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

I'm at Disneyland, in a large, covered outdoor amphitheater, watching a new stage show that consists of Sorcerer Mickey waving an oversized magician's wand around (the black, cylindrical kind with white tips on both ends). Mini-fireworks, red foil streamers, and red confetti shoot out of the end of the wand in turn while the “Fantasmic!” theme music plays. [The part of the music that played in my dream starts at 1:41.] [I don't think I've ever heard an existing piece of music that clearly in a dream before. Awesome!] A few minutes into the show, the wand stops working. Looking between the seats and the other guests at the floor where Mickey is standing, I can see that there's an extra wand there, waiting to be picked up and used if needed. There's also an entire bundle of replacement wands descending from the ceiling in some sort of holder. The show stalls while a replacement wand is selected. While the show is on hold, Cast Members start giving out free stuff by passing it around through the audience. One of the things that gets passed to me is a small basket full of pin-on plastic name tags that are shaped like, and designed to look like, license plates from Cars. They all have different organization names and titles printed at the top and bottom of the name tag, surrounding a blank space to write your name in. I read each one, looking for the one I like best [I could read them in the dream, but I don't remember what any of them said now], so it takes me forever to choose one.

Dreamskip. I'm in an elevated, landscaped parking lot to the west of my high school campus. I can see the brown car, and I'm walking toward it. I realize that I'm dreaming and decide to get to my car by flying, instead of just walking. I try to take off by kicking off the ground and jumping up at the same time, but it doesn't work very well. The move takes me a lot higher than it would have in reality, maybe a couple feet off the ground, but I jump up and then float right back down again in a symmetrical, parabolic arc. [I don't remember how I did it, but] Somehow, I end up flying. I say, “Screw the car. I'm going to fly.”

I'm flying over the west side of the high school campus, but am now facing toward the center of campus rather than away from it. The view is panoramic and beautiful from up there. However, I find myself only flying sideways and backwards. I can feel myself being pulled in those directions through the air. Why am I not going forward, over the campus? That's the direction I want to go, but apparently, I can't. I don't understand this. I think, “There's going to be a wall behind me for me to kick off of and start flying forward.” The next moment, there is one. I'm being pulled backwards through the air until I feel my feet hit the wall, which stops me. I kick off the wall, propelling myself forward. I fly forward for a little way, but I still find it difficult to do. I end up getting pulled sideways again.

[I think some other stuff happened at this point, but I don't remember it now.]

I wake up and I'm lying down outside somewhere. It looks like a park. It's bright and sunny there. There is a cartoon dog looking at me, dressed up in a Halloween costume to look like some other kind of animal. I say hello to it, calmly and happily. Then it dawns on me, Oh, this is a false awakening. I'm still dreaming. I'm going to wake up for real soon. Then I did wake up for real.

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Side notes:

Last night, I listened to the first 15 minutes of the Subliminal Lucid 3.0 mp3 as I was getting ready for bed and going to sleep, while doing MILD affirmations at the same time. I also had my cardboard-square wristband on my right wrist. I did not listen to the binaural beats file at all. Therefore, I can conclude that the binaural beats file is not a necessity for me to have a lucid dream. I'm pretty sure that the most important factor is the focused affirmations and the desire to have one.

I'm pleased to see that I still have my previously-discovered ability to make things happen or appear in dreams by quietly, passively expecting them to happen or appear. I'm a little disappointed that I didn't have better control over my own flying, but admittedly, I am out of practice. I actually have a large backlog of handwritten notes on my dreams that I haven't had time to type up and put into my dream journal. I'll get around to it when I can.

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

I'm at the camp I went to as a kid [Not the one mentioned in the catchup post below, another one] with my dad. The lodge is a Marie Callender's [Cool!], and we're going out to dinner there. We get a table and order coffee and cookies. Mom is already there and tells us to come over and join her at her table. She's mad at us for not seeing her when we came in, or looking for her in the crowd. Dad and I get up and move to her table, bringing our coffee and cookies with us.

While we're in the restaurant [I think], I start looking back at old pictures of myself on various camping trips. One of them is of my and several of my Literacy AmeriCorps friends, including Laya, Jen, and Chelisa. The oldest picture is from junior high school. It's a big, panoramic picture with lots and lots of kids and their camp counselors in it. I'm near the far right, next to Erica. [She didn't even go to my junior high.] Those of us who are on that side of the picture are standing near the grassy edge of a cliff; one of the boys on in the picture is pretending to be about to step off.

