lucid

I recently found an older SSILD tutorial on reddit that answered some questions I had about some aspects of it, so I’ve been trying it out the past few nights and felt like I was getting somewhere with it.

Around 6 or 7am a plant light turned on in another room too early, so I got up and turned it off. When I went back to sleep I went through 5 or 6 quick SSILD cycles, then began the slow ones. I feel like when I’m focusing on my tactile sensations I’m making progress, I think I fell asleep during one of those cycles.

One thing to note is that I had a benadryl around 6PM or so, my seasonal allergies were going crazy yesterday for some reason.

Awoken from dream sleep

On the side of a large smooth sloping hill/mountain there are many large nests attached to it with human sized eggs in them. I'm sleeping in one with two eggs around me. Something strikes the nest and I hear voices calling to me. I'm very tired and I look over the edge of the nest down the hill, there's a walking path down there that hugs the side of the mountain. P and a man are there looking up at me waving.

P looks very excited and shouts up to me that I should wake up and join them. I go back into the fetal position and shut my eyes, I just want to sleep. They continue calling for me so I get up and find myself walking with them on the path.

The situation is that P is looking for a new boyfriend and she had spent her time with this guy and now she wants to spend some time with me.

P is now showing me a motherboard that she's building. She's talking about how she plans to put a chip in a specific spot that will translate the audio of a game she's playing into German. I feel like she's just saying that because I'm learning German and she's probably not actually interested in learning it.

As she's talking I look at her, she's still looking at the circuitry talking away, the thoughts in my head drown out her words. I think to myself how beautiful she looks but also that I need to be with someone that I truly resonate with, I remind myself that I don't think that she and I would ever work out together.

Suddenly we're in my kitchen and I'm completely lucid. I turn to her and say "... I'm lucid?" She's holding a bag of popcorn, she puts a piece in her mouth nodding and says "Yup!". I walk over to her and ask her if I can borrow the bag of popcorn, she hands it to me and I take it.

I put the bag up to my nose and smell the hot air coming out, which of course smells like popcorn. I walk around my kitchen while smelling the popcorn, I'm very aware of the tactile senses of my body.

I turn to P and say "It's so stable, like, it's SO stable!" She just smiles and says "Yeah I know!" She adds "Can I have the popcorn back?” I say sure and hand it off to her. I go over to various counters and look at labels on different packaging that I find. I find myself slightly less grounded since I don't have the hot popcorn wafting into my face anymore so I shift my attention back to the sensations of my body. I'm so caught off guard that I'm lucid, I just take in what's around me.

As I turn around I find myself in a dark place that feels like an underground parking lot with hardly any lights on. There's a group of maybe 8 or so people huddled very closely together faced inward. It reminds me of that scene in 'I am Legend' when he finds those zombie like people in a dark building huddled together.

I imagine a spotlight is shining down on them and it happens. The people are looking at me squinting, shielding their eyes with their hands. One guy says "Could you not?" My recall ends around here.

‎
Notable substances: ALCAR/Phosphatidyl Choline in the AM, two alcoholic drinks ~7PM, Galantamine after WBTB 3:30am


My recall finally felt decent tonight!

Dream 1

I’m watching Summit1G parachuting into a match of H1Z1. He’s falling in over a wilderness landscape, heading towards a massive bonfire with another ring of fire around it. As he descends a tracking rocket approaches him and he tries to dodge it as it circles back around over and over again trying to land a strike on him.


Now the view is of him on his PC in his room and he spawns pixelated grass around himself in the room. Someone outside the door says something.



Dream 2

I’m traveling on a very narrow dirt road going uphill (I think it’s on the same H1Z1 map, but this is a reality setting). It’s a single lane path and there are many people in front and behind me. The road curves around a large white object that resembles an airplane’s fuselage.

When I’m at the halfway point of driving around this object the corner of my bumper collides with it and I’m comically launched into the air ~100ft. I end up landing way up ahead on the road in the way I was traveling. I reach the end point of this road which is some sort of base camp or small town. There’s another single lane dirt road that goes back the way I came from.


There’s a chain link fence separating the roads from the town with a bunch of protesters on the side of the town facing the two roads. The protestors are demanding the option to be able to use either single lane road to travel back on, that it’s their right to have the option to choose whichever road they want to use for travel. There were some officials trying to work this out with them.


I walk past this and enter a building. There is a long hall in front of me and the ground is tiled like a bathroom, it feels like a liminal space (backrooms). I’m wearing a backpack.


My right boot feels like it was struck, when I turn around I don’t see anyone or anything that could have struck me.

