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10.04.2011

Jumping between Planes of Existence (DILD)

NON-DREAM DREAM LUCID ASTRAL

I was in bed about to have sex with my wife. She told me she wanted to have a baby in that moment and get into business. I turned lucid, as we do not want to have kids so I realized it was a dream. I am aware that sex does not destroy my dream/lucidity, so I had sex with her (I will avoid details) My dream was blurry and a little distorted, so I flew for a while until it was stable.

I remembered to attempt to Astral Project. However, I did not put a lot of effort on it, I knew I could blow the lucid dream and wake up, usually, I do not care as I get a lot of lucids, but for some reason, I did not feel like it. I started to fall on my back like in slow motion, I was not focused as much so I failed to project.

I was in a house with some friends. I started to wonder if I was in my Astral Body. I did not feel the energy I feel when I project. I also touched myself and felt that my body was solid. I realized I was in my dream body and I was still dreaming. My friends were playing some cards. I attempted once more to project.

I might had a partial astral separation, but I lost consciousness on the process

I cannot remember if I actually did or I just lost lucidity, but I was with some made up friends talking about football. One lady showed me the photo on a computer of a Colt player (not sure who, I follow soccer, not football and I do not even follow the Colts, but the San Diego Chargers. She pointed at the Colt player and said he was dreaming with her.

I turned lucid again for all the non sense. When I was about to take off, I woke up. It was 8am and time to start the day.

Non-lucid, Possibly lucid?, [Commentary made while awake]

I'm at the mall in my town, standing at the outside edge of the big parking lot on the north side of it. The parking lot is empty because it's been blocked off, and the route for the annual Race for the Cure, which runs around the edges of it, has been marked off. There are lots of people walking and running around the track. This is a practice run for the actual event. I remark to myself that I need to train for this event, because it is a race, and that I'm glad to see that they've repainted some of the lines on the parking lot while they've had it blocked off, because the lines really needed repainting.

From there, I start flying around the west side of the mall. [I think I remember realizing at some point during this sequence that if I was flying, I had to be dreaming. I'm not totally sure, though.] As I go from the north to the west side of it, the terrain changes from flat parking lot to natural land that rises and falls slightly. I'm holding onto a small, rectangular, round-cornered, solid plastic board, slightly larger than a sheet of paper. It catches the wind, and I fly by using it like a sail to pull me along, holding it perpendicular to the ground, with both hands, with my arms straight out in front of me. It's a lot of fun to fly this way. The wind carries me up and over each little rise in the land; every time I go over one, I have to pull my legs up to make sure my feet clear the top of the rise. They do, every time. This entire scene is very clear and vivid; I can feel the air moving around me, the pull of the wind on my arms, and the motions I make, and can see the land and the trees around me clearly.

Someone else passes me on my left, flying past in the opposite direction. As she does so, she holds up a bunch of white pieces of paper, fanned out, with big, black letters printed on them. They spell out “SLOWPOKE!” I don't take any offense at this, because that's fair; this method of flying is indeed slower than my normal self-powered, superhero-style flight.

[Different dream scene.] I'm at a place that seems to be a restaurant, but has a dark ride in the back, meeting a man named Harley Davidson, for whom the company was named.

Lucid
task of the month

I'm so happy!! I've been struggling for ages to get a decent lucid dream that actually lasts and I've finally got it. Admittedly it was semi lucid in parts and my recall for the start is a little hazy (hoping more of that will come back to me) but it was still a fantastic experience and my dream control was great.

Basically I had a nap this afternoon to catch up some sleep with the intention to DILD if I had the opportunity and it all evolved from there. It was a shock to me at first when I started getting WILD sensations and I really enjoyed them this time, they felt really relaxing and comfortable. After this I found that my brain was in imagery overload and imagining loads of random images. One of them became particularly strong - I had found a way to break a simple sweets/toy machine without getting caught and could take all of the contents. This image was verging on dream-level and I hung it to it for as long as I could. After a while I felt myself coming out of the WILD state so refocused all of my energy on the image mentioned above. Before long the scenery started changing without my conscious effort, I still remember Thomas the Tank Engine in there somewhere.

After a while the random colours and imagery had evolved into a dream environment, I didn't even have to bother reality checking etc as I remembered the whole process. I started grounding myself, concentrating on what I could feel, smell and see. Foolishly I tried hearing the outside world too and almost lost my lucidity, but my determination and hand rubbing kept me in the dream. After this I found I could continually do the hand rubbing with an extra set of arms so set off on an exploration.

I was at my University and it looked a bit like the BBC news set. I didn't want to hang around here so headed to the back to find some toilets and check out my appearance in the mirrors. (I've heard a lot of rumours regarding this) A group of woman were approaching in front of me and being really slow so I dodged around them, noticing as I did so that one of the women was sick of the group and slipped into a cupboard instead of following them. When I got to the mirror I saw that I had my four arms. I decided to try and remove two of them and make the remaining ones more muscly. I couldn't do this effectively so instead I enticed the extra two out again and grew all four arms to hulk like proportions. Soon after this I remember I had the opportunity to dream fight but my recall around this point is quite hazy.

I left the toilets and loads of people were heading upstairs to my "flat" where we were going to party. I didn't want to bother with the stairs as I was lucid so decided to fly straight upwards through the floors. It got pitch black once I tried to do this however and it resulted in my first successful teleportation. I simply pictured the room and *bang* I was transported into it. Once there I was alone and didn't know what to do, and then I realised - Task of the Month! To the best of my knowledge the task was to eat a piece of dream fruit and pick a piece of dream fruit (I now know this to be from the dark side of the moon) so headed out to do both of these things. I visualised an apple a couple of times but it wouldn't appear, so instead tried a different tactic of turning away and visualising it behind me. To my surprise this worked really well and I bit into my new found apple with joy. It tasted quite fizzy but was by far the best apple I've ever had. Next I decided to persue the advanced task incorrectly and found a small plant in the hall way, I decided this was enough and tried to grow some fruit on it. I used the same looking away visualisation technique to get fruit onto the branches of the small plant. The first couple of tries yielded mouldy results but by the third try I grew a perfect lemon. I remember vividly how the plant prickled me as it pulled apart the leaves to get to it. After this I decided to practice again as the lemon was quite small, and grew a perfect sized grape instead.

Upon re-entering the main room in the flat I found that loads of people had arrived. I had vague memories of old tasks of the month as I was unsure which ones to do and remembered "kiss a dc". At this point I saw my friend A_ trying to kiss Rolf Harris. Rolf looked really uncomfortable so I went over, hugged him, and pushed Adam away, offering to get them both drinks. After a bit of mingling I realised that I wouldn't be able to recall all of this lucid as it was so long (there's still much I know that I can't recall) and decided to do one last thing. Whilst thinking this I saw Charlie Sheen in the corner with an inflated head - yes, punch Charlie Sheen. I went over, punched him quite hard and he disappeared.

I was so confident of my dream control at this point that I created credits. They were displayed as lots of small white letters in computer font making up the shapes of bigger letters on a black background. They read "This was a Josh production. Thankyou for watching." I then used this to make white noise and voluntarily woke up.

Awake, Non-lucid, Semi-lucid, Lucid, [Commentary made while awake]

[I had several different dreams last night, two of which were lucid.]

[Dream #1] I'm playing Neopets. [In this particular dream,] Neopia is a fully-realized, three-dimensional world, but it's still a computer game that I'm playing using a mouse. The art looks just like it does on the real site. The game is played from a first-person perspective, and there are lots of rooms and areas to explore [just like the plot adventures on the real Neopets Web site]. One such area is filled with Neopets who are dressed in vaguely Arabian-looking clothes; they all have their noses covered with veils, which strikes me as somewhat ridiculous, since they all have such different shapes and sizes of noses. This scene makes me think, So Neopia does have something resembling an Islamic culture. I click my way into a hidden area and receive a special reward for finding it.

[Dream #2] I walk into my family's house, which is big and spacious and has two stories [and looks nothing at all like any of our real ones. House #2, our only two-story house, was nowhere near that big and was laid out very differently]. Suddenly, there are several men in the house with me. They're there to challenge me to a martial-arts tournament. I had known in advance that this challenge was coming. In the course of my conversation with them [which I don't really remember now], one of them eventually says that there is no challenge. Having become semi-lucid at some point during the conversation, I say boldly and firmly, “I have better things to do.” I begin making my way out of the house.

