lucid

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.

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.

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.

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!

I was in a building with several families on it. They shared rooms with tapestries separating them for privacy. Nobody worked and everyone seemed pretty happy with their lifestyles, despite having never gone outside. Many generations were born into these communities. They were comfy and didn't have much in the way of crime (at least in the community I was investigating).

There were other buildings like this with other similar communities of families living in them. If residents wanted outside contact, they could get in touch with the other communities using computerized drones.

Sometimes people would transfer between communities, but it was a big deal to do this. That's what they assumed I came from, though nobody seemed interested in asking me anything about the details of my whereabouts. They were just friendly and interested in the new addition to the community. I was well-liked.

The computers and drones kept records, maintained society, and brought in supplies. They provided everything.
Nobody questioned the drones either. They simply regarded them as helpers and protection.

One of the hallways had no lights, so it would appear dark when you looked down the hallway.
I noticed a portal in the dark (it wasn't invisible, just an energy field I could feel). Going through it, I found that the portal led to another connected building identical to this one, but with different people in it.

I can't remember if it was just me that could use this portal, or if the residents knew about it.

There was also a door that led outside. I asked one of the residents about it. They expressed sharp disapproval and acted like I was crazy to even think about going outside, telling me there was nothing outside.

The drones will shoot you dead anyway, they told me.
Yet these drones were protecting them? From what?

I went outside when no one was looking.

Upon stepping through the door, I found myself standing in an empty parking garage.
There were drones patrolling the area. I turned into my dragon and went invisible so they wouldn't shoot.

There was a light coming from one of the car ramps leading down below. I already knew what it was before I saw it, but I went down to investigate anyway.

Sure enough, that's where the universe ended. Everything surrounding this building and the garage was a white void.

There really was nothing outside. Literally.

Accidentally deleted this journal, so I'm rewriting what I can remember of it.

---

I was in my childhood home standing on the balcony. I looked up and saw what looked like a cancerous formation in the sky (a patch of red that began to grow).
When the sun went down, some people with weapons and flashlights showed up. My family ducked behind the furniture. I was lucid and decided not to buy into the fear, so I stepped outside, knowing it was me they wanted. They proceeded to kidnap me, having me get into a van.

In the van, I went to the front and saw the driver, a woman with straight black hair. I talked to her, asked what was going on. I can't remember the full conversation and lost the journal for this, but she told me about how she was dying of a medical illness and needed a large sum of money to pay for treatment. Due to unbridled capitalism and its goal of limitless growth at the expense of life (like a cancer), crime was her last resort for health care to save her life. That's why she kidnapped me.

I reached forward from the back of the van (through the little window) and materialized money out of my hands. She was stunned.

I told her that her world is my dream. She was a bit horrified at first, though because she was already facing terminal illness, I think she took it better than some.

I felt like I was going to wake up soon and told her I had to go. I asked if there was anything else I could do for her before I left. She was still stunned, but asked if I could change her hair. So I kept myself asleep for a while to do her hair like she wanted, changing it on a biological level so it would stay permanent.

I then woke up and it was morning.

One hour long dream. I did V-WILD but decided to just pay a lot of attention to the process, feeling it, being present. I've been running lots of tests like this lately to try and get a better idea of how it works.

After doing V-WILD into my bedroom, I climbed out the window. I noted how a lot of things were different in my neighborhood like lighting and rearranged buildings.

I decided to test out waking myself up in a way where it’s more dream body instead of waking (trying to get a better understanding for the difference between dream and waking body lately). I tested to see if I can trigger a false awakening.

Yes! Maybe? I woke up back in my bedroom. I assumed this was either a dream, or I woke myself for real. I did a reality check with finger through palm and it didn’t work.

I was pretty sure it was a dream anyway though. I didn't take the failed RC too seriously, since I know that happens sometimes. I plugged my nose and breathed, that worked.

I proceeded to practice false awakenings a few times. Knew I was still dreaming each time, got a better feel for it.

Most of the time I was with my dream character version of SO. She watched me do all this nonsense lol. Most times I told her it was a dream, she acted mock concerned like half-heartedly gasped. I responded “Yeah, I know if you were my rl SO you would be rightly concerned about me thinking everything is a dream, but since we both know it’s a dream, you’re fine. No need to act all shocked haha."

I eventually woke myself up for real when it felt it had been an hour. My timing guess was right (I seem to still have a good sense of RL time in dreams).

This is an older dream.

I was in a world that had crumbled. Everything was surrounded by a white void, and the remains of the universe floated in fragments through space. There were mountains, roads, cars, buildings, and fragments of asphalt and other materials floating around.

The universe was still in the process of being consumed. In the distance, I could see the edges of the mountains being dissolved by something that looked like a wall of blue electricity or dust.
In my dragon's form, I flew around in search of remaining life, and spotted a woman standing on a fragment of the remaining road.

The brunette woman stood at the edge of the road coming off of a driveway. There was a house nearby that I presume was her home.
She stared out at the dissolving mountains.
When I landed next to her as my human self, she didn't look at me, but spoke.
"This is the end, isn't it?"

I turned and watched the mountains with her, and nodded.
I could feel my body waking. It was morning.
"I have to go soon. Do you want to come with?" I asked her and she looked at me in surprise.

It took her a moment to respond, but as soon as she agreed, I turned back into my dragon and picked her up, carrying her as I traveled straight into the void.