I enter a doorway on the right and enter a bathroom, the same tiled floor continues. The first thing I see is a wall with a large mirror and three sinks in front of it. Beneath each sink is a waste bin which I interpret as makeshift urinals here. People are coming and going into the room as I observe this.

I decide not to use the waste bins so I go deeper into the bathroom, it opens up into a large room. It sort of resembles an office, except the ‘cubicles’ are about half a ft tall and the tiling covers them as well. And where desks would be in these cubicles are toilets.

I go up to one of these toilets to use and it looks ancient, almost steampunk-esque. I’m suddenly discombobulated and feel drunk. I stumble and my foot ends up in this toilet, which of course is full of crap.

I take my boot out right away and it’s filthy. As I slowly put my foot back on the ground I notice there’s a lady right beside me kneeling, almost like a nun. She’s ready with a rag for this exact scenario and begins cleaning my boot but I instinctively yank my foot away from her because of how nasty the whole scenario is and how degrading her position feels to me.

I say to her “Thanks but..” I look to my left and there’s this large, equally ancient looking rusty washing machine and continue “..I’ll just use this washing machine instead!”

I put my boot inside the washing machine and press down the safety button so the machine thinks the door is closed and turn it on. Water pours over my boot and cleans it.



Dream 3

I’m in a bathroom that is the size of an average living room. On the far end there’s a shower, sink and toilet. The tiling on this end extends out to the size of a normal bathroom and then terminates where a wall normally would be.

Tami’s taking a shower, I notice on the other far end of this room there is a showerhead near the wall, and some tiling around it. But between these two sides is grass. I pop into Tami’s shower and say “I’m gonna make a path so you can go to the other shower!”.

I take a bunch of towels and make a path from her shower, across the grass and to the other shower. She runs across it and I turn on the shower head that she reached, it must have not been in use for a long time as nasty rusty water came sputtering out. She ran back to the other shower.



Dream 4

I’m playing on the original GameBoy. There’s some sort of save option that would normally be reserved for emulators, like a save state. I have to do some complicated menu options to pull this off.



Dream 5

I have a new apartment and I’m planning for something. James is jealous for some reason of whatever these plans are. He has the leg of a stool which is chrome metal. It has a piston-like function similar to how office chairs can be adjusted to be lower or higher and he’s making it go up and down.



WBTB - 3:30am

I wrote down these previous dreams and then took a Galantamine. It started working too quickly and I couldn’t get back to sleep so I tried to WILD.

I had one hour of conscious sleep with no events. Then I began hearing sounds, I assumed Tami was waking up but I heard some doors opening and people talking and coming into the house. I took this as what was really happening but this was actually a dream forming.

I tried to get up to see what was going on but instead was trapped in sleep paralysis. As I strained to get up my hands and feet began tingling really strangely. It took a lot of effort but I eventually pulled myself upright, when it dawned on me that Tami was still asleep and it was all just a dream that was beginning to form.

Notable day substances: No caffeine, Decaf, phosphatidyl choline, 5mg Benedryl 7:30pm
WBTB substances: 6mg Galantamine ~4:00AM

I wanted to have my first lucid this time around since my last break to be without Galantamine, but I'm impatient so I threw it into the mix tonight.



WBTB with Galantamine and WILD

I woke up at 3:45 am after 4 and a half hours of sleep. I read some Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming until I felt like my mind was awake, which took 10 minutes. Then I took 6mg of Galantamine and went back to bed.

I normally try to fall asleep as fast as possible after taking Galantamine because it works pretty fast and it’s difficult to sleep after it starts working. After about half an hour with no luck of going back to sleep on my right side, and attempts of laying very still for WILD - I turn over to my left side to try to WILD there.

Over 10 mins I made less and less movements until I was very comfortable and still. After a while I couldn’t really feel my body and that’s when the transition from waking into sleeping consciously began.

I had no visuals but I felt like I was sitting on a rollercoaster. I could feel when I was traveling up the tracks and the momentum and speed when I was going downward, I could feel myself lifting out of my seat. This went on for a while and was really fun, it felt very realistic. I also started to get some slight visuals of the track which was going around a ski-lift over and over again.


Then the visuals started. A colorful background appeared and there was some nonsense text in the middle that looked AI generated. The text made no sense but when I pretended to ‘read it’ it would transform into a new gibberish text. The text was only ever between 1 to 4 words long. Each time I ‘read’ one of these it felt like I was doing something right and getting deeper into something and the visuals got brighter.*

Now a ‘loading screen’ appeared, it was 16-bit SNES graphics scrolling from right to left of a brick wall. It was very stable and I would pick a piece of grouting and watch it go from one side of my vision to the other - the clarity and detail in lucid dreams always amazes me.

