non-lucid

I was applying for a job at a restaurant and was coming in on my first day. My to-be boss was telling me about the job I would have to do. It had something to do with waiting tables but wasn't very hard he told me. I said something about not liking the fact that I had to drive so far to get to work. He then gave me a uniform and told me to go change in the closet.

I went to go change in a utility closet and heard someone shouting on the other side of the wall. I moved a lose brick and saw my friends brother tied to a chair in a closed off room getting tortured and cut with knives by two people that looked exactly like the boss. They were cutting off pieces of his belly and his fingers and putting them into a bucket to later be put into the food served at the restaurant

I saw the boss behind me with a syringe full of what I presumed to be a tranquilizer. I should have been really scared but I must have been semi lucid, to the point where I recognized that there was no real threat, but didn't recognize that I was dreaming. I ran under his legs and got out of the restaurant. I later heard from someone that the manager was interested in me because I was one of the only people who got away.

...

The dream flashed back to when I was a kid who was (I think 11) and I had been to the same restaurant with my parents. I found a strange object in my food that was rubbery and looked like a chunk of human skin with some meat underneath it. I thought it was something weird and threw it away.

-+-

The dream was extremely cinematic. Some kind of opera/choir woman was singing in the background and the dream scenes looked to be shot like movie frames. There were two little girls and a boy with long white hair who looked like a young version of dreamcafe's guide Dawn playing in a meadow surrounded by flowers and trees while a group of four of five older adults sat on a picnic blanket. The sun went dark as though it were being eclipsed and everyone stopped playing.

It then showed a guy with a chin-strap beard and a lot of tattoos making out with a girl on the beach somewhere and the sun went dark from their point of view. The sun was still in the sky but was just a small point of light, like a bright star and the rest was surrounded by something. My vision moved up and I saw the alien spacecraft and the singing lady got louder. It looked like a huge wheel with a hole in the middle. The entire spacecraft was made up of thin black supports that sometimes were connected and other times floated independently of the main structure. From far away the supports looked homogenous and straight, but close examination showed they were made of gnarled and twisted roots that looked like blood vessels.

A black goo blob materialized in the center of the spaceship. It took on a blocky humanoid form then returned to being a goo blob, then went back and became a human skeleton. It then became a number of organs and muscles which fitted themselves to the skeleton. I think it had two brains though, one in the head and a smaller one where the heart should have been. Skin appeared over it and the whole thing turned from black into a normal human being. I became that person and the dream ended.

Some girl from a college class that I had met had brought me to her house in a very wealthy looking subdivision. She wanted to show me her new kittens. I think there were three of them. Something strange about her kittens though; they have the intelligence of small children and can say some basic phrases.

I continually revisit her house once or twice per week. One of the kittens, a boy who is a brown and black tabby with white paws and a white chin likes to play rough with me whenever I come over. We are pretending to be secret agents on opposite sides during the cold war and at one point in where I capture him, hiding behind a black SUV in the driveway. I pick him up by the neck scruff then he spins around and bats me with his paws (claws in) and I pretend to fall over and he drops onto my chest as though he has just beaten me at fighting.

The neighbor of the girl, a very tall balding middle aged man with a combover and cigar says that I am committing animal abuse and that he is calling the police. The police officer comes and tries to arrest me but I explain the situation saying that it's just play and when the kitten starts talking and explaining that he was the one who made up the game and he doesn't care if it gets rough, since he knows I wouldn't really try to hurt him. The police officer leaves and the dream ends.

-+-

I am visiting my aunt's new apartment. It is somehow merged higher dimensionally into our house, and by traveling through a specific part of the house in a certain way, you can access the apartment. The apartment actually has the same layout as my house but is much cleaner and has different decorations. I see my aunt's new husband on the computer eating and notice that he has a cartoony big belly from eating too much and ask my aunt about it, but she is busy talking to my mom's friend.

-+-

I am in a rock band with my friends; and we are preforming at my grandparent's house, or at least a location that feels similar to it. The rock band is kind of strange because of the instruments we have all chosen to play. I am playing a Hangdrum, S is playing a three-necked guitar and his brother is playing a keytar that is really small, like a children's toy. (I think I remember seeing the brand' Fisher Price' on the side).

All's I remember is we are preforming a song for an audience of 6 or 8 people in my grandparent's garage and people are booing us, until A runs into the garage dressed only in short-shorts and an unzipped leather vest and screams 'Penis' repeatedly. The crowd goes wild.

-+-

I get taken with my grandparents and parents to eat at the grocery store deli counter where there is a small sitting area (not present IWL). I cannot help but think what an unglamorous affair this seems like, as the four of them get involved in a heated discussion about complicated yet nonsensical political matters, and I continually try to indicate that I want to go home, and will walk home by myself.

My father complains of a flapping sound. There is a soft plastic sign above us that is flapping around and he can't figure out why. I look up and see the sign and there is a big green metal casing with an electric motor in it that is supposedly there to pull up the sign but the mechanism is broken.

My father complains for several minutes about why the store needs such a mechanism. I tell him if it bothers him so much he should tell the manager, but he says he won't do that because the manager would kick him out of his favorite store and it's better just to complain about it. My grandparents join in in finding things to complain about the store. I decide I've had enough and leave. (For some reason deciding to leave by walking behind the deli counter, into a storeroom and out the back door of the sore.)

I head outside. It is nighttime and I am now on a beach. I see two Jacks out there who continually flex their muscles and strike symmetrical poses attempting to impress some girls. I say 'hi' to them and high five both of them simultaneously before walking past. I look at the moon and see that it is irregularly shaped and smaller than it should be. It looks like a large asteroid. I become lucid.

I use some stabilization commands, and then start moving my feet in a skating motion to get across the water, the water turning to ice beneath my feet. I get to a small island where there is a swimming pool and a small building, presumably a locker room. I decide to practice water manipulation and with relative ease am able to force all the water to one end of the swimming pool.

I then realize that I have to go poo and decide I should wake myself up to do so, hoping I can do a WBTB and follow up. But upon waking up I realized the feeling was some kind of illusion created by the dream.

-+-

In one of my least-favorite brands of dreams, I was playing Minecraft. I was killed by some kind of enemy monster that was like an animated pool table that shot pool balls at me. I became disproportionately emotional, like a small child would, and started crying with outrage at my character's death.

-+-

I was at some kind of animation showcase. Rebecca Sugar (the woman who created Steven Universe) is there. She shows me a new Steven universe episode. I don't recall much of the episode, other than there was a part in where Steven was a young toddler, maybe about 2 or 3. This was when he said his first words while Pearl was feeding him ice cream and he licked it off her fingers. It seemed like the typical cute SU moment but there was some off-putting music playing and I thought something scary was going to happen.

...

Later there was a portion of another animation that had two people climbing a huge stone face underground. They looked like some re-interpretation of Milo and Kida from the disney atlantis movie. Milo got a metal spike in his arm and started bleeding profusely but then discovered he had some type of healing ability and was able to heal the wound.

For the past week or so I've been applying to jobs and my subcon has been stuck in loop about the concept of getting a job. Despite on-and-off attempts to meditate on the subject and flush the dreams out or use them as a lucid trigger nothing worked. In my private DJ, the past five days were lumped into one entry with me instead noting minor differences in the dream plot instead of even retyping the whole dream. This morning was the first morning that I had a new different dream. Though the way I recall it happening is very fragmented, and I've probably gotten a lot of details wrong. In fact, I'm not even entirely sure this is all last night, I think portions of it might be from a couple days ago.

I recall the dream starting out in this snowy area with abandoned buildings. This is some kind of war game in where dreamers and their constructs have to work together to compete in a field of combat. Manei and I are playing but we get some kind of unfair disadvantage from the start because we each only have a very underpowered handgun with only a few bullets. Other players are starting with much better weapons like LMGs and rocket launchers.

I remember I said we should try to scavenge some better weapons. We hid in a large brick apartment building and climbed to the top floor. We could hear people fighting on the floor below us. I saw somebody who looked like a little kid wearing a skateboard helmet with a fake mohawk made out of plastic spikes on the rooftop of a neighboring building and start shooting with a sniper. I shot all my bullets at him. One of them hit and he broke apart into blue pixels.

I tried to run and jump the gap to the roof of the other building but as I was jumping a big group of guys in yellow halo armor came out and killed both of us.

I re-appeared in this grassy meadow. The meadow was surrounded on all sides by these huge trees that grew like arches, growing up at an angle, curving and growing back down into the ground somewhere else. I saw the boy that I had killed there but he was wearing different clothes, like a white tee-shirt. Other people were appearing in flashes of light. I figured this was where people went after they had died in the war game. An official explained to me that I had 'above average physical abilities and confidence' and that using them made me a cheater at the war game, so the yellow armored guys (police/refs) came and killed me. Manei and I decided we didn't care about the game.

...

Somehow this led to a portion of the dream where we went to the store and Manei bought a lego set.

...

Then this somehow got into a dream about high school. I was in a class and there were only a few people in teh class. The teacher was talking about something math related. Manei was trying to put the lego set together in the back of the class and without the teacher noticing. I told her to put it away or the teacher might take it away. She then took out a tray of cookies and started eating them and offering them to the other students and I told her to put them away or she might get in trouble for eating in class.

When I walked out of class there was a big floating robot with two scissor arms in the hallway. It cut Manei in half and I became lucid. I didn't care that Manei had died because death is all relative to the dream and I knew with full confidence she'd reform shortly. The robot said in a female voice "You are under arrest for being in violation of the treaty of Versailles version 4 point [long string of random numbers]" All I could reply with was a bunch of profanities, followed by "Bye!"

I slid under the robot, almost getting caught by the scissor hand but the hand tried to cut me and got stuck in the floor. I flew up and out of the window (there was no glass in it). I flew up and looked over my shoulder to see many of the identical robots chasing me. I flew up through the overcast clouds and into space. The immediate vicinity had about a dozen green and blue earthlike planets orbiting the same sun and the space around them was cluttered with countless o'neil cylinders and huge solar collection arrays. I began weaving through them thinking I wanted to get clear of the dyson swarm before I tried to fly too fast as to crash into anything. I saw the scissor robots break off and be replaced by a large spaceplane with police sirens on it.

...

I don't recall if I managed to escape or not. I false awoke in my room and there was a big snapping turtle by my closet. At first I was scared of it because I thought that it was hostile; knowing that snappers can take a finger off. It knocked over some stuff in my closet and a rolled up poster fell out. I sighed and got up to clean up the spill and saw a two rings, one black and one green, and a folded note. I read the note but forgot what it said, just that it was written in red pen.

I haven't been posting or lucid dreaming much since the lag-ocolypse hit Dreamviews, but this dream from a couple of days ago caught my eye because of DawnEye's guide Dawn making an appearance in this semi lucid.

In the dream I am making an attempt to do shared dreaming with DawnEye11. I am in this hospital feeling room where there is a large bed with a nightstand on either side. The room is almost all white with a blue and light gray checkered tile floor and a small kitchen along the front wall with a coffee maker and microwave. There is also a TV and small sofa. Dawn and Manei come into the room, accurate to their normalized appearances save for Dawn having really short buzzcut hair. We meet and talk for a bit. Dawn explains something about DawnEye11 (using her real name in the conversation that I will not use since I don't know if she wants me to or not.) that he needs to attempt a shared dream from my mind in order to make an appearance in her dreams.

A nurse woman comes in and tells us it is time to attempt shared dreaming. She closes the sunny window and the room becomes warm and dark. The three of us get into the large bed together and lay down, with some kind of metal helmets on to prepare for the shared dreaming. As we are climbing into bed Manei says to me "Alright when we get to her dream; we all have to make our appearance as cute boys to get her attention." I suggested it might be fun to mess with her. Manei laughed but Dawn was apparently taking this mission a little too seriously.

When we were laying on the bed I was in the middle, laying face up with Manei to my left and Dawn to my right. I felt myself become aware of their energies. Becoming aware of a DC's energy or aura is always a mixture of sensory experiences. Manei's aura is as it has been; orangeish colored and warm like a sunny beach. But this was my first time feeling Dawn's aura that was light blue and smelled like flowers. I felt myself invert; in a way that felt sort of like how I've always imagined going OBE would feel, as though I was now facing downwards into the mattress, putting Manei to my left and Dawn to my right. They seemed to be going through the same thing as I.

We began moving what felt like downwards. Dawn said he needed to monitor her to see if she was asleep yet so as to see if we could enter the dream. He made three of these thermometer like devices appear. They looked like thermometers but had one mercury bulb with three stems. One stem was straight up and the other went straight to the left. The third stem was much longer than the other two and was at a 45 degree angle downwards and to the left. There were three of these devices, though each one had different colored marking lines on the stems. The one of my left was blue, the one in front of me was green, and the one in front of dawn had red lines. The red mercury inside the device would pulse. Dawn said it was a heart rate monitor and that her heart rate was really high meaning she wasn't asleep or was likely doing something physically demanding, stating that it would likely be 8 or 9 hours before we entered the dream, and that we would be stuck here waiting for all of that.