Then, I hear my mom yelling from behind me that the house is on fire and I should get out. I do so, thinking, I know I should just get out without stopping to try and rescue other people. I go out the front door and walk down a front walk that leads to a fairly high, steep flight of concrete stairs, which leads down a steep embankment, at the bottom of which are the public sidewalk and the street. I jump off the top step to get down to the front sidewalk more quickly. I fall in a long, slow arc, taking several seconds to get down, and land softly and gently on my feet. I had kind of known I was going to fall that way; I always do in dreams.

By this point, I'm definitely lucid. From the street, I take off and fly up over the neighborhood. Once again, it takes me two tries to take off. After the first time, I realize, I messed up – I wasn't concentrating right. I try again, kicking off with my right ankle and thinking about becoming airborne, as I always do, and this time it works. Flight feels like it always does, too.

I fly up and observe the neighborhood from above. I can see a little bit of the fire coming from the house I just left. After a minute or two, I land back on the street and see a little model of a single-story house standing on a table. I examine the model, concentrating on it, and succeed in making tiles blow off the roof with my mind. This action is directly inspired by the scene in Inception where they're at the cafe and the dream starts collapsing when Ariadne first realizes that they're dreaming. While I'm making the model blow itself to pieces, I think about how, when the characters from the movie are dreaming, they might use Michael Caine's name [*see Side Notes at end] in exclamations of surprise/anger/frustration, etc., as if he were their deity, because he was the inventor of the dream-sharing technology. I immediately dismiss this as a silly idea, though. I keep up what I'm doing, and eventually blow away all the broken-up pieces of the roof, exposing the interior of the model. It has separate rooms inside. There's a small, light brown, flea-like insect inside, with a sort of sail on its back. I know that the insect is my dad. [I don't even know.] I let it crawl onto my finger, rescuing it from the destruction of the model and setting it down gently outside the model.

This scene is immediately followed by an animated sequence of two foxes romping around in a grassy field and falling in love. I know that this means that both of my parents are still alive and got out of the burning house all right.

[Dream #3] I'm outside, in the daytime, on a series of tiled walkways, terraces, and stairways, elevated and built into the side of a hill. Some boy is following me around, singing a creepy version of some children's song at me, changing the words all around to suggest that he would like to do something sexual with me. At the end of the second or third repetition of the short song, I stop, sing the end of the verse for him, then smack him in the face. Then, a passing man helps me throw the offending boy over a wall and down a long flight of stairs. I see him get up after he reaches the bottom, and am glad to see that he can still get up and that nothing's broken.

The scene shifts slightly, and now I'm on the surface-level streets, walking around a city that I remember visiting in a dream before. [Except now I don't – false memory, apparently.] The city is bright and clean and filled with big trees. There is a train station across the street from where I'm walking. On my side of the street, there is an enlarged replica of one of the stores on Main St. at Disneyland. Upon seeing the prominent train station, I remark that my dream city doesn't necessarily have to be in the States; it could just as easily be in the UK. [This, despite the fact that said train station had a sign on the outside that very clearly read “Amtrak.”]

I walk in the main entrance to the store that replicates the one from Disneyland, and find myself in a shop that is part of a mall. I walk through that first shop and into a second one that resembles a Hot Topic (all the walls are painted black), only it's girlier (there are a lot more dresses). This store also has living mannequins that look exactly like the ones they have at Old Navy. One of these mannequins tells me that she wants to try on the dress I'm wearing, which I had gotten from that store earlier. It's a strapless, knee-length black sundress with little pink polka dots, pink lace decorating the top of the bodice, and a pink tulle underskirt part that makes the skirt puff out. There are lots of similar dresses on the racks in the store. [For some strange reason,] I'm wearing mine over the T-shirt and shorts I was already wearing. I'm really enjoying just walking around, exploring this dream. I exclaim aloud, “My mind is so awesome!”

I walk out of that store and around a corner, through one of the hallways that form the connecting core of the mall. I find myself wishing I could change out of the shorts I'm wearing under my dress, and just wear the dress. I go into another store, this one a Sephora. While I was in there, the dream ended.

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Side notes:

*Michael Caine's character's name is Stephen Miles (per the shooting script); that's what the other characters would say if they were to do that. I forgot that while dreaming, though.

Last night, when doing mental affirmations while falling asleep, I focused more on recalling the memory of what it feels like to be in a lucid dream, recalling past lucid dreams, and visualizing and imagining what it would have been like if I had become lucid in one of my memorable non-lucids. It worked really well.

As I was taught when I first tried to ski, people who are right-handed are generally right-footed as well, and are instinctively inclined to lead with their right foot and do most of their controlling of their movement with their right foot when skiing or snowboarding. I'm very pleased and not at all surprised to discover that this principle applies to my flying in dreams as well. I'm right-handed (and right-footed) in real life, and from the beginning, I've always instinctively used my right foot and ankle to kick off from the ground and launch myself into a takeoff.

14.02.2011

Night drive, day scape. (DILD)

NON-DREAM DREAM LUCID

I wad driving in the freeway. My wife was next to me and we were talking about some psychic exercises I was doing. My wife recalled some psychic attack I did to someone in waking several months ago. My wife told me, "I love your dark energy." I do not know where the heck this comes from... I am a good guy and a spirit of light! I guess my darker ego showed up in the dream. I found funny what my wife told me.

It was very hard for me to drive. I could not drive straight in my lane and I would change lanes without wanting to. I also could not keep a constant speed while driving. My vision was very blurry and I felt extremely tired. We arrived to some sort of mall and I saw everything super blurry. I felt it was not normal for me to be so tired, having a big time driving and such a low vision. I checked my hands. My index finger was very thin and long. I knew I was dreaming, but I needed more proof. I asked my wife to please check her hand. She also had six fingers. I decided to take a flight to make my dream stable, however, my lucidity was not great. I followed the plot of the dream and lost lucidity.

We entered the mall and my wife was mad at me for some present I gave her or something I do not recall well. She suddenly told me, "Yeah right, go get one of those 75% discount sunglasses like you always do." Funny, I have never bought my wife sunglasses in waking, I wonder why I dreamed that. I told her I was not going to buy any sunglasses this time.

I wanted to leave the mall, however, it had no windows, no doors and the roof was made out of steel. All I wanted to do was to leave. I saw some sort of reception and saw an exit behind reception. I could see the sun coming from the outside. I turned lucid again, it was night a while ago, it was impossible to be day so fast. I walked towards the reception and said, "12th floor, please." The receptionist told me, "There is a private party there and you have no ID." I told her I just wanted to go through the door to be able to exit the mall, I did not plan to take the elevators. She informed me, "We are going to need an attorney to witness you are indeed just exiting the mall." I replied, "Oh, come on... This is a dream, I will wake up eventually!" I had no dream control on this particular dream. I saw some guys approaching the door. They were granted access. I got next to them and ran outside.

A guy asked me how much did I charged for a Tarot reading. I told him I was dreaming in that moment. The guy was surprised. Before I decided to take a flight, I lost imagery of the dream.

I had a FA in my room. I had a ton of e-mails from Amity, however, when I tried to read one, it would not open. I also started to write down the dream in my pillow and read some scripts about meditation when I woke up for real.

Awake, Non-lucid, Lucid, [Commentary made while awake]

[I had four different dreams last night.]

[Dream #1] I'm at the apartment building where I lived in Japan. There are several different landlords who own parts of the building, which is reflected in the fact that different parts of the facade have different designs. [Of course, this was not the case in real life.] Inside the building, though, instead of many small apartments, there is one big, open space crisscrossed by wooden support beams. A few other people my own age are in the building. Several of the wooden beams are arranged in a tall pyramid shape, supporting a large heating/air conditioning unit at the apex of the pyramid. This pyramid collapses and the unit crashes to the floor. At first, I think it's killed the young man who appeared to be standing directly under it, but then I see that he's okay, just scratched up a bit.

One of the other people in this large, open space is President Obama. I follow him up into an enclosed hallway and eavesdrop on a phone conversation he's having with his wife. From the conversation, I gather that he's going to pay for repairs to the damaged support structure and HVAC unit.

[Dream #2] I'm riding on Ellen's Energy Adventure in Epcot. The ride vehicles move up to get to the room with the screens for the film portion of the attraction; I can feel the vehicle moving upward. We get to that room, and the film begins. The film starts out on only one screen, then widens to fill the wraparound screens on either side of it as well, but there are no curtains that pull back to reveal the additional screens. [There were curtains when I went on this ride in reality back in 2000, but according to an article I just read recently, they're not working anymore.] The film contains lots of exciting action sequences, punctuated and made more immersive and realistic by air jets built into the backs of the seats. The seats also have lap bars; I can feel mine. At some point during the film, it dawns on me that I'm dreaming. When the film ends, I exit the ride along with everyone else. As I walk along my row of seats, I say to the guy walking in front of me, “Hey! You're a dream character!” Again, I don't get his attention at all. I continue walking through the passageways that lead out of the building. They're very dark; I make sure to pay close attention to the people and the edges of walls that I can see by the few dim lights, because I know that if I don't, the dream will fade. As I walk, I sing a song aloud, which was my lucid goal for the night. [I don't recall now which song it was, but I have the vague impression that it was a current country song, one I know well, sung by a male singer.] It doesn't even occur to me to do anything other than go along with the dream scenario; this is a ride at Epcot, so of course I'm going to go along with it and enjoy the experience.

