side notes

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.

Since my last 'no caffeine' test I've resumed with going back to drinking coffee/etc but I've been wondering if it has been messing with my recall because it's just been terrible recently. So as of yesterday I'm again off the caff.


The Assassin

Inside of a dimly lit apartment I find someone knocking on the door. An asian woman comes in and a time lapse begins, showing the progression of several hours. It ends with us in the bedroom sleeping together.

She wakes and is looking for something through two boxes. I go over to her side and think to myself that these are some boxes she must've brought here with her tonight. It's still very dark and difficult to see but I notice one of the boxes were full of yogurt containers. It looks like they are all bloated and leaking. "You know these should be refrigerated right?" I mention, but she seems to have other priorities right now.

There's knocking on the front door, I head over and open it up. There's a group of ten to fifteen asian boys in a semi-circle around the deck, all around 15-ish in age. They're all saying the same word over and over again but it's hard to tell what it is over their accents. Then I notice something on the ground by the rightmost teen. At first I thought it was a Furby but I recognize that it's Gizmo from those old Gremlin movies.

I point at it and say "Gizmo!" as I simultaneously realize that's exactly what they've been chanting the whole time. I get a kind of foreboding and ominous vibe from the situation, I shut the door and go back to my room.

The woman reveals to me that she's an assassin and that she's doing some work in the area. I ask her if that's why there's a bunch of guys at the door. This puts her on high alert, she hands me a gun and says something about being found out and takes off.

I suddenly find myself outside looking up at a walkway that wraps around a building, it could be a motel. The assassin woman is struggling to get away from a man that is behind her with one arm around her waist and another over her mouth.

I still have the gun she gave me earlier, I take sight at the man but they're so close to each other, I don't want to risk shooting her. She shoved him away at one point and I pull the trigger, but an airsoft bullet comes out and it weakly arches downward. I wait for another opportunity to shoot and this time the gun fires violently loud, my recall ends here.


The slaughter house

As a floating perspective I view the inside of someone’s house that is being checked out by two police officers. The officers are saying there were reports of pigs being raised in this house and they wanted to see if that was the case. The owner is walking along with them with his ~5-ish year old son following the action. The cops only check a few rooms and then leave the house, satisfied that there were no pigs here.

Then from one of the rooms they didn’t check a small piglet comes running around the corner the father grabs it and says to the son that he’ll have to kill it now. The child protests and asks why? The father says if he kills whichever pigs venture out this far into the house it will encourage the other pigs not to do so, as he lifts the piglets head and brings out a blade.

My perspective leaves the house before I see/hear what happens next. I’m now semi-lucid and really disgusted at this man. I fly above the house and focus on the roof, I begin crushing it with my mind. The shingles and wood start splitting and bunching up towards a central point in the middle of the house. I think that this isn’t a productive way to teach the guy how fucked up his actions were as my semi-lucidity fades.

These dreams took place between 11:21pm and 5:11am

Rotary banquet

I’m at a sort of banquet dinner event, it’s a similar dining room to the PA house one but it’s very elongated. Instead of one long table stretching down the middle of the room it’s roughly ten shorter oblong tables in sequence down the room. People seem to be walking in circles around their tables, it was reminiscent of chainsaw teeth going around the metal part of a chainsaw.

My role is to put butter on things*, I’m standing there with a plate that has a stick of butter on it and also holding a butter knife. I’m at the end of one of these tables and am not walking around in circles like the others. As people rotated past me I would put butter on random plates, they were going too fast for me to even consider what I was applying it to.

I run out of butter pretty quickly and I go searching for more. I find Linda near a washing machine downstairs**. She seems to be in charge here so I ask her where I can find some more. She takes half a stick of butter out of the washing machine and is hesitant to give it to me as it’s the very last of it. We were wondering if it was going to last until the end of the event, I said there were five hours left and chances were that we would run out.


Unlimited loot

James and I are inside of a Diablo-esque universe. We’re fighting a boss and after we kill it I gather my loot. I get some sort of legendary item, and then another, and another. I keep getting these amazing items over and over again, James and I look at eachother like the game is bugged. This keeps going on until my entire inventory is full. Floating text appeared in front of us that said “Hmm.. That’s odd, best keep your eye on those items..” We both agree that a large portion of the items were probably cursed or something to that extent.

Now we’re in a city that feels like a cross between Agrabah from Aladdin and Lut Gholein from Diablo II. We’re fighting alien bugs that are swarming us and we’re armed with guns on the top of a building. When shot they explode into vibrant green goo.

I notice near the side of the building are a bunch of glittering jewels embedded into it. I have to lean over the edge to grab one, I take hold of a ruby and pried it out. Since my inventory was full it immediately replaced a legendary item, which popped out in front of me and fell down onto the streets below. I realized the ruby was a bad trade for the item I lost so I climbed down to retrieve it.

