LukeSid

To bed at 12.30, woke at 6.00am and WBTB at 7.20am. Lucid at 8.30am. It hit me suddenly. I'm at the edge of a very green field. There were others there. Overwhelmingly green, the grass, the surrounding bushes and (I'm not a biologist) some kind of ground vegetation, like docks, was everywhere. It was so intense, the most vivid dream I've ever experienced.

I thought something like, “hey! I'm lucid..do a reality check.” Doh! So I try to push my thumb through my palm and I can't. While I'm fumbling about the dream slips away. Gone. I try to get back into it and I can't...never have managed that yet. I'm overwhelmingly awake.

With no preparation, and very little in the way of good dream experiences these past few weeks, it came out of the blue...well green actually...so much green.

Anyone who has had a number of LD's surely knows what I mean, when I say I just KNOW when I'm lucid. There's no mistaking it. The vividness, the presence, my thoughts and responses. I know. So the last thing I should be doing is RC'ing so soon after I hit the event. Stand still, look around, and slowly and carefully stabilize the dream.

When I can, I usually touch a wall. Maybe I should have touched vegetation. I need to quickly spin when I sense the dream going. I've done that successfully once before. I need a different approach. I eat the right stuff, my brain get's all the stimulus it should reasonably need. I've taken “little helpers” like melatonin, but I can only hit LD's at the top of the morning. Mystery.

When I say there was no preparation, maybe there was. While I was up, I watched part of David Eagleman's series “The Brain” Part 5 “Who will we be?” When I went back to bed, I pondered for a short while about what it said. Maybe there's nothing special about the biological construct of the brain. The “mind” is not what the brain is, but what the brain does. Hooray for that.

We are advised to think “dream” things when WBTB, so maybe thinking “brain” things had the same effect and provided a stimulus (albeit short). When I WBTB, I'll work my way though The Brain series again, to see if I can trigger another LD from that.

Whenever I start to flag, I always seem to get something to spur me on. Short lucids, or the recent “schemas...” all contributions gratefully received...

PS An Afterthought. Maybe I'm looking at this from the wrong angle. Maybe I'm sleeping a lot deeper now and my (few and far-between and short) LD's happen when I'm rising from deep sleep, up towards awakening, and I reach a plateau when I'm not yet quite awake but I now have enough awareness to trigger a lucid. That might also explain my failure to pass the "thumb through palm" test

It's a thought, and maybe I need to condition myself to sleep lighter (if that's at all possible)

Only 3 recorded dreams since last time + 1 when I fell for the old “I'll remember a tag and write it later” trick. (I didn't remember it...doh!) But, I have bigger fish to fry at the moment.

I'm caught up in this “meditation/falling asleep and finding the sweet spot” experiment of mine. I drift and wisps of thought go through my mind and that's when I usually try my luck. I don't know where I'm going with this, but I think that it must be progress in something, simply because I'm doing (and seeing) things that I've not done before.

Two days ago I hit the sweet spot and thought one of my usual prompts (It was “box” – sometimes it's “house”) I expected a schema of a house but my brain seems to have decided to interpret it as my bedroom...well, it was in essence, but the orientation was wrong and it was bigger and I seemed to be looking down on it.

Fortunately, I'm well-conditioned to keep my eyes shut when I wake/hit near-sleep. I could hear my music, and felt the pressure of one foot on the other, so I was basically awake. On my little bedroom table were 3 knitted Father Christmases (what?? you may ask yourself) My departed mother knitted those as table decorations and they've been packed away for weeks. (but my sentimental minions apparently decided to add them to this little vignette.) Like my LD's it probably upped my heart rate a tad and it faded after aprox 30 seconds. That was the only result of aprox 40 minutes of M/FA

Today, I must have hit the sweet spot after about 10 minutes. I remember a wisp of thought (something about “Ron and a spaceship”) and I thought “house” Up came a screen (for want of a better word) with what looked vaguely like “The Martian.” It's a film I've seen and liked, but where's the house? And who's Ron?

The next bit is somewhat hard to explain. It looked like the images were HD but they weren't very clear?! Maybe a man in a spacesuit, maybe a robot, maybe it was just vivid and I thought it was HD. It wasn't a video, just still images that moved from place to place, maybe against a desert background. No big deal then. But, I was able to retain this image for nearly 5 minutes...and that's a first. Considering, a few weeks ago I got zilch I claim it to be a move in the right direction...so far.

Winter in the Uk now means wet and windy, and I hate that, so I'm not going out much. So it's maybe no surprise that I'm not getting LD's at the moment (although I'm still remembering, and logging a reasonable amount of dreams)

I'm now in a regular routine of 40minutes+ of meditation/nearly falling asleep. I'm not as bad as the lad in the first video link but you get the idea So it's bad for meditation but better for my dream research.

It means I can get the brain to show me how it works. There's a brilliant BBC documentary series, “The Brain” with David Eagleman, and he demonstrates how our brain usually controls us, and tells us what to see and do. (The second video link shows proof of that) I believe that kind of knowledge about the brain is important for dream research. He mentions schemas (templates) that the brain uses to “free up” neurons for other essential work.

So, when we pass a house, the brain pulls a schema from its template rack and merely adds details to it. Well, when I reach the hypnagogic stage I can get my brain to actually show a few schemas by thinking things like “show me a house” and I got the outline of a house. The schemas are tastefully presented in white outline and surrounded by a white border. I'm not saying that's necessarily how the brain stores them, but that's how it shows me.

So far I've got geometric shapes, a house (and when I asked for “a house” recently I got the outline of a key!) Fascinating stuff. Of course, the question is, can I use that to advance my LD ambitions? Knowing how the brain works could be the way in. Anyone who lives in a foreign country and doesn't learn the language is a fool. Presumably a DILD is just a person “creating a dream image” and the brain responds by popping up a schema , then embellishing it (i.e. a dream forming)

So, my “house” schema maybe needs to be pushed, so it becomes second-nature for my brain to create it on demand. Then the Polish building neurons turn up and give it a nice frontage, plant a few bushes and away we go into dreamland. It's a thought.

Brain trivia
Apparently the unconscious is the big brother and the conscious is the runt. Who knew that? He likens the conscious, to a CEO of a large corporation, who steps in when there's a crisis. The trick for us is to get our CEO to make LD'ing one of its priorities.

The brain's insistence on showing its pre-determined schema's (despite them sometimes being illogical) presumably explains why we are tricked by magicians. Well, not any more matey! You just have to shout “it's a bloody schema” and some big guy will probably throw you out...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njMP4c3SJJA


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtzzS9TtKes