side notes

Previous Results
<6hr/10m/8mg (Galantamine)>
#1: Moderate lucid (Seeking The Elusive Fantasy Forest™, Night of Friday 9/8/23)
#2: Weak lucid (False Awakening and Fade, Night of Saturday 9/9/23)
#3: Weak lucid (False Awakening, Night of Wednesday 9/13/23)
#4: Moderate lucid (Silverlight Way, Night of Thursday 9/14/23)

Summary
It's 50/50. Some great lucids here, but still not the level I'm looking for. Going to tweak a couple things and run a new test.

New Test
<6hr/20m/None>
3 nights in a row: Re-establish sleep rhythm. Go to bed at 11PM and wake at 7AM.
2 nights in a row: WBTB. Go to bed at 11PM. Wake at 5AM (6hrs). No supplements. Stay awake for 20m. Return to bed.
Repeat until four WBTBs are attempted.

Night 11

…/I turn and cross a door when somebody at my back says: “Here we ‘flay’ because of we f*ck and play”/… I woke up remembering that

Night 12

…/I’m in front of the model of a modern large house in the mountains. I’m carefully placing some round transparent reddish covering plastics on the courtyards to protect the next places I’m planning to go. I’m wearing skin colored stockings/…

07.09 - Night 7

…/I get into a new section of the sorter, it’s main purpose is to heal books. Here fall all books that got damaged along the process of distribution. The books this time are modern paperback versions. There’s a book with pink cover on top of one of the piles on the plates.
I don’t see it’s going to work, I have my doubts about the process. It’s not my task today anyway, I’m too wide away from my working place where I’m sorting stuff for titles for its placement or something like that. We’re moving to another section of the sorter, we have to board a train. There are people from the design area. The big J is there/…

WBTB

I succeeded to incubate the dream back again but failed to recognize when it started

…/it’s the same new section, there’re other paperback books piled there. I’m leaving the section now and I can see now the creeper of my living room hanging in a precarious way next to the sorter. I’m afraid it’s going to fall, I try to fix it into a better position while the sorter keeps moving. I’m trying to figure out what’s the logic of this new station. Each book has some values, like RPG cards. And they must be placed on their corresponding plate according to those numbers for the machine to take them to their new location or something like that . There’s a guy wearing glasses working on the first plate. He shouldn’t be there handling books because of his task has nothing to do with books. He’s taking the books away from where they should be taken by the machinery. I think to myself: “Now I see why it’s not working”/…

08.09 - Night 8

This time the dream was too abstract to recall a full sequence, I’m moving into thoughts and the scenery changes too fast to recall more

…/I see some coworkers, old J is there. They twist and fall into big woks like they’re sort of omelettes. Other stuff turns around and moves on/…

09.09 - Night 9

…/I’m on a train arriving at a train station. I see some cops with dogs doing their job/…

…/I see my daughter is watching films In a strange language. I cannot understand what the actors are saying. Look like a live show comedy/…

10.10 - Night 10

No recall, got too few hours of sleep, then must go back to work

…/There’re groups of cartoon like fat people with small thin heads, wearing coats. Some of them are wearing big round hats. They’re standing on platforms at different heights. There’s something like a huge tonearm of a turntable switching from one group to another. They follow its inducted instructions and sing along a melody. Some seem not to know the lyrics and start improvising. I don’t like it although it’s not bad the result. I go down to the lower level of the system. I get to the small yard of my grand parent’s house. The couch of the small living room is out there and another sofa. A short haired arrogant looking pretty girl around 20 is laying along the couch, with the head on the coach arm and both legs crossed on the couch back. She’s wearing black stockings, mini skirt, plaid shirt and a jacket. I want to correct her posture without being direct to avoid rebellious confrontations, just by sitting next to her in order to force her to put the legs down. She doesn’t look clean. I don’t want to get too close to her feet, she’s not wearing shoes. I sit and she turns to put her legs on the table in front of the couch. I think: That’s not the best but much better. I ask for a kiss as reward. She’s angry/…

…/There’s something with my dad/…

My daughter slammed the bathroom door when I was recalling the segments of this dream. That blocked my recall while I was remembering more details and lost the rest of the dream

I want to give myself a quick reference for ways I can earn points in this comp and formulate a plan to maximize points. This will also help me visualize the plan start to finish while meditating, hopefully making it easier to remember while lucid. If all goes according to plan, this dream will yield a total of 106 points, shattering my previous record of 70 points. If I achieve the below I will create a new plan involving the other ways to get points. For now though, based on the below I will attempt to execute the following:

Upon becoming lucid, I will reality check/stabilize (+1) and then teleport (+5) from wherever I am into a fantasy forest (+15). Then I will look for something to eat in the woods, preferably something sweet like cake (+10). Then I will find a cave and enter (+30). While inside the cave I will imagine my dream guide is inside it and find her (+15), and have a conversation (+15). My goal will be to have her give advice about how to create a persistent dream realm, and then execute on that (+15).