James is now leaning over the roof asking what’s up and I explain what happened. He’s trying to spot where my fallen item is from above but can’t see it. There are leaves on the ground, suddenly I hear a faint humming sound. I feel through the leaves and crawl around until the sound gets louder and louder. I pick up the item from underneath some of the leaves and it’s glowing gold and humming loudly.

It’s a golden ring with a skull that has fangs on it, with tiny rubies for eyes. I inspect it and it’s a vampiric ring, it has a life steal on attack function and is part of a set. The other set item is also a ring and I notice it’s in my inventory as well.

James and I get moving and more bugs are swarming, now with a huge one that is spawning spawning the smaller bugs and keeping its distance from us. I threw some grenades at it which caused a lot of damage but didn’t kill it. This part felt like Helldivers 2/Starship Troopers.


Death Roiland

Jeff Roiland is on what appears to be a very tiny island with a massive tree growing on it. He’s got a rope wrapped around his entire body which is then connected to the trunk of the tree. Apparently he wanted to be in this position and he’s bossing around some guy on a speedboat.

I get the dream knowledge that Jeff had wronged the speedboat guy many times and this was the last straw, his boat is tethered to the trunk of the tree and he begins to speed off very quickly. Jeff falls off of the tree-island and is now being dragged through the water. The speedboat guy intentionally keeps going near rocks and tries to swing the tree-island into other dangerous objects. Jeff apparently has the ability to levitate slightly but it requires concentration which he doesn't have in this scenario. He begins to get really messed up as he smashes into various objects.

The scene is kind of disturbing me so I ‘turn it off’ like it was a screen or something. I am only experiencing blackness now but I can hear people talking about the aftermath. “Yeah he survived, but he will have to live in an iron lung for the rest of his life”

* Probably from the Rick and Morty episode where the robots only purpose is to serve butter which I saw recently.
** My last dreams involved Linda and a washing machine as well but I can't find an IWL link for this.

Yesterday I did some awareness meditations three times throughout the day at 15 minutes per session. I didn’t take enough notes down about my dreams last night this morning and now it’s way later in the day now so I’m missing a lot of details :\


World of Weirdcraft

There was some sort of stand up comedy show going on. The audience was a bunch of politicians dressed very formally. There aren’t any tables or seats, instead the audience is just gathered around talking to one another in a large room - not many people are even facing the guy performing his standup routine.

I head out into the streets and I’m in a very World of Warcraft-like city. It feels like Stormwind but more peasant-centric.The experience and visuals are reality based but the style of everything is very much WoW.

I’m now sitting cross-legged on the cobblestone streets, I am cutting up some sort of chemical/drug pill, the white crystalline inner contents are rapidly yellowing when exposed to the air. I think of what I should ask ChatGPT about the best way of preserving it would be.

A mail-main-like figure is walking by* and asked “What time is it? I’m going to guess it’s about 11pm?” I respond that it’s only about 7 or 8pm. He was surprised and mumbled something about daylight savings as he continued on his route.

Now I see an overview of the city I’m in, it’s on an ancient looking scroll. An old wrinkled, long nailed hand of a wizard is pointing over various locations on this map. He goes past the location I was on the street to the end of the city and says that “This is The Order of the Catalytic Converter”. I think to myself ‘that’s’ not very WoW-ish.. Then I re-consider my opinion when thinking that the dwarves or the gnomes could have easily come up with something like that.
(IDK why I’ve been having these car related dreams lately)

Then the hand goes way up north on the map-scroll showing a new zone for this ‘expansion’. He points to a night elf looking woman riding on a large black dragon which has glowing ember cracks all over its body revealing its heated interior.

The wizard proclaims “This is the fat non-binary Dragon Queen!!” as the night-elf-looking character hops off the dragon to reveal a much larger midsection than is typical of WoW character models. I think to myself how blatantly pandering/insincere and virtue signaling Blizzard has become. He goes on about this character is the final boss for this expansion.


Cans for Hawaii

Tami and I are dropping off some cans at a recycling depot with the aim of going to Hawaii with the proceeds. We’re making an effort to grab four cans at a time with each hand for some reason. From our cans to the drop off point we make 10 trips back and forth, then celebrate that we dropped off 80 cans (It would've been 160 cans I realized after the dream). Surely enough for our trip to Hawaii!

*He gave me very strong vibes of the "My man!" mail guy from Rick and Morty, an episode I saw again recently.

Last night I messed around with the EEG system I've been working on. I made some improvements in the software that I was excited to see the results of, but the electrodes on the Muse S are prone to noise and the signal was way off from ideal. It was overall a waste of a night, and since I was distracted on the EEG system my sleep suffered and my recall was zero.

