of them.
40 % those were WILDs, the rest DILDs.

WILDing into a lucid dream is incredibly easy for me with these supplements.
I usually sleep less than 5 hours, take the supplements and make a WBTB for an hour. Then I stay in bed on my back for 15 minutes to get calm. After that I roll on my right side and in most cases only wait for the effects to start. Normally I will not have to wait very long.

I got motivated by reading Thomas Yuschak's book. Side effects are only very limited, even with 8 mg Galantamine. But I have to stress that I only make a new try after at least 2 nights off.

I tried it last night as a WILD aid with success.
I'm a newbie and I had just 2 WILDs before, and this WILD was much more full fledged, and I didn't lose my awareness for a second.
(This is my second time of trying Galantamine + Choline. The first time was about a month ago and I failed and fell asleep, and I slept quite badly too)

I took 4mg Galantamine and 500mg Choline Bitartrate about 4:30 hours after going to sleep. I then attempted to do WILD.
I tried to do relaxation meditation, to stop the "voice in the head", the annoying thinking that distructs you. I was quite unsuccessful, so I gave up on relaxation after about 20 minutes and leaned on the side, and waited for HI.
After about 20 minutes I heard the most horrible screeching sound as if the very fabric of reality is being torn apart, and after I endured that I entered the dream.
The dream was very vivid, very clear and organized. Every once in a while I felt like I was waking up, and I didn't move so I can re-enter the dream, and I succeeded in re-entering the dream about 4 times. I don't know if it was false or real awakenings.
All together the dream ( or chained dreams ) were rather long, about an hour. I was very satisfied with the dream, but for my taste this dream was too normal and neat, I prefer more bizarre dreams. In this dream I was walking around in a city. I could think very clearly, and I remembered that I wanted just to look around and observe the dream-scape. I remembered someone ( I think billybob ) suggesting to focus on textures in order to make the dream more vivid and detailed, and I looked closely at the texture on my hand, the walls etc.

Side effects:
1) After waking for good from the dream, (which I decided to do because I had enough ), I was very awake, and couldn't go back to sleep ( and didn't want to go to sleep )
But that was fine because I lay there reviewing the dream for a while.
2) In the morning I fealt very slight 'heart-burn', and some hunger, which is unusual for me to feel in morning.
3) During the day ( now ) I feel more alert than usual, my sight is slightly different: kinda sprarkly and a little less focused, as if it was over-focused to a degree that you see a little less clearly. The same goes for my thoughts, they are a little too quick, in a way which makes the flow of thinking a little less continuous. It's literary feels as if each neuron in my brain is shooting too fast, and so the next neuron can't catch up fast enough to enable normal, relaxed thoughts. But these effects are quite subtle, and not a major problem.

If I will feel any other side effects during the day I will update.

I will now let the Galantamine clear out of my body, and may try again in about week, and report again.

non-dream - non-lucid - lucid

19-10-10 I am lying in my bed, I have been tossing and turning for a good hour and a bit. I get a couple of hits of deep relaxing sensations in my body. The last thing I do (at least that is what I believe) is to slip out of my bed and lie down on the floor (FA). It seems like my normal floor, even has the exact amount of clothes that needs washing there. I take a quick one-eyed peak, why is my sub woofer over there? (I don't have a sub woofer). Ok I am close to something I try and look some more, but it seems to destabilise the environment. I lie still a bit more. I risk it all open both my eyes and stand up, somehow there is not enough stuff in the room, but it really does look like my room. Right even the curtains have been left in the exact position I left them in. I RC by seeing if I can withdraw them with my mind. They flicker and I doubt no more. I need light to stabilise this. I pull the curtains all the way to the sides, I touch and couple of edges on tables and rub my hands.

Although a bit firmer it still could do with a bit of solidness, the dream does grow a bit brighter and I fly through the glass without breaking it. Cool at least some of my control is coming back. I find a flat to peak into, there is a picture on the window frame of Buddha (sort of a pagan version, with red war paint across his eyes) The flat looks funky lot of nifty little stuff, good amount of light and a DC sitting by the sofa table. I assure him that I just need a bit of time to stabilise my dream and I consider telling him it is all just a dream, but decide against it. After a while I spot a flat with a lot of red/blue light coming out of the window, but as this fades away I just fly through the wall to the flat I was just at. It works, so more control coming back. I really pay attention to how it feels going through and although there is a distinct sensation of going through there is no resistance. Cool.

