side notes

10.10.2010

Experiences in an Unfamiliar Bed (Note)

NON-DREAM DREAM LUCID

There is a theory that sleeping in an unfamiliar bed or location brings a lighter level of sleep. Ie, one is closer to wakefullness (maybe an evolutionary thing- unfamiliar places could be dangerous, gotta keep alert), so lucid dreams come easier. I've recently moved into university accommodation , so I've had the perfect opportunity to test this theory.

Is it true then? After a few weeks of experience, I can confirm that the answer is: Maybe. I've been having a few more lucid dreams than normal, but this could be attributed to many things, such as my sleeping pattern (or lack thereof) or the many REM-rebound WILDs that seem to come automatically with a hangover.

With regard to WILDs, they are becoming more and more easy. Afternoon naps are the ticket. Lie-ins too. Anyway, I haven't actually been recording any dreams lately, so all I have are short synopses.

31.05.2010

Thoughts on Sleep Paralysis and "visitations" (Note)

NON-DREAM DREAM LUCID

I can't remember my dreams from last night in any great detail (apart from one part where I fell in the lake and soaked mah phone!), but I felt like rambling out some thoughts anyway. Maybe I need a blog.

I was watching "Derren Brown Investigates" earlier, a show where famous illusion/hypnosis/trickster-guy Derren Brown investigates different paranormal phenomena. Each week he goes in with an open mind, but nothing has yet shown itself to be anything more than bullshit. Anyway, this week it was the turn of ghosts/demons, and he spent some time with a "ghost hunter". The woman whom he was supposed to be helping with her demonic infestation described how she had woken up in bed at night unable to move, and had malevolent figures standing over her. She also said one time she was screaming, but no-one was hearing her, and the bed was shaking. All the time she was explaining this, I was thinking, "Surely, someone here has heard of sleep paralysis. This is textbook!" In the context it was presented by her (as a ghostly visitation, told to a ghost hunter), it seemed almost plausible that it was a ghost. But a rudimentary grasp of sleep paralysis would tell you otherwise. I found it really strange to hear it from the perspective of someone who believes in ghosts, and it made me think. I wonder how many (otherwise rational) people believe in the supernatural purely based on experiences like these. Same goes for alien abductions. Personally, I don't rule out the possibility of the existence of aliens, but I no longer give any credence to the paralysed, float out of bed, classic alien abduction stories.

The ghost hunter himself seemed to believe in what he was doing though. But from what I saw, everything he based his belief on was a combination of wishful thinking, poor-quality gadgets, and his own sleep paralysis experiences as a kid. At the end, Derren adressed this, and talked about sleep paralysis as a medical condition. The way he described it made it sound like quite a serious subject- a medical condition, I mean. I did a little bit of wider reading on sleep paralysis and found more of the same. Accounts of terrifying sights and monsters invading bedrooms while the victim is unable to move. Is it weird that we intentionally induce this state? I say yeah! But what lucid dreamers have done is proved that sleep paralysis can effectively be harnessed, directed and used as a platform for lucid dreams, which are awesome.

Me? I love sleep paralysis. It's a great ride. The realism of the sensations I've experienced have opened my eyes to the power of the nearly-sleeping brain, and have shown me a way to access greater levels of creativity. Some examples: levitation, sliding around the bed (as if being thrown around by a poltergeist), spinning like on the head of a giant drill, loomed over by a witch-monster, and thrown onto the floor. All stuff which could potentially have made me a believer in ghosts (and think I was haunted) in another day and age. Thank god for the internet! Thanks to the internet (and Dreamviews in particular), I've been able to recognise these occurences for what they are, and go into them with a positive attitude, even seek them out. It's given me some great times too. Listening to and manipulating my own personal soundtrack- without earphones, OBEs and of course, lucid dreams.

Anyway I think I've rambled enough for one night, I'm getting sleepy. Here's hoping for some demonic visitations tonight!

If you have anything to add, thoughts, or you watched the show as well, feel free to share!

29.05.2010

Superlucid Musical (WBTB)

NON-DREAM DREAM LUCID

I was woken up and went back to sleep three or four times this morning, so lots of mini WBTB's. My memory of them has really gone down the shitter though, due to other dreams and the time between then and now.



I remember already being lucid in a kind of mall. It was extremely bright. The walls and roof were made of glass with a steel frame. The roof was pretty damn high above me, and there were lots of little white columns and platforms on top of most of the shops. My friend Hugh was beside me. I turned to him and said,
"Dreaming aye?"
"Yep," he replied. I told him I wanted to do the task of the month, even though there was only like a day left. (Jump off a skyscraper) I reckoned that if I could fly up to the top of the highest columns, I could maybe get out onto the roof and see if there were any skyscrapers nearby. Hugh and I flew gently up in the air towards one of the taller columns. I didn't quite make it to the top, but I grabbed onto some rungs on the side. I surprised myself with the clarity of my thoughts here. I knew I had been completely lucid for a decent while, and had no difficulty remembering details from waking life. Then Jess shifted beside me, and the dream crumbled. I percieved that I was back in bed, but desperately clung to a feeling of disassociation to try to DEILD. I "moved" around and grabbed the rungs of the ladder as much as I could, focusing not on my real body, but the dream body. Not to blow my own trumpet or anything, but it took quite a lot of concentration! Pulled it off, I was back in. I drummed on the column with my fists in jubilation. The realism astounded me again- this was kind of like going back to my first few lucid dreams, wonderment-wise. Just a few seconds ago I had been lying in bed, but now here I was, seemingly physically somewhere completely different, banging my fists on a surreal column-platform thing, which appeared for all intents and purposes, completely real.

