StephL

Not patient enough here - maybe I'll edit it more extensive - but for now:

Since some days I do around 5 min. of meditation - only watching my breath and quieting my inner chatter - got to write more on that, too.

And - I sleep with a sleeping-mask since 2 days - that might have played a role as well.

And - I read up a bit on Melatonin, which I sometimes use, when I have sleeping troubles - and I found people swearing on it for LD and info, that a dose of 15 mg is completely harmless.
So - 5 pills I popped - I slept altogether maybe 12 h - no other side effects - woke up fresh.


Edit - bit tired I am today - and I have put up a post in TOTM, which I want to put in here, too:

It's not available over the counter here.
But do not worry:

Studies in humans have shown melatonin toxicity to be remarkably low with no serious negative side effects even at high doses (3 to 6.6 g) administered over a period of 35 days.159,160 Nevertheless, minor reactions to melatonin supplementation such as sleepiness, vivid dreams, headache, abdominal pain, and nausea have been reported to occur occasionally in a small proportion of individuals.

From: LE Magazine, January 2004 - Report: Melatonin and Cancer Treatment

You can find the references there.
Cancer patients receive around 80 mg a day in in other studies - and now please consider - it has been shown to be safe in 3-6.6 grams over 35 days - not milligrams. 6000 mg/35 d = 171 mg a day, if they mean 6 g over the whole period and not per day.

There are threads in the supplement department that seem to say, Melatonin does go against REM and lucidity and vividness and should be taken to be able to fall asleep with stimulating other supps.
This is completely wrong. It enhances vividness and is conductive to lucidity - this I read in several places - and my own experience was really impressive.
I had never taken more than 6 mg for falling asleep before - while I can sleep wonderfully like that - it seems not enough to be noticeable in the dream-department.
Of course one instance doesn't say a lot - I will report, once I do it again!
Something else - with ageing - our natural levels decline - maybe a hint at why children tend to vivid and also lucid dreams..?



Stupid just I didn't journal but slept on after my 3 lucid instances - and so I forgot almost everything.

Good that I did a TOTM and doing it I firmly remember:

First I jumped from the balcony on which I got lucid (old house - noticed it!! - yayy!), which was a bit funny cause I jumped and then hung in the air motionless.
And I didn't want to make flying motions or anything - but in the end I did - good ol' air-swimming..
Swam about a bit - then I saw a woman sitting on a bench and watching birds on the ground - colourful ones in the size and shape of sparrows.
They were walking about in rows, which turned and they walked a pattern like that - hard to describe - I almost forgot what I wanted over watching them.
Then - as I had imagined doing it irl - I "remembered" that there was a little knob to turn to open my chest up. After so many people have reported problems with reaching through their breast-bone - I thought, that would be practical - and it was.
I opened up - reached in with my hand - and got to grip a slimy blob - it didn't beat - it quivered, but more like it wanted away from my grasp.
Got it - tried to take it out, but it was quite fixed to blood-vessels - in the end I had to really rip to get it, which felt weeird - not painful - but I felt the ripping. Looked very realistic, did my heart - only the colour was a bit less than fresh!
My DC didn't like that whole manoeuvre at all - she screamed and ran away - me behind her - and in the end, I threw it at her, but I didn't hit her - she was gone then.
I decided this must be enough.


Later in another instance - I tried to phase through a window - but it broke and by that I got pain from the shards in my hands - weird - heart-ripping is painless - but a window causes me illusionary pain..







There was much more - but I'm too lazy now..

Ah - it's already a bit late, that I try to reconstruct this dream now - but it was really memorable, because I was leading a logical argument, and pretty complex for a dream.
No - not philosophy or theoretical physics - pearl-jewellery..

Jewellery keeps showing up in my dreams - I don't even wear any most of the time.
But I used to - I collected necklaces - unusual ones and used to always wear one.


It was so - I had given a game, a bit like Connect Four, as a present, but with water in the columns, and many different coloured plastic balls. You played it by levelling out the water, on which the balls swam with turning three way handles.
Then I tipped it over, and while collecting the balls back together - more and more jewellery made from these very little glass pearls showed up.
Many pieces - they were coming from my luggage - and it came to me then, that I had brought them to sell on a market the next day.
Something along these lines:



Then came this mother and made a snide remark.

She said, it would be obvious that I would have made them myself.

As in crooked, and it was clear to me, that she didn't like it either - not a classy sort of style.
And I was guessing, she knew, that I was aware of that style-deficit.

Then she stormed off somewhere.