I wake up in my current bed. I try several times to turn on the lamp next to it, but the bulb just flickers and sputters every time I try. I turn the knob until the flickering stops, tighten the bulb in its socket, then try again. Still nothing. I go out into the hall to look at the digital clock on one of our cable boxes, to see what time it is. It says 7:39, which disappoints me. Aw, man! It's time to get up, I think. Then I look again and see that I made a mistake: it's only 2:39. So, I get my notepad and start taking notes on the dream I just had.

...And then I woke up for real. This time, I remembered to do the nose-pinch RC. I was very annoyed with myself for not doing any RCs before and not catching the FA, especially when I realized that I had missed not one, but two of the classic dream signs, one right after another. My mind is great at giving me clues that I'm dreaming; I'm just oblivious.

After that, it seems to take me a really long time to get back to sleep. While I'm trying to do so, I think, Oh, crap, I can't talk to Cj on the phone tomorrow at 9, because that's when I'm meeting with Frank. I get up, take my laptop into the study, and sleepily start writing her an e-mail explaining that we'll have to postpone our date to talk on the phone because I have a conflicting appointment. I'm working in Yahoo! Mail [which is what I use for my main e-mail account in reality], and press Send. Suddenly, annoying, circus-y music starts to play out of the computer's speakers, and the screen is filled with a weird, old, basic HTML page with a colored background. The page appears to scroll down automatically. One of the first things to appear on it is a single sentence of text that contains my name. This is what makes me realize what's going on: I've stupidly allowed my Yahoo password to get phished by entering it into a fake website, and now my laptop has a virus. I let out a long string of curse words (actually, the same curse word repeated many times). Windows starts scanning my computer, trying to fight the virus.

Mom and P. are coming home. According to the digital clocks on the cable boxes, it's 12:02 A.M. Leaving my laptop on the floor of the study, I go outside to the street to meet them. They're coming home in a red VW New Beetle (where did they get that? I wonder silently), which they're parking on the curb across the street from our house, because our two regular cars [the ones we own in reality] are taking up both spaces in the garage. I come over to greet them as they're getting out of the car. As we walk back toward the house, I look at the side yard and see that there's a bamboo tree that sort of looks like a fountain there. Ooh, that's pretty! I think. P. goes back to put some more CDs in the New Beetle. [Neither it nor the bamboo tree exist in reality, of course, but I didn't realize that anything was strange until after I woke up. :/ ]

I woke up for real at 5:00 and took down more notes. I realized in hindsight that it hadn't actually taken me as long to fall asleep as I had thought; at least part of the process, and everything after that, had been a dream. I didn't actually have any such appointment with Cj, anyway. I was amazed at how completely and totally this dream had convinced me that I was in reality.

I'm indoors somewhere, and I'm wearing a cowboy hat. I look behind me and see my friend D.W. there, riding in a wheelchair. I think, Oh, good, she got a wheelchair. I feel the cowboy hat on my head and think, Oh, yeah, this is a dream. I can feel the by-now-familiar sensation of lucid-dream consciousness. I open my dream self's eyes and look very briefly at my hands, which appear normal, then up at my indoor surroundings. To engage more fully with my dream self and its sense of touch, I reach up to touch the brim of the cowboy hat with both hands, then take it off. I'm sitting in something [possibly another wheelchair, but I don't see it, so I'm not sure]. I stand up and try to turn around and talk to D.W., but just then, I heard my mom talking out in the entryway, which took my attention away from the dream, which instantaneously kicked me back into reality.

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Side notes:
I should choose my MILD affirmations with more care. The ones I focused on the most this past night were “I am self-aware and in control in my dreams” and “I bring clarity, lucidity, and stability into my dreams.” These backfired rather spectacularly in my second dream of the night. It was perfectly clear and stable, and, as far as I could tell, I was just as self-aware and in control of my own actions as I am in reality. And yet, I never realized that I was dreaming. I focused on that aspect more as I was trying to get back to sleep after 5:00, and it worked, if only briefly.

