Nerefa

Befriended a man who was a shapeshifter like me, but he had an unfortunate alter-form (in my opinion, at least). I didn't want to hurt his feelings, so I didn't say that, but he was... an insect in his other form. A large flying, stinging bug that I've never seen IRL. ><
I admitted that I was squeamish about bugs, but told him I still thought it was great and he should find some bug friends who will appreciate his incredible gift.

He asked what I was, so I transformed into my dragon, and told him: "I'm the universe. To me, this is a dream. Don't worry about whether you're real, though—we're both the essence of it."

He liked that and we went off on some excursions I forgot the details of, but it involved an apocalypse and I found a grieving family in the aftermath. There were three children who's mom had been lost in the disaster. I helped them a bit (forgot the details again), and my shapeshifter friend decided to stay with them and the dad.

When I left, the oldest child followed me. When I asked him why, he said that he had seen the dragon that fought with them during the disaster and he had seen me transform, so he wanted to go with me.

So we went off adventuring into the wilderness, helping clean up rubble and find other survivors.

I was at a convention, about to make a sale, and was in a bit of a hurry. I was nonlucid.

Suddenly out of nowhere, my grandpa walked by, as though just passing through. It didn’t fit with the scene and was a noticeable interruption from my current state of mind, but not because he was trying to be noticed. I got the feeling he wouldn’t have even looked at me, had I not initiated eye contact.

He smiled with genuine happiness, the way he used to smile at me. It was real, I thought. Something I hadn’t seen in a very long time, and never thought would happen again. I was instantly lucid.

There was something peaceful about him. He was ready to just walk by without interrupting the show, but I greeted him and we walked away from the convention into what appeared to be a Denny’s booth (with dark gray carpet on the floor, the wooden table and bench, and the red fake leather seatbacks).

“How are you doing?!” I asked, addressing him by his first name.

“Doing good! Its so nice to see you!” he said with a jovial lift in his voice like he used to have. I’ll never forget the joy he had.

“I’m glad to hear it.” I answered. “How is the real one doing?” I asked, referring to his physical self.

He frowned and seemed more dubious on the subject. “I just wish I could wake up…” he said with a sort of frustration and disappointment that was dwarfed by his happiness to be here. It seemed like he had been dealing with something lately.

That was about it for this one. I purposely woke up to write it down.

Had a dream in the same world as my previous “No Outside” dream: https://www.dreamviews.com/blogs/ner...outside-94602/

I didn’t realize it until later in the dream. It started out in waterways between tall (concrete?) buildings that had no visible windows or doors.

There was a hole-in-the-wall market. At the entrance, a man sold goods to customers (literally it was a hole in the wall of one of the buildings, it was well hidden). He sold everything from foot to housewears to electronics to drugs.

He asked me what I was looking for (his products were in the back mostly, customers stayed outside and he brought things out to them). I knew I was dreaming so I though “Sure I could go for some dream drugs.”

But I knew there was something I wanted to remember to do tonight that could be applied to this moment. What was it…?

Then I remembered. I was trying to figure out how to be truly happy again (been feeling off lately). So I told him I’d like something that’ll make me happy. He handed me some drugs and I took one. Nothing extraordinary happened, I just felt sorta drunk/high afterwards.

As I left, I noticed there were cameras watching just outside. Other customers told how to sneak around them.

Through dream scan, I realized this whole city was being watched by something and people lived in secret within the crevices. These people were surrounded and trapped.

I went out to look at the cameras and realized they were the same drones from my “No Outside” dream. Same world, different location. The drones were trying to recapture people who escaped.

I ended up letting the drones capture me out of curiosity to see what would happen but woke up (either SO woke me up or other natural waking).

After the wake up, I went back in but appeared in the woods. I was standing in a path when all the sudden about thirty soldiers in light gray uniforms showed up, but most of them were noticeably drunk.

A couple others appeared behind me with a higher ranking officer in green. The soldiers flanking him moved to join the group and they all looked at him as he spoke to the group.

I just happened to be there and was in the way, so I moved off the path and watched.

They were about to go home, which I guess was why he didn’t care about some random bystander being there, or the drunken murmuring. Everyone seemed tired, done, and eager to leave. Happy, in a way? Eh.

I suppose that’s what I’ve been feeling lately, whatever the hell it is. I’m done fighting, I’ve lost my entire family, everything I thought I knew was a lie, the world has been turned upside down and will never be the same. Time to go home and live life like none of it happened. I don’t know who I am anymore but everythings fine now and I’m supposed to be happy. I *want* to be happy. If I’m broken, that means they won. All they ever wanted was to break me. I’m so angry that I’ve let them win.