I fly through another set of walls and find myself in some sort of tunnels, these somehow transform into a real-time-strategy sort of landscape and I think to myself how come I can't produce a real mountain landscape. I try to visualise this, but nothing happens. The RTS landscape turn into a tunnel style scene again and I can see some light up ahead. I fly toward it and find a hole in the wall too small for me to pass through, but I am confident enough to just pop through the wall again. I exit a little while later on a scene hat could have been Berlin in the wake of being carpet bombed during WW2. All the building have no glass, are missing some of the corners and it looks amazingly real compared to the RTS landscape I just bitched about, nice, maybe I need to just not try as hard. I fly up and around, and seem to be going really slowly with a bit of a height limitation, so I decided to try and fly backwards and it works amazingly well increasing the detail of the scene around me. I get entangled in some electrical wiring hanging overhead, which I laugh about and quickly get out of. I wake up soon after.

Notes: It takes too much time to enter the dream (1 hour plus here). However I am unsure as to why my WILDs are so short. Do I disturb the sleep cycle by spending so much time awake and aware prior slipping into a dream again or is it a stabilisation issue? However I am pleased that my control seem to be coming back.

Oh and pardon the wall of text, but I am trying as much as possible to note every detail as my recall is a bit shaky atm

Awake, Non-lucid, Lucid, [Commentary made while writing journal entry]

[Fragment] I'm at junior high school, going to class and learning what my class schedule will be.

The next dream starts out like a documentary about Canada. In the dream, I remember that I visited a city in Canada once, and my strongest impression upon arriving there was, “Wow, I'm in a foreign country!” [I've never actually been to Canada. These are most likely straight-up false memories, but I also got the feeling when taking notes during my WBTB that they might possibly have been memories of a previous dream that I'd otherwise forgotten about. Weird.] According to the documentary, Canada has a “Mexico City,” a concentrated population center of Mexican immigrants.

The dream then shifts from a documentary to an episode of “The Red Panda Adventures” that involves all of Canada being hypnotized/brainwashed into hating a man with the last name of Campbell. I remember a long text document [don't ask me why a dream about an episode of an audio series generates a dream image of a text document] that goes on and on about what a despicable person Campbell is. At one point in the text document, there is a warped and twisted version of the Canadian equivalent of the Pledge of Allegiance that also mentions his name and says something bad about him. [I was curious, so I looked it up, and it turns out that there is no Canadian equivalent of the Pledge of Allegiance. My mind just made one up. Cool.]

Woke up at 4:00 A.M. at the end of a sleep cycle and needed the restroom, so I used it, then took a few notes on my dreams so far, then went back to sleep.

I'm in a really big library with white walls and lots of light wood. The word “dream” crosses my mind somehow. [I don't remember whether someone said it, or I saw it on a sign, or I was just thinking about it; I think it was probably the latter.] However it happens, it makes me realize, “Hey, I'm dreaming! I did it!”

I decide to try doing a scene transition. [I don't remember how I did it, but] I find myself sitting in front of a computer monitor, which is displaying a command prompt against a black screen. The program that's running is a text adventure based on the novel Watership Down. I can't do anything right in it – I try entering a couple of commands, but none of them make any progress. Even the inventory command yields a response that goes something like, “You can't have an inventory with only one!” It means that you have to have more than one rabbit in your party before you can check your inventory. I quickly discover that the program is tied to the computer's clock, and that if a certain number of seconds pass without the player making any progress, the program just gives you a Game Over saying something about how you just got eaten (you, the rabbit, in the game, that is). After I get this Game Over, I think: “I don't have to sit here and play this text adventure just because I ended up here. If I want to, I can get up from this computer and go explore the building.” So I do.