Then the three thermometers merged into a new one with black lines and a clock face appeared in the middle to show how long we would have to wait. We started waiting. We could still communicate in this state and went about some idle chatter but I forget what about. I began seeing throwing stars and waving metal chains dancing about in the black void. When I pointed them out to Dawn he became concerned about what was going on. He said that the chains had a lot of physical objects with all their links and they were taking up too much of the collective minds' processing power to run the physics for and that we had to back out of the shared dreaming attempt.

The three of us woke back up into the hospital room. It was much darker in the room now. We started discussing why the chains and throwing stars appeared. Dawn thought that I had created them and accused me of doing so but Manei said that I didn't have any control in that state and couldn't create them even if I wanted to. Me and her started making cinnamon rolls for breakfast but Dawn didn't want to help cook. Manei told him if he didn't help cook he wouldn't get any food for him and would have to go hungry but Dawn was apathetic and brooding about the chains appearing in the dream state. Manei whispered in my ear "He's just being a sourpuss because he can't appear accurately like I can. Look at that haircut!" I started laughing really hard and Dawn cleared his throat and said "I heard that."

o_o Manei stop being so mean. Dawn; stop taking your job so seriously.

This dream is from a little while ago. People tend to enjoy my really absurd dreams so...

We are coordinating a D-Day style invasion to overthrow the pumpkin king's kingdom. He is fortified on a small island about 10 miles long by 100 miles wide somewhere in the Mediterranean sea. The plan is to sweep across the island from the far end of the capital city and overwhelm the enemy with brute force. I do believe I pointed out the questionable military strategy in saying that it would be better to land nearer the capital and go straight for what was obviously the heart of their command and where their leader was.

Regardless I am overruled and we begin the landing on the beach. The main landing force consists of me, the Scotsman from Samurai Jack and several ships full of overly-muscular vikings. The beach is defended by battalions of Battle Droids from Star Wars and them being used had something to do with them camouflaging with the tan color of the sandy beach. I for whatever reason have gone into battle unarmed and pick up one of their guns.

It seems as though our landing is proceeding well when the sun is eclipsed by a giant Jack-O-Lantern and it begins raining down pumpkins. The pumpkins land on the heads of the vikings and mind-control them turning them into slaves of the pumpkin king. This causes infighting amongst our forces but me and the Scotsman press on. We climb a cliff at and get into an area with some forest and farmland. I see a compound with a pagoda that has blue roofs and I falsely remember that there are blue ninjas stationed in there. Manei appears and I tell her about how I once trained with them but I left because I didn't agree with their moral code. She suggests that we charge in anyway and the Scotsman agrees with her, but then disappears from the scene avoiding the consequences of her suggestion.

We get inside the compound and there are more battle droids along with Sugilite from Steven Universe. We start fighting and the blue ninjas come out and start throwing bombs at us.



I think the Scotsman fled. The ninjas it turned out were mostly small children and a few female mentors who recognized me and were friendly to me because I had in the past left them. I noticed that their morals had changed.

The dream shifted to something to do with training the blue ninjas to use a zipline and there was this park ranger woman involved.

So tomorrow I'm going to kick off and try to do my chart and med technique to it's fullest extent, since I won't be having to worry about being bogged down with stress and the likes.

I wanted to drop some nonlucid dreams for the sake of recall building since I've been really lazy.

Last Night

I had just gotten a job delivering pizza. Typical dream contrivance came into play right away. The first house I had to deliver was adress 904 in my own neighborhood, but the numbers on the plaques on the houses kept changing, cars kept coming out of nowhere to nearly hit me and and the pizza order was complicated and confusing. I had other houses to hit on this delivery run and each house wanted a different pizza, but all of the pizzas were in identical boxes, so I was fumbling around in the backseat of the car opening boxes and checking if the pizza was correct one.

I eventually got the correct pizza and the correct house and went up and knocked on the door. I saw Gab (Potrayed as a tall woman with a cat's head.) and spellbee2 who was a shorter guy with brown hair and glasses. Gab paid me $300, told me to keep the rest as a tip. She then opened the pizza box and took out four slices, or half the pizza. She then distorted the slices and stretched them to create two smaller pizzas, four slices each. Spellbee was talking to me about something meanwhile and a lady from my subdivision came into the room.

Gab then took the two smaller pizzas and spun them around on edge on each of her index fingers. She then pushed her hands in towards spellbee2 and the lady from my neighborhood and they backed away like they were really scared of the spinning pizzas. Gab kept teasing them and then she tried to tease me but I didn't care and went back to my delivery car, realizing that I was getting distracted and needed to deliver to other houses. I drove for awhile longer and saw that the next house I had to deliver to was that of my old high school crush.

I got really nervous that I had to impress her and decided I needed to paint my fingernails sparkly pink, but I also had to hurry because the order had to be delivered in 30 minutes or it was free and I didn't want my boss to be upset. So I parked my car outside her house and then started painting my fingernails but the nail polish dripped onto the seat and made a pink spot and I was worried what my boss would think because it was a company car. I saw my crush walking her dog and I woke up.

--Boot my annoying HS crush from my dreams and make my subcon get over her added to dream goals.--

Previous Nights (No particular order.)

I had a dream that Marcus was giving me a tour of various futuristic cities. I remember the planet we were on was one that he had helped to terraform. I don't recall the first two cities, that we toured; only the third. The city was medium sized and had large apartments with balconies built by the side of a lake in a mountainous area. The city had hot springs in it and a marina on the lake, and the forest around the city was almost unrealistically lush and vibrantly green.

I remember noticing the planet we were on had rings like saturn that arched across the sky.

-+-

I had a dream I went to a classical music concert in where instead of seats we were sitting at tables. I was on a date... with my high school crush. The date wasn't going well because my parents were sitting at the next table and my dad was talking with her parents about an imaginary time in the sixth grade that I peed in the corner of the classroom because I was mad at a teacher for her not letting me go to the bathroom. In-dream I falsely recalled this incident actually happening.

At some point I got up and told my dad to leave but when I got up I spilled water on her. I went to wipe it off and her face came off to reveal she was an android. I saw Marcus appear but lost the dream.

-+-

I was in an old abandoned steel refinery attempting to salvage something. I got into a lightsaber battle with a guy and it started to rain; with water pouring in through holes in the roof of the smelter. The dream had a lot of atmosphere and was pretty vivd. Shame recall was total poopy.

Safe to say after my few days of (semi) lucid dreams and very intense meditations I was expecting to return to having more mundane dreams. I meditated this morning but the meditation was not focused on a particular subject and more just on quieting down my stressed out final exams week brain and getting a moment of peace before what I expect to be a very hectic day.

One thing I want to focus on in in a future meditation is the nature of a fair few (though not all) of my dreams to be very random and absurd. (Though honestly instances of this seem to have been going down.) Though there was a time where I was having extremely random and trippy dream scenarios occur. To some extent, I understand that all dreams will to some degree be nonsensical but these took it to a whole new level. I have a RL friend who's not a lucid dreamer but keeps a dream journal and does meditation and I would always tell her about the most ridiculous dream in recent memory. (I think last time we talked I told her about being chased by the flying centipede poodle on a Jetski while trying to deliver tacos.); and she would always tell me it was an indication that I needed to meditate more often.

Though I'm tempted to say that is the explanation right there. Not meditating makes dreams less focused and more nonsensical. I suppose if I enjoy the madness I can always 'bring on the weird' once I become fully lucid.

Regardless last night's dream is pretty mundane, and a good sign that I should get back into keeping a private journal. (Would be nice cause I could meditate on private things and journal them too.)

I was driving the old minivan my family had when I was little and I had gotten lost. I was trying to use the GPS on my phone but as dream technology would have you it was only telling me about turns I could make to get back onto my route after I passed the intersection, and as contrivance could have you I couldn't stop the car. I saw that the van was running out of gas and figured that if I just kept driving eventually it would run out of gas and I could pull over and get out of the car and call someone.

At some point I activated the cruise control and fell asleep in the back. Miles later when I woke up and I was surprised to see that the van was still steadily driving down the road though I was now in a very unfamiliar location that I am certain is nowhere in my state. I thought I should stop the van but figured I would have to climb over to the front seat and press the brake and wasn't sure how I had been driving from the backseat.

I was in a small town by the sea. A massive fjord with a small town of colorful stucco buildings and patches of farmland built around the rolling foothills of a mountain range. Somebody was driving the van now, but it wasn't one of my parents. They pulled into a small hotel that had some semblance to that beach resort from every dream ever, but not very much. There was a beach along this part of the bay and even some palm trees. I presumed i was headed east when I fell asleep in the back of the car so I had no idea how I had so quickly found myself in a tropical location.

Regardless the people from the hotel showed me to a small cabin. I saw Manei but didn't pay attention to her and met this tall guy who looked evil and was a vampire but turned out to be really friendly. I lost the dream and woke up.

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.

-+-

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.

Spoiler for another really long side notes:

Motivation and Goal Setting

Motivation was always a funny thing when it came to lucid dreaming. I always found it sort of strange that people complain about being unmotivated to lucid dream, but when I think about it, it sometimes starts to make sense. Lucid dreaming is at least in some ways like most skills in where you practice and improve over time.

I’d be inclined to compare it to exercise and getting in shape, since it often seems to me like stretches of consistent practice produce the best results and stretches of inactivity result in you gradually slowing down. And like exercise people always want the results, the flat belly and toned arms, but nobody ever wants to do the work to get there. I’ve always made an effort to make the work of attaining lucidity fun but rarely had much success.

I sometimes wonder if it’s even possible to be unmotivated for something that you to some degree want to do. Somebody who plans on going to the gym but decides not to is doing so through the economic principle opportunity cost, only we’re dealing in the person’s time, rather than their money. They want to go to the gym, but they want to do something else more. Work on lucid dreaming is much the same way. I want to go to bed at 10 and have a really long and satisfying lucid dream, but I also want to stay up until midnight and play video games. And given that even if I go to bed on time and say mantras while I’m falling asleep, I only have a partial chance of actually having a lucid dream as I’ve had many experiences in where I attempt to undertake something like this only to wake up at 7:00am without a shred of dream recall to show for it.

So simple risk analysis takes over and I figure I have a 100% chance of making use of my free time and enjoying it by playing a game, or a 25% chance of enjoying it on the off chance I lucid dream. It’s pretty easy for the rug to be pulled out from underneath lucid dreamers in that regard, especially ones attempting regular nightly practice, and perhaps this is why so many people find themselves unmotivated. It’s not that they’re unmotivated to lucid dream, it’s that other things are more motivating. Though I would argue that reviewing one’s goals from time to time can be a very good way to keep focused on priorities.

Now of course say one was locked in solitary confinement without any games, or really any distractions whatsoever, most anyone who was familiar with even just the basics of lucid dreaming would probably become pretty proficient pretty quick, given they had no alternative usage of their time other than to commit their energy to perfecting their lucid dreaming technique.

Regardless, one of the things I wanted to do here was list all of the goals that I have set for myself since forever. Now this is not an exhaustive list, because some of the goals are very personal.

So obviously the goal was nightly lucidity to start with. Now I actually made this goal only about a few weeks after I became invested in LD. One funny specific about the goal that I have adhered to is that it only needs to be one lucid dream per night. When I set this goal I was relatively unfamiliar with chained lucid dreaming and the idea that you could have multiple lucid dreams in one night, and when I did learn about it, I decided to refine the goal to say that lucid dreaming every night but only once per night was my goal; with more lucid dreams being considered just “frosting on the cake.”


After that I would say my goals fairly cleanly subdivide into two categories; goals that would relate to self betterment and have a more serious tone, and things that I wanted to embark upon simply for the enjoyment of experiencing them within the dream world. Since the self-betterment goals will Segway nicely into my next topic, I will list my more superficial goals first.

I mentioned this on chat with MadMonkey a few nights ago; but I’ve always imagined wanting to go to some kind of dream-rave or music concert. I’m not a very auditory person and visuals are often what drive my dreams forward, but I’ve heard some fairly interesting dream-music in the past and would like to study it via a musical concert.

Upon hearing of the discovery of the trappist-1 system, I had the idea of flying to the system and checking out all seven of the planets for myself. I’ve flown at FTL speeds before in dreams, so this goal would be pretty easy to accomplish.

Development of dream spells is another one. When I came up with the idea, I made a short list of spell words that I wanted to try and utilize in the dream. As of today, every spell I originally created. (Semper Stabelem, Tesseractus, Feminosa, Mascusona, Cohete Bombad, Cohete Pyrosa, Ageionirus, and Vestimente, with a few others that I made up on the fly) have all been tested and the three-pronged approach to dream control. This overlaps with some other dream control oriented goals such as learning the last two elements, Air and Earth.