(crossposted from my DJ last night)

---

It’s 3am, been awake for 30-60 mins, mind racing with worries about things. Forgot to do dream recall because im so preoccupied with these thoughts. A dog has been barking in the distance.

i stop and think, none of these worries have happened yet. Why am i obsessing over them?

Wait

Is there a barking dog? Is that just a sound distortion from my noise machine? A hallucination?

I stop and listen carefully. Sounds real.

I lift my head off the pillow to listen from another angle. Still real-sounding. I swear, it's as realistic as anything I've heard, not coming from my mind.

But then I stop to think and realize it has been the exact same two barks every time. Dozens of times. The same two barks, spaced exactly the same, identical tone and pitch on repeat.

It’s not real.

I proceed to adjust the volume and sound of the two barks with my mind. The hallucination follows my adjustments. Still the same spacing between the two exact same barks, but I can slow it down, adjust the timing, and change the volume with my mind.

There was never any barking dog.

The things I'n worrying about aren’t happening either. I still hear the same barking on repeat and my worries are still there, but I know what's in my mind and what's not. I'm going back to sleep.

This dream was from the night before last.

---

I was lucid through the whole night (WILDed back into it after each natural WBTB). Most of it was one big dream (there was one smaller lucid dream at the start of the night, but I forgot it).

I traveled around a world made up of holograms. The people were real, and they had a system where if they wanted an object that they could pick off the land, they had to purchase it through a system. The purchased replaced the hologram with a real object.

For example, if they wanted a to chop down a tree to build something, they had to purchase that tree for it to materialize fully.

They had big cities for people to live, society, all built with stuff that’s real from past purchases off the land. It was mainly the rural areas that were holograms.

The boundaries of the world were in the ocean. The ocean didn’t get too deep, it just cut off at after a certain point and I could see the boundary's edge in the distance.

The forests were symmetrical. They looked like normal forests, except the trees and the animals, everything in them was perfectly lined up. You can walk a certain number of steps and find the same bear next to the same rock next to the same tree stump on repeat. Each forest was shaped like a pie this way and had its own unique stuff on repeat.

There were many different holographic landscapes. They were solid and I could interact with the holograms, but I couldn't use or take them.

I at one point tested this by getting a bear to chase me. It only chased me a few yards before going back to its spot where it was locked in with an "invisible" tether.

The people in the city were nice, good people, but I didn’t like the way society operated. I forget why, but they had some sort of societal problems.

I went off into the rural landscapes and found nomads living off the land on the rocks by the edge if the sea. They got by with what little they had. They had escaped the main cities and didn’t want to go back, even though life was harder for them.

I found a nice lake hidden away in a beautiful grove. The water was no more than four feet deep and crystal clear. There was a rainbow of beautiful rocks at the bottom.

One of the nomad women rowed a small boat around the lake and I spoke to her in private, enjoying the scenery and company. She told me that entertainment, play, and any forms of self expression or leisure were frowned upon in society even amongst the nomads. They needed to work 24/7 and should not have nor desire anything more in life.

She told me that she liked to come here to this lake to be at peace. This was her haven, a secret place she could escape to, and goof off. To live and relax. This was her freedom, no matter how small it was.

I told her I wouldn’t tell anyone, that I was from somewhere far away and this was my escape, too. I’m also just looking for somewhere to relax and be at peace. I told her how blessed I am to have this time to myself in such a beautiful world.

I didn’t tell her this was my dream since that usually gets complicated and I have to explain how that works, which I didn't feel like doing.

But we had a nice time.

I had a dream last night that led to a mind-blowing discovery about happiness.

I've been sad lately, don't get much joy out of the things I used to love. It feels like the light inside of me has gone out.
I have plenty of "reasons" for why I'm sad, like depression and life struggles that are real and understandable.
But that doesn't change anything. I'm still sad.

Last night, I decided to try using my dreams as references for visual art. I wasn't trying to find the grand solution to my relentless despair, but I thought maybe I'll be happier if my drawing skills improve. Or maybe I'll make money off of my art if it looks better, and the money will make me happy.
idk maybe it'll just pass the time, worst case scenario.

My small, simple goal was to improve my anatomy skills, especially eyebrows. I have trouble visualizing eyebrows and putting them onto paper. I thought "Well, my dreams look just like real life. The human brain is incredible, capable of coming up with elaborate scenery and imagery that look just like real life. Perfect reference material, right? I can study anything I want in dreams."

So I entered a lucid dream with WILD and started studying a simple painting of a woman facing to the side. I could study the curve of her chin and lips, the size of her forehead relative to her chin, the shape of her eyes and eyebrows. All of the shapes and proportions. It was as if I was looking at a real painting for reference.

But this didn't help because I can already draw something like that from memory when awake. Side-views are easy for me. I've already memorized the curves and proportions. If I was going to improve, I needed references for more complex angles and expressions that I haven't memorized.