I'm still in the library, because that's where that computer is. It's near a second-story interior passageway that's open and more like a balcony, overlooking the ground floor of the library. I follow the passageway over to where it ends in a flight of stairs going down, then descend the stairs, holding on to the handrails the entire way to keep myself focused on and grounded in the dream, and to make sure it remains stable. It works. The whole time, I'm marveling at how the sensations of walking, descending stairs, and holding the handrails are exactly like they would be in reality. The stairs have handrails running up the middle of the steps, but they aren't parallel to the ones running up the sides of the stairs; they're at an angle, so I have to go through a narrow space between two handrails on the last few steps of the staircase. I say, “Why did I have to design these stairs this way?”

I exit the building, and am outside on a dream version of my college campus. It's sunny and beautiful, and all the buildings are big and white and slightly old-fashioned [in real life, most of them are various shades of brown, tan, or orange, and none of them date back further than the 1940s]. Also, the St. Louis Arch and another, light-brown arch with some words on it in black, marking the entrance to some area, are there. [I can't remember what the words said now, but there were two of them, they were the name of the area, and they both started with S.] I go, “Ahhh, it's so good to be here.”

I notice that the beach, with its light-colored, soft sand, is down at the bottom of the cliff. I decide to try something. I think to myself, “When I close my eyes and turn around, I'm going to be standing on that beach down there.” I close my eyes, turn around in a circle (not too fast), and then open them again. I'm now on the beach, not quite at the exact spot I had been shooting for, but pretty close. “It worked!” I say aloud.

I stand on the beach for a moment, but the waves suddenly start coming up really close to the cliff, so there's not enough dry sand left to stand on. I decide to spin around again to go somewhere else, but this time, I'm thinking, “Just take me wherever.”

[In retrospect, that wasn't a very good idea.] I end up on the porch of an old, slightly spooky-looking house made of wooden boards, that seems to be floating on the ocean. It's not abandoned, though – there is a couple living in it. Also, I now have a friend with me – no one I know in real life, just a random, unnamed female dream character.

I look out from the porch to the east at the surrounding landscape and see a world that is ending. The sky is filled with thick, solid black clouds, with streaks of bright red and orange here and there because the sun is rising behind them. The entire landscape is flooded, and a jumble of disconnected buildings stick out of the water here and there. Some of them are on fire, some are falling apart, and one is being ruled over by some sort of dictator, whose enormous figure I can see looming over the building and gesturing with his arms in a way that means “work, you miserable peons!”

The couple who live in the house we're at start talking to me and my friend. They say that we have to get back to safety by sailing back the way we came. I think, “But we didn't sail here! We teleported!” I don't say so, though. [I don't know why not. Either I didn't get a chance to say anything, or I didn't want her to know about my newfound teleportation abilities, I'm not sure.]

[From this point forward, my recall is a little less clear in that I remember all the scenes, but none of the transitions or connections between them.]

The next thing I remember is facing away from the house toward the west, where there is a sort of path leading away from the house, but it's made up of a bunch of vines (or tree roots?). I try to get to the other end of the path by spinning around and closing my eyes again, but this time it doesn't work at all. I say, “Okay, if we can't do that, we'll just get there the hard way,” and start climbing over the vines.

Somehow, I end up on the deck of a ship, and there are waves coming up onto the deck I'm on, over and through the metal railing to my left. One of them doesn't look very big (it's about the same height as the railing), but it breaks right on the deck I'm on, tilting the ship over but not capsizing it.

The next thing I know, my friend and I are being escorted through the flooded landscape in a boat. There is a tank-like, armored boat with lots of guns in front of our boat, and another one behind ours. I take it they're there for our protection, but I quickly figure out that they're mostly just there for intimidation, and they're not even doing a very good job of that. There are lots of dangerous things trying to attack us, including exploding police cars, but we and our boat are passing through all of them as if they were air. What's really protecting us is a magic spell, one which, I know in the dream, comes from the Incarnations of Immortality universe.

I'm on foot, indoors, running away from something. I run into what appears to be a bathroom. I wonder if the protection spell is still holding now that I'm off the boat.

[I'm not entirely sure whether these last two scenes were in this order, or the reverse order:]

I'm a student sitting in a classroom, on the first day of school. All the other student seats are full of preteen or teenage Japanese girls, but the teacher is white. She explains that all we'll do in her class is make these little hat/hair accessory things out of tissue paper, which must be very trendy, because many of the girls are wearing them in their hair.