I once had a fantasy that upon learning some secret holy grail of lucid dreaming I would begin regularly doing the dreamviews Task of the Months. If I ever ran out of things to do I could start working backwards doing every single task of the month ever posted. Granted somebody who had attained nightly lucidity and was as lucid as I am envisioning could probably tank through the entirety of dreamviews TOTMs and TOTYs since 2004 comfortably in a year, given they completed each month’s worth of tasks in one night. TOTYs are generally multi parters. This would not be something that would be done all at once, obviously. Really I’ve always just kept such a ludicrous idea in consideration in the back of my head whenever I try and argue with myself that I would quickly become bored should I attain this level of lucidity.

Progression of narrative. In having knowledge of my dreams, they follow a narrative through the main characters. It’s not a very original or cohesive narrative, but there is one there. One I might find satisfaction in progressing and improving upon with new dream characters and storylines. Writing down a cohesive version of this narrative is one of my goals for an upcoming rant of this nature.

Shared dreaming. I always felt as though this concept could only be truly explored by somebody who had attained this level of nightly lucidity. I’m somewhat of a skeptic of shared dreaming but I remain open to the idea that it is a possibility. Regardless if I had limitless nightly lucidity at my disposal, I might find this an interesting subject matter to explore.

Though honestly that’s about it for the list. In my years of intermittent lucidity, I have taken care of most of these more superficial, wish fufillment type goals hence why I have difficulty fully fleshing out the list.

The second half of my goals are largely personal and I do not feel comfortable discussing them on this forum. Therefore these goals will be censored and kept to my private copy of this document, except for one, for the sake of example. This of course being my habit of finger biting. This is equal parts goal and hypothesis. I have had this habit since I was a toddler/baby and never really broken out of it, no matter what I tried. (I’ve even tried using that stuff that makes your fingernails taste bad, and still the habit persisted.) I envisioned that I could somehow dive into a dream and deprogram the habit subconsciously. How exactly this would manifest would vary. (I seem to recall one user suggesting that I manifest the habit as an opponent and defeat it in combat, given my propensity for dream combat.)

Regardless these are the goals that I have had more difficulty reaching; mainly because they require more focus and a higher level of lucidity than I am currently attaining on a semi-regular basis.

Semi Lucidity

Something that I noticed that I believe I pointed out in my previous rant without going into too much detail about was my instances of semi lucidity and how dreams are continually blurring the line between lucid and non-lucid and somehow it seems that I am both lucid and non-lucid at the same time. Last night’s dream provides an excellent example of this. Notice how from moment to moment my actions can be attributed to lucidity, non-lucidity and evidence unclear, impractical thinking.

I also cannot recall if I talked about feeling like I’m always subconciously lucid but not always choosing to act upon that knowledge and having the fortitude to bring that lucid into the forefront.

*checks previous rant*

Yeah, I did talk about this. In fact, I’m not really sure how to expand upon it.

Anyways, more ranblings from the back of my brain.

I am at my college campus crossed with a beach/coastal environment. Across the bay is the skyline of a large, modern city with glass skyscrapers. I am sitting at a cafe with Marcus. He explains to me that he is going to divide himself into two and put a portion of himself in a small robot orb that will follow me around. He explains how his purpose is to gather and analyze data and being able to have a portion of himself with me at all times will allow him to gather data, and in return the device can offer ways of assisting me. Of course I agree on the terms that I can disband the orb if I need privacy.

I learn that the orb is something like the ghosts from destiny, at least in functionality. I think in dream, it even works similarly to where I hold out my hand and with some expectation can summon the device into existence and communicate with it. Supposedly its data gathering functionality is only active when I summon the device. The dream begins to change gears. My old astronomy professor wants me to meet him at the top of the science building on my college campus so that I can help him to catch a rare pokemon in Pokemon Go.

I go to the top of the observatory. Upon getting to the top floor of the building I see a huge cavernous and messy room with many very flimsy wooden walkways suspended around the room, going up inside the empty telescope dome. Some are built up on rotting scaffoldings and others hang from rusty chains or old ropes from the ceiling. I begin making my way up until I eventually climb all the way up to another stable level where there is a large fountain being installed on the topmost level of the building. I manage to get up there and talk to the professor only for him to be let down by the fact that I have never played Pokemon Go. In my semi lucidity I said to him.

"Kerbal space program, I like it better than constantly getting punched in the pokeballs."

I have a false memory that upon completing one of the older gamebody pokemon games through cheating, I am taken to a secret area, a long canyon with pale white rocks strewn about and pink flowers everywhere. I have to face a number of difficult trainers that I have faced before in the game who have even stronger pokemon now, but with no healing items or breaks in-between. At the end I get to this computer terminal and get to enter my name on the leaderboards but choose not to do it because I got here through cheating.

When I finish telling the story and visualizing it, my professor tells me that he will raise my grade from a C- to a B-. He then tells me that it will be dark soon and if I want to I can go up to the observatory with him and look at the planets. This entails climbing more rickety wooden walkways. We eventually get up in the observatory that looks the same as it does IWL. There are a number of tables with small telescopes and optical instruments arrayed on them. My high school crush is there wearing nothing but an unbuttoned shirt sticking one of the telescopes up her *ahem* and really enjoying it.

I bring up the Marcus orb and ask it to analyze this entity and figure out how to remove it. He says that the threat level is very low but he knows her composition and can remove her if I can get her to come close. I signal for her to come to me and she walks over. I can see her acting like a sex zombie and I only need one look to tell she's going to start undressing me the moment she gets in reach. But a white painted plywood trapdoor opens underneath her and she falls into the room of wooden walkways and other junk below. When I look down there nobody is there, however.

...

The dream cuts to a portion in where I am floating on the ocean near the campus on a floating log. I bring up the orb again and ask it:

"How do I get to shore?"

"Yoga is the heaviest element on the periodic table."

"That's comprehensive."

I then see that the orb has gotten wet and think that it might be malfunctioning. I eventually float up to a sandbar and decide I need to head back to the college campus. I decide to attempt the teleportation command.

"Tesseractus!"

It works, I'm back on campus. But I want to get to another part of campus and there are fire ants crawling all over the sidewalk. I think to myself that I will want to wear shoes to get across this part of campus.

"Take me to a place where I can find shoes! Tesseractus!" (Being awake and fully aware now I'm not at all certain why I didn't just teleport past the area with the fire ants.) Regardless I found myself on a beach on Manei's island and she was swimming in the ocean and had left her sandals on the beach. I'm sure she really appreciated me warping in, taking her shoes, and warping away. I got back to the same area but her shoes were sandals and they were too big. I was able to with a fair amount of focus, shrink them to fit me but I couldn't convert them to another type of shoes.

I started running through the area with fire ants but they were crawling on me anyway. I got through the area to this cafe by the side of the ocean and started picking off the fire ants that were all over my legs and arms. I kept thinking I had gotten them all but would feel one more bite me somewhere, and each time I found one they were getting larger until I was finding ants the size of house mice climbing up my leg. Eventually I wound up jumping back into the ocean to get them off.

...

I was back in the college astronomy/science building. I was walking with two friends who I have never known before. One was a very short girl with black hair and freckles and the other was a tall, skinny, almost bald boy. I saw the Jack/Jonathan fusion character walking upstairs but when he saw the three of us he ran at us and grabbed the tall friend and began smearing his face on the bricks in a very gruesome fashion.

The black haired girl suggested we run and don't get involved but I said that was cowardly and we needed to get someone who would help. We ran outside and saw three people in blue military uniforms with guns and shouted help. They started coming in but when we got back in the tall friend was gone along with the blood on the wall and he was acting innocent. The military people left and the Jackathan character came after me.

I became semi lucid once more and realized I had to fight. Jackathan throws a punch and I block but there is an absurd amount of power behind his strikes and even being increasingly lucid I'm not able to take him on directly. I attempt to teleport without the voice command and visualize myself sliding behind him. It works. I appear behind him and elbow him in the back. This seemed to actually do some damage. He turns around and with some effort I'm able to teleport above him and lock my legs around his neck and twist to break his neck. He falls over and I get up, though I sense the dream is ending. I look at the fallen character and see it slowly morphs into Jack and Jonathan inside of larger clothes. The two wake up and they are embarrassed that they are naked inside of one large outfit.

I have to write my second long post on dream goals and motivation, so I might update this DJ with it or just have it come out with the next one.

Spoiler for REALLY long side notes:

Well today is lucid dreaming day, and unfortunately, due to time differences and class scheduling I will be unable to catch the live-stream, live, though I still am considering watching it in post. But I see it a very appropriate day to address the elephant in the room. My lucid dreaming career has been on hold since late February, and this was due to the horrendous failure of my previous lucid dreaming method, my meditation and chart method.

I suppose calling this a dreaming ‘Restart’ is not really an appropriate title, outside of matching up with that of my art thread, that title is somewhat inappropriate. I do not plan on simply discarding 6 years of lucid dreaming experience but rather doing what I told myself I would do on the off chance that my meditation failed; that being to step back, analyze what went wrong and come up with a new approach. Since meditation has proven itself a very poor means of self improvement in my case (though perhaps my particular techniques and lack of experience were to blame.) this is to be my means of analysis and composition of thoughts and coordination of how I shall carry on. That is to say that thisis much more for my own sake and self help than it is for any of you to read into it, though it is available to anyone who is faced with similar dilemmas might find merit in this writing. Though do expect it to get a bit dense and rambling, as I will break a lot of things down and describe in detail a lot of things that may not necessarily be particularly important.

My Previous Attempt(s)

I suppose to figure out what went wrong with my previous attempt I must break down what exactly it was that I did in my efforts to lucid dream. The self-derived technique worked on the principles of DILD and meditation. The first thing I recognize is that this technique is self-derived. Generally techniques taught on this forum are taught to a general audience and designed to work for most people. This only became self-derived as I began to take what I had learned from others on the forums and morph it into something that I thought would better suit me. Whether or not contorting a tried-and-true technique just because you think your modifications will suit your particular psyche and thought patterns will improve or lessen your results in lucid dreaming is up for debate, and probably varies.

Regardless, the technique, at least in its final incarnation set three main goals to occur every day:

Two meditation sessions, one in the morning and one in the evening. I broke this down more in my post on the meditation thread but the key detail was that each meditation had two distinct parts, a portion in where I cleared my mind and a portion in where I would either attempt to focus on maintaining a stillness of mind or focus on analyzing and finding solutions to a particular problem. Generally I focused on problems or ideas centric to waking life in the mornings and things related to lucid dreaming in the evenings, on the probably correct notion that meditation could benefit me both in waking and dreaming life.

Documentation of reality checks, with the aim of improving awareness. I would carry a small notebook and document each reality check. Generally this was done in a quantity over quality mentality, attempting a few very thorough reality checks that would help to raise my awareness and thoroughly confirm my reality rather than just clipping a clothesline pin to my nose and hoping for the best.

And the third being a rather straightforward consistent sleep schedule with it never ceasing to amaze me how much better I can recall dreams and how much easier I can become lucid when I go to bed at a reasonable hour.

These three focal points of my technique came together in a chart that documented my own work ethic along with a column for a star ranking system that would rank the results of each night on a loose scale from one to five, with one star being brief non-lucid recall, and five stars being an ideal night of a long lucid dream or a chain of shorter ones. I always found lucid dreams difficult to quantify because dreams are by their very nature an almost purely qualitative experience, so ranking in the system is generally based on my own judgement rather than a hard rubric or set of rules.

Before that there were earlier evolutions of this technique that involved a chart. At one point I attempted progressing (or regressing) as the case may be to a written dream journal having heard some say that writing your dreams by hand helps you to think more about what you’re writing. The dreams were documented along with basic information like listed above, star rankings, and a chart was kept in the back of the dream journal. But I honestly find that I can type about 80 words a minute, and my dreams often have complex scenarios or details that require explaining for the dream to make sense. The ability for text on a computer to be cut, pasted and moved around is also helpful when you don’t recall the dream linearly; you don’t have to rewrite everything.

And before that, the previous six or years were spent with my interest moving in and out of lucid dreaming, following to some extent a pattern. I was always striving to achieve a vague end goal of living a dream life, having adventures and completing some rather lofty lucid goals. With each attempt I would have some epiphany believing I had finally figured out what was holding me back, go in full force, learn a thing or two but eventually get frustrated and/or burned out and step away from it for awhile before being drawn back to it again, a little bit wiser and more mature but with the same determination and vaguely defined goals. I want to make a note of how vague my goals in lucid dreaming really are most of the time as I think this might be important to cracking the problem at hand.

What makes this unique is it seems for the first time the cycle has broken. For the first time I have no idea what direction or drive to give myself that might convince myself that my goals are attainable. (Last time, my big epiphany was that hard work and dedication were more important than a refined and complicated technique. I was frustrated with five and a half years of failure and decided I wanted a technique that was a blunt instrument of force and change rather than a sharpened and precise blade.