So I stepped away from the painting and started to look around at everything in my environment, marveling at how vivid everything was. The grass, the trees, every grain of dirt on the ground. I leaned down to examine the petals of a purple flower.

But again, I could draw a flower like that from memory. Neat, but not what I was looking for.

I needed to look at things that I have trouble visualizing when awake, because I don't know the finer details of what they look like.

So I found some people to study. I tried to examine the face of an older man who looked perfectly vivid and realistic at first, but upon close inspection, I couldn't wrap my mind around what his face was supposed to actually look like in finer detail. What's the exact curve of his eyebrow from every angle? Do all the hairs go in the same direction or do they curve out in separate directions? Where exactly on his skull do the eyebrows meet the orbital bone? I can't remember, I don't know these things, but I thought they would "magically" appear properly in my dream. For some reason, I thought my brain must've had this "secret highly detailed memory" storage that only dream-me could access. After all, my dreams are so vivid and realistic.

Seems kind of obvious that I was wrong, now that I think about it.
I couldn't make out his finer details in my dream any better than I could without a reference when awake. It wasn't even necessarily blurry, but it was like I was seeing the ambiguity of my mind failing to form an objectively correct visual. I was seeing all of the "possibilities" at the same time (not literally, but the illusion of my flawed perception was clearer than ever).

This is also what happens when I try to visualize his face when awake.
I still need a reference.

But it's mind-blowing that I didn't even notice the illusion covering up these deficits until I started looking for them. My unaware mind had convinced me that everything looked normal, when it didn't. That makes way more sense than my old magical assumption that we could somehow dream in 4K but not access this massive underused capacity for detail any other time.

So I can't use my dreams for art like I wanted, but this has even more incredible implications.

First, awareness is a much bigger aspect of our sensory perceptions than I previously thought. Everything you see is filtered through your awareness of it. You're not getting the real thing. Visual artists are specifically skilled to increase their awareness of visuals and a lack of awareness of visuals is reflected through their drawings, but we otherwise may never notice the awareness we lack (whether an artist or not).

We go about our whole life thinking we see things that we're not fully seeing. Our minds are filling in the blanks and we don't think twice about it.

Secondly, this is a huge difference between waking life and dreams that I never noticed before. Removing the "filter" like I did in this dream could help you recognize the dreamstate by reflecting on your level of visual awareness.

Third and more incredible to me is what this implies about happiness in general. I posted this on the Omnilucid discord, and a fellow dreamer pointed out how this happens with other things too (not just visuals) like when you dream of a funny joke, but wake up with the realization that it wasn't funny (your mind just thought it was). Or in waking life, the experience of a garden being extra beautiful knowing the labor and love that went into it VS just seeing a garden in a dream that was easily created on the spot.

I've had countless dreams that replicated the experience of something, without having the actual experience.

Like nightmares about things that aren't scary, or losing love for a person I've never met. It was just a trick of the mind, an illusion of having an experience I didn't even have... There's a pure essence to our experience of things that can't be seen, heard, touched etc. It doesn't seem to exist outside of our consciousness. It's invisible and intangible, but it's very real.

I think I've been getting wrapped up in the illusions of "stuff" and have a better understanding of what that means now. I'm feeling much more hopeful. Maybe I can find happiness again now that I'm seeing past the filters.

After years of regarding my dreams as nothing more than dreams, I started looking into astral projection and spiritual beliefs. I've been reading books, listening to other people's experiences, and running personal experiments (with the help of my significant other).

I'm now feeling more at home with it. I've reshaped my understanding of what it means to be real, which leads me to believe that AP is undeniable.

All our experiences (both dreams and waking) are filtered through our limited human perceptions, but consciousness isn't limited by perception.
How I came to terms with this:
- It's when you can feel the tension in a room after a fight takes place, even though you weren't there to witness it and may have no knowledge that it happened.
- When you don't hear a dog bark in your dream, but the sound somehow wakes you up.
- When in a dreamless state, you can be aware of changes in your surroundings, despite having no physical or mental perceptions of them.

I now believe that our consciousness isn't limited to our perceptions and neither is the universe. We can make the choice to find other ways to navigate the unperceivable aspects of reality, or ignore it.
So personally, I've chosen to be as aware as possible, even of the things I can't perceive.

This is where dreams and astral projection come in, providing a way to translate pure awareness into readable perceptions. Sometimes things can get lost in translation, but the more you practice and detach yourself from your own personal biases, the more you can perceive the things we wouldn't normally have access to.

Anyway, I know some people aren't into this sort of thing and respect that. I don't plan on putting much of this type of content on here.