There's a bottleneck along the exit route that slows down the flow of foot traffic. This makes me go, “Huh? What's going on?” Then I see what's causing the bottleneck: Suspended by individual cords from a track on the ceiling are multiple pairs of 3D glasses with polarized lenses, with no earpieces, so you have to hold them up to your eyes. Each cord is attached to a little wheel inside the track, so you can move the 3D glasses back and forth along the track. This passageway is filled with painted, Star-Wars-themed scenery, and when you look through the glasses, the scenery looks 3D. I take a pair of glasses and walk with them the rest of the way out of the building. I say aloud, “Oh my God! Rope-Trak!” [While in the dream, I remembered a dream I had when I was a kid that featured a very similar system, only with harnesses attached to the ends of the cords instead of the 3D glasses. In that dream, the purpose of the system was to make sure everyone at a museum followed the same path through the exhibits. I named this system “Rope-Trak” after the fact, when I was awake and used the dream as inspiration for a school project.] I'm surprised and pleased to see this concept reappear in another dream.

I reach the outside of the building. This outdoor space looks very much like I remember it, and I can see everything clearly in the natural light. However, the sky is overcast and cloudy, and it's either raining or just about to; a hurricane is coming in. The dream ended here.

[Dream #3] I'm at my high school, just outside the gymnasium, looking south. Apparently, just being there is enough to make me realize I'm dreaming. It's nighttime, and the quad is filled with students. I decide to fly; it takes me two tries to take off. My first try turns into a big, parabolic jump. The second time, I succeed in getting airborne. To help launch myself forward, I kick off the wall of the gym with my foot, as one might kick off the wall of a pool while swimming. Among the crowd, I see the B. brothers again as I pass overhead. I think, They didn't go to my high school. I fly higher and see that the school is surrounded on two sides by ocean, which makes me go, “Huh?”

[Dream #4] I'm riding in the back seat of the brown car down a street in my old city. It's nighttime. I know where I am because I recognize the trees and landscaping on either side of the car. Looking out my window, I see a white car flying along, above and to the left of our car. This clues me in that I'm still dreaming. I wonder if I can make this car fly. Almost as soon as I've decided to try to do so, I find myself sitting in the driver's seat, alone in the car. I immediately realize that I'm now alone and driving the car, rather than riding in the back seat while someone else drove, because I had wanted/expected to be the driver. My dream control is improving. Cool.

The car is still going down the street at the same speed it was before. I make the same effort of will I used in my previous dream to fly on my own, only this time, I try to focus my will on the car rather than on my own body. As before, I concentrate on the thought of the object of focus rising up, on how that should feel. It takes noticeably more effort, but it works. I get the car into the air. However, I find that it's now traveling backward, and I can't get it to go forward. Looking out the front windshield and over the landscape, I notice that the moon is low on the horizon ahead of me and to the left, looks normal, and is full. Then the dream faded and I woke up.

02/08/2011
Dream One
"Oneironaut vs. the Dream World"

(Wow. This is the longest entry I have made in a long time. Lol. It's been a while since I have taken melatonin, and I ended up taking 6mg last night, before bed. I also took a batch of multi-vitamins late, which might have played a part in this. I had a ridiculously long lucid, filled with some of the most incredible action I've experienced in a long time. Unfortunately, this dream was so long that I was not able to retain a lot of the detail - even though I stopped myself and tried to remind myself of the past events, along the way. Oh well. I was able to recall all of the encounters I had (I think), but the details of each fight (and the timeline of which fights happened when) are either hazy, or completely gone.)

I was back at my High School. (I had gone to a friend's memorial service, on Saturday, and it was at our old High School. I hadn't been on campus in over 10 years, and we actually got to go inside and take a look around, which was pretty surreal.) I was either in the gym or the cafeteria, and there was something strange going on - though I can't remember what it was. A kid near me was trying to help figure out exactly what was causing these strange occurrences, and he looked up behind me and pointed his finger toward the ceiling, yelling out "Look!!" When I looked up, I saw someone's arm, high upon a window sill, drawing itself back, as if trying to stay out of sight, the rest of the body hidden because of my lower position. This was all too familiar, though, because not only did I recall the last time I saw a mysterious arm tuck itself away from my sight, high above the floor, but the arm was decked out in that same tell-tale green and red sweater. I both became lucid and recognized this recurring character, at the same time. "Come on out here, Kruger!" I called up to him, from below, now fully aware that I was dreaming.

Freddy showed up. Unfortunately, I don't remember much of our conversation or fight. I do remember that at one point, he charged at me, and I did something of an aikido-type of counter, sidestepping and grabbing his arms - using his own momentum to turn him into a front flip and land on his back on a cafeteria table. After a while of fighting, he'd ended up giving up. (That makes twice he's given up against me, so far. Ha!) and I continued on around the school.

I remember even less about the next encounter, but I somehow ended up getting into a brawl with SSj Gohan, from Dragonball Z, still in the school. (I would almost think of this as completely random, but I did have a dream that SSJ Gohan was stalking me, some time ago. I was not lucid at that time, and ended up spending the whole dream running from him.) I remember vague images of this live-action kid with bright blond - almost platinum - hair standing up on his head, and wearing that purple gi he'd gotten from Piccolo. Unfortunately, I don't remember much of the actual fight, but I remember that it had ended up back in the gymnasium. I walked toward the closed gym doors, where Gohan was about to make his final stand. When I stepped toward the doors, prepared for anything, I remembered the Kaiyo-Ken attack, which is one of my favorite things to do while lucid. I flexed my upper body and imagined the energy pushing outward from my center. The dream was very vivid, and I could feel the energy surging through me, small flickers of red waves of light radiating around the edges of my peripheral vision. I could tell that my body was ablaze, but - in retrospect - I wish I would have looked at myself or something, to see how awesome it must have looked. Lol. The last thing I remember about this part was pushing open the doors and walking into the gym to finish the fight. Don't remember how it went, though.

The school scenario continued. Sometime after my fight with Gohan, though, I had lost lucidity. A couple of friends and I were walking on the top floor of the school, and ended up in a wide open hall that felt somewhat like our old school library. (In real life, the school was only two stories tall. In the dream, it was much, much taller.) There was a long row of windows, set over a wall that was probably about 3 ft high, to our immediate right. Seemingly out of nowhere, a Harrier jet hovered into view, its nose slowly waving from one side to the other while pivoting along the hallway. (I was playing CoD before bed, which heavily features Harriers.) It was scoping for us - one of us, at the very least. The moment it zeroed in on us, the fighter jet opened fire. High-caliber bullets came streaming in through the glass, and my group scattered. Being that I was the closest to the wall, I hit the floor and rolled toward it, positioning myself to a seated crouch in a corner, below the window - just this short, thick stone wall between myself and the flying jet outside. I figured that, if I wasn't directly in front of the window, the jet would no longer be able to see and target me. I was wrong, though. Even through the explosive shower of glass particles, I could see the tracer rounds blazing into the building over me, my friends ducking and diving behind any cover they could find for themselves. Then, the train of supersonic shells began to descend toward me. The plane was now gunning for me, even though I thought I was out of harm's way. I lay down on my back, the bullets cutting down through the glass, and then into the top of the stone wall I was hiding behind, busting through the stone barrier as if it wasn't there. All I could do was watch the tracers break apart my hiding spot and rocket across my body, inches above my chest. A feeling of dread washed over me, and all I just hoped to God that the onslaught stopped - that the pilot would become convinced that I wasn't actually behind this disintegrating wall anymore, and cease fire before his bullets cut through me.

I don't know if it was my subconscious will what made it happen, but the line of fire settled on a height just mere inches over my chest. Even though he kept firing, he wasn't cutting down through the wall anymore. His aim just loomed over me like a limbo bar. With these few passing seconds, I had enough time to process my disbelief at what was happening. I realized that I was still dreaming. Immediately, I jumped up to my feet, completely ignoring the machine gun fire, which I must have simply phased through, because I didn't feel a thing. Itching for revenge, I remember jumping out of the shattered window and landing on the plane itself. I'm not sure exactly what I did to it, but the next thing I remember is levitating in the spot where the jet was once hovering, and looking down below me as the jet fell toward the earth, already engulfed in flames. It hit the side of the building once and exploded, the wreckage crashing down to the courtyard floor.

