CazmoV

After having a bit of a rought time recently, I've been doing a lot better. I've been keeping up with work, eating relatively healthy, reading, and making music. I had a big tidy up (my flat was a complete shithole) and this improved my mind clarity. I did buy some weed a couple nights ago and have been smoking fairly regularly, but I've been making sure that I'm not wasting my time consuming online videos, trying to be a bit more aware and productive.

A few days ago, a book I ordered arrived - Stephen LaBerge's "Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming". I bought this book because of a recommendation somewhere on this forum, and I'm so happy with it. I only started reading it last night, but it struck a real chord with me. I've been aware of lucid dreaming for almost 15 years and had relative success with DILDs and WBTBs as a kid, but I lost my way with it through various bad habits and the general challenges life throws at you as an adult.

I read the first 50 or so pages in one sitting and I felt a pretty profound change in my state of mind. LaBerge has written this book so that it flows really nicely, and whilst I already know a lot of things he is informing the reader of, it feels great to start from the beginning again. I kind of forgot about the depth of potential benefits that Lucid Dreaming provides, and reading this put me back into a magical state of inspiration and motivation to succeed in lucid dreaming again.

I felt so connected with all of this that I went to bed feeling immersed in my thoughts of having lucid dreaming. I had my laptop by my bed, ready to write my dreams in the morning, and I fell asleep half-attempting a WILD, staying completely still and having my minds eye encompassed in hypogogic hallucinations.

However, I woke up this morning with no dream recollection, feeling fairly groggy despite a long sleep. I had smoked quite a lot of weed last night but felt fairly collected as I got to bed, so I hoped that it wouldn't interrupt my sleep too much. However in hindside, it probably did. I need to remind myself that whilst I can smoke weed in moderation during the day, I'm going to have trouble pursuing lucid dreaming if I keep going to bed high.

Another interesting thing happened last night - whilst I was reading the book, I had a few moments where my consciousness felt altered, like I was aware of something spiritual or mystical on my mind. I've felt this many time before when I feel inspired by mystical scenarios or readings, but this put me quite on edge. I started to have this fear that I would look away towards my kitchen for example, and see a terrifying, black demon, such as the woman from The Ring. This genuinely spooked me for a while and I kept having this sensation that any second now, something terrifying was going to happen. I remembered that I used to get this all the time as a kid, I got spooked to the point that I wonder if I experienced trauma as a child, once to a film and once to a book.

I obviously wasn't scared to the point of true terror as I was as a child, but I realized that I hadn't thought about this sensation in years. When I've gone to therapists, they'd always ask me about my past and if I've had any traumatic experiences, and I've never had anything to offer there. I sometimes have felt that there is something hiding in my subconscious that I need to remember, and thinking about these feelings of terror made me wonder if that was it. I really was a bit of a messed up kid at times and the intensity of the fear would make me say and do weird things. it makes me wonder whether exploring this could be another application of lucid dreaming for me, working past my weird fears that seemed to arise again after reading lucid dreaming content as I would as a child.

Anyway, onwards and upwards - I'm excited for a new day today, to begin working through the dream sign annotation exercise in LaBerge's book, and I plan to stop smoking at least two hours before I go to bed tonight. My recall used to be amazing with up to 10 dreams per night, and I cannot wait until I've got back to that spot.