Normally I get up to go to the bathroom, but on my way, I smashed into a sharp corner of my wall last night (not dreaming, this happened in waking life).
My face was bruished, bleeding, and my significant other woke up in a panic. I assured her it was fine, just kinda hurts, and thought to myself "I don't want this to ruin my WBTB."

It did not!

I went on to have a few hours of borefest lucid dreams. I made rice and some other foods in the dream, but had no pesto for it so was very disappointed. I spent the rest of the dream trying to find something else to eat.

But then I hopped on a plane, chatted with the pilot, and found out that someone sabotaged the plane to cause a crash.

There weren't many people on board, and they didn't act like normal civilians. The whole thing was a set up to identify and flush me out. They knew I'd use my abilities to escape the plane crash.

Everyone else already seemed to have a plan and escaped easily with parachutes as the plane started to tip over. This all happened in seconds. As the nose went down, the plane plummeted faster and the pressure pulled me back.

One woman was at the escape door as if she'd been waiting for me, irritated that I was taking my preciously sweet time to evacuate. She left as soon as I followed. There was only a split second of time left and I climbed out just in time.

As I free fell out of the plane, I transformed into my dragon and took to the skies, looking down at the mountains and a plume of smoke that billowed out of the crash.
I flew down to investigate and look for the people who had been on board. I found them, and they were fine. Then I woke up in morning.

This is a personal dream that I wouldn’t normally post, but I wanted to share one of these. This is a good example of a therapeutic lucid dream. It shows one of the ways you can benefit from lucid dreaming if you experience grief or other difficult emotions.

Warning: A lot of unpleasantness ahead.

—-

We went to my grandpa’s house since we happened to be there and I decided to real quick grab some more of my stuff like the office chair. We didn’t leave much there, but the office chair was the one big thing I left.

He wasn’t home. I deliberated skipping it, but figured it wouldn’t hurt to just go in and grab the chair so he wouldn’t have to worry about moving it.

I know how much I personally hate unannounced guests and I would never want someone doing this for me, but I keep thinking of how much he’s expressed difference from me in this way. It makes no sense to me, but he never cared about people just walking into his house. He used to refuse to put doors between rooms in his house, removing them any chance he got, and didn’t like locks—he’d never lock his house. He’d leave doors wide upon and get excited about the happy surprise if anyone like a neighbor just happened to walk in out of the blue. All the time he’d invite people to show up and do things for him when he wasn’t home, as if the very thought of (what I would consider) an intrusion delighted him.

So I went in and got the chair. It was already sitting by the door, affirming his intention to get rid of it.

He then pulled up just as we were leaving. He was pissed, but not because it bothered him that I walked into his house. He wasn’t truly bothered at all, but acted as such merely because it violated the boundaries he knew I had. My boundaries, which he found a way to weaponize in this moment. It was shallow anger laced with the “Gotcha” delight that almost overided it to a point where I couldn’t take it seriously.
“So we’re just walking into people’s houses now.” he said with a sneer, but he could barely take his own pseudo rage seriously and I could hear the laughter below out from behind it.
It was strange, though. Something wasn’t right.
He then turned to me and I saw glimpses of the nice grandpa I used to know as he held his arms out and hugged me. He said he was happy to see me, he loved me, and goodbye.
There was anger and spite still in him, directed at me at the same time.
I asked if he wanted some money to cover any potential bills.
I felt bad that I don’t have much now because we just moved, but I’d give him whatever I could.
He answered with two voices clearly speaking in unison. One said yes, that it would help. The other voice cheered with derision. “Ooh money, hehehe!” it chuckled, as if celebrating plundered goods despite me giving it freely. It made it sound like I was being robbed even though that’s not what this was. I owed him far more than I could give, and I wanted to help him more than anything.
I didn’t like how that voice made me feel gross helping him, so I ignored it. I gave him $100, silently promising I’d have more later, and hugged him again. I told him thank you, that I loved him. I knew it was stupid to cry, but did so anyway.
I hurriedly got back in the car after waving goodbye and could hear the deriding voice cheering and mocking me as it celebrated the money.
His other voice didn’t speak, but it was sad and watched us leave as if it wished it could leave, too.
I felt pulled in two different directions whenever I was around him lately, ever since we moved here.
I never used to feel this way.

As we pulled out of the driveway, I saw something sitting there. It was short and black, and it sat in a massive puddle of itself. Now that I looked at the house from outside, I could see it better. There was black grime everywhere. It was all over the property, having spread itself onto everything, a wet spiderweb of black goop. It was all over my grandpa too. His clothes, hair, and skin had little strings of weblike goop all over. It leaked out from inside his mouth and the corners of his eyes.
I thought about how, in waking life, there was always this strange invisible grime that follows him. It has a physical texture and smell, but I couldn’t see it. The only time I ever saw him without it was for a few years when he was practicing Buddhism. At that time, he was happier than I had ever seen him before.
He still keeps all the statues and pictures from his trip to Burma, but I avoid talking to him about Buddhism as it seems to anger him if it’s brought up.
Anyway in this dream I didn’t see it when I was in the house, but I could see the black grime clearly now from the car.