More time passed, and I was now walking through another section of the school, still lucid. I was in an outside, upstairs hallway, walking with some teenage kid (as a visual aid, here is an actual picture of an upstairs hallway that I took, when we visited the school). He was leading me somewhere, but at the time, I didn't know where. The longer we walked down this hallway, the more it seemed to morph. It was changing from the school to something of a dark, medieval castle, the stair-well area that we were coming to turning out to be a catwalk-connected castle tower. We stepped into the dark tower, and guess who showed up to greet us...Ol' Freddy Kruger. Again. He thanked the kid for leading me to him. Apparently, the unknown kid was just sent out to fetch me. Kruger wasn't the least bit happy about our earlier encounter, and he wanted another go-round. This time (as I had done in a previous dream against him), I matched him nail-for-nail, flicking my fingers so that matching razors came out of my fingertips. We had a short clash in the tower, but again, I don't really remember the details of the hand-to-hand combat. The one image I do still have is of stabbing at his face with my fingers/nails, and him bringing up his own hand, threading his fingers between mine and stopping my hand right in front of his face. We fought for a while, though, and it actually ended up spilling off campus. I remember running out to the parking lot with some girl, and we both jumped into an old muscle car. There was a high speed chase where we were either chasing or being chased by a 'ghost car' that was being 'driven' by Freddy (by that I mean he was just controlling the car, but no one was in it). Unfortunately, I don't remember much more about this part than just weaving through traffic with the girl in the passenger seat. I believe that it was sometime around here, that I lost lucidity.

(It's possible that this next part was a separate dream, but I honestly don't know, so I will count it as the same one.)

I was back in the High School. There was a girl walking in front of me, and I remember looking at her back, lost in thought. (I don't know if it was the same girl from before.) For a moment, I had completely forgotten about all of the previous events, but the girl looked back at me and said something to jog my memory. (I wish I could remember what it was.) Whatever it was this girl said, she tipped me off that I might be dreaming. A bit surprised at the possibility, I looked at the wall to my right, where a clock was supposed to be. There was no clock, but there was some kind of schedule which showed times that marked certain events. Using that as my clock, I remembered one specific time on the list; 9:59. I turned away from the schedule and when I looked back, there was no 9:59 anywhere on the list. I had to look carefully, because there were times close to it, but there was no 9:59. I was still dreaming! By this time, I was completely amazed that I had not woken up yet. I ignored the girl and tried to recount all of the events of the dream(s) I had been having - thinking back through my fights with Freddy, Gohan and the Harrier. Even by this time, I didn't remember all the details, but I remembered the basics. The girl stopped and asked me something about why I seemed so distant. I told her that I was in the middle of the most incredible lucid dream, and started exclaiming about all the battles I'd won.

We walked through the 'multi-purpose room' (which was the main room that we entered/exited, when I revisited the school in real life, on Saturday), and out the side doors of the school, toward the parking lot. There was someone walking out behind me, but I didn't notice at first. He was talking shit to me, but I wasn't paying him the least bit attention. Eventually, he said something about the boy that had led me to Freddy Kruger, some time ago. I heard him imply that I had kicked the kid's ass (though I don't remember doing so), and that the kid was his brother. Apparently, this DC wanted to fight me, in his brother's name, but I really wasn't interested. I had half a mind to just keep on walking, and let the guy keep on running his mouth. But then he said something about my ex, MJ. I can't remember exactly what it was he said, but it was something like "Or maybe you'd like to hear about what I did to your girlfriend, 'the Virgo." (MJ is the only Virgo I've dated.) I stopped in my tracks and turned around. I recognized the guy. He was B.S., one of the 'tough dudes' back in HS, that you just didn't fuck with. J.S. was his brother (in waking life, but I didn't recognize the kid from before as J.S.). He chuckled at the fact that I had turned around at MJ's name. He said something like "Ohh....why so defensive? She's not really still your girlfriend, is she?" As he said this, two other guys walked up beside him, putting down their bags as if they were all about to kick my ass. Still completely lucid, I said something like "No...but I'm just getting tired of hearing you talk." I stepped up to him, staring him dead in the eye. I said something like "Well? You are apparently looking for a fight. Go ahead. Come on. Do something." This obviously threw him off his game. He stammered a little bit, looking at his friends. I just egged him on. "Come on," I said, looking down at my wrist, as if there was a watch on it. I warned him that "you're running out of time," knowing that I would be waking up soon. If this guy was going to make a move, I wanted him to do it now.

He did. He and his goons all attacked me at once, and I basically just tore them apart, punching and kicking from person to person, not worrying in the least about their attacks. It was like Jackie Chan taking on a bunch of punks. They didn't stand a chance. I just completely took them apart, criss-crossing between them - moving as fast as I could to attack whomever came in range. By this time, there was a crowd gathering, and one guy came close to me yelling "Yeah! Alright! ...." and I punched him in the mouth, thinking he was one of the attackers. The guy stumbled back, holding his face, and said "WTF?! I was rooting for you!!" Quite comically (and in somewhat traditional Jackie Chan fashion), I apologized to the guy and kept on fighting against the small gang of schoolyard bullies.


(I woke up during the fight. From the way things progressed, I was already amazed at how long the dream had lasted. I knew that I'd taken a lot of melatonin, and was expecting that I had slept most of the day away. But when I looked at the clock, it was only around 7:30am - and I didn't go to sleep until around 4:30am. I had only been asleep for 3 hours! I was absolutely blown away by this, and I jumped out of bed and went over to the computer to jot down my notes. Looking for a chance to induce another lucid dream by WBTB, I then went back to bed and tried to fall back asleep, before I stayed up too long to do so. Thanks to the melatonin, I had no trouble drifting back off.)


Dream Two:
"Fight and Flight"

I don't remember anything about this dream, before becoming lucid. I was with Todd and, having already known I was dreaming, I was flying over the landscape with him right behind me. Since I had a lot of room to work with (and no real plot to pay attention to) I was really pushing my speed, digging in and trying to go faster than I had, the last time I was flying as fast as possible. I had amazing control, and I would dip down toward the patches of water beneath us, changing directions close to the water and having it spray up around me in my wake. I remember just trying to go faster and faster. Every time I would settle on a speed, I would try to push it even further. Flying over what was either an ocean or a marshland, I came toward a patch of trees. The patch was at least 100 yards wide, maybe slightly longer from front to back. For just a moment, I wondered about trying to fly around these trees, but since I was going so fast, I wanted to try something else.

When I came to the watery forest, I imagined myself phasing from left to right, zig-zagging so fast that I became nothing more than a non-local blur moving through the trees. I have never really done this before in a dream, but it worked perfectly. I didn't lose speed at all. I simply came in contact with the forest, and 'whisked' my way through the trees, shifting myself around so fast that it practically felt that I was in more than one position at once. Still flying at a breakneck pace, I exited the forest, looking back behind me and seeing that Todd was still right there on my heels. There was no trouble with gravity; no 'sinking' feeling, when thinking about the fact that I was trying to fly. I was just in total control of my flight, at a level that was very rare for me.

The last thing I remember about this dream was that we had landed on some far-off jungle island. Night had fallen, and there was a bit of a scenario about a voodoo-type tribe treating us like monsters and plotting our demise. We found ourselves in a torch-lit courtyard, standing before a set of enormous doors made of logs. The doors flew open, and an enormous beast charged out at us. It looked almost human, but had elongated arms like a gorilla, and it was very pissed off. Once again (and this is becoming an unfortunate habit), I can't actually remember much of the actual fight. I do know that we ended up winning, because there was a part afterward, when we were talking to some of the indigenous about our victory.

(Even though this dream seemed much shorter, I woke up almost 6 hours afterward, which I would suppose accounts for most of the details of the fight scenario being lost. All in all, though, the entire night's worth of dreams was absolutely amazing.)

Awake, Non-lucid, Lucid, [Commentary made while awake]

I'm at a set of buildings that look kind of like an old-fashioned elementary school. I'm there to sign up for offline 'HITs' [Human Intelligence Tasks, small jobs for which I will get paid]. There are various organizations offering HITs to people, such as the Registrar of Voters. To work on each organization's HITs, you have to go to that organization's counter to sign up for them. When I get to one of the counters, I discover that signing up requires you to show an ID card, and I don't have mine with me. I have to go back to my car to get my purse and driver's license. Before I leave the counter, though, I notice a sheet of paper lying on it with P.'s name written on top. That means she's signing up for one of that organization's HITs, too.

