So today (last night more accurately.) I began actual formal meditations again. Seeing as in my dream journal I use an orange-blue scale with the color gradation in-between representing different phases between lucidity and non lucidity, it seems logical that meditation is more lucid than a lucid dream or any regular thoughts. Therefore I a considering that on any chance I include my meditated thoughts with my dream journals, something I may begin to do, along with the star rankings. I will probably not post a lot of meditations as I think those are personal. (The same reason I don't post all my dreams. ) But when I do, I will spoiler tag meditations since most people probably won't care to read them.
Spoiler for Meditation 3:
Well they say insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting that you will get a different result. Well I guess I'm insane then because I'm retrying meditation even though last time it resulted in me losing dream recall and dropping my lucidity rate rather than increasing it like I expected. But meditation helps me to get my thoughts in order and keeps me from feeling scatterbrained. So I'm getting back into it anyway, if not for the sake of lucid dreaming, then at the very least I can get my ducks in a row in waking life.
It's final exams week and arguably an extremely bad time to try and kick of any sort of serious lucid dreaming routine even if I do keep the stress low by properly studying and the likes, so I shouldn't consider anything serious until after that is over. But at the very least I can begin dream journaling and building up my dream recall a little more. After all recalling nonlucid dreams is a lot better and if I do come up with a motivating idea or way that I might want to try and approach this, I wont have to worry about recall and can just hit the ground running.
I've been thinking about what a chat user. (I believe it was MadMonkey) said to me, that all the really great lucid dreamers have two things in common; that they use (was it either DILD or ADA or something like that?) Maybe I can send him a PM... ; [Edit] That was Man of Shred and he said it in a comment and it was DILD [/edit] and they started young. I formally started lucid dreaming right around the time I turned 14. Not as young as some people, but at least I'm not trying to start NOW. Though it's fun to fantasize how things would have played out differently getting the presumably godlike head-start those of you who started when you were still in grade school have, I'll have to accept the fact that I can't really change that. But I suppose there's no real reason to attempt to unpack something one person said in chat so thoroughly, since I've gotten countless bits of advice on how to become a master LDer.
One thing that crosses my mind is an idea that I often put forward is how everyone's mind functions differently and techniques that work well for one person may not necessarily work well for others. Hence why everyone does things a little differently and I often take techniques with a grain of salt. Whether that also means I'm closing out particularly effective techniques simply because I decide they won't work for me is difficult to say, as I've always tried to give suggestions a fair trial.
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There's something else on my mind. I've been considering how my dreams have changed lately, and I know I've talked about this before. Nonlucid dreams feel more lucid, like I'm always by default at layer 0. I've talked a lot about how a lot of really intense nonlucid dreams feel dulled out because I have a vauge awareness that what is happening is not really, but don't really break through and become lucid. In some sense I feel like after six years, even my scattered and non-unified efforts have had an effect on my dreams, shifting the entire spectrum of nonlucids a little bit lucid. Meanwhile, lucid dreams have become less clear and looking through my most recent few pages of DJ entries I can find quite a few places where the nonlucid lack of logic is infiltrating and intermingling with lucid logic, and a few places where I used the blue "Lucid color" where things should have actually been teal or green. It's almost as though nonlucid dreams are becoming more lucid and lucid dreams are becoming more nonlucid, and over the past few years the two have slowly become meshed together until now, like my past two entries, I'm semi lucid and constantly alternating my state between the two. This is what makes me feel like lucidity is a choice rather than a discovery. I sort of relate it to a space mission to colonize the moon. (In fact I relate lucid dreaming to space travel a lot.) The first time you do it, it's a big deal, and you're just happy to be there. But once you've been to the moon a couple times you want to start doing more with being there. You want to bring things with you, go to specific places and maybe establish your presence there. Getting to the moon is now no longer a question of "can I" but, how do we get the time, energy, and people to fly the rocket that we know works because we've done it two dozen times.
Okay maybe not a great example; I feel like I'm digressing. But it was this logic, that I need to just 'power up' these semi-lucids and layer 0's is what led me to want to meditate. If I can be more focused and alert, I can break through and become fully lucid in these situations, hence why meditation is key. But maybe I need to do more mindfulness oriented meditation and less subject oriented ones for it to work. Though it's that same logic that failed last time despite me having so much confidence in the idea.
Regardless, I have an insatiable itch to try my med and chart technique again even though it failed horribly last time. I'm keeping an open mind to possible changes I might make to my system, however.
But waking life should be my focus until exams are over. Doesn't mean I can't focus on LD at all, just I shouldn't get obsessed with it.
One other thing that I meditated on is Spellbee's comp going on. I used to be really adverse to lucid dreaming comps because I thought they were a sort of bastardization of lucid dreaming, turning a passive, relaxing and fun activity into a soulless game of efficiency of dream control feats and lucid chains. I always argued with myself that lucid dreaming should follow the philosophy of my Taekwondo studio, compete against yourself to be better than you were, and don't worry about others. But I suppose I can re-orient your way of thinking that to participating in a lucid dream comp and only focusing on how I improve relative to myself rather than making it into a big old dick measuring contest among my fellow lucid dreamers. I'm competing to see what I can accomplish, not how many people I can preform more dream control feats than. Though if that were the case then I could just score myself whenever I wanted and using my own system. (Given I have some qualms with the standard LD comp scoring system and it's heavy emphasis on dream control, offering only peanuts to NLDs and nothing for the waking work you do.) After all I still feel like I've accomplished something by doing meditation and RCs, even if no LD results from it, and I would like to feel like I've somehow 'won' just by doing all the work.