I looked down at myself, checking our car and things. We were clean. It wasn’t on us. I wasnt worried about it getting on us either, as I knew it didn’t want anything to do with us.

It had already tried over the course of the two years we lived there. That’s why it spited us, and wanted us gone.
I looked out the window at my grandpa, who watched us drive away.

“…I got manipulated, didn’t I?” I then turned and asked my partner.

“Yeah.” she said.

I nodded, not knowing why I asked other than to get her opinion, I guess.

For a moment, we couldn’t decide where to go, but ultimately we decided to go home to the new place.

The world was fragmented into chunks. Many people were gone, post apocalypse.

Some of the remaining people were hang gliders, which allowed them to survive traveling between fragments, but it was getting harder and harder to survive since more and more land was destroyed every day and a constant storm picked up.

Most of the remaining fragments were pieces of ocean that flowed into an abyss with raging currents because of the storm.

Hang gliding was a death sentence at this point, but so was staying in one spot. This was the end of the world. A lot of people were ready to go one last time.

One of the hang gliders and handed me a blank piece of paper and a pen. He had another piece of paper in his hand that he attached to the hang glider with something written on it as he prepared to take it for one last deadly spin.

I asked what that’s for.

“Freedom. You write down all of the things you forgive yourself for.” He said as he got ready.
He then took off.

I went my own way. I knew it was a dream, so every time I fell, I rewound time and did it again.

I accidentally deleted this DJ, so this is a brief rewrite.

I went to a city that was underwater. It was beautiful! The water was shallow in most places, just barely peaking above rooftops in some places, so the sun could shine through with bright golden sand below.

There were two young men employed to take tourists out on a boat. They were hiring more workers and I applied. They started training me for the job and I used my dreamer abilities to cheat around the work sometimes when they weren't looking. At one point for example, I had to pull one of the canoes back to the dock and turned into water my dragon for this, using its massive tailfin to paddle back in record time.

Anyway, some slarms started to go off in the city. Another tsunami was on the way, and the two guys called the boss to tell him they were evacuating. Their boss started yelling at them to stay put despite the risks. He was angry at the evacuation, claimed it was scaring his customers away and he didn't want to lose business, so everyone better stay and run the place as if nothing is happening.

It was nonsense. I gave the two guys a big sum of money (that I used my dream powers to manifest secretly) so they could catch one of the evacuation flights last minute. They happily took that and left.

Another DJ I accidentally deleted. Rewrite.

There were some dilapidated buildings being rebuilt. I was my dragon, flying around the wreckage. There was a shed with a thin, crumbling roof that couldn't handle my weight or it would have caved in. I practiced reconstruction with my dram powers but don't remember much. The owner of the buildings was nearby and didn't seem to mind, but he was mostly in the background.

Next thing I remember was being on the beach with a blond-haired woman who was particularly demanding. She knew what I was and for some reason she felt entitled to using my powers for her own gain! Where did this entitlement come from? Beats me. Lol. I was amused and fond of her energy, though, so I listened to her request. It was.... for a roller coaster.

I don't know why, either.

I informed her that I could give her a roller coater in three different ways:
- If she gives me a location, I will create it from scratch. This is the least ideal way and she might exactly not get what she wants.
- If she has an object of similar size and similar materials (like a building), I can transform it into what she wants with greater ease.
- If she already has the roller coaster she wants, but it's broken down, I can transform it into what it used to be before it broke. This is the best way.

I can't remember what we went with, but afterwards, I looked out at the ocean and thought of disappearing into it, but a new request pulled me back.
She wanted me to physically carry her.
So I picked her up and physically carried her as the tide came in, bringing her to a safe warm cave where I gave her a bed to sleep in, and curled up at her feet (still in dragon form). As I laid there, I eventually woke up.

Disclaimer: This is a guide for my own personal technique that may not be as viabl. It's how I learned to lucid dream originally (at around 10 years old). I've had hundreds if not thousands of lucid dreams from it over the course of 20+ years. It remains my favorite and most reliable technique personally, but I can't promise it will work for others. Take it with a grain of salt.

For those wanting a universally practiced technique, I recommend vanilla WILD or MILD.

Anyway...

Dream Brain Mimicking is a way that I personally like to initiate lucid dreams from the waking state (similar to WILD). It works by mimicking the same areas of your brain that are active during dreams, allowing you to seamlessly transition from waking to conscious sleep without the usual WILD anchors.
Note: Technically, the dream story you come up is your anchor, but you don't have to think about it that way.