There's a lot of potential here and I've only just started, but I've been experimenting with so many different things recently that I'm going to take a break from it all and just focus on the basics for a bit. I think I'm going to limit myself to finishing ETWOLD and doing some of the practices there. Below are some dreams from two nights ago that I didn't get around to journaling.



Elon’s tire warehouse

I’m in a large warehouse that seems to be predominantly filled with tires, I’m feeling almost as if I work here. I ask a man if they have two tires for my car and affirms that they do. I wander around and find myself accidentally locked out of the warehouse. Beside the door that is locked is a very long and tall garage-like door, most of it is transparent. I look through and see that there is another identical garage door about 20 feet into the building and through the window on that one I can see many people walking around working, it’s where I was standing previously.

I knock on the garage door to try to get someone’s attention, but nobody can hear me through both of the doors. Suddenly to the left of the door by a fence in a small garden-plot of dirt, a tire comes bouncing out and rolls right past me. I pivot around and watch it go away from the warehouse, which is the entire front yard of the PA house. It bounces down the steps and through the driveway and then I notice it’s heading towards an old man. I shout “Hey, look out!” and he notices it in time and hops out of the way.

It ends up striking a tree that was behind him and rolls back to stop gently by his feet. I hop down the steps and grab it and bring it back to put it where it came from. When I approach the small garden by the warehouse I see that it’s just dirt with a bunch of tires in it. The tires that are laying down flat are unmoving, but all of the other tires that were in any other position were slowly moving to an upright position and seemingly ‘sprouting’ out of the earth. I guess this one was 'ripe' and popped out. I laid it down on its side to prevent it from jumping out again.

I somehow managed to get back into the warehouse, I want to ask about the tires again. A woman passes me and I gain the dream knowledge that she’s a new employee here and that she’s a gamer, I want to get to know her more.

Now I find myself in a back room in this warehouse, it’s kind of like the manager's office or something. I’m sitting in a chair with a large desk in front of me with Elon Musk (bleh) on the other side. Behind that is a long desk against a large window - the gamer girl is there, she’s doing some work for some college project. Maybe everyone is on a break right now in this warehouse.

I ask Elon if a Tesla is worth getting. He responds with “No, I think you should take that money and instead split it with me and we can run off and be GamerLords together” (lol). We talk about some other topics.

I then ask him what games he's currently playing, he says “I don’t play games, gaming is for pussies” The girl whips around to say something but I’m already mid sentence with “How are we supposed to run away and be GamerLords together if you aren’t even a gamer?”



Freezing cat

I find myself in a living room sitting on a couch with another couch across from me and one to the left as well, there’s maybe 5 or so people sitting around here. I look over to my left and see a very generic white looking refrigerator. I immediately know that my old cat S is in the freezer. I run over and open it and take him out instantly. He almost looks inflated, like his ears and head and body are just too large which I attribute to him being in the freezer. He’s extremely cold but he’s moving slowly and I feel sick just imagining how long he must’ve been in there, so many thoughts are going through my head - is it too late? Can he come back from this? I feel his nose and it’s just about frozen. I turn to everyone and say “S was in the freezer!?”, nobody even looked up from what they were doing.

Last night I was testing out a wireless EEG headband and some REM detection software I made for it. I have it connected to my PC which then sends a sound to be played on my phone once REM is detected, unfortunately it unpaired with my PC before I got to REM sleep. My sleep was pretty poor since I was semi-aware of that process going on in the background.



Dreams - 11:10pm - 10:09am (I can’t believe how long I slept)

I’m in a house with Tami, it feels like it’s a new place we had just recently moved into. My phone rings, I pick it up and I can recognize it was DF by his voice. I wasn’t really interested in talking to him so when he said “Hello? Is this (my name)” I awkwardly responded “Uh.. No it’s not, you must have the wrong number!” We awkwardly end the call.

A man enters the front door with five other guys. I assume this is the landlord with some guys to work on the house in some capacity. Tami is in the kitchen. I’m suddenly back on the phone with DF and we’re having an awkward conversation. He seemingly wants to get to know me better or to be friends outside of a professional setting but it’s just awkward. I can tell he’s watching tv in the background as we speak.

A lull in the conversation comes up, we’re both silent. I’m suddenly wracking my brain for something to talk about, as if this was a really important meeting or interview or something. I let my mind go blank and tell myself if there’s something I want to talk about with him then it will come up, otherwise it won’t.

I’m pacing as this is going on, I see Tami in the kitchen grabbing something out of the sink and one of the repair guys is standing right beside her, reaching to the top shelf for something in the cabinet. It dawned on me that these people came into the house without any notice, and the fact that this guy was going about what he was doing and seemingly crowding in on Tami's personal space really bothered me. I put the phone down for a sec and shouted across to the guy “Hey you, get out of here!” Tami turned and said “Oh, no it’s okay I’ve got him helping me! ” As the guy handed some spice he was grabbing from the top shelf to Tami. Now I feel kind of silly but also happy that he wasn’t bothering her, so I return to the call and resume pacing around.