After maybe 10 seconds of this the loading is finished and I’m playing a SNES-style beat em’ up genre game**. It looked like Super Double-Dragon - the very basic track ‘Train Ride’ from this game was playing as well, which I haven’t heard in probably over 10 years.


So now I’m playing this game, the graphics are very bright and vivid - enemies are coming at my character which I’m controlling. But I don’t have a real body, it’s like I’m looking at a screen with blackness all around it and that’s it.

I told myself before going to bed that if I had a lucid I was going to go with whatever the dream was, for stability and practice sake. But I didn’t want the dream to be about playing some SNES game, I at least wanted it to be based in a reality-like setting.

So I test out transforming one of the enemies I’m looking at, which begins to work but the contrast and brightness of the dream begins to dim. I figure I’ve only been in here for less than a minute so I should slow down, so I stop doing that and the contrast and brightness return.

I still don’t want to be having this experience so I close my eyes and now I feel my body in bed. I decide to do a reality check and reach over and plug my nose - I can still breathe just fine! Also I’m seemingly on my back, but I know I’m on my left side in reality. So I decide to try to get out of bed to get out of this gaming situation.

But as I start to move I feel like my left arm is still not totally asleep and that if I move it I will wake up, it feels really heavy compared to the rest of my body. So I close my eyes and enter the video game again, just to see a enemy hit my character and die. The game over screen says ‘YOU FAILED!’ with a big fat purple weasel laughing with a high pitched voice as the dream collapses and I return to feeling my actual body in bed laying on my left side, awake. (5:08am)

I think I just tried too much too fast and needed to let the dream develop more and become more involved. I’ve had plenty of close call WILD’s but normally I get to a point where my body feels like it’s humming with electricity as the visuals begin and the dreams collapse very early. I’ll count this as my first successful WILD! Even though I used Galantamine and ruined it pretty fast.



Dream 2

I’m on the phone with JohnF, a guy I only met very briefly maybe 10 years ago. He’s severely depressed and I’m trying to make him feel better but it wasn’t working. I suddenly had the random thought that he hired a hitman to kill someone. I asked him if he had done something irreversible. He said ‘yeah…’

I don’t know what he actually did but I said he should try to forgive himself and maybe do something that feels like he’s giving back to the world in some way.

I heard super Mario RPG music coming through the phone and asked him if he was playing it. He lit up a bit and said he was, the remastered version. And that he had plans to swap if for another game when he was done.

Then an unknown friend of mine comes by the room I'm in (PA house, bedroom at the end of the hall on the left). He says he got a purple coat and a mustache and he's really excited about it. He doesn't want to show me though because he doesn't know the guy I'm talking to, who is now in the room with me.

JohnF and I both say we wanna see it so he shows us. 'It's not purple at all!' I say upon seeing it, it’s a deep mustard yellow. He says 'oh yeah? Well look at THIS!' He opens it up to reveal a mustache on the hanging loop/tag on the jacket. He takes it off and clips it to his nose, it's a really convincing mustache. We both applaud him.


This dream started out serious and dark and ended feeling funny and relaxed.



Dream 3

I’m deep underground in some sort of mine. To demonstrate how extremely deep a hole is, a man/woman pair toss a raccoon down into it. Immediately it sounds like it hit pipes or something and there are lots of scrambling sounds. The man then throws a basketball down which hits something, and then it's silent.

The woman explains that the raccoon was so relaxed when it fell with its limbs stretched out, that when it made contact with the only pipe exposed it quickly grabbed on. Then the basketball was thrown to hit the raccoon and send it all the way down..

We spoke about something but I forget what. I vomited up a strange pufferfish looking like creature into a nearby basin with water in it, which freaked the lady out and she ran off.

This dream just had all around gross vibes.



Dream 4

A gust of wind blows the front door open slightly, Mogmi makes a run for it! He gets outside and I chase after him. He goes right across the street into the backyard of the neighbors (which is unlike IWL).

A man with a large beard is smoking a cigarette on his phone and there is another guy standing there with him.

Mogmi is hopping up like a dog trying to smell the cigarette. I grab him and apologize, then take him back to the house.



*I suspect this was REM starting, reading these short sentences were making my eyes dart back and forth a lot.

**At this point I became aware of NPT (nocturnal erection), which happens during REM.