Challenge Task
Enter a Cave = 30pts

3-Step Tasks
Teleport(5pts) --> Eat/Drink(10pts) --> Summon(15pts) = 30pts

New Goals
Go to a fantasy-themed forest = 15pts
Have a lucid conversation with my dream guide = 15pts
Build a persistent dream palace in the forest = 15pts

Persistent Dream
Enter the same dream space more than once = 15pts

Enemy/Team
Fight one or more enemies = 20pts
Teammate takes you into their dream = 15pts
Fight an enemy dreamer = 10pts
Convert an enemy dreamer = 10pts
Teammates teaches you something = 10pts
Meet a teammate = 7pts

Old Goals
Make rain fall up = 10pts
Make music play during the dream = 10pts
Ask a DC to hangout = 10pts

Theme
Library = 5pts

Fragment 1

…/I’m heading to the end of a low illuminated dark brown corridor with dark green doors on the sides. In stead of a wall at the end, there’s a section of a conveyor belt crossing the way from left to right. The corridor is 3 plates of the conveyor belt bright. This part of the corridor is better illuminated with white lights above the machinery.
There are old but well preserved hard cover brown books on each plate and I’m filling the plates with more books to get piles of three books on each plate while the conveyor moves on. I finish to set the piles and turn to do something else to my left. Looks like I’m very concentrated in some task at work/…

I woke up remembering these scene, and wondered if I should consider it as a theme related fragment for the competition, since such books can often be found in libraries. They might come from one, same as they might go there. One way or another must point into that direction. Anyway, I’m constantly handling the main components of a library although I’m not aware of that during the dream. So I think it could score for that. Working with basic components of a library. I could use these books and the conveyor belt under dream control circumstances, to get straight into a library. May be jumping on one of the plates

Then I considered to give it one more try and started to think about the fragment I remembered and fell asleep somewhere in the process

Fragment 2

…/I’m again in the corridor next to the conveyor belt. The sequence unfolds the same until I start to arrange more objects on the first books. This time I see what I’m arranging on them aren’t other books, it’s my folded clothing. And think: “So, they weren’t all books, there were my clothes as well” and put my pants on the old book to see it disappear to my right carried by the conveyor belt/…

Night 3

I didn’t recall any along the day until I opened the refrigerator to see my daughter didn’t buy any other cup of her apparently beloved dessert

…/I open the refrigerator to see my kid brought more cups of the dessert that she didn’t eat for more than a year and are still on the upper corner as a reminder to show her great love for it. I start complaining about that fact with sarcasms/…

Night 4

…/back in my teens, catching up with a friend. He’s talking about his father and how he killed him because of he didn’t want to hear his arguments/…

…/It’s a huge house, I’m walking all around looking for something, possibly recollecting something, not sure. We have to set all in order and there are still two circles left to be finished/…

…/I’m on the street, close to one of the campus of the university of my youth, performing sort of sorcery or ritual with somebody dressed with long hooded clothings. We’re drawing big circles on the floor, with a broom that leaves a line of characters on the floor, turning our body 360 degrees to paint the whole circle with lines that must be perfectly matched in order to have a continuous closed line. It must avoid the evil spirits to come in or something like that. It reminds me an old film about an apprentice that has to spend 3 nights closed in a locked room with a coffin containing the dead body of a witch. I see the signs that form the border of the circle, twist at my will to match their ends. Some characters look like ‘m’s other are just straight lines. I have to finish two more circles of those/…

…/In the kitchen, somebody is washing the dishes and putting them on the dish holder. Turns it downwards and all of the cutlery falls on the floor. I come out of the kitchen and find a coworker is about to get into the bathroom. I stop her to tell something and cannot avoid the impulse to kiss her. She kisses me back and with a gentle push she shows me that she’s in a hurry/…