I admit to DF that earlier when he called that it was me. He says “Well, I did think it was you. It was your number, and it was your voice” (lol). I realize that there is some sort of bent up wire going around from the back of my head and close to my mouth - encircling my head. It was like electrical wire but the part right in front of my mouth the insulation was stripped showing bare copper. I felt like it may have been a mic.



This whole dream felt like a gross fever dream, I woke up with an awful headache.

Notable substances: 1g Glycine

I didn't get to try the biphasic/segmented sleep schedule I was going to experiment with, going to save that for another time. In the past two days I tried taking the amino acid Glycine after reading up on how it helps with sleep and increases dreaming for some people. Yesterday I tried 3 grams before bed. I kept waking up in the night with long dreams in mind, but it made me so groggy I didn't have the energy to write them down and forgot them in the morning. It appears to make sleep deeper for me and makes my body heavier feeling than usual after waking up.

So tonight I tried 1g. This dream was unusually cohesive/tied together for me and vivid, though I had to interrupt my sleep and wake up for the day after only 5 hours of sleep. I'm going to experiment with it more after seeing how kava kava does tonight.


Dream 1

I’m using a computer that has two video cards. They’re extended from USB risers from the motherboard and are sitting on my desk to the right and in front of my keyboard. I mess around with finding the best place to put them, their fans are loud and they’re so clunky.

There’s a guy in the room with me and he recommends that I remove the power supply unit off my desk, which also was extended to fit there by the left of my keyboard. I lower the PSU onto the ground and put the video card in its place which is a better setup, but not ideal.

The guy with me wants me to play a game that he’s really into, it’s sort of like CS:GO. I try it out, in the first round I spawn with my team of about five people. I don’t like my assault gun out of the gate so I look around on the grassy ground for another one. The guy with me says just go, don’t worry about it. But I spot a bolt action sniper rifle, I go to pick it up but the usual hotkey isn’t working so I try others until one works.

As I travel onward I see a great valley with my teammates far ahead of me, already almost across to the other side where the enemy is. I climb up a hill near me and begin sniping at the enemies that are engaged with teammates on the other side of the map. I think about the netcode as I lead my shots.


I injured a few enemies and right as I took one down I’m being fired on from my right side at a very close range. I turn and take out my assault rifle and begin pre-firing as I lock onto the enemy. We both die at the exact same time. The camera pulls out to third person and slowly rotates around our bodies.

Our team ended up losing, on the scoreboard I played 3rd for my team.

Round 2 began and now we spawn in a smaller building. I go ahead and just barely see an enemy run into the room in front of me, he hides beside the door. I toss a grenade into the room right as he begins to set up a claymore by the door. The grenade goes off and I get a hit-marker, but no kill. I go into the room and finish that guy off.

In quick succession I run into a few of the other enemies and take them out. The last one runs by me, he has no shirt on and has a really hairy back. He’s armed with nothing but a crowbar, I think to myself that he’s probably trolling this match. He hides in a locker and shuts the door behind himself.

Okay so he wasn't quite this hairy!

After chasing him around a bit I eventually take him down and the match is over. The score screen shows me in first place with 5 kills and all of my teammates have 0. The person that was in the room with me must’ve ran out for a sec as they’re not there, I wait for a moment and they show back up. I show them the score screen and he says “daaaamn!”

He proceeds to show me that the better you do the better of a reward you get at the end of each day. You’re rewarded with a different color hospital bracelet, depending on how well you do. He then explains that they allow you to enter certain e-sport areas in the game. Most of them are sort of training videos with tips and tricks from famous e-sport players.

Supplement update: I'm wrapping up my no-caffine experiment. I've noticed improved sleep and some slight improvements to dream vividness but I think that effect is marginal. What I didn't expect was how much calmer I am off of caffeine and how much less anxiety I have that I didn't even know was there before. Going forward I will probably have caffeine related drinks here and there but I think I'm largely going to stay off of it just from how nice it's been.

I woke up at about 4:00am naturally after about 4 and a half hours of sleep. I decided I would stay up and sleep again in several hours. I went back to sleep for about an hour and a half at 11:00am but didn't recall any more dreams from this short sleep.

I'm thinking starting tomorrow I may try waking up after ~4 hours of sleep and then stay up for ~4 hours before getting my last ~4 hours of sleep just to see what it's like with dreaming, a sort of biphasic/segmented sleep pattern. My schedule is flexible these days so why not!



Dream 1

I’m in the passenger seat of a truck, some farmer guy is in the driver seat. He’s driving around the fenced perimeter of the property. As we’re driving I daydream (night-daydream? dreamdream?) a vision of pills that I think are Alpha-GPC but they’re modified in some way. When you take them they replace your vision with lighting against a black background, but only for a few seconds then the effect resumes being Alpha-GPC.