I feel as though it might have been the chart itself that led me to fail. The chart gave a grizzly and honest insight into how poor and scattered my efforts into lucid dreaming really were and how much shorter term cycles of waxing and waining interest had an effect, but never fulfilled its goal of motivating me to clean up my act and showing me how my effort nets positive results. The fact that on the nights that I did see lucidity or at the very least heightened recall were often not correlated with the days that I had the most success in completing my three daily goals wasn’t helping me to stay motivated.

Learning Skills

It always seemed to me like lucid dreaming was like learning any other skill. I’ve developed other skills alongside lucid dreaming. (In fact I began my Taekwondo lessons within a month of learning of the basics of lucid dreaming, and I sometimes suspect this caused the two skills to become all mixed up in my brain and resulted in my dreams involving a lot of martial arts sequences.) After all with other skills I’ve been able to, with a fair bit of self discipline, get myself to a respectable level.

In the six years since I began lucid dreaming I’ve been in Taekwondo classes, and I am now preparing to test for a black belt. Though in Taekwondo I get enjoyment out of going to almost every class, except the odd day where I’m really distracted or focused on something completely different, and the progression of belt ranks has not been my focus so much as simply becoming more disciplined and developing fitness.

More recently, upon starting the first incarnation of the chart and meditation method I began a jogging routine. I wanted to develop better cardio (and lose the baby fat that taekwondo had did a number on, but not yet managed to finish off.) And while I saw myself improve in cardio very quickly with my running routine, lucid dreaming stayed stagnant, even though it was getting daily effort and focus on my part. I began to enjoy so much going out jogging, seeing myself improve. It became a sort of self-powering positive force. You realize you are improving and then get more motivated and keep pushing yourself to work at it.

But lucid dreaming, at least in my case, has not been improving like learning a normal skill. If anything, I would say my ability to lucid dream has depreciated in the six years since I began lucid dreaming. I can recall my first lucid dream. (The one involving meeting Manei on the beach.) More clearly than I can recall any dream in recent memory. Now I realize that is basically trapping me in a negative loop in where I recognize that my ability to lucid dream is depreciating and therefore is reflected with even more muddy dreams. This might be what sets it apart; lucid dreaming’s dependence on your mental state and focus on it. I can go for a run when I’m angry or emotional and still improve; I just focus my anger into running and I still see improvement, but, at least in my case, non-positive emotions of anger and self frustration cannot be put in any useful way towards lucid dreaming.

I remember seeing a post on another forum in where they talk about Jedi and Sith meditation in the Star Wars cannon in where Jedi meditation is all about letting go and being at peace in everything you do, and Sith meditation is more about using emotions (generally anger) to motivate you toward your goals. When I’m developing an athletic skill, being focused on anger is great, much better than being peaceful. The problem of course being that in lucid dreaming, you can’t be emotional, or your dreams will reflect that emotion.

I know I’m leaving a vacuum as to what exactly motivated my lucid dreaming efforts as far as emotions go. This is important and I’ll come back to it.

Learning from the past

As I introduced this post, I am not discarding past knowledge, but rather de-programming and deconstructing my ways of thinking and attempting to troubleshoot the problems. There already seems to be a lack of motivation and proper goals set. In my other pursuits, my goals have always been clear cut. Jogging? Run a 5k in 22 mins. Taekwondo? Get a black belt. Art? Senior gallery show at my college, and start a webcomic. I don’t want to say that setting a very clear cut goal for myself will magically fix everything, seeing as none of my past “epiphanies” really seemed to do that. Now I recognize I’m about to dive headfirst into a mental minefield of schemas that will probably destroy my ability to lucid dream in the near future, but I feel that doing so is necessary in the long run for fixing the problems that lay ahead.

I will call these epiphanies since they seemed like such things at the time, they seemed like such massive revelations that would quickly resolve everything and tie up all loose ends, allowing me to attain the level of lucid dreaming that I had always wanted.

In learning to lucid dream I’ve programmed myself to think that certain things will greatly effect my odds of lucid dreaming; in where they probably will since I think that. I begin to think that having or not having one particular technique or thought process is a make-or break for lucid dreaming, and that not having it will mean I’m screwed. Really, what I just wanted to do was break down my previous epiphanies and see what merits or faults I think they hold with my present state of mind. I’ve already broken down that most recent epiphany that “There is no secret technique, only hard work and dedication.” and why it ran into problems.

Henceforth I present my previous epiphanies and realizations in roughly reverse chronological order.

-“It’s all in your head”

I recall coming up with and subscribing to the notion that lucid dreaming was something that was all in my head, and that to be good at it, all I simply had to do was believe that I was good at it and choose to do it, since there was no skill curve, and it really was just all in my head. Though this didn’t seem to work and was actually built upon by my hard work philosophy believing that with concentrated and regimented applied effort I could attain regular lucidity.

Continuing on this, my though process was very centric on the idea that lucidity is not a goal but more like a choice. I began feeling this way because at the time, I was having a lot of semi-lucid dreams and beginning to develop an underlying feeling that I was constantly lucid, but simply not choosing to bring that lucidity to the front of my mind. I still feel like this logic is present in my dreams; that I always have the potential to become lucid yet sometimes lack the mental fortitude to think clearly enough to bring that lucidity to the forefront, and that I need some kind of enhanced willpower and awareness to actually beak through from subconscious lucidity into true lucidity. The feeling and situation I am in when these dreams arise is somewhat difficult to describe, but I could somewhat equate it to sitting in a really long boring high school math class and daydreaming. You’re not really mindful of your reality and probably not really mindful about what you’re daydreaming about. You’re just daydreaming and allowing said daydream to go wherever seems most interesting.

I remember being in this state of mind often equating lucid dreaming to breathing rather than a learned skill like I would later on. I thought to myself that breathing is something people do all the time, but most of us don’t really keep ourselves aware of it; just like dreaming. But you can very easily become aware of your breathing to where it becomes a conscious action (You, reading this, probably just became aware of your breathing.) But you can’t be mindful of breathing all the time, it takes your focus away from tasks at hand, and to focus on another task as well as being mindful of your breathing takes a lot of focus. That perhaps best describes how I felt I was grasping at lucidity.

-Creativity and Happiness vs Logic and Reasoning

This epiphany is unique in that it was the only one that actually came to me within a dream, in where a dream character told me to focus on creativity and happiness rather than approaching dreaming logically.

I came up with several interpretations of how to apply this notion. One was to begin drawing dream related artwork. Another was to write “fake dream journal entries” as an applied visualization exercise and to be utilized for motivation. Another was just simply to remain optimistic in the face of adversities like garbage dream recall and muddy or nonexistent lucidity. Needless to say none of these philosophies or techniques helped as much as one might have expected.

Obviously this notion was reconsidered by the time I got to my chart and meditation method, a decidedly logic and quantitative focused way of focusing on lucid dreaming.

-Something in the dream is holding me back

Generally when there is some kind of problem or issue people like to have a scapegoat. Someone or something they can peg the problem on. In this case I began thinking that there was some barrier or entity within the dream world that was holding me back.

This first manifested itself as a complex series of dream plots involving my dream guide requiring me to complete some trial in where upon completion a “weighted belt” that had been steadily mounting would be removed and I would be able to lucid dream to my full potential. Of course once this extremely contrived dream plot concluded and the weighted belt was supposedly removed, I saw no long-term effect to my ability to lucid dream.

Later I would engage in a second dream plot in where some entity had to be defeated in order for me to be able to lucid dream at my full potential, but that had a similar result; no long term effect on my ability to lucid dream.

-Engagement and active thinking is the key

I once built my lucid dreaming routines and goals around the idea that being actively aware and trying new things would hold the key to attaining regular lucidity. This was one of the times that I was arguably way more active and social on the forums, and most active in learning about lucid dreaming in general.

I subscribed to the notion that dreams generally reflect what you are actively thinking about at the time, getting the idea that when you are learning or interested in some new knowledge you tend to dream about it. I remember when I was first becoming invested in things like a new TV series or video game and finding it overtaking my dreams. Yet older media that I am already familiar with tends not to make many appearances in lucid dreaming. Given that, if I could continue to steadily engage myself with new lucid dreaming concepts and keep fresh material flowing, I could continually lucid dream.

-WBTB/WeeBTB is the key

There was a time that I was very successful at lucid dreaming and closer to my goal than I had ever been before. This was when I became heavily invested in using the WBTB and WeeBTB techniques. People talk a lot about WBTB and DEILD being great, and they are, but the were not what I was looking for to achieve nightly lucidity, simply because it’s very easy for me to get burned out on these techniques. One can only wake themselves up at 4:00am on so many mornings before they become burnt out or their sleep schedule begins to alter so that a 4:00am awakening results in you being awake and staying that way.

-The Symbol

Remember this? This was my attempt to cheat at lucid dreaming. This project was a titanic failure. The premise of this was simple. To engrain this symbol into my mind as a trigger for lucidity and a reminder to reality check by placing it around in the waking world. This meshed nicely with at the time I was living in the dormitories at college and needed a means to mark what was my property.

Though disappointingly the symbol only appeared in my dream once after about three months of the project, and that was only because in the dream I was semi-lucidly making an effort to explain the nature of the project to my dream guide.

-MILD is the key

The first time I cycled out of lucid dreaming, I came back in with a renewed interest in MILD, thinking that autosuggestion would help. Like my symbol method, this meshed nicely with something new that had been introduced into my lifestyle at the time; Driving. Driving afforded me long stretches of time in where I was alone in the car, and these were perfect for reciting mantras as nobody else was around to judge me repeating “I am a good lucid dreamer; lucid dreaming is easy.” a dozen times, and the time was hardly useful for any other pursuit.

-+-

So by stepping back and observing this what do I recognize? The first thing is that there is a cycle of waxing and waning interest in lucid dreaming that is something I do not experience with my other interests and hobbies.

I am very reluctant to jump to conclusions as that may just mean another cycle of attempting something only to find my results and motivation diminished and slide into another low point, but I am tempted to say that regulating my motivation and applied effort to attempt to stretch from cycles of high and low activity to a continuous ongoing regimen of moderate activity might be a potential solution, though the option is on the table?

The second thing that I recognize is that these repeated attempts all entail increasingly complex and muddied philosophies, and means to achieve them. This would correlate nicely with the increasingly muddy lucidity, and blurry line between lucid and non-lucid dreams that has developed over time.

And the third thing that I recognize is that I am closed - mindedly regarding all of these as failures. Though I still tend to carry over and consider strong suits from previous attempts at lucid dreaming and attempt to bring them into a new light. Whether this means I am learning from my past mistakes or just repeating them over and over with minor variation is difficult to say. Sometimes I mourn the fact that for so long I have struggled with this goal of achieving nightly lucidity, and feel as though if I were to be able to start over today, knowing everything I know now that I would easily succeed, given how much effort I am applying, and I’m tempted to blame my past failures as building a very powerful and engrained negative schema around myself in all directions.

In essence what I feel I am doing is giving up and quarantining techniques because of a failure. Once I’ve seen that a technique can fail, it’s all that I focus on, and therefore the technique becomes useless, and slowly but surely I’m losing confidence in every conceivable lucid dreaming technique, and constantly raising the bar for myself in terms of the amount of effort I feel as though i need to put in in order to be successful without actually increasing in skill or drawing any closer to my original goal.

So what is the goal and why?

So I think thus far I’ve done a pretty good job of outlining the issues that I’ve had over the past six years with attaining nightly lucidity. It’s not the most through direction and there are places I could go into more detail if I had the patience.

And as far as goals go, it’s a pretty vague one, since a lucid dream, as I’ve stated is difficult to define and the line has become a bit grayed with time. Early in my lucid dreaming career, I found it very easy to determine if I was lucid or non-lucid. But that line has slowly become very blurred. Many of my non-lucid dreams feel vaguely lucid and many of my more lucid dreams are muddied with non-lucidity.

For the sake of argument let’s say that nightly lucidity entails a more clear lucid dream. But that goal is kind of empty. It’s like saying that you want to be fit enough to run a mile every day, and not have to be in recovery so long as to you can run that same mile at the same pace the next day.

I’ve always stated that I would focus on attaining nightly lucidity before I began seriously turning to a list of lucid dreaming goals that has frankly become a bit monstrous over the years, for I did not want to dedicate an extended stretch of time to getting myself to a very high level of lucid dreaming only to run out of things to do a few weeks after attaining nightly lucidity, but my goals have become lofty and also muddied and that is why I find it very important for me to “restart” and set all of these goals aside. Obviously I’m going to take the time to outline and list them here at some point so as to not forget them, but I have to recognize that as of right now I am not actively attempting to attain any of them.

Moreover attaining nightly lucidity or at the very least coming close to it would offer me a much more scientific means to explore the intricacies of the impacts of techniques. I had planned to do this once I had achieved a stable schedule with my chart and meditation method, that after perhaps about a month of preforming the routine regularly I could scientifically introduce variations (over a two week time period) and possibly refine the routine overtime, with the problem being that the base routine netted detrimental results.