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

I'm taking some sort of computer certification test using Prometric's testing software. I get to the end of the test, and the software gives me a message saying that the computer hasn't been recording any of my answers after the first four or five, and there are only 4 minutes left on the test's countdown clock, so there's no time to go back and answer them again. The timer runs out, and the software gives me a big fat zero as a test score. Very distressed, I run down to the end of the row of computers where I'm sitting, which is in the center of a large, open room. There's a desk with another computer on it in a cubicle at the end of the row, with one teacher/supervisor sitting at the desk and another standing outside the cubicle. I tell the one standing outside the cubicle what happened, but I see that the one sitting at the desk has my green-and-white CompTIA ID card right there, with my picture on it and everything. That tells me that I must have passed the test; otherwise, they wouldn't have made an ID card for me.

Guy is there. I follow him into another room, where there is a big, black laser printer. He explains to me how sometimes, the test results get sent directly to the printer without being saved on the computer, and that's what happened to me. I say, “So I didn't just lose an hour and a half of work?” He says, “No.” [In the dream, I actually had the false memory of working on that test for the last hour and a half.]

Woke up at 11:55 P.M. (after having gone to bed at 10:20 P.M.) and was really surprised at how short a time I'd been asleep. I exclaimed, “That was only one cycle?! Wow!” That was a really long and detailed dream for a first cycle. I felt that this was a promising sign, and decided right then and there to try for a lucid dream later. (I'm supposed to be cycle-adjusting right now, but I was feeling impatient. Sorry.) I took some notes, then went back to sleep.

[Fragment] I'm interacting with all the characters from Inception this time. [I don't remember anything we did, except that] At one point, a bunch of us are sitting around a dark wood dining table, apparently in a restaurant.

[Fragment] I'm in House #2, upstairs, and I shoo a cat out of my bedroom. I know that it's already too late; it's been in the room long enough that I'm going to start having allergic reactions when I go into my room.

Woke up at 4:25 A.M., took down some more notes, then listened to the second half of my binaural beats file and did some MILDing. It worked.

I'm following my friend Sam K. and his girlfriend [who I can't identify as a specific person in this dream] through the entrance to a department store in a mall. There are other people in the store. I pass two different old men who are really tall and each have two sets of eyes right on top of each other, and are wearing two pairs of glasses on them. I think to myself, Those men must have an unusual deformity. Or I might be dreaming. I don't attain full lucidity or self-determination yet., though. [I didn't think to RC, either. D'oh.] I continue following Sam and his girlfriend. They start climbing a wide, white flight of stairs up to the second floor of the mall. I speak aloud to them, saying something along the lines of, “Guys! We could just take the elevator!” They either ignore me or just don't hear me.

Very short dreamskip. I'm on the second floor of the mall, looking up at a raised, square, brown section of the ceiling. I recognize it as the ceiling of the mall we used to go to all the time when I was a kid. [Which doesn't look at all like that in real life. Weird.] At that moment, I definitely know I'm dreaming, because I'm somewhere I wouldn't normally be in reality. I think to myself, F*** yeah. I'm here. [“Here,” in this case, meaning “in a dream,” not “at that particular mall.”]

I stop to take a good look around and touch things, to make sure the dream is stable so that I can explore it. [I'm learning to do this as a habit – yay!] I touch the carpet and look closely at the pattern on it. It's dark gray with little rectangular flecks of various colors on it in rows. I start walking around in the mall. Sam and his girlfriend are gone. This part of the second floor is the food court. I cross over the walkway that bridges one side of the mall and the other. There are white tables and chairs everywhere. One of the fast-food restaurants in the food court is an Orange Julius. I pass it, then turn around to listen and watch while somebody makes some kind of public announcement about something. [I don't remember what they said now.]

It occurs to me that since this is a dream, I can climb over the chairs and tables with impunity. I climb up onto a table, walk across it, step down onto a chair, then hop back down onto the floor. The impact feels lighter than it would have in real life. I say something like, “Sure enough, no one cares!” [Wow. That's quite a shift from the respectful attitude I had toward the DCs in my journal entry dated 05-Nov-2010. This worries me.]

I continue walking along through the food court, then think, Why am I just walking? I can fly. I can explore faster if I fly, too. So I start flying, going only a little faster than I'd been walking, and staying at about the same height above the floor of the mall as my eyes are when I'm standing up. [I'd never flown indoors or in front of DCs before, so it makes sense that I would be cautious about it.] There are two vaguely gangster-ish guys in front of me, one of whom says to me, “You're lookin' at me the wrong way.” I ignore them and fly right on past them. I head toward a row of glass-and-black-metal doors hung with dark red curtains. This is the entrance to another department store. Strangely, I find it difficult to fly toward them with any speed at all. It feels like trying to push one pole of a smaller magnet (me) toward the same pole of a much bigger magnet. I realize that it would be much easier going if I started flying backward, so I decide to release my deliberate control over my flying and let myself be pulled backward, just to see where I end up. The unknown force pulls me backward through the air very quickly. Much to my dismay, I wake up. I might have guessed that that was what would happen.