When my next dream begins, a boy from my high school class appears. As soon as I see this happen, I lock on to him as the focus of my attention, knowing that the appearance of an image out of darkness like that must mean that a dream is beginning. Then other classmates of ours begin to appear around him, followed by the environment we're all in. We're in what appears to be a restaurant seating area, sitting around long, high tables on chairs designed to match their height. This area is covered and enclosed on three sides, and it's on our high school campus. Every single student sitting in the area is someone I recognize from high school. A female teacher I had and another, male staff member are also in the crowd there, walking around between the tables.

I get up from my seat and walk out of the seating area, heading out into the main part of the campus. Beautiful morning sunlight illuminates the campus. I take two steps, then take off from the ground and start flying around, staying at about the height of the roof lines of the single-story buildings. Typically for me, flying is the first thing I think of to do when I find myself lucid dreaming. Flying is fun, as always, and feels good. I have good flying control this time, but not perfect control. I don't feel like I'm being pulled or pushed in any direction, but at one point, I start losing altitude, and reach out to touch the top edge of a concrete-block wall with my fingers as I pass by it. It feels exactly like it would in reality, but I get the strange sense that it takes a split second for my brain to generate the simulated sensation, creating a tiny delay between touching the wall and receiving the sensory input. I recover and continue flying along.

As I pass the edge of one building's roof, I notice a crawlspace that you can't see from the ground. It's formed by the flat, real roof and the pointy, upper edges of the building's decorative facades, which extend above the real roof and slant toward each other, creating an empty space shaped like a long, triangular prism. I try to make a 90-degree left turn and enter this space, but I find I can't; I just start sinking down again. I shrug off this failure, recover, and continue flying across the campus. I reach an area where the long walls of two buildings run parallel to each other, and have crenellated ramparts [those square things on the top of the walls of a castle] at the top. As I'm flying along in between these two walls, the dream ends and I wake up.

I make a post at the beginning of a thread on a message board that turns out to be ridiculously, insanely popular, so that my computer is flooded with e-mail notifications from people posting to the thread at a rate of about one or two per second. [This dream may or may not have been at the beginning of the previous sleep cycle, I don't remember.]

I'm in a building that consists of a bunch of interconnected rooms that are filled with a colorful, random assortment of furniture and stuff. It kind of looks like a cross between someone's house and an antique store. [I just visited a bunch of antique stores on Friday, February 4.] I know I'm dreaming without any particular clue. I walk through the series of rooms, admiring the details of the dream environment, observing it with close attention. [That has been my lucid-dreaming goal for the last couple of days.] I think, I have to stay here as long as I can.

I reach a point when the sequence of rooms ends in a short T-intersection of passageways. I come up to the place where the long passageway I had been walking through ends. There is a piece of light-blue yarn hanging down in front of a low wall that stands in front of the back wall of the room. I touch the piece of yarn, running my fingers down it; it feels real. Then, I realize that the low wall it's hanging in front of is a mirror. It's a very speckly, dim mirror, and I can't see my reflection in it very clearly, but I can tell it's a mirror. I think, Hey, in a dream, you can walk through these and get to somewhere else. I straighten up and step forward with the intention of walking through the mirror.

First my arms, and then my head and part of my upper body go through the surface of the mirror. It is the coolest feeling. Like when I walked through the wall, I feel a slight resistance at first and then it yields to me, but this time, instead of feeling like something thin and hard breaking, it feels like going through a thick, liquid membrane. The membrane stays where it is as I go through it; I can feel it on my skin. There's nothing beyond the surface of the mirror but blackness, though. I realize that I didn't really think about what I expected to be on the other side before I started going through the mirror. Not wanting to go into the unknown, I pull back, out of the mirror.

I notice another, smaller mirror to my right. Just to continue experimenting with this newly-discovered ability, I start putting my fingers through the surface. Once again, they go right in. I don't really want to try to get anywhere else anymore, though, so I pull them back out. They come away with a silver coating of liquid mercury on them. I shake my hand to get the stuff off my fingers, but I'm aware that liquid mercury can't really hurt me in a dream.

In the small room off to the right, there is a slightly fat, female DC. I know her from somewhere, and know that her name is Melody. [Which is strange, because I've known several people named Melody and this DC didn't look like any of them.] We talk briefly [I don't remember about what], and then I turn away to explore the other side of the T-intersection, the small room off to the left of the big mirror. As I'm going into that room, I go, “Oh, yeah.” I remember the basic Task of the Month. I turn back around and say, “Melody. Melody!” She starts approaching me, and I approach her. When I get close enough, I put my arms behind her head and shoulders and lean in to kiss her. She realizes what I'm trying to do and pulls away with a look of revulsion. I say, “Just on the cheek. Please?” She stops pulling away and just stands there and lets me kiss her. I give her a kiss on the closest, most convenient spot I can reach, which is on the forehead, just above her right eye. Then I let her go, and she leaves. I look back at the big mirror and consider trying to get to Neopia by going through it, but I decide not to because I don't trust my dream control abilities that far. I've never done that before, and I'm afraid of it going wrong.

False awakening in my current, real room. I hear a sound that I recognize as the sound of fish splashing in a fishtank. I also hear P. moving around in her bed, which is on the other side of the room, parallel to mine. I don't open my eyes to look, but I do say aloud, “No! P. can't be here, and neither can her fish!”

“Yes, I can!” says P.

“When did you get home?” I ask her.

“Yesterday.”

“Oh.”

When I woke up for real, I found this FA rather amusing. Also, I was surprised that I'd had a dream that consisted entirely of sounds, with no visuals at all.

[This is a catch-up post. This dream is from the night of January 4-5, 2011.]

Awake, Non-lucid, Lucid, [Commentary made while awake]

I'm flying around a large, elaborate, indoor shopping mall that has an upstairs and a downstairs level. [I don't remember how I became lucid, but I did.] Like real malls I've been to with upstairs and downstairs levels, there are lots of open spaces connecting the two. I fly down through one of them to get into the lower level and explore it. Some of the people who are in the mall see me flying, and I talk to some of them.

The lower level is completely enclosed with no windows. It's all painted off-white and appears to be mostly offices, rather than shops. When I get into this enclosed area, I start walking. I encounter a female DC and we start talking. At one point, I actually tell her, “You're a dream character!” She either ignores this or doesn't hear me, I don't know which.

While exploring the corridors and passageways of this enclosed lower level, I find a door that is an entrance to the Arlington Theater. [Although I identified it as such, it didn't quite look like that in the dream. It looked like a big theater for live performances, but without the decorative, themed walls, and even bigger and wider than the real one.] When I enter the theater, I exclaim, “I was looking for this place!” Then it occurs to me, Couldn't you have used an ability to get here faster, rather than just searching for it? I go to take an empty seat next to some of my high school friends. The performance we're watching is a live-action version of Jaws. At the end, I walk up to the very front of the theater and take a picture of the audience.

Then, I feel a need to start floating upward, just like a helium balloon, so I allow myself to. The ceiling of the theater is made up of several layers of pieces of canvas stretched out with ropes. I make my way between the pieces of canvas, sometimes detaching a corner and folding it back, until I float out of the building and into the sky.

The next thing I remember is being on a street corner. My dad and sister bicycle past me and tell me to stop at the corner before crossing the street, to be safe. I say yes, I will. I walk along the road I'm on. I think vaguely of trying to do something else cool, like run really fast, but I don't do it. I look at a photo [presumably the one I took of the audience in the theater; I'm working off brief handwritten notes here] in what I at first think is reality before I figure out that it must still be in my head, because I know that I was dreaming when I took that picture.

While still outside on the street [I think; not sure of the specifics of the transition here], I suddenly find that I'm lying down, and my entire body is vibrating. When I look up and to my left, I see a sleep paralysis monitor. It's measuring how much I'm vibrating. It looks like an oscilloscope, kind of like this one, only in the dream, the screen is all black and there's only one bright-green line across it, that grows thicker and takes up more of the screen as the SP intensifies. Below that line is a numeric readout, also bright-green, that jumps from 40% to 88% as I watch. Below the numbers, I see the words “You did it!” appear on the screen.

So this is what sleep paralysis feels like, I think. I know what it is, but I'm still just a little freaked out by the all-over, shaking, vibrating sensation. I realized that I had to be waking up and thought, No! I don't want to wake up yet! Go back! I tried to DEILD, but I couldn't think of a scene to visualize, nor could I calm myself down enough to visualize one. Eventually, the feeling went away, and I was awake and back to normal. [First time I've ever woken up into SP. Very interesting.]