Once again, on the vague and muddy nature of things, I maintain a self awareness of how long and rambling this post is. This speaks as a testament to how complex and difficult I view this problem (if you could even describe it as a problem.) as. If I could describe things more simply, then I would. Simple problems need simple solutions, but as a problem grows increasingly complex, as this one has, and there is no clear or definite answer in sight.

In the next few posts, I would like to break down my goals and motivations, as they are something that I do not have the time or patience to cover right now. Goals are key to understanding why nightly lucidity is so desirable and motivation is a talking point that I would also like to cover since, not to add to this already messy and complex parable that I have laid out, but I believe it is pertinent.

You know it's bad when you can't do much more than array your problems and discuss what happened.

Random dreams from the past couple of weeks.

I was in the show Naruto (An anime I have not watched and hold very little interest in watching.) Now I've seen somewhere IWL that there are two Narutos that exist at the same time, an old one and a young one, and both of them were attending school, albeit at different grade levels. The focus was on the young one who constantly got bullied by the other students because his hair was yellow and apparently that was an unlucky color. He was standing under a large oak tree outside of a building that looked like a small elementary school, maybe only big enough for three or four classrooms on the inside, with the other kids around him.

I went over to one of the students who was causing the bullying, who happened to have black hair. I tried to talk him out of it, asking him how he would like it if he was the only student who had black hair and everyone picked on him for it. He then started crying because I made him feel guilty, and hitting my leg and I told him to stop or I would tell the principal. At this point I became aware that I was supposed to be the teacher and was responsible for all of these kids.

Of course as soon as the anxiety about my responsibility kicked in the dream went haywire. One of the kids got stung by a bee and started crying, and I had to administer her epi-pen but she was kicking me because she didn't want the shot. Another kid stole cookies out of several kids lunches and got a sick stomach, and started crying. Once the other kids realized their deserts were gone, they all started crying as well. The kids reduced in age and kept finding more and more reasons to cry, and before I knew it I was surrounded by ~20 waling babies.

I became lucid as the anxiety was about to climax and realized that this wasn't my responsibility, or anybody and acknowledged that it was just a dream about an anxiety. I started to walk away as the dream faded out, not wanting to be bothered to acknowledge each of the children's individual needs. I thought the crying children would vanish as I walked away and recognized my anxiety but they didn't. The older Naruto jumped in front of my path and confronted me for leaving them behind.

-+-

I was with Marcus. I think we were at his house and he was playing Spore and I was watching. He had heavily modded the game to be better in many ways, explaining some of the dreamlike and nonexistent features of the game that I did not recall from playing the game back in high school. He started a new game as a cell, but didn't name the planet he was on the right thing, so he had to start over on another planet.

When he did, I noticed the planet was around a binary star system. (Starting a game around a binary star is not something you can do in regular Spore, I recall that much.) Most of the mods he had created revolved around making the game cooler, more realistic and more in depth that the original.

He showed me the creature stage where he was playing as this six legged monster. He was talking about how plants around different stars would need to be different colors to absorb the different wavelengths of light, and that planets around red dwarfs would have plants with black leaves because they could catch all available light. He then showed adding in this fern-like plant with black leaves.

He then cheated his game to space stage where he had made the most mods. He showed me how the home solar system he was in now had asteroids and comets that you could visit and set up small bases to mine and research, planets could become tidally locked, and could have multiple moons. You could 'colonize' gas giants and harvest resources there.

He started flying through space and went to a solar system around a small red star and colonized it, then zoomed out and showed me the galaxy. He showed me how there were some endgame items you could now unlock for your ship that allowed you to create custom stars and planets.

-+-

I was playing airsoft with Jack but somebody on the other team was using a gun with real bullets and shot him in the head. Somehow even though there was a big bloody hole in his forehead he got back up like it was only a minor injury.

-+-

I got a text from Manei and became semi lucid. She said that she saw a stray cat get hit by a car and that she needed my help to take care of her kittens until they could get into proper foster care. I drove over to her house which in the dream was in the same neighborhood as my friend A's house, and very close to it, but was only one story. In the hazy semi lucid dream logic I remember wondering to myself why I didn't visit Manei more often even though I always wanted to have more lucid dreams.

I don't recall the remainder of the dream's plot because outside of her showing me how to bottle-feed kittens nothing else really happened.

-+-

A very lengthy dream about me accidentally hitting a guy's car and making a dent it, and the other guy drove away.

-+-

A long dream about installing a Kerbal space program mod that added a planet in orbit around the homeworld with an atmosphere.

-+-

This was the dream from two nights ago that motivated me to get back into this.

I had a dream that started of somewhat similarly to my very first lucid dream. I dropped from several stories up and landed on a beach, already reasonably lucid. Some false memory details about the dream came back to me in where Manei and I were going to the beach, and we had swimsuits, towels, a beach umbrella and the likes. Marcus was there too wearing a Hawaiian shirt and he brought a folding table and chairs.

The beach was different though, it seemed completely original to the dream and didn't resemble any beach I've ever been on in waking life. I felt disoriented and looked only to find a small parking lot with some cars in it and notice that there were a few dream characters scattered about, though the beach was by no means crowded. I studied the dreamworld briefly reflecting upon how much I liked the fact that the dream had constructed an original environment rather than re-using my house or my college for the bazilyionth time.

Manei turned to me and said in the voice of one of my old friends from grade school. "Aww man, I wanted to go skinny dipping, but there's a fat guy in the water." (she gestures to a man standing waist deep in the water who looked a lot like my maternal grandfather but fatter.)

I said back to her, fully lucid "Skinny dipping isn't about your weight. It means you go swimming naked."

The dream went into some scenes that I cannot recall particularly well of surfing on the water and using my fire jets to propel myself. I recall later on Marcus set up the card table to where it was so close to the shore that in sitting on the chairs around the table the waves would wash over our feet. The three of us began discussing why my lucid dreaming effort has dropped off since my meditation stopped. When I brought up the meditation,

Marcus replied "Meditation has created 1,011 faulty dreams. Deficiency of applied effort 403 times pi percent."

I entered into a virtual reality simulation where everything was neon green cubes and black, and things looked like the movie Tron, but I don't recall much else of what happened.

I know this is a really long entry. Truth be told I've been coming on here for like a week and a half and writing down whatever I remember into this giant draft entry; and I wanted to post it before writing all my dreams down in a single giant draft entry became a habit. Enjoy.

I am taking a journey to Marcus' home star system. We are supposed to be on board some kind of spacecraft but when the visualization of the journey is given, I am simply flying through galaxies like I would when I was flying via my powers, though I can still sense Marcus' presence. We fly into a small star cluster outside of the milky way and head towards a star system.

The peripheral of the spacecraft becomes present and Marcus explains to me that this was the star system in where he was created. He goes on to explain that his is a race of cyborg beings, and tells me their history. In his history, humanity fell into an atomic war and nearly destroyed itself, and the only ones that were left were those who did not think humanity should develop as a warlike culture, but rather a culture of science and art.

As such his forefathers set out and colonized the solar system, made alien contact. The aliens they met were very different from humans in that they were very powerful, intelligent beings that lived for billions of years, but only a few dozen of them could exist in the universe at any one time. (When they were visualized, the aliens were a massive black being with six or eight eyes, as large as the earth, sitting on a decorative throne that acted as a spaceship.) The aliens recognized that the savagery in humanity was beginning to fade and that they may be ready for the gift of interstellar travel.

As such humanity colonized the galaxy and made contact with other alien races. But the mentality of the survivors of the nuclear war on earth was inbred into their culture, the desire to self-preserve and to have a safehouse, but on a galactic scale. Hence the colonization of the Bastion-Remedy system.

Spoiler for crappy sketch:

The system was chosen because there were a lot of resources and the system contained smaller, longer lived stars than the sun. I sketched a crappy map to help expedite the details of the system but its not super important to the overall plot of the dream, just interesting that I was able to remember such a detailed system. I don't recall any of the names of the planets but I do know that every planet marked in green was terraformed. The only location of importance was the space station Gigatet.

Marcus described it as a fortress system because of its extreme defenses, and remarked that a dyson sphere was too expensive and too vulnerable, but the entire system was protected from cosmic rays and unwelcome by the Gigatet projecting a shield. That was our destination. There was supposedly another larger structure nearby called the "Archive" that was the true archive of all the science and art that this civilization had gathered through the eons but the Archive's true location was known only to their most trusted members. However the Gigatet served as a sort of halfway point for information to be screened and collected before being prepared to be taken to the archive.

He shows me a room in where his body can be upgraded and repaired. His civilization has eliminated death of the body. He begins to remove his skin, first on his right hand to insert a circular mechanical access key to the room. Then lays down on a medical table and loses conciseness. Robotic arms spring to live and begin disassembling his body very carefully. Past the skin layer, Marcus had a shiny metal skeleton. His muscles and organs were blue and they didn't look fully organic or fully synthetic either. His muscles looked sort of like fiber optic cables, and the internal organs were more like squishy plastic. In places there were little valves and clips that linked blood vessels and nerves allowing for modularity. Close a valve, remove that part, and put a new one in.

He then proceeds to 'recompile extraneous data for download', essentially empty his brain's memory banks of information that he did not need. This data would be reviewed and either dumped or stored in the archive. I saw his brain inside of his skull and it looked like a blue glowing orb, like a blue sun with little solar flares on it.

Marcus then talked with me about how people in this society have a choice to be human, machine, or something in-between, but each choice has its own pros and cons. One can make a fully robotic body that is more or less immortal, indestructible, and makes you highly productive to the society. Or one can be a completely normal human with only one implant; a device to move your soul/consciousness in and out of your body. Marcus lays somewhere in the middle of that his body is between mechanical and biological, and his body can still die, though that is very unlikely and he can go for many human lifespans without returning here to be repaired, but that he likes to play it safe and routinely have his systems checked up on just to ensure nothing sneaks up on him.

He explains to me that his body still acquires energy from food rather than the power sources used by other more mechanical variants.

But because they have the technology to transfer your conciseness, everyone in this society is basically immortal unless they are killed by violence or a sudden and swift failure of their body, with inadequate time to transfer their soul into a new body.

...

At some point we are on the exterior of the Gigatet. This area of the station is like a city and has an atmosphere held in place by gravity projectors and magnetic fields. We encounter this group of two or three boba-fett looking characters. (in that their armor was similar.) They hit Marcus with some kind of paralyzer device that seizes up his more mechanical body, but when they try to use the same device on me I feel nothing more than a buzz like a mild electric shock.

I became lucid and started fighting them. At some point I tried to fly into the air but my flying was not working because I was wearing a heavy cloak or cape and could not seem to take it off, and the cape was stifling my flying jets and weighing me down. I tried to think of another way to solve the conflict and thought that the dream was taking on a star wars theme so maybe if I played along my dream control would work. I reached into hyperspace and got a pair of lightsabers.

This was really thrilling to me. I blocked some laser fire and some of the assalants retreated until one was left. She and I jumped into the air (her using a jet pack on her armor and we fought.) But at some point, with a fair amount of effort I was able to get my leg above her head and kick her down into the ground. I then released Marcus by removing the paralyzing device. Some police drones came and Marcus explained the situation and they arrested the one I had fought last.

For some reason the dream got really dark and I spent a lot of time carrying her over my shoulder. Eventually the police came to us and there was closure to the plot line. The plot line somehow carried on to a point where I was having my birthday in an old warehouse. My birthday party was pretty big, all of my friends were there. There were aged up versions of friends that I had not seen in years, and some people that I only vaguely recognized.

Amit from Infected Mushroom and Samurai Jack came out onto a platform and started playing rave music, Everyone started dancing. I saw my old high school crush standing on a table topless chugging a keg of beer. This guy with a handlebar mustache and a white suit coat came up to me and said that I had won a motorboat and a trailer came in with a big red and brown motorboat on it. He gave me some paperwork and told me that I had to sign it to get the boat. He then said I could also win fifty bucks if I could manage to roll two dice and get snake eyes.

I somehow found myself at the base of the basement stairs in my house attempting to roll the dice, but it was too dark to see what my results were. I was worried I was going to lose my first prize.

-+-

I had a dream I was at the beach resort in Puerto Rico. My mom told me I was in an alternate universe created by my imagination. I recalled something I told her a few weeks ago IWL as a joke. I said that if I had been born as triplets, one triplet would be an artist, another would be obsessed with Taekwondo, and the third would be an expert programmer. I then saw the three younger triplets of myself walking around in these yellow and black scuba suits.

I remember seeing a big row of palm trees on a sandbar out at sea and thinking that that was not there last time I went to the resort.

-+-

I was teaching my taekwondo class and the class was abnormally crowded. There were lots of kids. Most of them were kids that are in my class now or have graduated. The class was taking place in this warehouse with brown brick walls and high windows and it was kind of dark in the room.