There is a loud compressor that is on. I ‘know’ that it doesn’t belong to us and that we shouldn’t be using it. A cop and some sort of addict show up, my companion stops driving and runs over to the compressor, shutting it off.

The cop and his companion walk up to me and we exchange some words, not sure what was said but the mood went from tense to neutral.



Dream 2

I’m with James and my dad, we are approaching a house that we’re supposed to be inspecting. Dad has no shirt on and his skin is very deeply tanned, he has a mystery scar on his left shoulder blade.

As we approach the building dad says something about the owner of the house is a 30-ish year nosy guy. I entered the house in a weird way, like the side paneling was peeled back and I ducked under and in.

Upon entering the building it’s immediately apparent that it’s in bad shape. Everything is covered in a sheen of wetness, the walls are soggy and wooden beams are waterlogged. It’s like nobody has lived in here for a year and the humidity was 100% all the while. I say that it’s too gross in here and that I’m leaving.


Now Dad James and I are approaching three mesh lawn chairs around a camp site on the small farm property from Dream 1. Dad takes the middle seat, James takes the seat on the left - the dream fades as I approach the last remaining seat.



Dream 3

I am wearing a kimono with a hakama, as are a group of maybe 20 other men. We’re all kneeling facing the same direction in several rows in an open grassy area. They are getting up and going in front of the group to present their swords, one at a time.

I look down and I have what looks to be a regular katana, unsheathed in my lap. Now a man goes in front of the group and presents his insanely long sword - reminiscent of Sephiroth’s Masamune. He boasts about how none of us wouldn’t even be able to get near him in a fight. I think about how the sword is probably not an advantage at all.

I keep waking up around the time I would usually set my WBTB alarm for even when it's off now. It felt like it took a long time to get back to sleep after waking up.


Dream 1

I’m sprinting directly at a loaf of bread so fast that I somehow cleave it cleanly in half. I repeatedly do this but it seems I do best when I have someone standing about 20ft in front of the bread and then I sprint at them and sort of slingshot around them as if they have a strong gravitational force, which propels me even quicker into the bread.

There is some sort of party going on as I’m doing this and I learn that this bread-cutting technique I’m doing is called the ‘herb werb’. After learning this I silently repeated under my breath ‘herb werb’, alternating between pronouncing it with and without a silent h.



Dream 2

I’m in a large apartment with a lot of my relatives, they were all frantically running around seemingly terrified. I’m in a bedroom, there are two closed doors to leave the room and I begin heading towards one of them.

When I’m about to reach the door the ghost of my grandma passes through it. She looks grumpy and continues through the room and passes through the other door. I was startled at first but then after seeing her face I said “Oh.. Grandma!” and watched her go on her way.

I open the door I was originally heading for and head out into a hallway to see everyone running around frantically. I ask Terry what’s going on and she exclaims “It’s grandma, she’s HaUnTiNg us!”.

I sort of wander around the apartment a bit, it has multiple hallways. I eventually enter a large kitchen with an island table. On one side of the island ghost grandma is sitting on a chair, and all around the other side are the relatives.

They are all sort of shouting at her things like “Why are you haunting us!”, “Just go back, why are you here?!”. I’m confident that I can at the very least deescalate the situation. As I walk over to the island I say “Hey everyone, let me talk to her for a moment”. They all back up and make room for me to sit across from grandma.

I ask her “How have you been?”. She seems angry and confused but answers. We begin having a pleasant conversation and her mood is improving. She’s now speaking as if she’s still alive and had not passed away. Then one of the relatives interrupts and asks me very loudly “When are you going to tell her to stop haunting us??” - Which ruins the progress I was making and upsets grandma. Someone else also chimes in “Why are you asking her these questions, she’s dead!”

The feelings of getting a handle on things but being set back was frustrating.



Dream 3

I’m with two annoying men dream characters that I wouldn’t normally associate myself with. They’re both parents and talking about parenting, let’s call them GuyA and GuyB.

GuyA is talking about how recently he was out shopping and his kids asked him to buy them something. He goes on to say how he began losing his temper with them and was arguing about it but then had a moment of clarity that he was acting like GuyB, and stopped being so hostile with his kids. GuyB seems unphased by this.

I look around and we’re standing by the doors of an apartment building, but there’s only a small ledge made out of stone that surrounds the building, which drops off to the ocean. I look out at the sea and it’s snowing lightly and dark out. The ocean is churning with huge swells, sometimes almost reaching our ledge.

I feel dispassionate and flat, I walk around the ledge to one of the other sides of the building and I see a small stretch of highway in the ocean running parallel to the building, it’s supported by 8 or so metal pillars going down into the ocean. It’s probably only about 100 ft long and the road ends abruptly on both sides.

I point to it and quietly say “Highway here, get your highway here” like one of those old times paper boys. I feel like I said something about ‘magic road’ as well.