I woke up in my bed. When I looked up, I saw the figure of the woman standing at the end of the bed.
"Thank you." she said and then faded away.

Lost the dream journal to this, going off memory.

---

I traveled to a post apocalyptic version of earth. The few people still surviving didn’t know what happened, so I was just there to tell them what caused the world to end—so that history can be recorded and they don’t repeat the same mistake.

I then traveled back to before the apocalypse wiped everyone out (still in the distant future from our modern time), and I noticed Arthur was still on the air.

So, I turned on an episode and… it was bad.

It was unbelievably bad... Instead of having a round head, Arthur had a chipmunk shaped head. Instead of human eyes, the characters all had animal eyes, but they were enlarged to fit the cartoon animal face. Absolutely horrifying. Picture large beady black orbs slightly jutting out of the face with flimsy tacked-on human eyebrows. But they had human mouths…. And teeth. It was hyper realistic, but 2D not 3D. You could see every hair, but smooth areas like the teeth had no detail.

No that's not what started the apocalypse, but dang thank goodness the apocalypse ended it.

Followed a biologist named Ethan to an alien planet. Him and a group of researchers set up a base of operations to study the native wildlife. There was a slothlike creature that he was creating a 3-D model of (they recorded many different animals and plants). They brought a dog with them and whenever I went near the dog, I started levitating. At some point I asked whether there was something causing me to levitate around the dog or if it was a dream thing. Suddenly all of them looked at me demonically and I got scared and either woke up or got a false awakening.

This hasn’t happened to me in a while. I think maybe I broke immersion too harshly and spooked myself.

It was a fun dream though so I decided to go back into it with WILD.

I reappeared in a futuristic version of Earth in which many years had passed. Everything was tightly controlled and monitored. People weren’t allowed to communicate without a device listening and tracking them. The government kept tabs on everything people said.

I decided to look for Ethan. After messing around with my phone a bit, but deciding the phone wasn’t worth it because of the tracking, I looked for him in person. I found him in a truck parked in an alleyway, and told him I could break him out.

He didn’t want to be freed, though. He was worried about the government catching him. Turns out they were following me anyway. They already knew.

So (in my dream dragon form) I grabbed him and flew out of the building.

Outside, there was a shore and what looked like ocean. I started flying over the water in a random direction until I saw some land. An escape, I thought.

I thought we were making it out, but then I realized they had cows on a boat heading in that direction. We were heading straight for a slaughterhouse.

I realized in that moment that there was nothing out here. The whole world head been reduced to this one island and section of ocean.

I was still being followed and they were laughing their butts off at the fact I was going straight for the slaughterhouse. I turned back and was captured. I didn’t want anything to do with the void beyond the ocean, so I just let them take me back.

I then journaled this dream inside the dream and then woke at 5:09 AM real time (checked clock).

I went back to sleep and re-entered the dream again, back to being caught.

I don’t think much happened but they brought me back inside and seemed like they weren’t sure what to do with me. They knew what I was and that I wouldn’t be here long. Eventually I woke up again to 7:00 alarm.

Had some dreams last night were a post apocalyptic thing involving a battle with cyclops people.

There was a family that needed to evacuate their house, and they shoved everything onto this deck that converted into a boat. Then they use the rapids to swiftly exit the area. A lot of people were evacuating like this. Unfortunately, the cyclopses got into the water. One family lost their child.

I turned into my dragon and breathed embers on it (I really need to incubate some new, actually useful powers), which did nothing. It pulled out a gun and started firing at me, so I had to dodge in the air, flying in zigzags.

I proceeded to use my dragon’s tailblade to reflect sunlight into its eyes, blinding it temporarily so I could properly attack.

But I lost.

It ended up grabbing me and was going to eat me, but I stopped the scenario in that moment. Everything came to a halt. The monster just sat there waiting. It wasn't a complete time freeze, but more of a narrative freeze.

It was feeling early morning though so I woke up at about 7:40 AM.

A dream character approached me to borrow my phone (for eBay). As she logged in, I saw her use her own account instead of mine, which was less convenient. So I asked, “Why didn’t you use my account instead?"

She avoided eye contact and uttered a quiet “I don’t know."

So I asked her, “Don’t you know my password?”

She looked visibly shaken by this question and shook her head no vigorously.

"Go ahead and tell me. I think you know it. What’s my password?” I asked with confidence, curious about something.

Visibly shaken now, she read off my password. It was correct, except one or two letters off.
Soon after, she broke down and cried.

I tried to reassure her she did a good job, the guess was mostly correct, and asked her what was wrong.

She cried and told me it was horrifying to her that she was not her own person. It disturbed her that I was in her mind like that. Like a parasite, she said.

I sat down. “Nooo no no no. Look, you’re a part of me, that’s normal." I went on to explain (as I've done many times with other dream characters in the past—this comes up every now and then).
"We're part of a collective, the human race. We’re all just a part of something.” I said, explain it to her as best as I understood it.

She didn't take it well, though. Ran off in a panic.

I looked over at another woman who was standing by, having seen the whole thing.
“Those parts of my password she got wrong… She knew them, didn’t she?” I asked the quiet witness.
She nodded.
I understood that the woman who had run away did purposely give part of the password incorrectly.
It scared her too much to speak the correct word.

I walked outside and eventually woke up.