And I was left explaining to her son, friend of mine, why this comment had been nasty on several levels.
He needed convincing - that was a real longer back and forth and I remember it exactly:

First of all - there was hardly anything crooked on them.
Secondly - such jewellery is always handmade.
Thirdly - I had never said, whether I made it, or hadn't made it myself.
Fourthly - I felt insulted, that she thought, I would have spent hours, weeks, probably rather months, on making such things - it was really a lot of stuff.
Fifthly - she somehow seemed to know, that she would insult me with attributing this style to me, so I was partly thinking, she might have well known, it wasn't my work, but said it to be nasty.

I find it remarkable, how much logical thinking and organized argumentation I was able to put up.
Can't even find a flaw - I dreamt her saying it - so I guess it's only reasonable, that I understood what she meant.

But I like, how much colourful complexity, I dreamt up again - see above - there were maybe 50 such pieces.
I really don't like that style - but anyway - lots of detail.
The game at least looked great!

Not sure, if I can transport, what I am on about - but what I really find astonishing is people claiming their non-lucids would all be totally bizarre and they would loose their rational minds.
Bullshit in my opinion - the overwhelming most of it is very realistic, and I function nicely in the situations - only the over-view-awareness is lacking.

Got to say - very happy with my recall lately - despite not writing anything down - only going over it in my mind.
When I do that waking up in the middle of the night, I mostly forget them again.
But I anyway feel, that I have lived in the night - if that makes any sense.
It's not that nothing has happened - I believe I gain a feel for dreaming like this from the forgotten dreams as well.
Still suffering my pretty nasty cold - lots of people down at the moment in Berlin.
So that means - it would really surprise me, if I got lucid - maybe night after tonight I will be feeling up to further activities. Yesterday I simply fell over backwards in my bed, where I sat/lied all day anyway.

Having a cold - I decided against any activities, except bit mantraing on dream-signs, when going to bed.
But I will do my peppermint WBTB, when I'm able to normally breathe again!

So anyway - I could write a lot around this - has to be a draft now, I am tired.

But the basic thing was - without concentrating on lucidity, let alone the TOTM of skiing up a mountain - I did part of it again - obliviously. The first time I had been non-lucidly operating on myself.
Now - both topics are pretty unusual - I guess there is a connection.

I was back in my dream-sign area of choice - it was winter, and I was out on my own with not regular skis, but ones for ski-walking, or however that is called in English.
This on the background, though - that I wanted to impress somebody by my unusually sporty behaviour.

Normal all - then comes a vertical rock wall covered in snow - and first I think, this is not possible.
It's maybe 8 m high, supposedly something natural - it went right down almost vertically again on the other side, but there it was more like only a very difficult piste - not true 90°.

I went back at least twice, too - after my first adventure - I went into a cosy Bavarian pub and met friends and this guy, and was bragging, that I made it up that wall.

I had taken a run at it, and sort of hacked them in in v-steps, and probably flew a bit on the side.
I took this guy back with me there, he was really fast - and for some reason, I was there later with my mother, and it was dark and cold and dangerous - there were supposedly wolves around at night.
I even saw two - but very far away - and I wasn't afraid for some reason.

What is even freakier - in a following dream - this wall appeared again, but in spring, and it solved itself from the ground, and in the end it was from stone and came "from the heavens".
Had a lot of holes - like almost a web only - and a hermit!!
A friendly old man - maybe 8 m up in the air, in a white bedsheet..

And something else to the side of it - also reaching far up and up - but forgot, what it was, and most that dream anyway.

Just a short episode - I was in the staircase of a posh hotel - broad stairs and plush carpet, and had a short cheap summer dress on.
Around the corner came a black gentleman - in a beautiful grey evening suit, walking stick, silk-tie and 4 dogs - all different, rather small decorative ones.
When I passed, he made some snide remark, how I was underdressed for the location.
I was in a take no bullshit mood and remarked something back.
The dogs didn't like that, turned around and barked at me and I stepped back - directly into him, who suddenly stood behind me.

And believe me - if you could bottle up that scent, he had - you could make a fortune with it!!
I was completely transfixed - very disappointed about having woken up from there...

It's very rare, that I have a taste or scent so prominent in my dreams - but when I do - I'll note it here.

I recognized a dream-sign, which had only shown up once before and got luucid again last night!
Compared to two days of doing nothing before - I had done maybe 5 RCs in the day and matraed a bit going to bed, and when I naturally woke up and went back to sleep.

Again I dreamt of digging a bit into the ground for some reason, and finding lots of different finger rings.
I had dreamt exactly that some weeks before, and so remembering that - I got lucid from it.
No need to RC - I was instantly convinced.