GuyA looks at me, then the ocean highway back and forth several times. As if competing for my attention he begins running towards the ocean and shouts “Oh yeah? Well watch this!” as he leaps into the frigid water.

He begins comically doing an exaggerated butterfly stroke, every time he comes up for air he looks at me to check if I’m still watching. His clothing and coat seem to be slowing him down. I walk around to another side of the building.



Dream 4

I’m sitting on a large stone beach by the ocean, it’s very sunny and beautiful out. There are many little shelled creatures moving around me, about the size of golf balls. I consider how they look like the real life equivalent of enemies from a video game (Ninja Gaiden), even though the correlation didn’t actually make sense.

Someone says something to me, I look up to see who it is. I feel interrupted.

Been fairly discouraged recently from my lack of results. I feel like I'm trying too hard but at the same time I know if I put in less effort that doesn't get me anywhere from past experiences. I must be fundamentally missing something here.



Dream from the night of Feb 19th

A man is a DJ in a movie theater, switching between DJing and using a giant laser-tag assault rifle that lights up and makes zappy sounds. The zap sound effect is so crushed and poor quality sounding.

Everyone else is using old school laser-tag guns that have to reload slowly after each shot so it's unfair going against the DJ with his fully automatic laser.

I'm looking at the world top down and I see an airplane take off near three mile Island, the DJ guy is on it. I am with someone else and we both follow it landing in Ukraine where he is meeting a love interest. It's like an Indiana Jones map sequence but viewing the real world instead of a map.

As the above is going on I'm simultaneously holding a jar of mayo. I have a lid that is so small that it fits inside the jar of mayo and I begin screwing it on, halfway inside the jar. I can feel the threading catch as it tightens, there's mayo all over my hands. It's not even a complete lid, it's just the outer rim of a mason jar lid without the center metal part with the gasket.


Now the dreams from last night
I did a WBTB last night.



Dream 1

I'm at some sort of gathering and I have a non-IWL girlfriend with me. It's like we're trapped in some sort of giant playpen, the floor was thick foam and there was colorful jungle-gym like equipment around us. We want some privacy so we use these giant foam buildable pieces to make a sort of fortress.

When we get into the fortress that we built it's suddenly as if we're in a car that's very similar to a Chrysler 300 S. We're putting the seats forward to make room as we're in the back seats.

The tinted windows are halfway down and I notice we're now parked by a restaurant and a large window is about 50 ft away from us. My mom is in this restaurant seated right by the window and she's staring at us grumpily. I put the windows up to block the view of her.

I don't know where this fits in but Tami asks me "how come when people refer to Banjo-Kazooie they don't talk about the characters or worlds, they just say 'Banjo-Kazooie'.



Dream 2

There are these cats that have really thick fur that is more like sheep wool. It's very dense and feels awesome to squeeze their fur, I could feel the oils that were in it. There were two of these cats and they were on a bed. The bed had three strips going down the length of it, as if demonstrating that this bed could have three people in it.

I bring Tami to the bed and want to show her these cats, she pets them then lays down in the middle spot on the bed. Suddenly there's a creepy guy to her left in that 'slot' and rolls over to her, grinning with his face way too close to her cheek, I instinctively push him off the bed.


Dream 3

I'm speaking with RacheL. We're talking about mundane things in life that 'you just have to do'. Like work, shopping, etc. She says 'why would you do that?' to one of these things that seem mandatory in life. And I say well you know, it's something we have to do - you know? She says 'Uhh.. No'. I ask her 'Haven't you ever had to do something before that you didn't want to do?' to which she responds plainly 'No. Why would you do that?', and looks at me in a way that makes me 'remember'. I stop and think 'You're right.. I don't have to do anything that I don't want to do' and genuinely felt like it was true, almost like remembering a state before this life or something where everything truly is optional.



Dream 4 - Fragment

Some small tribe camp with tents by the sea, a campfire is in a central location of the camp. The camp is stormed by people from another tribe that are very similarly dressed as the people in the tribe they're attacking, loin cloths and white dripping painted handprints against their dark skin. Some had spears, some had bows and arrows.



Dream 5 - Fragment
VHS tapes or something in a store. One section had long artificial seaweed for a fish tank, Tami wanted it. (IWL she bought some fish today, funny coincidence)



Dream 6 - Fragment
There is David and someone else, perhaps James. They are getting a new computer for me, almost like as a reimbursement for something they messed up on.

‎
WBTB - 3:30am

I've been curious what kind of efffect an extremely low dose of LSD would do after a WBTB on dreaming so I gave it a shot tonight. I woke up and took ~2.5 μg of LSD and immediately went back to bed without staying up for more than a few minutes. I quickly felt something in my mind 'turn on' and I realized that even though this was a micro-dose of a micro-dose that it was still going to be enough to probably interrupt my sleep based on what I was feeling.