Those moments of super-lucidity really are great. When you are 100% you, not some quasi-self, slightly warped by the dream world. I was me in the Matrix. Unbeatable realism.

I think I gave up on climing to the roof, it got a little difficult and I was having trouble flying. (Lack of control sometimes seems to go hand in hand with hyper-realism for me) I ended up back on the ground, looking down the other end of the mall. A set of very tall doors looked to open up into a type of ballroom. I decided to investigate, and started running towards the doors. As I did, music started playing. It was a brass band or something. The floor was shiny through the doors, so I dropped to my knees and slid through, arms open wide. In mid-slide, someone tossed me a microphone, and I caught it, jumping to my feet. I was on stage in an auditorium. There were two galleries full of people near the roof at the other end of the room, and on the floor between them was a massive fountain. Behind me was the band. I instinctively started singing. The band backed me up. I was literally just singing whatever came into my head, but for some reason I was hyper-creative and the song just seemed to flow. It became a continuous medley of songs from the 80's. I remember YMCA was definitely in there. As for the rest, I wish I could remember more of the song, it was brilliant. It was a proper musical performance. The audience loved it, and cheered wildly.



When I finished the song I bowed, and reminded myself that I was still asleep. I thought,
"No doubt Jess will wake up soon, she's an early riser." It was strange. I visualised the sight of her lying in bed- as in, just imagined it. But the act of doing so made it real. I wasn't just thinking about it, it became part of the dream and caused a false awakening. I got out of bed and started typing this up.

Makes me wonder. Can we have a visual imagination in a dream? Surely that ability is already maxed out with the creation of the dream itself. Is it possible to imagine something in there and not have it become real in some form? Puzzling.

Update

I've added more evidence to my "hangovers are awesome for lucid dreams" theory. Mad bastard hangover today, just WILDed my ass off and got two epic dreams- one of which involved blowing up a horde of zombies, can't wait to type them up, unfortunately I'm feeling too fragile right now. On a side note, never drinking again.

Stuff to Do

There's a few things I want to do in future lucids to increase quality and vividness. I thought I'd post them in here to remind myself. The main one is to find more natural methods of dream control than forcing my visualizations into existence in the dream world. In the sweet WILD I had earlier, there were a few times where I tried to change scene, or get someone to appear, purely by trying to see them. It kind of half-worked, but I lost a lot of focus on the entire dream world, and the results were pretty poor. (One example was a ghost-like, ugly girl who appeared instead of a hot girl I was after- her face also distorted a few times)

I guess the results were so bad because my imaginative facilities were already in full use with rendering an entire world. That could be why it's hard to visualise things in your head in dreams- everything is already in your head, we can't have a "dream imagination" without the subject of our imagination coming into existence... can we? Anyway, if I maybe used some more logic-friendly control methods, I could get clearer results.

28.01.2010

Forgotten DEILD (DEILD)

NON-DREAM DREAM LUCID

this morning, I remember doing a DEILD. However, I can't remember the dream itself! I was lying on my left side, visualising a dreamscape I had just left- a grassy gnoll near my dad's house.

I was comfortably in the stage where I was actually "seeing" the scene rather than just imagining it, and I thought to myself,
"Yeah, that's what I'm talkin' about," before my memory goes blank.


Warning: tangent...

This got me thinking about how the brain creates our reality. Now I'm no neuroscientist, but that doesn't stop me hypothesizing! When we see things, sensory information is sent from the eye to the brain, where the brain processes it all, allowing us to "see". But when we are recieving little/no sensory input (ie during sleep), surely the brain can still do its processing? In fact, I think the senses are not completely essential for the creation of a reality by the brain. When I was trying to DEILD, it felt like I was "seeing". Of course, my real eyes weren't involved at all, the scene was created from my imagination. The brain will still be firing the same neurons, doing the same processing as it would if it was getting the input from my eyes rather than my imagination. I highly doubt this is making any sense at all, hopefully someone knows what I'm getting at, even if I can't word it...

I guess my concluding thought would be: how different are dreams from reality? A quotation from Morpheus springs to mind,
"If real is what you can feel, smell, taste and see, then 'real' is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain."

I'm going to make a habit from now on to "question everything" and "feel everything" in my everyday life, see if that makes me have more lucid dreams. I figure, if I get in the habit of asking myself, "Is this real? How do I know?" it'll carry over into my dreams. DILD's here I come!

Major Dream Sign Discovered!

Something I really have to look out for in my dreams from now on is getting my phone wet. I know it's not in any dreams here, but the past few years it's cropped up excessively. I'll be swimming, or fall into a lake or something, then find to my horror that my mobile phone was in my pocket the whole time. When I check it, it works fine! This has actually happened about 12 times in dreams and never in real life. I guess it must be something I'm subconsciously paranoid about... So far, every time this has happened, I've merely gone, "Phew, thank god!", set my phone somewhere safe, then gone swimming again!
I'll have to look out for this in future.