Yet I still feel driven to set a goal for myself; to build myself up and participate in the next competition. (They happen every 3 months so the next one will be in August.) So in some regard I must enjoy the slingshot of motivation that I get from competing against others, even though I recognize it's a philosophy I disagree with. (I suppose it can't be that harmful given that comps don't happen all the time.) Though I've always felt comps were destructive to those who don't do well. Lucid dreaming relies a lot on your confidence level and if your confidence is flattened by seeing lucid dreamers that vastly outperform you (especially those who put in a lot less work.) Heck, when I did particpate in comps, I did pretty well, but in the intermediate league, there were always one or two dreamers light years ahead of the pack, and I still felt like I was a failure.
Maybe comps are a bad idea because (as a kid this wasn't a problem for me.) But I've become the type of person who internally set the bar for myself very high. I don't have to be the best at something, but I have to be pretty damn good in order for me to be satisfied with myself. I'm sometimes tempted to say that every comp had something unfortunate that impacted my results. (In one comp, I fell ill the first week, in another, my dad had a kidney stone the day the comp started and we spent two nights in the hospital with him, and in yet another the day the comp began coincided with a family vacation that led to more disrupted sleep and little time for RCs.) And this is what tempts me to want to try just one more time.
Also who's to say that by participating in dreamviews at all I'm not putting myself into that kind of environment. After all even if I'm not entered into a comp, I'm still exposed to other dreamer's stories of success and failure, and many of them are much more skilled than I, and I've managed to not let competitiveness decay my motives. (Or perhaps I have and I'm just not able to admit that to myself yet.)
Though I want to try one more time, for the sake of having a goal set for myself. I want to participate in spell's summer comp (too late for the current one, and I don't feel like starting in the second week.) I want to get 'in shape' first, charge in and dominate the comp. That would be a good goal to set for myself. But I don't want to become the demoralizing villain that dominates the intermediate league. Perhaps a goal to set to motivate and center myself on lucid dreaming would be to participate in the summer comp, but build myself up to the point that I could be confident in my ability participate in the expert league. I wouldn't demoralize any less experienced intermediates and the simple confidence booster of being able to call myself an 'expert league participant' would be nice. I'm guessing I will not be at one lucid a night, after three months of work, but I will probably be doing pretty good, and this comp will be a nice stepping stone to my final goal, if all goes well. Of course the option to abort and reconsider is always on the table.
I just need a direction to go.
So let's start getting in shape; well after exams, of course.
(I had more I wanted to say about what went through my head during this meditation, but my mom's cat is making dough on my sweater and typing has become awkward.)
I dreamed semi lucidly that I was going for a jog. It was summertime and very warm and sunny outside and I was jogging through an area that I have never seen before IWL. There was an asphalt bike path that I followed through first a park area with a playground and a some slides. It then took me by a river with some large willow trees growing by the water and some tall pagoda-like houses across the way. The path made a left and went alongside a railroad track and an abandoned warehouse with piles of scrap metal and broken concrete in its front yard.
I view myself in third person and notice that I am in my dream avatar body. This causes me to become more lucid. I begin flying on fire jets above the path and getting a view of the area. Nowhere nearby do I recognize any landmarks. I do see an elderly man driving a large red tractor/ATV type vehicle down the path a ways ahead of me. He attempts to go around a sharp turn too fast (maybe 40 miles per hour) and crashes into a metal telephone pole. The crash looks pretty bad and wreck rolls over the man into a ditch.
At first I don't even want to look at the crash for fear of what I might see, but my continence/semi lucidity kicks in and with only vague and confused awareness that it is a dream character and that I don't really have a reason to go help. I consider calling 911 but then consider again how annoying and unreliable dream phones often are. So I turn around and land. The crash is every bit as grizzly as I expected and the elderly man's legs and lower body are completely gone and his guts are hanging out. But somehow he's still alive, and everything above his bellybutton is completely unharmed. He's in a lot of pain and screaming in pain but I can tell he's fading fast.
I talked in my previous rant about how I haven't come up with any new dream control spells and have confirmed that all of my original ones work. I figure I can still use my three pillars of dream control and just plain English. My first priority is to put him out of his pain. I raise my hand to the man laying in the heap.
"Anesthesia."
The man stops screaming and is knocked out. I then point at him with two fingers, presumably to represent the arteries that carry blood away from the heart and the veins that carry the blood back.
"Stop bleeding."
All the blood disappears and stops coming out of him. I think some other bits of his lower body that were lying around disappeared too. I spread my hands apart wide and try to imagine completing his skeleton. I closed them in together.
"Reconstruct Skeleton."
There was a bed of gravel to my right, by the side of the trail. Hundreds of small white stones came alive from the gravel and rolled together forming the rest of his spine and the bones in his upper legs. I had to repeat the command and hand motion four or five times before his skeleton was actually complete. The dream began fading out here but I was so intensely focused on my dream control that I tried to ignore it and hurry up to finish before I ran out of time.
I wondered how I would get flesh to cover the lower half of his skeleton once more and decided to pull and stretch the part of his body that was covered in flesh and imagine it growing to restore him fully. I began doing so psychically, manipulating his body to grow and stretch over the new bones. I lost the dream and woke up.