I became lucid and decided I wanted to summon Manei. I forgot to try the voice command and just tried to summon through intention, by focusing on the door and imagining her coming through. I was thinking about how it was a dream and it was just my imagination so I should be able to make anything happen. Instead, my characters Raiah and Alduir walked in.

The kids got older and the room was even more cramped. They said they wanted to play dodgeball and everyone started pulling out red rubber balls and throwing them at one another. Raiah said she didn't like dodgeball unless she got to play her way and started throwing with her robotic arm but she threw the ball so hard she knocked a kids tooth out and we had to stop.

...

The dream carried on at some point. I was at like a carnival peir with the two of them. I was getting a strange enjoyment out of conversing with two of my original characters. I remember asking them for advice on how to make them better characters that more people would like. Alduir replied

"The pretentious pillbug's snakeskin handbag --FUCK! I FORGOT THE REST!! Thats a poem I wrote for you? Do you like it?"

-+-

Coming off another dream that I don't remember, the dream was playing out the scene from the ending of Star Wars Episode I; The Phantom Menace, where Obi Wan and his master fight Darth Maul, and I was Obi Wan. I got kicked down the reactor shaft and grabbed onto the ledge. I remember thinking that I knew what happened in this scene, that I jumped back up and grabbed my lightsaber.

When Darth Maul looked over the edge I saw that he was now shirtless with a gigantic fat stomach. (Though his upper torso and arms still looked really muscular, and of course all of it was tattooed black and red.) He also had two arms on his left hand side and was holding three lightsabers. The first one was a standard lightsaber. The second one had an unusual handle and the blade went backwards down the arm like a tonfa. The third one was his double bladed lightsaber. He started slashing at the edge of the pit and taunting me. He said that if I didn't jump up, he'd use his triple bladed lightsaber. I wondered how such a thing would work. He then showed me that when he pulled apart his double bladed lightsaber there was a third blade in the middle between the two handles and he could now prod at me while I was holding on, but I avoided him.

Darth Maul then grabbed a woman I had never seen before. She had long wavy blonde hair and was completely naked but had gag tied around her and told me to try and come up and save her. I wondered how the Star Wars movie would keep a PG rating with a fully naked woman in it and I realized that the situation was different from the movie and became lucid. I flew up and summoned a green lightsaber and beat Darth Maul, and the dream faded out.

-+-

I had a really long dream that was stylized. It looked like the animation style of Samurai Jack. In the dream, Manei was a small child wandering around a meadow. In the meadow were the hulks of gigantic derelict space warships. One of them was overgrown with grape vines and Manei was trying to get the grapes down from the top but as long as she couldn't get them, she had to sleep in a cardboard box.

My character entered along with two other characters and I showed her how she could get the grapes down by using a long stick with a hook on the end of it. I then got mad that someone had 'ripped off my dreams in an animation' and after some figuring became semi lucid. I made an effort to converse with her to no avail.

-+-

At some point I recall a very funny exchange in where I was dreaming that I was taking a science exam in high school and became semi lucid. I looked over to my crush.

"Will you have sex with me?"

"No."

for some reason I completely lost my sh*t and began using telekinesis to crumble the building around me. My crush disappeared and the other dream characters in the class began running away in fear and panic.

I woke up a short while later and pondered my behavior. It seems as though, even in dreams we are more in touch with a more primal, animalistic and emotional side of ourselves that awakens these desires.

-+-

I was visiting Florida with my cousins and my old friends R and J. We were at a beach. I decided to go for a swim but when I got there I found my cousin had somehow beat me there and was crying because I wouldn't play a game with him. I tried to comfort him and told him that I would play with him. But my friend J also wanted to play with me and the two started fighting. I tried to get everyone to agree to just do one thing and all three of us could do it together but it didn't work. I saw J's dad coming over and wanting to work out the conflict but I didn't want to be involved so I dove underwater and swam away.

When I came back up I was lost. At first I was worried about not being able to find my family members or my friends family members and became very worried of what they would think that I ran away and didn't come back.

-+-

I remember having a very long, 'realistic' and detailed dream about a zombie apocalypse. My mother and I were staying on a farm with Jack (the dream character) and his two brothers and father. Jack was showing us how to use guns to kill the zombies and gave me a long rifle with a scope.

The dream ended when I started waking up and WBTBed wanting to re-enter and continue the story but instead got a dream about my cousin having an allergy attack and needing to be administered an Epi-Pen.

-+-

I had an absolutely absurd dream about being at some kind of hybrid of a water park and marina. The setting is that in where there are boats parked everywhere, attended almost exclusively by bikini-clad party girls. Large waterslides and roller coasters arc over small islands and rock formations that are above the water.

In the dream, I have recently acquired my first job delivering tacos to the partiers via Jet Ski. I remember thinking that the job should net me decent pay and tips but didn't seem to be doing so, and I was still learning to properly control the Jet Ski. I also considered that I needed a better means to transport the tacos than holding them on a large tray in one hand while piloting the jetski with the other.

At one point I was tasked with navigating the jetski between two tight rock formations, only to attract the attention of a very large centipede-like poodle. From far away it looked like the dog had been fake but getting closer made it look animated and lifelike. Though its body looked sort of like it were made of papier-mâché and cotton balls, like an arts and crafts project.

It began chasing after me, barking and growling. The dog was able to navigate through the air with a swimming serpentine motion. I attempted to lose it but it was too fast, and I was still navigating that narrow pass. I attempted to splash water in its eyes and some of the women on the nearby boat scoffed at me for mistreating the animal. It was at this point that I also recognized that I had gotten the tacos wet and that they were no longer going to pay me for them. Though upon inspection, it seemed as thought he Jetski had made it through the narrow pass without sustaining any damage.

I ran into my aunt, uncle and cousins and lost the dream.

-+-

I was stranded in the ocean at night after a plane crash sequence that I only recall secondhand. With it came the old drowning feeling that usually accompanies any dream involving swimming, as big waves came crashing down on me.

I then saw my character Raiah appear in the dream. She was struggling to stay afloat aswell. The sequence played out similarly to one from my comic with her character in where, since she has metal legs and a metal arm she cannot float or swim and had to detcach them to stay afloat.

Then Manei came and reduced both of us and helped us both swim to the shore of an island. We woke up on the beach and the situation reminded me quite a bit of the movie Castaway, except there were three of us now. We started planning how we were going to survive until help came and the dream faded out.

...

The next thing I remember was all three of us were in a city somewhere in Italy. Raiah had her bionic limbs back and the three of us were sitting at a cafe. Raiah was complaining that Italian food in Italy doesn't taste like Italian food in America.

People began approaching us. They had grayish green skin and vampire teeth. The dream had some confusion as to wether they were actually vampires or zombies. They moved slowly in a big group like zombies but had teeth like vampires and were out to drink blood. I became semi lucid and began helping to fight them. I summoned my weapon and turned it into a staff and knocked some of the closest ones away.

I then converted it into a bow and stood on a table and started shooting arrows. I was able to create a wide variety of elemental trick arrows by simply calling them out as I drew the bow. When I called out "Fire arrow" a group of zombies got set on fire. I called out "Ice Arrow" and it froze one solid in a block of ice. I called out "Lightning arrow" and the bow shot a bolt of electricity that chained from several of the zombies taking them all out. I called out a "Plant Arrow" and when it hit the vamp/zombie vines sprung up from under the brick pavement and entangled around it preventing it from moving.

I started running out of ideas for arrows after awhile. (I was operating on weird logic that I could only use each type of arrow once.) and in my semi lucidity got concerned about my mother. I false remembered that she was in a house on the other side of the town and took off running. I don't think I was able to fly because I wasn't fully lucid but I was able to run at a speed I would place around 30-50mph. I started running through the streets and saw more of the vamp zombies coming after me. I converted back to a staff and did a pole vault over them.

I remember the sequence of me running through the city streets seemed to go on for hours. I recall thinking to myself that my dream body seems to have unlimited cardio endurance because it's not a real body and all I have to do is imagine running full sprint and preforming flips, and I can do that all night.

At some point I go third person and I'm running along rooftops parqouring and doing gymnastic flips that no real human could do. I eventually climb in the second story window of the building that my mom is in only to find she is a vamp/zombie. I convert my staff back to a bow Agian and declare that I will fire a "Holy Arrow". It works and she converts back to a normal person. I tell her to barricade the door and windows and wait for me to come back.

I then spot a structure in the distance. The structure is a massive mining rig built on top of a volcano. I get a sense that Manei and Raiah have made their way there but that they are in trouble. I then see a robotic policeman attempting to barricade the vamp zombies. I fly to the volcano rig that has a giant staircase running up the side. I decide that I will land there. But before I can blast off at full speed Manei yells my name. She is still running towards me and is all out of breath.

"This is ridiculous- you start jogging a little waking life and now I cannot ever pace you."

"You saved me from the first dream, call it even."

I become almost fully lucid. I forget about my other objective. The city starts to look like the city from Attack on Titan. I then see a two-headed Naruto going to fight Titans, but we ignore it and just sit at a cafe again. We start having a conversation. I realize that I should include Marcus in the conversation and just by thinking of him he materializes out of a blue portal in the ground.

[Removed The conversation was personal. It ended with Marcus saying this.]

"The Progress of humanity is advancing at an unforeseen pace. From the wheel to the spinning wheel to the printing machine and the mushroom bomb, figure-8-DNA and the three-two-two hyperdrive, our species spreads with a like a tenacious disease traversing the cosmos. [The dream fades out as I see a visualization of the milky way galaxy.] One day all of this will be ours but we must ask ourselves if that is a good thing or not." [The dream then zooms in on a solar system at the tip of one of the spiral arms. It is a binary system and there is a dark black planet orbiting far from the two stars. Marcus somehow implies that we will find something really bad there and when people try to colonize that system we will awaken some ancient evil or something.]

I am going around in a large city built by the side of a bending river interviewing at various locations for jobs. The first place I go to interview at is a very large skyscraper, upwards of a hundred stories tall. The building is very interesting in that the original shape of the building was a sort of cone that got gradually steeper as it went up. But apparently after the building was built a new company bought it and built a frame around it in the shape of a hexagon. So there was like an outer tower and an inner tower when you went inside and the two were connected by interior catwalks and the lobby of the tower ran all the way up the inner wall to the hundredth floor.

I go to the interview and it seems like this company would like to hire me, but I'm not entirely sure I want to be hired by this company. Simply by observing the social interactions I can tell that this company has some problems with income distribution and that at this company the CEO and higher workers get paid a lot while the people on the bottom who are actually doing most of the work are getting paid peanuts. I don't think the company is deserving of my skills but want to think things over. I decide to explore another job opportunity.

In the industrial sector of the city is a woman who owns an abandoned warehouse and some of the surrounding area. I meet with her and begin talking about her business. What her business does is not entirely clear, but it seems to be a cross of a design and sculpture firm and a recycling and scrapping business. She has a friend who works in a scrapyard and breaks down automobiles and other scrap into usable materials, as well as another friend. (A gigantic cyborg rat) who takes apart computers and electronics, and remakes some of the components into art projects, while selling some valuable things like gold.

I have a sort of informal interview with her, telling her that I will return with a resume and such at a later time but just want to get a grasp on what her company exactly does. She avoids the question and instead brings me hot chocolate. "I'd love to work here, and she seems to really want to win me over, but I doubt she can afford to pay me well, if at all." Our interview is interrupted by an official looking person from the city coming in and saying that the business defaulted on a loan and will be closed down in a week if they cant make up the money.

I very vaguely remember the woman embarking on a new conceptual art project. Her cousin is Benedict Cumberbatch and she wants him to pose naked in a public place with a picture of Lapis Lazuli from Steven Universe over his crotch. But she wants me to draw the picture that will be used, if I can, she will hire me and her business will get back on its feet so she can pay me.

We are testing the piece in a vacant office. I draw several pictures in different styles and mediums until I get one that the woman seems to think will work. The last thing I remember was we were playing Fallout 4 and talking about the game.

-+-

I was with my dad in the front of my house. It was a clear summer day in the late afternoon. I looked up in the sky and saw that the moon had rings like Saturn. I recognized the dream sign and became lucid. I thought about how my dream dad usually doesn't like it when I get lucid so I decided to try and educate him about lucid dreaming.

"Hey, do you notice anything different about the moon?"

"No, the moon has always been like that, ever since the [vauge astronomical event] changed the solar system."

"No, the moon has never been like that." (More planets began to emerge from behind the moon, and the ringed moon begins to get larger.) "Because this is a dream; my dream. Everything I say and do is a product of my mind, even you."

He goes on to say that he doesn't believe me and insists that this is real.

"Look, anything is possible. In a dream you can go anywhere, and do anything. You see that planet up there? If I want to, I can fly to that planet." (Gesturing to one of the small planets that had emerged from behind the saturn planet.)

"You can do that in No Man's Sky."

"Shut up."