And the dream was really vivid and realistic - I didn't want to change something and risk loosing quality.
But I made a small pause to recollect what all I had planned for an LD - checked if I know exactly what is the case and engaged all my senses - which worked very nicely.
Usually it doesn't and I sometimes lost lucidity hunting down dream-senses - not this time.

For taste I licked a tree, since my dream-teeth wouldn't let my take a bite - or the tree was very resilient.
It tasted salty.
What I kept doing throughout was hand-rubbing and touching things.

It was a really beautiful landscape - much better than I usually LD together - a bit fairy-taly - but nothing completely mad.
There were plants, like they don't exist - with interestingly shaped leaves and white and violet flowers.
Beautiful weather and a deep blue sky with some fluffy white clouds - sun shining and giving a fine warmth, like spring.

I walked about and then hovered.
Doing experiments with the hovering - getting up was instantaneous - but for the first time I really played with it - direct the height, fly in hover mode in such and such a height and such and such a speed.

I had to practise a bit but got it down real nicely - except for getting an impression of long distance and high speed, where other forms of flight might fit better - I think, I will be a hover-fan now!

I did remember darts - but was worried to destroy the beauty of this fairy-tale landscape and get something less enticing.
So I thought - lets at least do a basic TOTM, when I cam to a little valley with two houses.
Also fantastic looking - the one I entered had a door which consisted of very intricate webbing of branches into patterns - looked great.

So I went in in the expectation to find a DC for asking the question.
That seemed nicer than summoning dog-food.

A woman in her fifties, very good looking with black hair and a red dress and some strange jewellery was behind the bar - it was a pub or café of some sort inside.
So I sat down on a bar stool and asked her, who my true love would be.
She got a conspirational look on her face, took out a piece of paper and pen and wrote down a sentence - one word per line.
And I couldn't read it - the letters were clear and I could read it as in read it out loud, but didn't understand it. So I asked what it means - and she said, it would be in a language, I was yet to learn.
A mix of Latin and something else. It became apparent then, that there was indeed Latin shining through the words.
She said - once I learn that other language - I would know the answer, too.


Forgot to mention - I looked into a mirror too - and I looked like I am supposed to look - just that I have a new short haircut and not in that reflection. But I didn't notice that.

It starts to work with recognizing dream-signs - I had three spontaneous, but short lucid episodes last night.
Recognizing dream-signs.
In the first instance I summoned somebody successfully - I had thought of doing that going to bed.
The night before I had dreamt of him and wanted to meet and talk to him again.
Again using pretend-remembering - and he was around the corner, I choose.
This was the first time, I managed (second time I tried) to summon a real life person.

He sat on the floor and was unfortunately pretty life-less initially.
So I started engaging in conversation - and that dragged me back into non-lucidity.
But I enjoyed it.

Somewhere in between - I didn't journal, but woke up between dreams and recapitulated a bit - there was a nice dream-animal again - close to this summoning episode somewhere.
But this time it was different - bit over-colourful, bigger and with regular four legs (the other one had hind-legs like a rodent and the butt close to the floor).
But again with many, many vibrating whiskers - not only around the nose.
Didn't look as cute as the first one - rather silly - like having had a collision with a rainbow.

In a later dream I recognized my "most persistent one"- that I am overjoyed, that our old house in Bavaria still stands. Which it doesn't - and that came to me. And twice that spiked lucidity.
So I had a bit of playtime, which I spent with flying and walking about and marvelling at how even more beautiful the village had become in the meantime.

Ah - not to forget: This was a really vivid, colourful and detail-rich dream - lucidly and non-lucidly!

But stupidly - I went to where the house used to stand, and took a look at the several story nasty stuff, that had been built there instead - at least my imaginary version of it - and again it was strong emotions that robbed me of the lucidity.

I spent the rest of the dream berating and being quite cruel to my mother - mainly for having sold it for an apple and an egg (which is true).
Having her at my hands (or mouth, better to say - I am more in the verbal violence department) seemed more important than having a lucid dream.
Didn't do me good - didn't wake up satisfied, but feeling pretty lousy.
Not nice - waking up from being hateful.

My recall is quite okay - I start analysing the stuff a bit for my personal reference - and that is not for here.
It's a bit of a balance - makes sense to journal for myself only, and not censor myself - but then again I know, that posting here keeps getting necessary again, because I let that slip otherwise.

Enough excuses - I had two unfortunately short LD sequences last night.
Instead of pondering the implications of lucidity as planned - both times I simply took flight and lost it in the process somewhere and dreamt on.
I wanted to get somewhere - and both times it somehow came to me, that since this is a dream - I can simply fly.
So I did - and that was it..