This guide will explain the mindset for what I like to call "dream brain", what kinds of thoughts you can engage in to encourage dream brain, the mindset you want to cultivate for dreaming, and how you may feel in altered states.

If you're already familiar with the feeling of dreaming, I highly recommend you embrace your own personal experiences as a frame of reference in addition to the tips outlined here, as this is what Dream Brain Mimicking is all about! The more you emulate your own dreaming mindset, the better.

Optional Reading
My WILD guide can be found here if you want a more thorough understanding of vanilla WILD: https://www.dreamviews.com/blogs/ner...d-guide-94340/).
MILD can also (optionally) be incorporated into Dream Brain Mimicking for more powerful effects. Here's a good MILD guide: https://skyfalldreams.net/guides/skyfalls-mild-guide/

Moving right along!


Choose a Setting
As you lay in bed, choose a setting that you would like to start with. It can be related to your daily life, your dreams, or be something entirely new.

If you want the most potent option, choose a setting that includes dream signs that will continuously trigger and reinforce your lucidity and/or a setting of a dream you had previously. For example, a mythical fantasy world with dragons and cities in the sky will remind you that you must be dreaming. If you already dreamed of this mythical place before, even better! Any dream settings you regularly get lucid in are the best if your only goal is lucidity.

The setting you choose can always be changed later as the dream progresses, so it's not set in stone. The important thing is that it will eventually turn into a dream, so ideally pick something you want to dream about. The more motivated you are, the better. What's something you've always wanted to do?

You can also connect settings together. If you have a previous dream setting that you're always lucid in, you can create a path from that location to another setting for a dream you want (maybe it's connected by an alleyway or a portal) and go from there.

I'm going to continue this guide with an underwater city setting for demonstration. For this, you could start in the ocean already, or start above the water and dive in.


Starting Your Dream
Imagine yourself beginning the dream. If you picked the underwater city setting for example, imagine yourself flying above the ocean under a bright blue cloudless sky. See the mountains in the distance and circle downward as you dive. Feel the current and hear the water's surface breaking as you plunge right in!

Fully immerse yourself in the sensations of swimming downward towards an underwater city as a rush of bubbles trails up behind you. The closer you get, the more details you can see of the city below as it comes into view. You are immersed in this real time experience.

Take Your Time
There's no rush to this process. Feel free to take your time and be immersed with any or all of your senses. You can imagine breathing underwater in any way you want, whether you have gills or if it feels just like breathing air.

Does the seawater taste salty? Look at all of the color and details, bubbles, light, and darkness. Do you see any fish swimming by? Try looking around from different angles and perspectives. Look up and see the sunlight coming through the surface above. Then, as you look back down, get a view of the underwater cityscape and how the streets were once laid out by some lunatic who can't design a city, now in a serene murky ruin. Set the tone! Fill your world with personality and backstory, as if it has a real history. And what are you looking to accomplish? Why are you here again?

Note: If you have aphantasia, feel free to skip the visuals and work with other senses. The important thing is your immersion with your dream, not the specific details of it.

How to Be Immersed
Don't worry about using all of your senses or doing specific step-by-step tasks. There is absolutely no checklist to follow. The goal of this practice is to be fully immersed and invested in your unbridled inclinations. Be freely driven by your most primal and natural emotions. Follow your gut instinct, do what flows naturally (as opposed to complex decision-making and logical thinking). This is how we usually engage in dreams. It's a light, passive way of thinking. Like a flowing stream of though

Show, don't tell; do, don't think!
Although it may sound contradictory to lucid dreaming, part of immersion means not having constant meta awareness of what you're doing. In other words, put yourself in the mindset of actually being there in the moment, rather than being highly aware that you're laying in bed thinking about it. Engage the experience of the dream, not just thinking about the dream. Engage thoughts like "I am lucid now, this is a dream." and "I'm exploring! What's over there?!" instead of things like "Oh. Did I do that right for the technique?" or "Uh oh, did I use my sense of taste yet?"

Engage with your environment as it comes, rather than going through a checklist of tasks. Again, "I need to focus on this or that" isn't the right mindset. You want to engage in the environment in your mind as if it's real and right there in front of you. Allow yourself to forget your current physical position in bed—you're not laying in bed doing a lucid dreaming technique. Rather, you are experiencing this dream in real time. The thoughts in your mind are more than just thoughts. They are your direct reality.

It's okay if you don't do this perfectly. If you have to scratch an itch, move around, or your thoughts veer off track, that's fine. Don't worry about it! I do this constantly and it doesn't interfere when I don't draw attention to it.