I haven't collected good data yet for WBTBs, so I am making another attempt at that now. Here is the go-forward schedule to test 6hr/10m. The idea is that balancing WBTBs with 3 days rest and 2 days on will help maintain sleep rhythm. I've also made it such that I will have 4 WBTB attempts from now until the end of Autumn Comp. So I've set myself up to potentially break my points record again. Time will tell on that one. This test will have Galantamine used in each WBTB, so consistency is maintained. I've also removed Choline because the pill bottle smells fishy. It always smelled, so it is possible that I had a bad batch from the start. It was probably bad judgment to use it for that reason. Either way, new tests are using Galantamine alone. Future testing will look at use/non-use of supplements and rest/wake timings and their impact on favorable lucid dreaming results.

Goal of the test is to prove or disprove this statement: While on a consistent 8 hour sleep schedule, performing a 6hr/10m WBTB with 8Mg Galantamine will yield favorable lucid dreaming results for theshirecat.

Night of Tuesday 9/5/23: Re-establish sleep rhythm. Go to bed at 11PM and wake at 7AM.
Night of Wednesday 9/6/23: Re-establish sleep rhythm. Go to bed at 11PM and wake at 7AM.
Night of Thursday 9/7/23: Re-establish sleep rhythm. Go to bed at 11PM and wake at 7AM.

Night of Friday 9/8/23: Galantamine-assisted WBTB. Go to bed at 11PM. Wake at 5AM (6hrs). Stay awake for 10m. Return to bed. <6hr/10m #1>
Night of Saturday 9/9/23: Galantamine-assisted WBTB. Go to bed at 11PM. Wake at 5AM (6hrs). Stay awake for 10m. Return to bed. <6hr/10m #2>

Night of Sunday 9/10/23: Maintain sleep rhythm. Go to bed at 11PM and wake at 7AM.
Night of Monday 9/11/23: Maintain sleep rhythm. Go to bed at 11PM and wake at 7AM.
Night of Tuesday 9/12/23: Maintain sleep rhythm. Go to bed at 11PM and wake at 7AM.

Night of Wednesday 9/13/23: Galantamine-assisted WBTB. Go to bed at 11PM. Wake at 5AM (6hrs). Stay awake for 10m. Return to bed. <6hr/10m #3>
Night of Thursday 9/14/23: Galantamine-assisted WBTB. Go to bed at 11PM. Wake at 5AM (6hrs). Stay awake for 10m. Return to bed. <6hr/10m #4>

…/I see a black and white drawing art of a modern house. The paper size is around an A2. It’s hanging on the outside of a building in front of a glass door I have in front of me inside of this building. I see the picture breaking into pieces with the wind while I open the door/…

…/Some coworker pooped on his pants three times, there’s something spoiled in the work place because of it, I’m still confused about the incident. We’re working at night with very low illumination. I don’t get the new distribution of areas. There’s a lot of work taking place changing the distribution of items along the different aisles/…

It’s a very recurrent dream scenario

…/I’m working in a Sorter which is distributing the different media into its respective cells, it’s sort of huge warehouse with 4-5 story buildings inside. I’m getting close to one of the corners of the transport band which is being loaded by people on a platform some levels away to my front. I see the moment when a large thin book gets stuck at the end of one of the curves. The coming articles which are also large books, start to crash after it and get stuck in a chaotic way. It’s starting to be a mess. I run and pull the squeezed book out of its plate, to let the rest of the material flow again. It’s a large light blue book and is ruined on the corner. Looks like it’s a book for kids and it’s too large to be put on the plate of the sorter. I get angry because of somebody intentionally put it there in spite of it was way too large. I walk to the upper levels. I see an ex-girlfriend working there, she looks perplexed. I keep walking some levels up until I find my brother and ask him if he knows where to find our uncle who is one of the auxiliary teachers in the place. He has no idea where to find him. Somebody says he’s somewhere straight ahead, on the top office of one of the buildings which is close to a big yard, where a group of students in sport uniform forming a block are following the instructions of some trainer. I feel like I’m not going to be able to talk right now with my uncle, so I try to figure out who might be the person to talk with about the incident of this book/…

I failed to realize because of the rush, this uncle passed away long ago and his DC sometimes uses to be a dream sign.

Recently moved reluctantly to my old area.

one HH vision of Jesus's crown of thorns, or like a giant version of it lain down on the property where I live. It was all over the shrubs and stuff.