It did take a while to fall back asleep so I'm going to try this again in a few days but at one tenth of this dose at ~0.25 μg instead. These dreams were more vivid than usual but at the same time felt sort of interrupted.


Dream 1

I'm selling a white car that was previously a cop car. Some people are going to come by to look at it.

A cop car parks in my driveway and two police get out. They have keys to open the car I'm selling, they get in and try to start it but fail. They don't seem happy and they say they'll be back, they want to take it or impound it or something.

Then a family came by, a wife, husband and their son. The wife wanted the car so she paid for it and they drove off.

She ends up texting me something about a bullet hole in the car and that it's not working.

I drive out and find them, looks like she hit a tree. They're all okay and I ask her about this bullet hole that she mentioned. She says nevermind about that, I end up taking the car off their hands to scrap it.

Dream 2

A really emotionally charged dream, no doubt brought on by the LSD.

‎

Notable day supplements: No caffeine

I didn't put very much effort into recalling my dreams last night, I guess I've gotten used to them coming to me fairly easily and thought I wouldn't have to try as hard. Turns out effort is still required, I didn't recall that much.



Dream 1 - Fragment

In my dream, I wake up in bed (different than my IWL bedroom). I feel kind of odd so I glance at my watch and see that my heart rate is fluctuating between 5 and 10 bpm. I'm alarmed but I try to really freak myself out to get my adrenaline going, which works and my heart rate goes up to normal.*



Dream 2 - Fragment

I'm flying FPV, but instead of flying the drone I have it's sort of a hybrid between two different models. I like its power balance and agility, I think I'm flying over the ocean at one point.



Dream 3 - Fragment

I'm with two girls and we need to drive somewhere fast, but we won't make it in time. They say that we should try flying. I say 'Wait, we can fly here?' and one of them says 'Yeah, but it's really difficult. You just have to 100% believe that you can fly'. One of the girls can slightly hover, but the other one and myself are struggling.



* This dream was triggered by a reddit post I read just a few days ago where someone's heart rate dropped down to 10bpm.

‎
Notable day substances: No caffeine - was tempted today though.

I woke up at 3:45 for WBTB, since I've done it many days in a row waking up at this time is really easy now. But I wanted to see how my dreams would differ if I had a full night of sleep tonight so I went right back to sleep (though it took maybe 10mins).



Dream 1

I can’t really recall this dream. I only remember that there was an RV that was full of movies. Also I was sitting on a couch with RacheL, I made a funny observation that fell flat.



Dream 2

I go to dreamviews, on the landing page it shows a list of recently banned users. I think 'Weird, I've never noticed this before' There's only one name on the list, 'Harlequin'. I think 'what?? What could've Harlequin even done to get banned?' I ponder about how the site has such little activity, over-protection as well doesn't help.



Dream 3

I'm in an old strange run down house sleeping against a window. There are glass window panels all around me and there are plants growing through the window, they’re all around me. I'm frustrated and hop off the window sill.

Linda seems to be here. I leave the house and it's surrounded by sparse woods, mainly open untamed fields.

Mayan comes by and begins guiding me somewhere. We travel through the woods until we're in a small neatly kept neighborhood.

The front door to one of the buildings is open, and he takes us through it. We go to the living room, he sits me down on a couch and then he sort of wanders off.

The furniture is organized in a circle facing inward and every seat is filled, maybe about 17 people or so. Before I sat down they were all laughing and having some sort of party or something. But now they all went silent and are just staring at me.

I look at each person's face, and I don't recognize anyone*. From what I can tell this is a birthday party, most of them are a bit older - from early to late 40's.

I apologize for dropping in so randomly and kind of jokingly point out how awkward this is but the tension remains. Very slowly people begin picking up their previous conversations but when I try to connect with the people closest to me everyone would stop again and stare.

Eventually things were more relaxed. There were two guys off to my right speaking Russian, they were wearing very Russian jogging apparel. I ask them if they speak any German. One of them puts his index finger and thumb very close together and says "some". I responded "Ein bisschen?" (A little?) he responds affirmingly in German with a Russian accent - something I haven’t heard before.

We have a short conversation in German where I mainly get across that I've been learning it for fun for the past few years.

I hear tearing from my left, I look over to see one of the guys wearing a party crown opening a present. I ask him if it's his birthday, he says yeah. I say 'lemme guess you're turning.. ' I look at his features, I think 46 but maybe he's closer to 45' someone else says '46?' I respond with 'I was gonna say that too but my guess is 45'. Birthday guy says he's turning 43.

This went on longer and eventually I got to know more people and it was alright. It was a very vivid dream. Besides feeling super awkward at first it ended up relaxed and boring even.



* I can still recall most of the faces of the people there really well. Normally I forget the features of dream character's faces pretty quickly.