Plan Ahead
If there are very specific things you want to do, I recommend making plans for your goals ahead of time rather than trying to sort it all out in the moment—particularly for more complicated ideas that you're not sure of. For example, if you want to make up a plot about a sea dragon living in the heart of the city and what it's doing there, make some notes about it before you start. You could still have this sea dragon show up without planning, and improvise what it's doing, but if there's anything you want special control over, do that ahead of time.

Same goes for dreams. Incubate anything you really to go a particular way ahead of time so you don't get caught up in complicated plot structures in the moment—because most of the time when you're dreaming, you're not going to be making tons of complicated plot decisions. Dreams tend to form naturally and are influenced by our intentions, associations, free-flowing thoughts, and natural expectations—rather than heavy logical thinking and scheming.

So I recommend you do your fancy logic brain stuff beforehand for best results. It's not that you can't do this in dreams, it's just that we tend to do it less, and doing it less makes this technique easier to fall asleep to. We are, after all, trying to fall asleep. Easy free-forming thoughts you can fall asleep to is the goal.

Engage Your Passion
Dreams that motivate you on a personal level can be highly effective. If possible, pick something that you can easily get lost in while staying immersed, and invest your time in without it feeling like a chore. Feel free to follow your instincts and desires. Do the things you're most motivated to do.

Things that are currently pressing you in waking life are great candidates for dream material, too. For example, if you have a fictional crush you're interested in, you can make them a character in your dream. Tie what you know about the character into the story. For example, if the character is an author, the dream version of this character could have written about this underwater city and joined you to learn more about it for their research. Or you can shake things up a bit—maybe this character has a book that allows their writings to become reality, which can be a dream control tool for the both of you.

Perspective
Don't feel like you need to maintain a first person perspective for the sake of immersion. Overthinking this is immersion-breaking and not worth doing. Third person perspectiive is fine to have! Dreams often switch between perspectives randomly anyway, often without us even noticing because we're so immersed in the contents of the dream (which is what you want to emulate).

Follow Your Natural Schemas
If you're familiar with schema for dream control, you know that personal associations are involved in dream formation. If you see a cat, it will be more likely to meow than to bark like a dog, because you associate cats with meowing (unless there's some specific reason it would bark instead). This dream doesn't have to follow the rules of reality, but it should generally follow the personal way you associate concepts, because your dreams also form in this way. There's a lot of schemas that many people universally share (like cats meowing and dogs barking). Other schemas may be cultural, and then there's personal schemas. For example, if I see a white cat, I might automatically expect it to be a male with one eye, because I had a male white cat with one eye growing up. For someone else, a white cat may be more likely to have other attributes since having a one-eyed male cat is a highly specific experience for me and not others.

You don't have to overthink this though. Schematic associations that you have already will come automatically without you even having to think about them. It's the way dreams are formed instantaneously without the need to think about it, and waking thoughts will do the same when we let them flow naturally. It's a good idea to let your mind do what it does naturally, even if it doesn't always make sense, rather than trying to narrate, drive, and control every little detail.

Your Dreams "Want" to Process Your Experiences
An important underlying fundamental behind all of this is that your mind "wants" to process something when you go to sleep. You have dreams about your past experiences, especially the more recent experiences you've had. If you went to a family gathering the night before, you're more likely to have dreams about it. We even have dreams about media we've recently consumed. The things that are most immersive and "important" to are often the things you dream about. It's your brain's way of processing and storing memories. Dream Brain Mimicking takes advantage of this natural processing by "feeding" your mind an experience you want to process in your dreams. The "mimicked" dream you create in your mind becomes the thing your brain thinks you need to be dreaming about. This is why an immersive approach with personally impactful themes that tie into other memories works really well.

Dream Control
With the above said, you can absolutely control the dream and I recommend doing so if you don't like something or if you want to adjust how the story unfolds. You can totally backtrack and start over when it's necessary to fix unpleasant things. Despite everything this guide has explained so far, you absolutely can make decisions and change things as needed. It's just not a majority of what you should be doing.

I recommend using dream control methods that you would employ in real dreams for making changes (not required, but it generally works better this way).
Here's a guide on dream control basics: https://www.enter-the-mist.org/post/...-part-1-schema
And another guide for schema: https://www.dreamviews.com/dream-con...ur-dreams.html

There are multiple ways you can control dreams:
- Redirect your attention.
- Switch out unwanted schemas for wanted schemas.
- Develop new schemas/expectations.

For example, you may associate being underwater with saltwater. If you don't like the taste of salt, you can change this in different ways:
- Stop paying attention to the taste. Unlike waking reality, dreams depend on your attention. If you thoroughly ignore and forget about something, it ceases to exist completely.
- Change it to a different taste that follows a another schema. For example, maybe it has an algea flavor. Kinda nasty though, redirection may have a more desirable outcome in this case lol.
- Create a new schema such as imagining that this is a magical ocean that tastes like cotton candy. This can have transcending effects on your entire story and you may need to change other things about your surroundings to reinforce it. This is more of a drastic change that I don't recommend most of the time, but absolutely recommend it to fix particularly unpleasant trains of thought.