2 Jamie dreams: I'm at a convenience store (the one I was in the other day where I spotted a Jamie Look a like - I say that because mysteriously running her look a likes is a common occurrence for me, especially in convenience stores.) in the dream Jamie has a huge hole in her chest. I'm then dreaming from two perspectives - one as Me trying to stop her chest from bleeding so much - The other from her perspective laying on the ground in shock all the blood pouring out and I'm fading out. As I fade out so does the dream.

Second dream: I go into the convenience store again. The person in front of me turns around and I am seeing a T-shirt (Metallica- Ride The Lightning). I look up and the face is of Jamie smiling. And that's all I remember of that one.

I'll try not to take these occurrences too seriously unless I know all the facts.

Vague other dreams: One where I run into a gut I use to work with in Canmore.

The other dream I ran into my cousin, who I use to live with but nothing memorable happened.

Going to try something new this week. I will try to incubate the forest scene I was targeting for my lucids during the competition. This should help me be lucid - my number one dream sign is grass apparently.

But being lucid isn't the goal here. I want to experiment and see if I can influence dream content from waking life practice alone, and if so, to what degree. I'm going to try and apply techniques from a 2012 post from Evolventity, Frobthebuilder, Oreoboy1996, and NightSpy2 (https://www.dreamviews.com/general-d...-tutorial.html).

In a nutshell, the task is to set the intention, visualize the scene using meditation, and use mantras/art/writing to support the incubation. I plan to achieve that by performing a visualization exercise (meditation) about 15m per day in the sauna post-workout. That way it fits into my existing routine. I will also be writing down incubation entries as if they are actually dream recall.

Goal: Dream about a deep forest setting.

Nothing much happened, but I'll post the notable parts here Entries in quotes are things I actually wrote at the time, either in my DJ or my phone. (Rewrote most of the DJ logs because they're very messy.)

(From 0-30 hours I was at my house, 30-55 hours I was at J & L's house, and 55-59 hours I was back home.)

3:10 am (18 hours): Was paranoid that my brothers were awake, so I lay still for a while and entered a half-asleep state. Felt refreshed when I snapped out of it twenty minutes later.

??? (~19 hours): Was rubbing my ear and could've sworn I heard my mom yelling my name from downstairs. I was terrified she'd somehow heard me moving around or creaking the bed, but I didn't hear her coming up the stairs, so it must have been a hallucination/hypnagogia.

5:23 am (20.5 hours): Fell into the same half-asleep state for the same amount of time, and again felt refreshed afterwards.

6:30 am (21.5 hours): "Tired. Eyes keep unfocusing, can't read. Still feel gross. Closing eyes leads to instant hypnagogia, auditory and visual."

6:45 am (22 hours): Decided to lay down until 7:00, accidentally fell asleep for 10 minutes and had this dream:

I was in a house for a swim team meeting. Kept floating and a little girl was making her bear stuffed animal float as well. I jumped down from a ledge onto the bed she was on, then bounced to the floor.

"Wow, did you purposely avoid my legs? 'Cause that was a close call!" she said. Her legs were curled into her chest underneath the blanket.

"Yeah, I have lots of practice jumping on beds," I said, referring to my brother's.

She pointed to my brother's friend Vinson and said he had a younger brother. I was shocked, and they were amused that I didn't know. She asked if I could go get him and with a sense of deja vu I agreed. I sensed that he had not come any of the other times I went to get him.

Went into a hallway/basement area, was a bit worried because I knew I was sleep-deprived, and even if it was only for 24 hours exposing myself to creepy situations wasn't a good idea. But I ignored it and went on, calling for the brother, "Arglot." (Pronounced Arr-glow.) I heard Valerie [person from swim team] calling for him as well.

Surprisingly, he appeared around the corner and said bluntly, "What do you want?"

To diffuse his attitude, I said in a casual tone, "Your friend and brother… well, just your friend, really, is asking for you."

"Okay, okay, well tell her…"

Forgot what he said. We were going up the stairs and I saw Kira, was thinking about how Arglot looked like her brother Marcus and how I didn't know she and Marcus were related till recently.

I really am clueless, I thought.


7:50 pm (35 hours): J&L and I were watching a movie and I felt pretty horrible the whole time. Wasn't sure if I'd be able to make it through the night. The feeling cleared up after the movie ended.

??? (~41 hours): Briefly fell asleep for ten minutes. J was calling my name but I didn't respond, had to be slapped awake.

