false awakening

My dream recall would have been pretty good last night. Except I only wrote them down in a FA dream journal and not in real life.

Balls.

I'm going to colour code this slightly differently than normal just to make it all a bit clearer.

Waking Life (Top Level)
Semi-Lucid Dream (Middle Level)
Lucid Dream (Bottom Level)

I am walking down a stone spiral staircase with my old media teacher. I know that I am dreaming and don't need to reality check as the environment is one of the clearest I've experienced. The excitement that I may have a vivid, lucid dream for the first time in a while ends this fragment of the dream.
I am in a grand lecture theatre/exam hall. It is all on one level and the walls look a lot like the Great Hall in Harry Potter. There are red drapes and the seats have red cushions on them. I am sitting next to T_ S_ and realise that she is extremely beautiful. I lean in to her and realise I am lucid. "Breath on me," I say "And poke me". She asks why and I tell her it's just extremely important that she does so - I use the sensations to ground myself within the dream and everything becomes extremely vivid. I ask her to kiss me and she does so, it was amazing - better than any kiss I've ever had in real life. Despite the fact we're in the somewhat busy lecture hall we start to make love.
I wake up in what I think is my bed, making love to a brunette girl. She seems shocked I'm doing this and I quickly explain that I was having a lucid dream and that the actions must have carried over to waking life. I am still semi-aware that I'm dreaming as you can see in the rest of this dream extract. We are back in the building with the stone steps and the girl takes me to her class, it seems to have a similar atmosphere to the dream in the lecture hall. I watch from the back for a while and then, when class is over, we head back up the stone steps and emerge at the top of a hill in the desert. Her friend has joined us and we turn to close the large wooden door. As we do so a zombie comes running up the hallway, we just about manage to lock it out.
I have the sudden urge to help and a presence (dream guide?) tells me that I can. I need to find a particular seed and feed it to the zombie people to return them to a human state. Whilst being told this the zombie breaks through the door and bites the brunette girl's friend. She quickly becomes a zombie and I fight her off, trying to protect the brunette. I can't hold them off for long forever before she gets a small scratch. I vividly remember seeing her right eye developing a white sheen and before long she is one of them.
At this point I fly off the hill and over the desert, searching for the seed. When I find it I see that it looks like the head of a venus fly trap but purple, with pink spines sticking out of it. I quickly return with three of these and feed them to the three zombies. Two of them become the seeds themselves and start chatting (I blindly accept this) and when I give the third one to the brunette she recovers as quickly as she changed.
The next thing I know I have taken the two girls back to their dorms and am saying goodbye as I plan to leave for another adventure - the advanced task of the month. I try to teleport there but the dream ends.

Definitely dipped in and out of lucidity in the last part of the dream there but it was definitely one of the best LD's I've ever had! It has also occurred to me that the voice I heard that told me to get the seeds may be my dream guide. I felt a sort of presence (as I have read about countless times) when I was being told this information.

I really hope I find a dream guide, not for the advice, but so that I have a companion on my adventures to share the fun with.

Dream
Lucid
Fragments

I am in my hometown and for some reason I'm riding a moped. I remember driving it one way up the dual carriageway but my recall is poor until my return trip. On the way back down there are some features of an american highway, concrete boundaries are on each side before the big roundabout and the traffic is much more frantic than usual. I accellerate onto the roundabout with too much speed and almost come off the road due to one of the lanes abruptly ending. I managed to stay on however and check my speed which is shown on a cross between an egg timer and a milk carton. It shows that I'm doing 50 and gaining speed fast. I try to slow down a bit but even when coasting my speed doesn't seem to be affected. On the way back down I realise there are police in front of me and that I'm reaching well over 80. Applying the brakes doesn't work but luckily I manage to naturally slow down to 50 when I reach them, assuming that the relaxed speed would draw little attention to me. I'm then aware that I've overtaken them and that a truck which was accompanying us (I have no idea why I know it's "us") is having trouble sneaking past the police, we're worried that they'll realise we gave two women a lift on the back of the mopeds earlier and arrest us. Luckily it overtakes them on the inside and somehow gets past. We're watching from the roadside. Dream ends.