Simply shifting your attention off of the undesired experience is often the best route. Take the path of least resistance for the little things. Save the schema-changes and new schemas for more important things or for when shifting attention doesn't work.

Strengthening Associations Through Repetition
The more consistent you are and use repetition for the things you want, the more it will become a part of your real dreams on a consistent basis. For example, if you give yourself gills in this dream every day for a week of practice, you will be much more likely to always have gills in your dreams when swimming and you may even unconsciously develop an association between the feeling of having gills and being lucid in dreams. Through repetition, gills can become your default in swimming dreams and even a trigger for lucidity.

You may also have more swimming dreams in general, lucid or nonlucid, because of the repetition.

Dreams are often formed through associations and repetitions. Be mindful of the reality you're creating for yourself. I recommend not botheringt with nightmarish or unpleasant things. Turn your attention off of things you don't want, and change them with schema if they're particularly ingrained (sometimes deeply ingrained connections require more repetition of new associations to fix).

Staying on Track
It's normal for the mind to wander, especially while falling asleep. Dream Brain Mimicking can help you stay on track because of its dreamlike mindset, but if you find yourself losing track, keep practicing! You can also hop on your new train of thought and create a whole new dream from it, alternatively.

It helps greatly to use a dream story that you can easily and comfortably follow as you fall asleep. Some things may be easier to stay on track with than others. The more enjoyable and low effort, the better. The goal is to fall asleep consciously using passive awareness (aka WILD technique), so unlike regular story creation, skip the complex decision-making, boring parts, complicated plot structures, and overfocus. For example, sometimes I just skip character dialogue altogether and assume they conveyed something without deciding every word spoken. Detailed dialogue is boring to me. I just assume they conveyed the intended meaning without worrying about the details.

There are no specific details that you must follow. You can skip anything that doesn't interest you. Dreams are oftewn nonsensinsical like this, but they make sense to you, the dreamer, in some way. That's all that matters. This is a dream process rather than a final draft scripting process. The only audience is you. Allow your mind to flow freely on its own, like a dream, even if it's not always logical, and have fun!

Easy Thinking
Most of my success with Dream Brain Mimicking comes from things that are easy to think about. Low effort is ideal. Feel free to be lazy and make half-baked stories. You're going to sleep doing this so it need not be work! When you get the ball rolling on a story narrative, you will start to (eventually) fall asleep consciously because you're immersed, not because you're trying hard to perform a task. The story flows and wanders sometimes nonsensically like a dream, but it'a a dream you're passively following.

Doing this all cultivates a dreaming mindset before you fall asleep. You start the dream when you're awake, you encourage dream-like thought patterns, and work with your mind (instead of against it) to enter a real dream that you can stay engaged in. This will not only give you lucid dreams, but train you to have longer dreams with stable story narratives and can also be used for MILD and incubation of specific dream elements.

The Final Transition
You may or may not notice when the dream becomes real. Sometimes I experience hypnagogia with this technique (odd sensations like buzzing or tingling), but usually not. If you do experience anything like that, keep engaging in your dream. The transition can often appear as if the scene becomes more vivid (gradually), you may encounter a doorway or portal of some kind, or you may not notice any transition at all. Experiences can vary, but eventually you'll wind up fully asleep in the dream.

Final Note
Just a heads up that you can also get DILDs from this technique, not just WILDs. Sometimes if you fall asleep unconsciously, you end up back in your intended story lucid dreaming anyway later in the night.

Happy dreaming!

I've been playing around with moving and talking during hypnagogic and other dream-like states (in addition to dreams).

What I've found so far is that the mechanism that controls your waking body does not automatically wake you up. These seem to be two separate mechanisms.

More coming soon.

There's a state of sleep in which you can be aware without perceptions (neither physical or mental). No imagery, sight, sound, or touch. No perception-based thoughts. Just pure existence in the moment.

I got into doing this by accident when using intention for dream recall. So here's what I did, for those who want to try for themselves:

Set your intention to be aware at the ends of dreams. These can be in between dream cycles, when you wake up naturally in the night, or waking up in the morning.
Placing intention on awareness at this time is key. This allows you to be aware between the dream and waking states.
We naturally switch states at this time (going from sleep to waking), so you have a moment of change and heightened awareness going from one state to the next. It's a gentle shift you can influence. Instead of making that full switch, you choose to stay asleep, allowing the dream to have ended without waking life beginning. You'll stay in the in-between moment. It's uneventful, but in a good way—very calm and quiet.

Enjoy!