I'm standing on some rocks in the ocean, near the beach. I'm still lucid, so I think, “Okay! Text-messaging! Task of the month!” I go to take my phone out of my pocket, but then think, “No, better not do that here – I don't want to get my phone wet.”

Woke up and was delighted to have had another lucid dream. While thinking back over it, I laughed out loud at that last part – I was concerned about my phone getting wet? It wasn't even my real phone! :-D Then again, I realized that that makes sense: my dream cell phone would have been just as damaged by dream water as my real one would be by real water. After all, that's what I expect will happen when cell phones get wet.

-------------

Commentary:

Last night, I listened to about half of my binaural beats file at the beginning of the night, did a five-minute WBTB, did a lot of MILD affirmation and visualization both when I first went to bed and when I was going back to sleep after the WBTB, and had a new cardboard-square bracelet, one made with a smaller square of thicker cardboard than my first one, on my wrist the entire time. Something helped me have a really good, long lucid dream. I don't know what. How very unscientific of me, I know. I'm sorry, everybody.

On a more positive note, I'm getting a little better at this! I had more lucidity than ever before this time, and I thought about and actively tried out some dream control techniques while in the dream. I've moved out of the “what is this new world?!” phase now, and into a phase that can be characterized by these thoughts: “Okay, I get the idea of what lucid dreams are, but how do I shot web?” That is, I'm just starting to learn to use those dream control abilities. It was one thing to read about the spinning scene-change/teleportation ability, but as with most skills, now that I've done it for myself, I truly understand what it's like. Note to self, though: I should never spin around to transition to a new scene without first deciding what the new scene should be, because if I let it be random, I may not like what I get.

#967:
Date: (Approx.) October 10th, 2010
Length: 5 minutes

It's another zombie apocalypse. I begin the dream in a large, fortified bus with a bunch of people from my family. We drive down a bunch of roads until we finally reach a coastline. We roll down the beach until we reach a sort of military encampment which is apparently one of the few human settlements remaining. There are many white tents, and as we drive into the camp, people are impressed that we've survived on our own for this long.

We don't stay for more than a few moments though, I think because we realize that whoever is running this camp has some kind of sinister motives. In particular, we notice a sort of symbol on the side of buildings and vehicles that looks like "^^^^", and it makes us very suspicious. We end up in a sort of city, and we stop at what used to be a restaurant, looking for food to scavenge. My recall is a bit blurry at this point. I think we find some guns inside the restaurant, and then someone appears at the door. At first we think it's a zombie, and immediately take aim with our rifles. It turns it's a human though, and we all end up sitting at a table and talking.

Big jump here, I somehow end up in a kind of massive factory, and I am being taken to an audience with the factory's owners (I think the guy from the restaurant told me to go here). After taking an elevator, I enter a large, Japanese-style room, and stand in the middle of the large carpet that spans the room. After a few moments, I am surrounded with a bunch of vaguely human-like cats, who are apparently incredibly wise and think I'm some sort of chosen one. I try to talk with them and explain that I'm nothing special, but they speak a language I don't understand.

For a while I'm really confused, as the cats are all saying many things and I have no idea what is really going on. Eventually, I try to just relax, and I think I slowly start to understand what they are saying, despite not knowing their language. They begin some sort of chanting, and I start floating in the air. I just try to roll with it and wait. Unfortunately, I don't remember much of what happened after that.


#968:
Date: (Approx.) October 8th, 2010
Length: 3 minutes

It's night-time, in some sort of suburban neighborhood. Apparently, I'm "in" a sort of horror movie, and I sort of know it, so while everything feels real, I also have some notion that it isn't, if that makes any sense. Anyways, I'm outside with a group of 4 people, one of whom is Mel Gibson. Armed with a few guns, we're on the hunt for some kind of mysterious animal who has been wreaking havoc (maybe killing people?) in the neighborhood.