When I went back to sleep after that, I had another non-lucid dream. This time, I'm in my church. The room seems to be the same size and shape as it is in reality, but lots of things about it are different. The piano is front and center [rather than off to the side], and I'm sitting a few feet behind the piano bench, with my chair up against the windows that form the front wall of the room. I'm watching Wendi play the piano. We talk to each other about something. We're attending Betty's memorial service [which was held the Saturday after I had this dream, and I knew that both Wendi and I were planning to attend].

Later, when we're at the burial service, I look down into the box that forms the underground enclosure for the coffin, and I can see furniture inside it.

After the service, I leave the church building. Outside it is a big, complex interchange of road overpasses and underpasses that spans across a straight main road. Airplanes are using this main road as a makeshift runway. I walk across one of the overpasses with my family to get to the overpass on the other side.

----------------
Side notes:
This was the second night that I wrote down a goal before going to bed. This time, I wrote: “Goal: become lucid, look around at scene, make sure it's stable, then see what other verbal commands I can use.” This time, I accomplished the first two, but forgot about the second two. So far, based on two nights of experience, my working hypothesis is that writing down my goals is definitely helping me to achieve them, but that in the future, my goals should only consist of one or two actions at most, not three or four, because I don't seem to be remembering more than two.

01/06/2010
Fragment One
I was hanging out with some chick who was kind of a cross between AF and LK. AF's real life boyfriend was this hybrid girl's boyfriend in the dream, and they had a son who I believe was representative of LK's real life son. He was not happy that this girl and I were such good friends, and he had a really shitty attitude toward me, the whole time I was there. The last thing I remember is the infant son almost falling off of the bed, at one point.


Fragment Two
I just remember being with family and friends, at Kellen's old house.


Dream Three
"Hang Time with Michael Jordan"

I was on some sort of assassination job. The objective was to kill a High Value Individual, framing one of two factions within a military base. This would effectively cause what one of my commanding officers called a Civil War," within the facility. I don't really remember much about this dream, besides taking the shot, through a set of bars, and hitting the HVI, center mass.

Later, I was in what was basically a cross between a mall and an airport terminal. I had to pull a "drop" job (literally), which consisted of dropping a bag full of something illegal over the second-floor railing, and down to someone making the pick-up, below. It was ridiculously obvious that we were doing something illegal, but...that was the plan. Lol. After the drop, we were making our way out of the building, and security was buzzing all around us. They knew that something had just happened, somewhere in the mall/airport, but they didn't know what, or by whom. We slipped right passed them, and walked out to the parking lot.

Outside, randomly, I ran into Michael Jordan. Lol. He was just on his way home from doing some shopping, and making his way to his car. Almost surprisngly, I became lucid at this encounter. (Considering everything that had just happened, before this, I find it funny that all it took was meeting Michael Jordan, to make me lucid. Lol.) I started walking and talking with him, for a while. I told him about the fact that I was just dreaming, and he just quirked a skeptical eyebrow at me. It's hilarious, but he pretty much just looked/acted exactly like Michael Jordan! Lol. He said something sarcastic, like "right. Sure you are..." continuing to walk beside me, at a relaxed pace. I said something like, "don't believe me? Watch," and I levitated into the air, moving around in front of him and hovering backward, while he kept walking toward me. I grinned at him and said "See? You're not the only one who can fly, Mike," laughing. He raised both eyebrows a bit, otherwise seemingly stoic. Though I could see that he was impressed, he didn't quite say much about it. He just kept walking, looking up at me.

I turned around and took aim at a car, a few dozen yards in front of us, reaching up toward it with one hand. Focusing my mind on the vehicle, I flipped my palm up, and slung my arm upward, grabbing the car with telekinesis, and hurling it through the air, over us. It soared to a good 30 feet in the air and then nose-dived toward the pavement. The car smashed into the parking lot, head-on, crunching itself nearly flat and toppling over. I couldn't help but note to myself how cool it looked.

Michael and I finally reached his car, and he asked me something about whether I planned to just follow him around, the whole time. I shrugged and simply said "I might as well, I'll probably be waking up soon, anyway." (Dunno why, but I just sort of had that feeling.) What's even funnier is that his car was an old, beat up, paint-stripped Pontiac Firebird, which wouldn't have surprised me, if it didn't even make it out of the parking lot, from the looks of it. We got inside, and it was just filled with all kinds of garbage; empty drive-thru bags; bottles; cans; etc. Settling into the seat, I was just about to look at my hands, to try to stabilize the dream, but I ended up waking up, instead.

Awake, Non-lucid, Lucid, [Commentary made while awake]

[This is a catch-up post. This dream is from the night of December 21-22, 2010.]

I'm at a ticket booth in a train station, trying to buy a round-trip train ticket from home to L.A., where I plan to spend the day. The train ticket costs $35 and change; when I receive my ticket, it's a plastic card with my picture on it.

I'm at a desk at a music studio, explaining that I'm there because I want to record a demo. The lady at the desk doesn't want to accept a demo from me, until I mention that it's for a contest. She takes out the CD she has of demos for the contest, puts it in her computer to see how much space is left, and sees that there's enough space on it for one more song: six minutes. She tells me I'm lucky, because I'll be the last person to enter a song in the contest.

I'm standing outside some building [the music studio? I'm not sure; I get the impression this may have been a different scene], near the side door, waiting to get in to do something. I realize I'm dreaming and turn away from the door, looking at the other buildings on the street around it. Again, the scene looks just as sharp and vivid as reality. I hesitate for a moment, deciding whether to go along with the dream plot or go off and do my own thing. I choose the latter and take off, flying away. All it takes is an act of thought and willpower and a very slight push off the ground with my legs and feet. I have no problem taking off, but I immediately find myself being pushed backward again, unable to fly forward. Then I realize that it's only the wind pushing me in a particular direction, and if I let it carry me instead of trying to fight it, I'll have an easier time of flying. So I let the wind push me along, and it is, indeed, much easier.

I'm flying over a town. I remark aloud, “And, of course, it's another beautiful, perfect, sunny day here in the dreamverse!” I'm complaining again about the lack of snow.

While flying, I happen to pass over the backyard of a gray building that might be an older apartment building, and I spot two duplicates of myself there. I land in the backyard to get a closer look, but I don't want them to see me, so I try to will myself to be invisible to them. I can't tell whether or not it works.

I wake up in my bed. I'm a little disappointed to be waking up so soon from a lucid dream. I can clearly see a single eyelash moving back and forth in front of one of my eyes as I open and close them. I'm lying on my right side. Looking across the room from this position, I can see my closet. I think, I can't see the closet when I'm lying on my right side in bed in the room I have now. This is my room in House #1. I'm still dreaming! This is just a false awakening!

So I walk out into the living room of House #1. I look around to see if there's anyone else around, but there isn't; I'm all alone in the house. Since there's no one around to see me do it, I decide to try to walk through a wall. The wall I choose this time is the one directly to the right of the front door (as I'm facing the front door from inside the house). This wall separates the living room from the kitchen. [This is exactly how that house is laid out in reality, too.] I say to myself, “I'm going to walk through this wall,” and start walking through it. It's not completely solid to me, but I do feel a slight resistance at first. I continue pressing forward, and feel something hard, but thin (like a very thin sheet of balsa wood) break under the pressure my body is exerting. I continue walking, and end up on the other side of the wall, standing in the kitchen. Looking back, I see that on this side, the section of wall I've just walked through is blank except for a couple of metal panels with doors in them, like the kind that cover circuit-breaker boxes. [In the real-life House #1, there are kitchen counters and cabinets attached to that section of wall. Go figure.] Said metal panels are on a flap of drywall that is now sticking out from the wall at an angle, like a door. My passage through the wall has left a big, rough-edged rectangular hole in the drywall, the same height as I am. I can see the inside of the wall, and how thick it is, because the hole goes all the way through. This wasn't what I had been expecting to happen, but nonetheless, I say aloud, “Hell yeah! I did it! I just walked through a wall!” I'm pretty proud of myself. [Actually, that does make sense. I've had enough experience helping to build houses and doing home improvement projects in real life that I have a very detailed and complete schema for what the inside of a wall is like. I'm not surprised that when I said, “I want to walk through a wall!”, my mind answered, “okay, but you know that means breaking a hole in the drywall.” Interestingly, though, there were no studs to be seen in the dream.]

