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    WILD Attempt 4, A Dream Fragment

    by , 07-01-2020 at 03:53 PM (288 Views)
    First, the WILD (wake induced lucid dream) attempt (because it happened first):

    As per usual, went to bed and set an alarm for 4-5 hours out. This time I went to bed around 11 PM and set an alarm for about 4 AM. I probably fell asleep around 11:20.

    I woke up, peed, sat on the edge of my bed for my 15 minutes, and thought about my upcoming dream. I decided I would try to go into the spaceship I saw in the hypnagogic imagery (HI) from the night before that woke me out of my WILD attempt. I settled also on a simple mantra: "Enter," meant to mirror the immediacy of Sageous' "dive," while communicating the intention of entering the dream.

    I laid down on my back in the bed and began with my mantra. I tried shifting my attention inside my head more than I have the previous days and intentionally shutting out the bodily noise (both the feeling of my body lying there and the small sounds in the room). I probably only laid there about 20 minutes this time and encountered some of the usual problems (swallowing, an itch at one point). I found myself becoming a little frustrated and reflecting on something I had typed yesterday: I have a hard time falling asleep on my back, and it feels as though I could lie there for hours and never quite get there unless I'm very tired.

    In response to the frustration and the fact that I couldn't let the thought go, as well as remembering that the WILDs I have succeeded with happened on my side in the past (although I thought, really, that lying on your back makes more sense because it's harder to fall asleep totally as I tend to do quickly), I decided to abandon the position and roll onto my side. After awhile of lying there in such a way, still awake, repeating my mantra, I felt the need to move yet again. At that point I committed to just doing the sloppiest WILD I could to see if it would meet with success, by which I mean, every time I wanted to move, I moved. Every time I wanted to swallow or scratch or whatever, I went ahead and did it and returned to my previous position.

    My logic in giving over to this was that when I'm going to sleep, I tend to shift positions 3-4 times until I find the one I like and then I fall asleep rather quickly. I figured if I shifted positions several times while repeating my mantra and maintaining focus, I'd eventually find the position I liked, fall asleep within a few minutes, and manage to keep awake while doing so. Maybe. I didn't really know; I just figured it was worth a shot.

    Well, when lying in each of these positions I sometimes got as far as HI happening, but then would end up shifting and moving, and therein saw the flaw: my constant moving kept setting me back in the WILD (perhaps obvious in retrospect). But I figured when I did find the correct position, I'd fall asleep so quickly it would be as though progress wasn't lost.

    Ultimately, I probably moved about 3 times, eventually settled into one position, and as expected, I went out like a lamp. Unfortunately my consciousness didn't stay with me, and I had felt it fading already when I had moved into that last position so it's not surprising.

    Take-aways:
    • Just one main one, I need to experiment with either timing or position because something feels wrong about the 15 minutes up, and then lying on my back. I think both together are too strong of an obstacle for the WILD to culminate in me actually falling asleep, especially when I add in all the thought-work of repeating the mantra and visualizing the dream. My mind is so busy that lying in an uncomfortable position after having so much time to wake myself up pretty much just ends up with me lying there very awake and struggling to become sleepy.
    • In the sake of eliminating one of the above, I'll start tonight by shortening my WBTB to as long as it takes to get up, pee, and go back to bed (i.e. 1-2 minutes), but still lying on my back. This is against Sageous' advice, but I just think I should try it because my intuition tells me that it may help.
    • If shortening the WBTB does not help (I still have trouble falling asleep), I'll extend it to 15 minutes (or more), and I'll just begin the WILD on my side in the first place, and commit to not shifting positions. This is harder on my back because it's uncomfortable, but on my side I am comfortable and I suspect will fall asleep more quickly. That's why I will almost have to keep the WBTB longer in that position: otherwise I will fall asleep immediately.

    Now, the dream fragment:

    Awake/explanation
    Normal dream
    Semi-lucid dream
    Lucid dream

    5 AM - 8:30 AM or so:

    I dreamed I was on some kind of comedy game show, and honestly I don't know how I ended up on stage. I remember being in the audience, but somehow I ended up performing/competing. One of the key elements on this stage was that there was a window which exited into a pool of water about a floor down, off the side. When people left the stage, they would dramatically be shown "diving" from this window (I guess as if it were a building window), and land safely in the deep water below.

    Unrelated to this, there was also this girl who did her act in a barrel. It didn't strike me as strange at the time but in retrospect it was very strange: she was always in the barrel even when she was off stage. Which means that she couldn't get back up to the stage without assistance, and lucky for her, the stage had these air tubes she could hop her barrel into, and it would shoot her up to stage level. After I had somehow ended up down where the pool was, I at one point watched her hop her barrel into this tube and be whisked away by air pressure.

    At one point, I somehow (sorry, there's skipping which is why this is a fragment, I can't remember everything) ended up back stage where these tubes connected to the stage. There was a room where there were four tubes in the floor, and two tubes which connected horizontally out to the stage. There was another girl in the room with me, and at the same time as this barrel-girl was getting off the stage by entering a tube, the other girl in the room shouted to me that they were sending up a back of bricks through the floor tubes (so they were going to potentially collide).

    She and I both began yelling through the tubes not to come through, but barrel-girl, now simply sitting on a pillow for some reason, but still holding the barrel-lid above her head like a hat, was already in the tube and coming. I jumped in-front of the tube and scooped her up as she came sliding out and pulled her away from the tubes while the aforementioned sack of bricks (why were they sending a sack of bricks to the stage...?) came hurtling through the tube she was headed for, going upwards, and was sucked in by the in-take tube towards the stage (powerful air!).

    Holding her in my arms (and I have to say, noticing how beautiful barrel-girl was with her wavy brown hair), I gave her a weak smile and said, "which tube am I supposed to drop you in?" and she just said, "the back left." I was already nearly standing over-top of it so with a quick nod, I simply let her go over the tube. I heard some clattering and a small scream and looked over the edge of the tube to see she had spilled from her pillow and dropped her barrel-lid and was sprawled on the floor of the tube. I called down, "are you okay?" and she just said, "yep!" and gathered her pillow and lid and took off. She sounded more embarrassed than hurt, so I minded my own business.

    I'm not sure what else happened but somehow I eventually reached the next day, where I waking up on what appeared to be a school campus. I walked down the sidewalk and was greeted by one of the women on the show with me, who performed some kind of gesture with the burrito she was eating as if she were pulling it from her pocket, and laughed. I had no idea what this meant, but thought it must be a reference to something that happened on the show, so I politely laughed and said, "yeah," as though I had any idea what this woman was doing, then I walked past her and entered the door on my right.

    It instantly went into a Hardee's (a fast food chain) and I began standing in line. Somehow the line got out of the way rather quickly (perhaps a time skip) and I found myself standing at the counter unsure of what to order. However, they had one biscuit which was piled comically high with various things, and I didn't see why not, so I ordered it-- it was called "Drew Crews' Biscuit". I had no idea who Drew Crews was but figured he must be someone famous. Unfortunately the cashier told me, "oh no, we don't have the stuff to make that right now, you have to order that earlier in the morning, we're almost done serving breakfast right now." So I apologized and said, "just give me a couple of bacon-egg-and-cheese biscuits then."


    And then I woke up! Strangely, with "Such Great Heights" stuck in my head out of nowhere.

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    Updated 07-02-2020 at 10:09 PM by 24709

    Categories
    non-lucid , dream fragment

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