I wake up in my room at night with overwhelming fear. I have no idea why but jump up immediately and RC. My finger works its way through my hand with some effort but I am unconvinced so only become semi lucid. There is a child standing by my window and this scares me further. I run over to her and shake her, asking who she is. Upon closer inspection she is my ex's younger sister and I calm down. But then I get a bad feeling about downstairs. I open my door (which has become cupboard doors) and look down to see a baby at the bottom. Again I am inexplicably afraid of this and shout at it to go. I close the doors and open them again, repeating this shout several times. Finally I open the door and bang against the wood to scare the child off, this almost works as it backs away for an instant but I decide to escape anyway.

I am tempted to fly jump out of my window but due to the unconvincing reality check I try hovering first, this works so I fly straight through the window, ignoring the glass. As I fly around the edge of my house I realise that the imminent danger is gone and that I should ground the dream. I closely inspect the bricks but stupidly focus on the silence of the night, this brings the ringing of my real life ears into focus and the dream collapses instantly.

I recall a few more interesting scenarios throughout the night.

I definitely remember having quite a detailed dream but don't record it as I attempt to DEILD or WILD. I cannot remember the main events but remember speaking to my Mum in it.

I also remember nearly becoming lucid and frantically rubbing my hands together to bring everything into focus, I think this didn't work unless it was a prelude to the above lucid dream.

In the last hour or so of my sleep I started telling myself "lucid dream" over and over again. I started visualising different dream scenarios and these become vivid to the point where they were no longer visualisations, yet I didn't feel I was asleep either and could have easily stopped thinking of them.

EDIT: I think one of my vivid visualisations involved somebody cleaning a table with a spray on cleaner, the thing which prevented this from becoming a full on dream is that my finger started twitching in real life, as if I was doing the spraying myself. This made a scratching sound on my duvet and I woke up.

Overall then a pretty successful night, I seem to be making quite a bit of progress and I put some of this down to the fact that I'm now home and therefore can get a good nights sleep and a lie in. Absolutely gutted that I broke the lucid dream, but knew this would happen at some point as I remember reading about it happening to someone else so it lingered on my mind.

Interestingly I knew I'd LD last night because I'm home, and I know I will again tonight. I just feel strongly that practicing in such a challenging environment at Uni will make it so much easier when I'm relaxed at home.

What a brilliant nights sleep, a bit of background information first. I have no recall before my last hour or so sleep, but I had a total sleep time of about 11 hours. I had every intention to lucid dream and my bed was incredibly comfortable.

Non Lucid
Lucid

I am being chased through the jungle on a very linear path, just like a level out of Donkey Kong. I'm not sure what is chasing me or who I am with. Eventually a see a red token fly past and try to catch it, assuming it would be a power up or something help me escape being chased. This token has a white stencil of Bowser from Mario on it, once I touch it it balloons in size and starts chasing me too, destroying everything in it's path. Eventually it gets stalled and I look round and realise that I am at home, he can't fit through the hallway door. At this point I realise that once again I'm being chased and that I must be dreaming. I don't quite get the opportunity to become lucid as I wake up seconds after making this realisation.

After this dream I got woken up by the phone. I turned over and tried going back to sleep and WILDing, I didn't really need to sleep but I really wanted to Lucid. I remembered some advice that I'd heard about focusing on internal stimuli to get back to sleep so started vividly visualising things. A thought entered my mind about how humans can't explain some learned skills such as riding a bike, we can just do them, so I started trying to visualise how exactly I balance on a bike no handed. I have visualised things in the past for nmenonics and have always found it very hard to "tame" the images I create, they always seem to morph into unwanted viewpoints or into different objects entirely. However I decided this would be my internal stimuli challenge, not only would I get back to sleep I would also try and help improve a useful skill.

The next thing I knew I was awake and really needed the toilet, after I was done it occurred to me that I had failed my WILD. I decided to do a RC anyway and was very excited when this worked.I decided to do further reality checks so tried to float, at first this didn't work but then I gripped onto the sink for a bit of a boost and found myself floating. This made me extremely happy. At this point I left the bathroom and went into the kitchen, I assume I was only semi lucid here for a moment because I decided that I still needed to reality check further and was going to see what happened if it cut myself on a knife. Upon seeing that my knife was actually a single blade of a pair of scissors and became fully lucid again. On my way back to my room I bumped into two of my flatmates. Not thinking that they were DC's I happily exclaimed "I'm lucid dreaming", from what I've heard this causes DCs to vanish, however I don't think they fully clocked on because they both got angry at this point and tried forcing their way into my room afterwards to find out more. I managed to hold the door shut against them but then it got smashed down. Donkey Kong was back, he seems to have been lingering on my subconscious. He overpowered me for a moment until I realised that I was invincible in a dream state and I forced him out, his appearance flickered to that of my Dad for a split second and also an unknown female. Once I had locked everybody out of my room I decided to try and fulfil one of my dream goals - play in the superbowl. I convinced myself that through the bathroom door was the stadium. Upon the first opening this didn't work but upon the second the appearance had changed somewhat. Clothes and drapes hung from the ceiling and I was excited that I'd managed to influence my environment even to that extent. This excitement woke me up.