I decide to just leave him and show myself. I leap off expecting to fly there, but I begin to float back down and land on the roof of my house. I leap off again and try to engage my fire jets. I look over my shoulder and see them blowing out clouds of smoke and sparks. (I think they were even making sounds like a gasoline engine that wouldn't start.)

"You can't do it, see?" He yells.

"You're not in control of what I can and cannot do." I turn and focus on my destination. My fire jets properly activate with a loud crack and I shoot off out of the atmosphere and into space. The ringed moon is becoming a gas planet. As I got closer I tried to focus on the color. I wanted to see if I could control its color and make it be green, as there were no green gas planets in the solar system and wanted to see what my mind's interpretation of a green gas giant would be like. It turned into a green planet with some bluish bands and storms, and I thought "Close enough" without realizing that I was heading right at it. I tried to pull 'up' and fly over the planet's pole. I ended up glancing through the upper atmosphere for but a second flying through storms of swirling turquoise clouds before emerging on the other side and coming to a stop.

I looked around at the moon system of the gas planet. It had five major moons. I didn't take the time to look at all of them in detail; my eyes went straight to an earthlike moon (I think it was in the third or fourth orbit out) and flew straight at it. I was trying to focus on having spaceflight be steadier and not rocket me towards destinations so fast, but of course focusing on the negative schema only caused me to rocket forward once more, giving me only a second to slow down as I fell through the clouds and collide with the ocean of the planet.

After my crash I lost a great deal of lucidity and became semi lucid and stopped paying as much attention to the dream's plot. Somebody on the planet had found me and brought me to the planet's leader. The planet was populated by small, pale skinned, dwarf-like humans and their king/leader gave me a dinner of fried fish and potato planks, then sent me on a quest.

Marcus was there and he told me we needed a mode of transportation for the quest. He took me to a train yard and started pressing buttons on these steam engines and mechanical faces came out of the front of the boilers making them look like Thomas the tank engine characters. He got a silver steam engine and started driving it through these security gates while I held out a lance on the front of the train to break through them. The silver steam engine turned into a robotic velociraptor and started going the wrong way so we had to get off.

...

The dream somehow gave way to us venturing through a dangerous mountain pass. The area we were in looked like one of those east-asian landscape paintings with the very exaggerated mountains. It was during a clear and starry night, but the light from the massive gas planet in the sky made it as bright as twilight. I was venturing with Marcus, a huge stone golem monster, and one of the Thomas the Tank engine engines. (Okay... once again... very interesting choice of characters.) I wonder what it is with dreams making trios of utterly random characters.

Regardless navigating these mountains was difficult. There was a floating cobblestone path but some of the stones would give way and fall to the ground if you put too much weight on them and I was trying to help the rock monster get across. At one point he fell and I grabbed him with one arm, and I wondered how I was strong enough to hold him up.

We managed to get to the next mountain where we encountered another animated stone figure, this one even larger. It attacked us, punching Marcus with the force to break the stone temple floor below us, then ran out of power and returned to being a static statue. I tried to pull Marcus away but his arm came off. When I looked at where it had been, I just saw very high tech looking mechanical parts and somehow knew that it was some kind of automated drone and the real Marcus was somewhere else.

The sky turned red and all the stars and planets disappeared along with the other dream characters. The sky was full of thousands of jet black shooting stars. A giant six-armed woman appeared and claimed to be the hindu goddess Kali. She showed me a purple blanket with gold embroidery of leaves and flowers going around the outside. It was made of some kind of indestructible silk. She then wrapped it around my head and face, leaving only my eyes exposed, tied it so it would stay on, then walked into the haze and disappeared.

I was now back in my house, standing at the top of the stairs. I undid the knot in the blanket and examined it. I thought I had woken up and was just hallucinating that the purple blanket still existed. I lost the dream for real into another short false awakening that I don't recall.

I was watching Danny Phantom. I noticed that Danny looked somewhat more muscular than the usual art style.

-+-

I was building sand castles and explaining a battle strategy to someone while talking about the 'Art of War'. Manei's father came over and he was telling me how he built their whole home island in Minecraft and wanted to use it to plan a defensive wall around the bay that if ships came into the bay they would run aground on sharp rocks and wreck.

-+-

I was on my college campus, only, as usual, it was truncated in some strange way where. There was a section of campus that was a former radioactive wasteland, with skyscrapers overgrown with vines and trees and the likes. Though it wasn't radioactive anymore because the radiation was from a very long time ago. There was also a tram system running around the college that had a stop in the abandoned city because my college planned to reclaim the land eventually and build dorms and classrooms there.

But until then my professor had to teach there. He was talking about how he wanted us to do a photography project of the abandoned section of campus. I then got back on the tram but it overlapped with being on more of a school bus. I had a discussion with some dream characters and one of them said that there was a rumor going around that this girl that I barley had said she was both my girlfriend and my sister, and it all started because my math professor shipped us. I didn't want the rumor to spread so I lied and said that I was homosexual.

Then the tram stopped and I had trouble getting all of my stuff back into my backpack. I wondered why the tram hadn't closed and gone to the next stop. I then saw that it was my professor that was driving the tram for me. I thanked him for holding the tram at the stop and told him I was sorry for being clumsy and disorganized with my possessions. He smiled and said to be more organized next time.

I got into my car and drove home. Just about as soon as I get home there is a knock on the door. I then 'remember' that I agreed to babysit some woman's child for the evening and that she would pay me (either $20 or $50, I cannot remember). I wanted to ask her some basic questions like allergies or her phone number but she was in a real hurry and just left. Her child was a chubby boy of maybe about five or six, with short blonde hair.

I will save the details but the boy's behavior turned out to be very inappropriate for someone of his age. I wanted to call his mother but didn't have her number. I told him to go sit in the corner for a time-out but he made a face at me. I then saw him in the kitchen, in nothing but his underwear pulling all of the knives out of the block and laying them out on the floor while eating cookies. I drew the line and said that he was coming with me. I picked him up and he started crying, then bit me on the arm and I let him go.

He ran to the counter and pulled my laptop computer off the counter by the headphone jack. I went over and looked at my now nonfunctional laptop and recognized it as a dream sign, and became lucid. I looked back up to the kid.

"This is an anxiety dream, and you are just a part of myself. You will now stop. I will now stop."

"You're not the boss of me."

The child began to transform. His head grew about ten times in size and his body expanded and stretched with a large round belly that reminded me of that of a pregnant woman forming. This new form of his a strange cross of absolutely hilarious and utterly terrifying.

"You are becoming a nightmare. What do you represent?"

I get no reply. I thought of the usual self-imposed rules I put upon myself for dealing with nightmares. If they represent something then I have to accept that thing and befriend them. If they do not represent something, or refuse to tell me their origin, then they exist without meaning in the dreamworld and can be defeated. This nightmare's presence doesn't make sense. I've long since gotten over my anxieties about working with children. His persistent presence is simply frustrating to me.

He starts walking towards me with a toddler-like wobble and a grin of excitement on his distorted face. I just start to think about how everything about this character is unlikeable. He's a brat from the moment he walks in and he's chosen such an awkward and disturbing form once he realizes there might be combat.

I strike him with my hands in a pushing motion. As I swing my hands foreward I notice sparks of electricity linking my hands in a small arc. At this point I'm still reluctant to seriously injure him at the thought of what his mother might think of me when she returns. (Guess I was not fully lucid...) But the monster barely registers the strike. He bends over and attempts to bite me again, where he now has teeth like the titans from Attack on Titan, way too many giant teeth in a wide grin. I figure thats what the dream was probably inspired by. I rocket backwards, clumsily colliding with and destroying the front door of my house, and sliding across a cold, muddy front yard.

Outside I see that I am in a twisted, nightmarish version of my town. Fires, lava, screaming victims, corpses and giant ash-black figures resembling the child but with more proportionate heads wobbling around, being the harbingers of the torment brought upon this world. One detail I remember in particular was the sky was stormy, but the clouds parted in the eye of the storm and the face of a colossal snow-white being with six eyes stared down on me. Even lucid, I could feel the fear emanating from that face and didn't want to continue looking at it.

I turned my attention back to the child monster, whos neck stretched and he made another attempt to bite at me. I wasn't holding back anymore. I kicked him in the jaw with enough force to create a shockwave and saw in slow motion from third person as the kick caused the monster to bite off its own tongue. The monster went flying upwards, and I rocketed into the air after it, unleashing a hail of fire missiles straight up, each blast propelling it higher into the air. I saw the monster clear the explosion, we were nearly at cloud level, closer to the fear-emanating six eyed face, who was now watching the battle through its window in the clouds. I saw the child monster and that my attack had no effect. The monster's stomach opened top-to-bottom and its intestines shot out like tentacles and wrapped around me. The entrails had a disturbing amount of detail, being covered in slime and blue veins.

I created a transparent bubble shield that repulsed my trappings. I then targeted his open stomach, interpreting it as a weakness. I created a spinning fireball with a point and shot it into the open stomach. It caused the monster to rocket back down towards my high school. It was screaming in pain but quickly recovered. I flew down after it and we were now low above the main street of my town. There were cars but they looked very punk, decorated with skulls and spikes. I flew very low over the pavement, that resembled molten magma, at one point flying underneath the car and re-emerging to see the monster hovering above center of town.

I at this point recognized that because this monsters 'home turf' was a firey hellscape, perhaps fire wasn't hurting it.

"Mea Impedius" was the voice command I had prepared to summon my weapon schema, should I ever need it. I heard a humming sound as a a long bronze staff manifested. I looked at it and saw small mechanisms of gears and levers moving. The dream changed completely the moment that I did and I saw Marcus, and we were sitting in his living room. He explained that my weapon schema could become multiple weapons and I simply had to command it to do what I wanted. I looked at the staff and thought that I wanted a ranged weapon and it bent. Two halves of a string connected from either end and it became a bow.

I was back in the original dream. I pulled back the bow and an arrow appeared. I fired at the monster and the arrow, in flight became a huge spear and impaled it through the body. The monster shrieked in pain and I knew I was hurting it now, but it pulled the arrow out and recovered from the wound. I flew backwards down the road as the monster charged at me. It was now wearing a crown made of holly, like a christmas wreath. (At first I thought it was a crown of thorns.) I kept firing arrows into it but they seemed to just be absorbed into its flesh. But then I got an X-ray visual of all the arrows inside of it were still there and they were weakening the monster because they had amethyst tips that emitted an energy that somehow weakened the monster.

I then willed the bow into a spear (with a very large amethyst tip) and threw it at the monsters head. It too got absorbed.

The monster became desperate and in too much pain, and vomited the grim reaper for lack of a better term. A skeletal body connected to the back of the monsters throat by a hundred spinal vertebrae shot fourth weilding a scythe. I couldn't remember the command I had planned for a dreamcatcher shield. Instead I just yelled "Shield, NOW!" and small metal leaflets arranged themselves into a silver Shield." However when the reaper came down onto me the shield broke and I got knocked backwards.

"NO! Dreamcatcher Shield!"

This time I was successful, a blue web of light appeared in front of me. The reaper's scythe came down on the glowing ward, getting caught right in the central eye. The scythe and grim reaper exploded off the shield that created a gonglike sound that shook the entire dreamworld. When it had stopped I heard a low, deep moan that I could feel through my old body. I looked up to see the six eyed face (that now only had four eyes, and looked more human) retreat up the hole in the storm. Rain began to fall and extinguish the fires and turn the magma into obsidian.

I woke up, but did a DEILD almost immediately. I think I saw my alarm clock for a few seconds and it was 4:43am.

The dream went back to the front room of my house where the whole thing had began. I was somehow still fighting the child monster but it was greatly weakened and had a smaller sized head (still disproportionate, though). It had its arm around my neck and I was struggling to get away. Apparently it had some kind of regenerative that allowed it to partially regenerate after all nightmares had already been banished.

I manifested a crossbow on my left wrist and said that the crossbow bolt would negate its regeneration. I saw two tiny green ghosts go around the bolt and the shaft glowed green. I fired it and the monster melted into a puddle of black and red goo and a 'baby alive' doll.

Marcus came in through the front door of my house. I asked him why the nightmare was so hard to kill and he said that it was a homunculus baby that somebody had released from a medieval painting that was haunted. He created an android that tricked the monster into coming over to my house and figured I could do all the 'dirty work' for him. I felt a little used not being informed ahead of time but I've been doing Marcus' dirty work since we met. He promised that next time he had a job for me like this he would keep me better informed, but that this had been on short notice because it was such a big threat.

I asked him why Manei had left my dreams and he showed me a comic panel that looked like my drawing style of her sitting on the couch eating ice cream out of the container and watching tv.

The dream faded into a nonlucid that I don't recall.

Another kind of interesting lucid last night. Not as good as last. But I know a lot of people like my persistent DCs.

Marcus was giving a conference on the Vietnam war. I was standing next to him on stage, but he was doing nearly all of the talking. He said that the war was very expensive, not just in terms of money, but in terms of human life, and showed a graveyard for people who had died in the war.