After walking around for a while, we spot a dark figure, which we assume is the animal. I think it runs away before we can kill it, and I think to myself that it doesn't look that dangerous. We decide to split up. I end up exploring some sort of log cabin with another person, and it's suddenly morning. The guy with me uses his walkie talkie to contact the others, but eerily, there's no response at all. Everything is suddenly very quiet and tense. There is a knock at the door right in front of us. I feel like something horrific is about to happen, so I get behind the door and try to block my vision, as if trying to ignore the movie I'm in. The guy opens the door, and there is nothing there but books on the floor. If I recall correctly, the books belonged to a little girl who had been killed by the animal, and for some reason it was quite scary that they were suddenly here (who brought them there?).


#968:
Date: (Approx.) October 15th, 2010
Length: 2 minutes

I'm walking around on campus, and I see a girl I haven't seen in years. I follow her, and see her go into a sort of deli I have never been to before. After a few moments I decide to go inside, but go in through the wrong door and end up in a kind of bathroom. There's a bucket with some food in there, so for a moment I wonder if this is the actual deli, but eventually conclude that it isn't. I go in through another door and find myself in a kitchen area, where an employee tells me this isn't the right place to get food. I go back outside and in through another door, which is the right one this time. I ended up admiring some of the delicious things for sale.


A fragment from last night: I was in an elevator with some guy, and suddenly it started shaking fairly violently. It barely reached the floor we were going to, and when it did, the doors opened but the elevator started moving again. We scrambled to get out of the elevator, and did, just in time, before it dropped free-fall to the bottom of the shaft.


Finally, a kind of funny and technically lucid dream from the other day. I woke up in the morning, having overslept already, but fell asleep again. When I did though, I ended up in a dream of getting out of bed, only to see my roommate hiding in a corner getting ready to jump out to scare me or something. I knew my roommate wasn't here IRL though, so I yelled out "NO!!', mad at myself for falling asleep again. I woke myself up and get out of bed, for real this time.

Thursday:

Dream 1: Religious?
I decided to reread a series of books that was very popular in the dream. They looked like a mix between the Series of Unfortunate Events books and the Chronicles of Narnia books. I was reading them near a pool in the middle of nowhere in California. There were mountains and it looked like the kind of area you'd drive through on some kind of road trip within California. I was rereading the books so I could make a religion based off of them. I "read" the first of the seven (I never actually thought about the contents of the book I just remember telling someone I just finished the first book). Then I was looking for some type of white bird or something to fly overhead.

Dream 2: Hairstyles
I was in a small white room. My friend Maxx decided to french braid my hair. He was braiding it when my english teacher Nathan walked in. He said that when he french braids hair he likes to "earl" it sometimes. (I do not think there is such a thing, but in the dream it was taking a piece of hair and just wrapping it around in the middle of the braid and then continuing).

Dream 3: Ann
I was at some kind of pool party. This english teacher that some of my friends have and hate was there just walking around. I was standing with two boys in my math/chem classes Jake and Ian. Jake was telling Ian that if he looked up from his house he'd see Ann M___ (I'm not giving her full name, she's a boy in our grade's mom) because she was going to be at a Grizzly Bear concert. (In the dream this had something to do with the fact that it was supposed to be at the Hollywood Bowl and Ian lives close to the Hollywood bowl). They started laughing.

Dream 4: Tumblr for Homework Help
I was on tumblr and a girl in the grade below me named Maddie (who doesn't have a tumblr in real life) was asking how to do something in biology on her tumblr. I started responding to her even though I've never taken biology.

Friday:

Dream 1: Stuck
This one's a little foggy. I was stuck in some kind of pod thing that kept going underwater (in this pond) and then being flung into the air or something. Either I had to be in it or one of my friends so we were trading off. That is all I remember, but it was one of those dreams where it is pretty boring, pointless and annoying and it seemed to go on forever.

Saturday:

Dream 1: Paper Dresses
The whole school had some assignment to make dresses out of paper. They were due the next day. I asked where we would get the dress forms and they said they would order them tomorrow. (obviously that makes no sense because they were due that day) The assignment was to make one on a water bottle (a tiny dress) and one that was life size. I just remember that the school looked different and that my friend Siena finished hers early and was standing on the other side of the street. I also remember having to go into the P.E. office to get something.

Finally, a note. The dream I had before about project runway being inspired by top chef that ended up being slightly precognitive is eerily similar to something else. The challenge in this week's episode of Top Chef was to make a chocolate DRESS. It was Top Chef inspired by Project Runway!