After that, I go out onto the street that House #1 is on. I climb up on top of a car that is parked on the street in front of my house, just because I can do so with almost no effort (unlike in reality,) but I don't start flying again. I just climb down the other side and walk along the streets of my neighborhood, which are also laid out just like they are in reality. The dream starts to fade, but I focus my vision and attention on the environment around me, and successfully bring it back into focus. Then, off in the distance, I see several tall, scary-looking metal structures rising up above the houses. They're as tall and narrow as construction cranes, but they aren't construction cranes. I'm frightened, so I run off and hide in a nearby public restroom.

[At this point, the dream transitioned from a lucid dream to a long, elaborate non-lucid dream that I don't remember much of now, so I'll summarize:] I'm watching a sci-fi story unfold from third-person perspective, like watching a movie. In it, people are punished for using long words. My dad is one of the people being punished.

When I woke up, I discovered that I actually had managed to fall asleep while lying on my right side in reality, corresponding to my position in my false awakening. I also realized: It's my dream. I don't have to be scared of anything I see in a dream - I can make it go away, by ignoring it, if nothing else. I can also transition to new scenes at will, and could find some snow that way. I just need to learn that these things are true.

----------
Side notes:

I had this dream the night after I had had a small, private celebration of lucid dreaming, as I'd announced in this thread. I was so proud of myself that I'd not only had a lucid dream that night, but had accomplished one of my lucid goals in it!

[Fragment] I'm in a grocery store, sitting at a disused checkout stand. The store has recently been rearranged so that the checkout stands that are actually being used are on the opposite side of the building, but the old ones were left in place.

I'm parking my Saturn [the car I had in Florida] in the parking lot of an Albertsons grocery store [none that I've ever been to in real life]. I notice that the temperature gauge on the car is maxed out [as it usually was in reality]. I think about how I have to make this car last all year because, in my situation, there's no other method of getting to work that will do. [In this dream,] I'm back in Florida for a second year.

When I went back to bed after having taken some handwritten notes on the above dream, I noticed that my body already felt heavy. I decided to roll with it and try to WILD. I had attempted to do so a few days before during an afternoon nap, and had gotten as far as one of my arms starting to go numb before my mom interrupted me with a question. This time, I succeeded, and to my surprise, it wasn't nearly as scary as I had thought it would be. My hypnagogic hallucinations consisted of a buzzing sound in my head that seemed to go on for a few minutes. Then it stopped, and a few seconds later, I find myself lying in my bed, looking around at my current bedroom. I immediately recognize the false awakening for what it is, since I had been expecting to be dreaming. I did it! I think excitedly.

None of the lights appear to be on, and yet I can see everything clearly. In other words, the room looks very much the way it does when early-morning sunlight is coming in through the window, and yet I'm aware that it's nighttime. I get out of bed and start walking out of the room. Just before I walk out the door, I do the nose-pinch RC just to verify what I already know, and for the cool experience. I can still breathe, which I still think is the neatest sensation.

I go out the door and walk down the hallway. This looks exactly like my real house. There's no one else around. As I pass by the door to P.'s room, I notice light coming from underneath it, but this is normal in our house, so I don't investigate. I go to the front door and open it. It's exactly like the real one, too; I even have to unlock the deadbolt on the screen door before I can open it and go outside.

I walk along the front walk. I notice that I'm wearing one of my summer nightshirts, the one with the teacups printed on it and the pocket in the front. It occurs to me that I could have stopped and gotten dressed if I had thought of it, but I didn't, and it doesn't matter anyway because this is a dream, so it's only natural for me to be wearing sleepwear. I'm not cold at all, though. [The strange part, which, of course, I didn't realize was strange until I'd woken up, was that I wasn't wearing that nightshirt in reality; I was wearing my new purple pajamas. It does get cold at night in the winter here, so I always wear pajamas in winter.]

The scenery outside my house looks just like reality, too. When I get to the driveway, I take off and fly in the way that I've learned to do it, by pushing gently off the ground with my legs and feet while thinking about initiating the act of flying. [The mental process involved is very similar to the mental process involved in starting my bicycle moving with that first push on the pedals, now that I think of it.] It works, but once again, once I get airborne, I immediately start getting pulled backward. I try to relax and let myself be pulled along, as before, but it seems I'm not being taken anywhere in particular. Then I hear a male voice that seems to come from the air around me, and yet sounds like it's coming through a radio speaker. It says something along the lines of, “If you always expect life to go the way you want it to go...” but doesn't finish the thought. I finish the thought with, “...you won't be able to control it?” [Hmm. Very interesting.] [Because, once again, I've forgotten to concentrate and pay attention to the scenery,] the dream fades and I wake up.

[This next dream is from my next sleep cycle on this same night. I'm adding this section on 1/15/11. I didn't have time to write all this out on the day I had the dream, but I did today.]

I'm watching a series of commercials and reading some poster-sized ads for kids' day camp programs at a chain of big, fancy hotels. There are two such programs: one is called “adventure camp” and features soccer, while the other is called “non-adventure camp” and features poetry and other non-athletic, creative activities.

Then, I'm at one of the big, fancy hotels, sitting on the floor in the lobby, leaning up against a wall. I use my laptop to log in to a game website, not Neopets but similar to it, that I've been to before. I wonder, Do I remember my password for this site? The login screen plays music. A lady comes by and asks me to go outside, where the music won't disrupt the quiet of the lobby, so I do. I go out to a wooden patio with several metal table-and-chair sets on it. There are people sitting at the tables and studying, though, so I press the Mute button on my laptop. I ask one of the girls on the patio if the chairs at her table are taken. She offers me a seat, and I take it. Another girl sees my laptop screen, and we have the following conversation:

Girl: Is yours a dragon?
Me: (after figuring out that she's talking about my pet on the site I'm logging on to) Yes, it's a silver dragon.
Girl: They know about it.
Me: Who?
Girl: Your 'rents.

I haven't told my parents about this site. They know about my Neopets account, but not my account on this site. I wonder about the girl, Are you my dream guide? but don't ask her. [Yes, I managed to think that without realizing that I was dreaming. I don't even know.]

Me: We don't get along very well right now. This is part of the reason.

I log in to my account anyway. The screen shows animation of the digital creatures on the site fighting each other by shooting beams of various things out of their mouths, like some Pokémon and Digimon do.

Non-lucid, Lucid, Dream within a dream, [Commentary made while awake]

[This is a catch-up post. These dreams are from the night of December 13-14, 2010.]

[Note: I'm writing this entry well after the fact, working from handwritten notes, and even when I made the handwritten notes, I wasn't sure in what order the dream scenes had occurred. When writing this entry, I just arbitrarily put them in an order that made some kind of sense to me.]

I wake up in my bed in my room at House #1. A big, strong man is invading my bed and trying to attack me. I'm scared, and I try to get P.'s attention by yelling for her, but no one comes. I manage to evade him and escape. I know that once I'm standing up, I'm safe. I feel upset after this experience, so, to cheer myself up, I decide to go off and have a lucid flying dream.

The flying dream begins, and now I'm definitely lucid. [Yeah, that's right. In the aftermath of a regular nightmare, my non-lucid dream self decided she wanted to have a particular kind of lucid dream to cheer herself up, and my mind obliged. Weirdest DILD technique ever, but it's a pretty cool story.] At first, the dream is in third person, and I see myself flying over a beautiful town that fills a beautiful valley [now that I think of it, it looked a lot like the one in Kiki's Delivery Service]. I see another girl also flying over the town, unaided, the same way I'm flying. I consciously, deliberately shift to first-person perspective [That's a pretty neat trick. I wish I understood how I did it.] and approach closer to the other girl. I recognize her as Chihiro from Spirited Away. I come right up beside her and ask her, “This is a good way to fly, isn't it?”

“Mm-hmm!” she answers cheerfully.

I decide to ask the same question again, in Japanese this time, just for fun and because I can. “Fly no shikata wa sui ne?” [trans: “(This) way of flying is good, isn't it?” Again, dream!Japanese is weird – the word for “good” is ii in reality, not sui.]

"Un!" [trans: “Yeah!”] Chihiro answers. She continues talking in a language that I take to be Japanese at first, because the sounds of it are characteristic of Japanese, but after listening for a few seconds, I realize that the words are actually Spanish.

[Dreamskip.] I'm on foot, exploring some old, pretty brick buildings.

I wake up in my bedroom in House #1 again. P. is sitting at a table in the room, writing an essay.

I'm telling my family about the DreamViews website, but lying about its nature and telling them that it's strictly fandom-related. I tell them that my username there is “Stupid Top.” When P. finds out that I've been writing about the dreams that I've had about her, she gets sad and angry, and cries.