3:04 am (42 hours): "Watching Inuyasha but very tired and keep drifting off, was shocked awake by hallucinating my brother's echoing scream/roar."

3:16 am (42 hours): "Keep drifting off slightly and hearing songs before an Inuyasha character speaks loudly and snaps me out of it. Cannot focus on screen, eyes too blurry and unfocused. But I can keep track of the plot."

4:27 am (43.5 hours): "Feels like I fell asleep, but it's just the plot of the anime feeling like a dream."

5:40 (45 hours): J gave up. She was somehow able to stay awake just by lying on her back and daydreaming, though at one point she hallucinated me asking if she was up and mumbled "mmhm" to the air. I was very confused.

9:37 am (45 hours): "...I accidentally fell asleep at 6:30-ish. The experiment is probably ruined but I'll just subtract three hours. Might've had a dream but not sure. Something interesting did happen, though:
"I don't know if this was a dream or hallucination or what, but when I woke up my Chromebook was open in front of me with a bunch of text-to-speech voice options on the screen. They kept playing and it was difficult to move the cursor, but I managed to close the tab. Then I logged out, closed the Chromebook, and placed it on the desk.
"I know the TTS tab was not real because I don't have anything like that on the Chromebook. But it actually is on the desk, which doesn't make sense because I didn't plan to go to sleep and must have fallen asleep with it open on the bed. Well, whatever...
"My eyes are slightly bloodshot. Last night J said they looked purple, like a raccoon."

1:39 pm (49 hours): "I'm not tired, but when I close my eyes I feel dizzy. A throbbing dizziness, similar to that boat-rocking feeling I used to get when I was younger."

8:11 pm (56 hours): "Again, could've sworn I heard my mom calling for me, but it was very quiet and unclear."

9:35 pm (57 hours): "Tired only in my eyes. When my mom asked me for help with something, I suddenly felt a strange, full-body fatigue."


And that's it. The rest of the time I felt fine, sometimes a little tired. I also got a feeling similar to heartburn once in a while, and had a mild headache. Would've done another night if I could spend it at J&L's, but doing it in my shared room with only books and podcasts to keep me occupied (plus trying to stay quiet) is agonizingly boring.

My friend and I will be doing this, so I won't be dreaming for the next 2-3 days

Fragment finishing the week at work and a couple of longer fragments for the first day off. Still one to come, I’m gonna use this scenario to try sort of extended DEILD

16.06.23

Stress of work once more sneaking around. This time only fragment of the night was a situation that happened some days ago at work with one of my coworkers. In the dream it happened the other way around as it really did

…/I see E. searching for one item, doing his best to find it between the other items that cover it/…

17.06.23

…/I see two kids on the upper platform of a toboggan of grass. One of them stands on the taller kid’s shoulders who jumps high in the air to do a somersault 360 forwards. To land standing. The smaller kid lands on his back touching the feet of the other who stands. The feeling of the moment is not good. It sounds terrible bad when they both land at the same time. One standing the other laying. The smaller changed his position from the older kid’s shoulders to the feet during the somersault. It went wrong and now the kid doesn’t react laying unconscious on the floor. There’s a lot of stress around, it breaks a lot of events that were happening at the time. One of those events is related to a dream interpreter who went somewhere and will come back today at any time. I’m worrying about him, because when he’s going to come back, the place will be empty because of the accident/…

…/To the right side of the toboggan there is a small hangar. I’m waiting for a tire to be changed there. I see the old tire resting on one side of the car. It seems that S. stands somewhere around/…

…/In the same dream, I see my brothers approaching, Rn got long hair and it seems that P. is coming together with him. Rl comes from a lower platform, it’s a recurrent scenario, like a park fused with a backyard/…

I had some impressions from past dreams, related to the place. I’ll use that to focus when WBTB later

Possibly alarms are breaking deep sleep stages or somewhere around, but far away for REM stages these last days. I woke up contemplating the void mostly. Last night was a bit more accurate although due to work couldn’t go on for the lucid.

…/I’m playing an air fight arcade game 80’s style. Seeing my space ship from above. The opening screen reminds me the graphics of Galaga. The game is a bit more complex. I detonate the bombs that I first dropped on the ground/…

…/I’m dressing one of my kids. It’s night, we’re in a corner on the street. She’s 3 or 4 again, reminds me the times when she didn’t go to school yet. She’s happy and kisses me playing while I finish to put her warm clothings/…