At this point I was aware of being in my bed but could hear my infamous ringing sound which indicated I was about to lucid. I found that by holding my eyes in a certain manner I could increase this ringing. I started visualising lots and once again woke in my bed. I went into the bathroom again and reality checked. It worked, but the dream wasn't too vivid. I tried grounding myself by feeling the texture of the towels, the texture of the floor on my feet and I also bit my finger to feel the pain and stimulate my tongue. This grounding had surprisingly realistic effects, all of these actions felt extremely real. Unfortunately the next thing I knew I was awake for real. Unless I am still dreaming now.

Although I didn't do anything particularly exciting in these dreams, I'm very proud of the progress I have made. This is the first time I've had multiple Lucids in one night and the first time that I've had LDs on consecutive nights. Hopefully tonight will mean three in a row!

Had quite a heavy night last night, but my recall was better than usual in those circumstances - maybe I'm improving? Even so, I can only remember fragments of two dreams.

1. My friend Gareth wrapped himself up in clingfilm and went for a bike ride, trying to convince everybody that this was the perfect way to get fit.

2. Unwanted attention from a friend of mine.

I also had a moment where I woke up and just knew I was going to go lucid, I had a huge ringing in my ears which changed in pitch as if it was a siren going past me. I then found myself in the "floaty" SP state which I had encountered before. I had my eyes shut but could see my room around me but was quite over eager. Tried to throw my arms in the air and fly to get the dream going but this actually caused me to move in RL and wake up.

Still, very proud that I made this much progress with alcohol in my system.

Very annoying experience! Had an afternoon nap (with the intention to LD!) and when I woke up found that somebody was trying to get into my room. One of my flat mates friends came in and I tried to usher her out as I was just in boxers and in my bed, so didn't really want her seeing me. She decided not to though and kept pushing me to get off with her, I didn't take the bait as I have a girlfriend and have no intention of cheating on her.

I woke up again.

All of the shenanigans turned out to be a FA which prevented me from being able to RC.

Hooray! I finally had my second lucid dream, it didn't last for ages but I'm really proud.

I live in student halls of residence so there was a lot of noise last night, however I woke up at one point and there was silence. I felt the urge to reality check but for some reason I couldn't be bothered but my thoughts lingered on lucid dreaming. The next thing I knew I was in a shopping mall and just knew I was dreaming, I did the reality check of putting my finger through my hand and on the third attempt it worked. There was a bright white light around the entry point which looked pretty cool. The dream faded quite a lot but I found that looking at my hands brought things back into focus effectively every time this happened.

After I succeeded with the hand test I decided to check for certain and tried to fly, to my surprise this worked! I remember being shocked at how easy it was and flew around the shopping centre a few times. After this I met a woman, but as my focus was so directed upon her and let the dream fade out hugely, and before I knew it I was flung into a dark abyss. I tried to "spin" out of this but failed, my second attempt was to close my eyes and imagine myself elsewhere but I think this took me back to proper sleep as I don't remember any more.

This whole dream was a lot less vivid than my previous lucid dream.

Been recalling my dreams with some success but not recording them for about a month now, seems like a good time to take this more seriously.

There was a house party at my flat which was all going well. My flatmate Emma then brings in a load of her friends, one of whom I recognise. I then realise that it's a girl whose face I had only seen for the first time the night before. I know she can't physically be at the party as she knows nobody there and ask my friend James who she is. He says it turns out that she was lying and she actually lives nearby and knows Emma. I suddenly realise that I can see her face perfectly with no errors and work out I'm dreaming.

I then have what I now know to be a FA. I hear an intense ringing in my ears and can't move so just embrace the ringing and concentrate on the dream I just had. Suddenly I'm back at the house party and can control everything (yay!). I end up with a lovely mansion at the seaside having a great time.