I wake up again in a variant of my bedroom in House #1. P. and I are in the bottom bunk together. Elsewhere in the house, there is a larger room that resembles the patio of our grandparents' house. A bunch of people from church come into the bedroom, and I explain that this is our old bedroom, and we used to share the full bed (we had just pushed our full mattress off the top bunk and onto the floor), not this twin bed. A woman in the group corrects me, calling the full bed a [something I can't remember] twin. I go along with it. The youngest S. girl is put into the full bed by her parents, but she doesn't want to take a nap.

I'm in a parking garage, and I randomly find some panties.

I'm reading a book that introduces the reader to a code of spiritual laws and rules that I realize are of Mormon origin when I see a citation that says something like “Uses 21:7” [e.g., a citation from a book whose name I don't recognize]. One of the rules in the book specifically forbids entering holes populated by worms for long dreaming. It surprises me to find that the people who wrote this book both knew about lucid dreaming and made a rule about it. [Yes, I did read the thread about why it's hard to get to the moon, and I think that's what inspired this dream.]

I'm exploring a building somewhere, and my friend Mary T. is there. [Day residue; I'd seen her the day before I had this dream.]

I'm driving over the bridge on W. Road that crosses over I-15, heading toward a buffet-style cafe, where I routinely go for breakfast [only in this dream, not in real life].

12/19/2010
Fragment:
I was on another relic hunt. This time, I was partnered up with some, really douchey 'hero.' He was a celebrity, or something, and was just so full of himself that I had to constantly restrain myself from choking the shit out of him. We were searching for precious stones and ancient jewelry, scouring through dark caves and tombs and whatnot. After all of our journeying, when we were finally able to find the treasure that we were looking for, he started acting like he was too good to even help carry any of it; saying something about how they were "just stones" and they were beneath him. I seriously just wanted to slap him.




12/20/2010
Fragment One (Lucid):
(Damnit. I completely lost a lucid dream, last night. And from what I can remember, it was a pretty good one.)
I remember walking around at night, having just realized I was dreaming. I believe I was in an apartment complex, walking down the sidewalk, with patches of grass all around. There was a little light around - kind of blue-ish, but too bright to be moonlight - and my shadow was being cast, on the large white wall of buildings, to my left. Fortunately, I do remember looking at my hands, to stabilze the dream, which I've been trying to get back into the habit of doing. I tried to think of something to do, but I couldn't remember what the tasks of the month were, and I eventually recalled WakingNomad's RPG, and my Djinn character (which is another good thing, because we had just recently talked about it, and I was able to immediately think about it, upon becoming lucid - which is sometimes rare for me). While continuing to walk, I just inhaled, clenched my fists, and felt a surge of energy swell within me. Looking at the large shadow of myself, upon the wall, I could see that I now had the wild hair of my character, and even though I don't remember looking down, but I could tell that I was no longer wearing my shirt. Having this new sense of power, being back into the body of my Djinn, I lept into the air and went flying, searching for something to do.

There is a lot, around here, that I don't remember. The dream was very long, and had something to do with mutant vampire things... I can hardly even remember what they looked like - only that they were ugly. At least one of them were being held in some kind of wooden structure, down at the base of what I believe was a flight of stairs. I know that I interacted or had a conversation with one or more of them, but don't really remember a damn thing, other than that I was lucid. I do, specifically, remember reminding myself to go back over the events of the dream, so that they would be easier to recall, when I woke up.

(I vaguely remember waking up, in the middle of the night, and being too tired to get out of bed, to write my notes down. It's just an obscure blur of a notion, but I'm pretty sure it happened.)


Fragment Two:
Something about my mom having brought home food, after I'd just eaten something that I didn't really enjoy. She said something about if I wasn't going to eat it now, I couldn't have any of it later. So, not really all that hungry anymore, I still ate whatever of it I could.

Non-lucid, Lucid, [Commentary made while awake]

[I dreamed for a subjectively really long time last night, but my recall is a bit fragmented. I don't really remember the transitions between most of the scenes, which is reflected in the absence of flowing transitions between paragraphs in this entry.]

I'm lying in a bed that I'm sharing with a man I know. It's not sexual; he's asleep. He rolls over onto me, apparently completely unaware of my presence. I struggle to get out from underneath him, and succeed, standing up.

I'm now in a long, wide, rectangular space with white walls that serves as the entryway to our church's offices, which are within a really big building. A long, straight hallway leading to other offices on the floor forms one of the long sides of the rectangle, and the doors into our offices are on the other side. The center of the rectangle is filled with a row of wide, square, dark-colored, upholstered seats. I'm lying on one of them, with my knees bent over the front edge of it and my feet on the floor. Several people from my church walk by, coming in and out of the doors. They see me, and I say, “Hi.”

I'm in another room in the same really big building. It's being remodeled. There's a couch that's completely wrapped in newsprint, because someone is going to paint this room. I'm standing near the doorway, and I see L.M. [a teacher from my real high school, whose class I was never in] walking by out in the hall. I introduce one of the other people who's in the room with me to her: “This is L.M. She teaches biology.” L.M. is wearing a name tag that says “Sakura Lily [Something-or-other beginning with M],” in Roman characters. I think, I didn't know that was her real name.

I'm looking out the wall of the really big building that's make up of one really big window, at a sky filled with pink and orange clouds. I realize that it's already 3:00 in the afternoon, and I've already wasted most of the day. I'd better hurry up if I want to do the studying I still need to do for my final. [In the dream, I actually remembered having experienced most of an entire day in that really big building, including lunchtime.]

I'm in another living-room-like room, similar to the one that was being remodeled, except that this one isn't. At this point, it hits me: This isn't a real place. I'm dreaming. That explains why I wasn't really hungry for lunch earlier: my real body is asleep, and I had a big dinner before I went to bed. Oh! Since I'm dreaming, it's not really 3:00. The day hasn't even started yet! I still have time to study! Strangely, thinking about the fact that I'm dreaming causes me to feel woozy, dizzy, and sick, and the whole world to tilt. [Probably because I was rereading parts of the Inception shooting script again, in which telling someone that they're dreaming causes the dream to destabilize. Dang it! I know it doesn't have to be like that.] I think, No. I have to keep the dream stable. I kneel down to feel the carpet, which, this time, is a little like the carpet in my real room, except lighter (more yellow than brown) and slightly shaggier. The dizzy, tilting feeling goes away. Standing up, I put my hands under running water. At first, I can't feel it at all, but then I feel the warm water running over my hands. Then, I reach into a fish tank on a nearby table to touch the goldfish in it with my fingers. I've done this before, I think. What did it feel like? This. It does feel pretty much like I remember it feeling when I had my own goldfish tank in reality.

I return to the room that was being remodeled, to find that they're done remodeling it. The couch has been unwrapped and all the other furniture has been returned to the room. This room will be serving as the first-aid station for some kind of event; there's a handwritten paper sign on the door saying so. I feel the need to leave this room clean and neat before this dream ends (I sense that it will soon), so I pick up all the trash and used tissues that are lying all over the middle of the floor.

I'm outside, at night, looking at a couple of brightly-lit city blocks. I think, Oh, cool! Those are the blocks just to the south of home! [What home, I don't have the slightest idea.] I start flying, this time taking off with more of an effort of will and belief than by jumping (it also helps that I'm feeling happy and excited), and go straight up, so as to admire the view better. When I get up high, I start being pulled backward again [see this DJ entry and this one], but this time, it doesn't frighten me. I think, Oh, I must be going back to my real body now.

It turns out that I'm wrong. I find myself in another unfamiliar place [I don't remember where it was]. I pinch my nose and can still breathe through it, which is a pretty neat feeling. I'm still dreaming. [I remember doing this on two different occasions, but I'm not sure when the other one was.]

I'm entering my family's house [but it's none of our real houses]. P. is waiting for me inside, and expresses frustration that I've been gone so long. I'm still aware that this is a dream, but I decide to play along with the dream plot. I enter the kitchen, and my parents are there. I look at the whiteboard/calendar attached to the side of the fridge and see that something I wrote there before has been erased, and the magnets on it have been moved around. I follow my family up the stairs in the house, and we end up in a room filled with barrels of wine.

----------------------
Side notes:

This dream seemed to go on for a really long time, especially considering that I remembered being in the dream building for most of a day. I only wrote down the most memorable moments. I think this is because time dilation was the topic I was reading the most about here on DV before I went to bed last night. I am pleased with this development, and now I'm even more motivated to learn better control, so that I can really take advantage of the time and stability I now seem to have in lucid dreams.