He then said that war could be harmful even to those that survived it, and showed me that most of the people attending his conference were veterans. Most all of them had some kind of lasting injury, like missing limbs or eyes. I recall one man, who was short and skinny and looked rather young to be a solider was missing his right hand and had replaced it with a magnet. Apparently he put little magnets onto items he frequently needed around the home and could turn the magnet on and off with his nerves.

A second guy had a rather strange configuration in where he had a couple of wires running from the stump of where his arm had been to a cart that had the base of a green robotic arm (like an industrial factory robot) on it.

A third guy in the back who was bedridden and only had one eye left, and no limbs. He was interfacing with a computer through his brain that he could use to preform simple tasks and ask the doctors to bring him things. Marcus went on to talk about how the technology to create artificial limbs that interfaced with the nervous system already existed but was too expensive for most people. Even so, he wanted to give all of the war veterans in the room his model on a reduced payment plan, with the vets paying very little, if at all, even when other companies refused to do so.

He then said that he was still working on it but could not yet create artificial eyes or repair the spine.

My phone buzzed and I got a notification. My phone was holographic and I remembered Marcus gave it to me. The youtube user 'I Hate Everything' had posted a new video. 'I Hate the Nebulon B frigate from Star Wars: Return of the Jedi.'I became semi lucid when I realized that Marcus had given me the phone and that I am not subscribed to that channel.

After the conference Marcus took me into a back room where he was talking about how hard it is to eliminate war. He showed me a room where people were playing dungeons and dragons, then showed me a room full of video games and people playing, and then showed me a room full of toys and comic books and told me how violence was so engrained in our culture we tend to ignore it and never really think about the consequences.

"Our culture devours violent media at such an alarming rate, faster than-" [he made a humorous some analogy to a fat guy in a place with a lot of fried food, but I forgot his exact wording.]

Marcus took me back to his house. He said it was christmas time and that Manei's sister (who's name was like Kathalia or something) and her boyfriend were coming over and I had to help get ready. He told me to get a christmas tree and created a portal to my college. I did some rather sluggish flying around on my fire jets for a bit.

I saw a guy selling christmas trees in the quad and just took one back through the portal without paying for it. I thought the guy would call me out as a theif at me but the guy turned out to be one of the people he had given prosthetics to, and he said that it was the least he could do to help him out.

I took the tree back to Marcus' house and he set up a hologram projector that projected red and green snowflake ornaments onto the tree in very vivid light and color. I think he actually had two projectors, one that projected in a red light channel, and another green. I lost the dream staring at the decorations.

Semi Lucid; my subcon is explaining to me/ I am explaining to myself how every one of my dream characters is just an aspect of myself and/or my worldview that is distinct enough from myself that it becomes personified as a separate entity. My subcon is explaining that when one aspect completely owns the dream it can become something completely different depending upon what aspects of myself are present within the dream.

Marcus' Dream:

I am in a sort of spectator view mode; that will be the case for all of these dreams. I am only able to witness, never interact. Since only one aspect of myself is present the other dream characters cannot possibly be present either. There is a fleet of space warships situated in front of a blue swirling gas planet with rings. (Neptune) There are different classes with distinct roles; Carriers that carry both manned and unmanned bombers and interceptors; Missile cruisers that carry advanced fusion weapons; and Warships that carry massive railguns. The fleet is escorting various cargo and mining ships that are looking to mine the rings and moons of the planet for resources vital to the war effort.

An alien fleet appears farther out from the planet. While Marcus' ships are somewhat typical "Sci Fi Flying boxes" the alien ships are brightly colored and have organic forms. (They looked kind of like Covenant ships from Halo). He organized the entire fleet. The way he commands things feels like the movie Ender's Game. He creates formations of unmanned fighters to protect the vital fleet members and begins dividing the fleet off into smaller groups. Each one will use various gravitational interactions with the moons to attempt to strike the aliens from multiple angles.

The larger alien fleet begins moving in. They do not break apart like his did and simply advance straight for the flagship that Marcus is on, that has remained in its same orbit. Before long they are struck from all sides by surprise and the alien fleet falls into disarray. They attempt retaliation but Marcus' ships are protected by what he calls "Onion Shields", essentially instead of having one powerful shield generator his ships have multiple weaker generators creating layered shields for redundancy. Funnily enough, when struck, the shields will also glow bright blue and be the shape of an Onion, a product of how the magnetic fields of multiple shield generators interact.

The Aliens eventually begin to organize their fleet and form a counteroffensive, having vastly superior numbers. Marcus thinks how he anticipated this and took into account the rotation of nearby moons. We then see, from the point of view of the moon several huge laser cannons mounted on the surface with miles of solar panels powering them rotate into view. The cannons fire drive the alien fleet back. The remaining alien ships jump to lightspeed in retreat.

The dream then somehow transitions to another dream that overlapped it in some way. In the dream we were sneaking into an old building together and we came into a room where there were Lego Star Wars sets. (With there of course also being sets of the various spacecraft Marcus and the aliens had utilized in their battle.) The room had supposedly been locked since before the first star wars movie was even made but there were sets from all the movies there. I remarked how well planned out the story was for sets from all the movies to have been made this far in the past.

In some way the entire battle never really happened and what was happening was we were just playing with our Legos. I was for some reason very disappointed with that fact. The dream scene started changing to look more like Marcus' house just with a big pile of various Lego sets on the floor. Marcus wanted to read and I wanted to build my own ship but I complained that all of his Legos were gray and I couldn't put any color into my design.

One thing that I think was sort of funny was that he had a collection of globes that I never noticed before in a row on a shelf. Each of the globes was for a different planet, most of which were not part of our solar system, and they were all to scale so they were all different sizes depending upon the planet. Including a globe of a gas planet that we had been using during our play session with the ships.

Jack's Dream:

He is riding his motorcycle down a road in the desert. It looks like the American southwest with mesas and such. He comes into a town and that I suppose was a town for people who did cattle ranching and such because a lot of the people were wearing cowboy hats and stuff.

Then Chuck Norris, Lightning McQueen and the Monopoly guy (Okay... Interesting choice of characters. ) Lightning McQueen wanted Jack to drive him but because this was a talking car this was also meant to be sexual in some way. Jack didn't realize this and opened his door and Lighting McQueen's brain fell out but was still attached by the brainstem. Jack was trying to put it back inside and Chuck Norris (who was like the town sheriff) wrote him a ticket for improper treatment of a motor vehicle.

I don't remember any more specific chains of events but I do remember the general plot. The parts I remember were that Jack (like in the plot of Cars) had to fix up the town for committing a crime and was therefore stuck there. Meanwhile two girls were fighting over his attention. One of the girls was descended from the leader original settlers who came to the valley during the gold rush and the other girl was from a native American tribe who had been forced to share the land when the settlers arrived, so their feuding was amplified to the point that their families came into conflict and there was fear that the whole town would fall into a civil war.

Somehow the whole issue was resolved when Jack was caught by the families having a threesome with both the girls at the same time and it was supposed to be like Romeo and Juliet but I was just confused. This got the families to realize that they were not so different after all. Since the Monopoly guy who was also the mayor and was the most senior member of the settlers' family, he relieved him of his punishment for his crime and his dream ended he rode off on his motorcycle.

Manei's Dream:

It felt like the whole dream took place on this beach we stayed at for a couple days when we vacationed in Hawaii. Only the hotel was not there. (In fact any man-made structures were absent.) The dream was sort of like a more realistic version of Minecraft because there was a holographic menu that she could bring up that held items and options and her objective was to craft and create a suitable living environment. The dream environment had certain modifications that made it easier and faster to do things that would normally take a long time. The things I remember her doing (in no particular order since I can't remember)

~At one point she was carving in the side of a palm tree with an obsidian dagger. She carved her full name (Maneimonehi Qui Tarr) into the tree vertically. Her writing looked somewhat archaic and distorted but I could still make out the lettering. I'm not sure if the font is her way of writing or was a product of carving letters into a tree or an actual way of writing.

~At another point she needed to acquire food. Since she has had water manipulation powers she apparently can also hold her breath for extended periods of time, allowing her to swim deep into the ocean and spear fish to cook and eat.

~At yet another point she crafted a potion that would allow her to change her appearance using various plant ingredients on the island.

~The final thing was she built a house. This was the part that seemed the most like Minecraft. Only the concept of inventory did not apply. Henceforth she had to cut down several dozen trees and manually carry the logs and assemble the house herself. At some point I manifested into the dream again, still semi lucid.

I started building the roof onto the house to help her out. My character seemed to have some kind of inventory as I was simply able to project a beam out from my hand that created a thatched roof on the house. I went back and fourth in a lawnmower pattern until I was done. We went inside to decorate the interior together. The navigation of the menu was confusing. I tried placing and removing several items. This was the part that seemed the most like Minecraft. The only difference between our characters was that she apparently had to acquire her resources manually while I had unlimited access to everything through a menu.

She asked me for some gold and I gave her a big stack of gold bars. I then tried decorating again and managed to add a bunch of potted plants, rugs and paintings on the walls. I think most of the paintings were like ink paintings on parchment with Chinese calligraphy. I was having trouble placing things symmetrically, though I eventually got things to work. Manei then showed me she had made a golden safe and put iron bars inside.

She then used the potion that let her change her appearance. She said she was tired of having wavy hair because it was hard to brush. She kept making changes to herself. I remember at one point she changed her height to be much shorter and at another point she gave herself slightly lighter skin and freckles. But when she finished in the menu she pressed 'cancel' instead of 'save' by accident and reverted to how she normally looked.

We then went outside of the house and the house had been moved somewhere else. I was under attack by zombies and had to get back inside, but I fell into a hole and lost a lot of my health. When I went back inside, Manei was gone and the house was like a store. There was a guy with a tophat and steampunk goggles selling potions. I bought a whole bunch because I had unlimited money from having an infinite inventory, but for some reason couldn't just access the potions myself. I then saw a crossbow in the corner and decided to take it with me.

I went back outside and took a better look around. I also became fully lucid at this point and went outside with the expectation of seeing an interesting dream scene, but not before stabilizing by feeling the crossbow in my hand.

I went outside and the entire dream was different. The sky was night with green and purple auras dancing overhead. I was in a village of buildings, similarly styled to the house Manei had built. Some of them were built up on high, rickety looking wooden stilts. The ground was covered with snow-white coarse crystalline sand that I examined in my hand for additional stabilization.

The next thing I noticed was a female police officer yelling at a giant mushroom with a face who told the mushroom to stop 'sporeating' (apparently a term for releasing spores) because he was giving people in the village allergies. The mushroom took out a pipe and began smoking weed that made the policewoman even more mad.

I remember thinking "bring on the weird, I wanna see how weird this dream can get". A giant ostrich looking bird ran up to me and bowed down. I figured it was indicating for me to get on because it had a saddle and bags of supplies strapped to its side, so I got on and started riding it out of the town. The dream went into third person and I saw myself. I was wearing a long blue cloak and had all of the potions that I had previously purchased strapped onto my belt in order of color, making a rainbow of bottles. I saw the ringed planet from before hanging in the sky along with dozens of moons, only affirming the lucidity further. As I rode out of the village I saw I was on what seemed like a salt flat with giant crystalline structures jutting from the surface, and fungal bulbs growing freely in the place of grass.

I then saw a headless skeleton wearing gold armor that had a small group of zombies around it and it challenged me to a battle. The battle was turn based, like in an RPG where each side could only attack once, then had to afford the other side an option to attack.

The skeleton a magic spell that caused a bunch of shovels to appear and dug a hole that me and the ostrich fell into but the ostrich flapped its wings. I didn't seem capable of flight but it was able to fly just long enough to get out of the hole before the zombies could go in and attack us.

The ostrich then breathed green fire at the enemies but the made a magical shield and blocked it.

The skeleton took out a Yu-Gi-Oh card and played it down so small red dragon would appear. The dragon bit off and ate the ostrich's leg but it got replaced almost instantaneously with a holographic leg.

I then saw I had the option to attack and thought that I wanted to use the crossbow but it was now just a regular bow that was named "Bow of the Dodecagon". I knocked and drew an arrow and a dozen other bows appeared in the air above and beside me. When I fired all the arrows released and killed the dragon.

The skeleton then removed one of his arms and stuck it in his groin and pulled out a sword with that arm making some kind of phallic metaphor. He attacked the ostrich and did 838 damage.

The ostrich got mad because it was at low health and could do a special attack. Its holographic leg turned into a holographic machine gun and it fired and killed all of the zombie henchmen leaving only the skeleton. This caused the headless skeleton to surrender the battle. He pooped out a bag of in-game money.

Apparently during the battle you automatically used your potions to do special attacks and I was upset about this because the potions that I had bought were rare and I didn't get enough money back from the skeleton to buy all of them again. I tried to go back to the store anyway but it had been replaced with a 1950's style diner. Jack was there and we sat down and started talking and I lost the dream.