‎
Notable substances: No caffeine, 5mg Benedryl 9:00PM (testing out some potential REM rebound effects)



Dream 1 - FPS

I was on one of two teams against each other, first person shooter style. It was slightly more real life than game. I used a shot glass to rest my sniper rifle on while aiming, I thought it was a pretty cool idea and I showed it to my teammates and they did too (even though it accomplished nothing). I took sight to headshot an enemy on another rooftop, I waited for the perfect moment and fired - it should have taken the other guy out but it was like he canceled it and he was annoyed.

One of the guys from the other team came over to us and wanted us to surrender or something. Apparently the entire team were cops, outside of the game. They were somehow corrupt game cops, they demanded that we let them win.

I’m not sure how that situation resolved, but it was over now. I was being shown a pamphlet for some lost dreaming ideas or techniques (I'm so oblivious).

One of them involved a way to store many details about a dream you want to re-enter later by using a drug called 'Quona'

As I was looking at it I heard someone speaking highly of it 'I'm not familiar with this but any guide made by (username that I forget) is great!



WBTB

I had an alarm set to 3:45am but I woke up before it went off at 3:36am - this was after about 4 and a half hours of sleep. I read some of Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming and then returned to bed at 4:20am after doing some brief stretches.

I performed the tense-relaxation technique described in ETWOLD and did a bit of the 31 of the 61 relaxation points until I felt very comfortable. I tried to WILD but I kept catching myself almost losing consciousness. I was struggling on the verge for a while and then fell asleep.



Dream 2 - Boat dream

I'm on top of a massive aircraft carrier boat. There's a crowd of people on the shore watching me. I run and jump off the back deck tucking into a ball and flip as many times as I can before hitting the water, which was quite a ways down. The crows cheers. I vaguely recall swimming back to a dock where the crowd was.



Dream 3 - Ceiling dream

I'm jumping trying to hit my head on a drop ceiling. I can't, I announce some sort of challenge to see who can pull it off. There were a lot of people wandering around, they all simultaneously stopped what they begin jumping as high as they can to hit the ceiling with their heads.

I get a running start, jump and this time I hit it easily, briefly lifting one of the ceiling panels with my head. Everyone's clapping, I say that their involvement was why I was able to do it.



Dream 4 - Some violence

I'm in this super-religious household*. Everyone is wearing old school dresses and stuff. Everyone including me seems to be around 20-ish, excluding the parents.

I'm getting ready to go to school. Apparently I have a dream friend who wasn't present, and he had a girlfriend who is sick. I go into her room to check how she's feeling and she's doing okay.

I realize that I'm actually not feeling that well myself. I go to leave the room but my shoulders are seized and I'm pulled back into the room.

The mom of this girl was apparently hiding in the closet the whole time, which is who yanked me back in. She’s saying how great her daughter is and how great we would be as a couple and rambles about this almost incoherently, her eyes look insane. She wants us to get to know each other she says as she leaves the room and locks us in it. I'm very creeped out and am still trying to figure out how she had even fit in the closet, I just want away from this whole situation.

A time jump occurs and now I'm standing in school. Then my dream friend, the boyfriend of the girl, comes from around the hall. He's furious, his face is red and he's clearly been crying. He has a black knife in his hand, he thinks I slept with his girlfriend.

I start backing up, simultaneously saying that I need to explain what's going on (and try to figure it out for myself as well) while reaching into my right pocket to find an identical black knife as his. It's folded shut, I snap it open - the blade is probably 3 or 4 inches long.

He's screaming "You fucked my girlfriend!!" as he takes a jab at me. I side step it and stab into his sternum, the bone is firm and the blade only goes in half an inch. When I pull it back a small shard of glass remains.

He looks at me shocked and I repeat that we need to talk. He advances and stabs again, I grab the wrist of his hand with the knife and pull it towards and past my left side as I stab into the upper side of his other arm.

This causes him to drop the knife and back away, I pick up his knife. I apologize for his wounds and say again that we need to talk.

'I don't think so' he says as he takes out a long silver scimitar from behind his back. I considered using both of the knives for a sec but would rather have one free hand so I put the second knife in my pocket.

The longer scimitar doesn't feel as threatening to me and based on how he has been fighting I don't think this will end well for him but I don't think he will stop.

I say to him very plainly that if he continues this it will not end well for him. I begin to say how I am going to take him out but stop short at 'I'm gonna-' , I feel like it would sound cocky and insulting and I don't want to egg him on. He looks like he has a slight moment of clarity, like the rage was draining from him. I feel like this might resolve peacefully from here on out.

Such a stressful annoying dream.



Dream 5 - Talking cat

I was walking to the H-town house down the long driving holding an old small cat. She was able to talk, and was fairly sarcastic.


* Probably from a conversation I had recently about how I used to be religious when I was younger.

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.