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Side notes:

I didn't wear my cardboard-square bracelet at all tonight, which suggests that it isn't the deciding factor in whether or not I succeed in inducing a lucid dream. It has to be either the MILD affirmations or the binaural beats file. (Or both; how do I know that the combination isn't more than the sum of its parts?)

Well, you might have noticed I haven't posted in this DJ for about a month...this is because I've been kind of taking a hiatus from attempting to lucid dream. My success rates were ridiculously low, and I had the feeling it was because I had so many different methods in my head that I couldn't stick with just one, and I probably wasn't doing any of them correctly anyway out of a lack of motivation.

Basically, I'd lost my appreciation for lucid dreams because all of mine were a bunch of very hard-earned crap. I read back through some of the earlier entries of my DJ, when the concept of LDing was new to me, and I was kind of inspired by my enthusiasm from back then, so I figured I should just start over.

I had no real 'return date', just whenever felt right...and I guess that would be now, since I had a lucid dream after relearning MILD and focusing only on that method for a bit. However, it didn't quite succeed the first time, so I'll put down that non-lucid dream as well, for the sake of recall and finding more dream signs.

Dream 1: I was at work. It was a pretty normal day, except for a lot of little behavioral abnormalities in all my coworkers. The differences weren't big enough to make me realize I was dreaming, but they did get me thinking.

Then I went to stock some music that had just come in, and I noticed a poster that had a rather big difference: the band name didn't seem familiar at all. I recognized the album cover, but the name just wasn't right...although...I couldn't really...remember what the right name was anyway.

Suddenly this fact became like taking a blow to the head. I stumbled back, my vision suddenly fuzzy and dizzy. After a bit my confusion grew to the point where I couldn't remember that I was confused, and so all this ceased and I came back to.

Once my vision had cleared, I still couldn't recall the proper name for the band, but this time the name I was seeing sank in. The poster read: "The Lucid Dreamers"

Next thing I know, the dream has gone to me being on a train with a bunch of other people, and eating Pizza. I was annoyed that my sense of taste was so weak. I could taste the Canadian Bacon, but everything else was very bland, like a distant sound is to an ear.

Then I woke up.

Of course technically my MILD hadn't yet worked, but it sure had gotten me a long ways. I had seen and recognized differences in multiple senses and circumstances, and my mind was obviously thinking about lucid dreaming due to the poster. It happened to be early enough in the morning for me to go back to sleep and try again, so I wasted no time. I repeated my MILD a couple more times and was out once again.

Dream 2: The dream began with me as a soldier in a futuristic city that strongly resembled what you see in the movie Minority Report. I was part of a squad that was taking down a group of Koreans that had invaded the place. (no offense if you're reading this and you're Korean, of course, I just play Crysis from time to time) Suddenly, however, I realized something...I was in a sci-fi city, firing a weapon, and wearing a suit of armor. All of this was cited in my MILD as dream signs to watch out for.

I smiled to myself then, looked through the scope on my weapon, and picked off all of the remaining enemies as if I were an aimbot. Precision and accuracy was 100% all the way. I threw down my weapon then and flew up into the air to get a good look at the place. The thought occurred to me that I should reality check, but I decided against it.

"I already know that I'm dreaming, and usually if I nose-plug RC when I'm like this it wakes me up." I told myself as I glided over the vast expanse of the world.

Below me, everywhere I looked I saw cars speeding along multi-level highways, rotating 90 degrees and then plunging straight down to reach other levels when need be. All of the buildings they rushed in between were shiny and steel; cold, clean, and sophisticated.

It was also all fading away.

"No, this dream can NOT end now!"

I rubbed my hands together furiously, but things were still fading out. So I tried spinning then, still rubbing my hands together. The city only spun about me as it finally faded into blackness.

"Rats...I failed." I thought.

But after a few more moments, I still hadn't woken up. I looked around me again, and now I saw a grid of white dots everywhere in the blackness, increasing in clarity every second. I rubbed my hands together again, and one by one each of the white dots became a building, every one more detailed and clear than before. It wasn't long until the whole city was back, and I was ready to head out on an adventure.

Unfortunately, this is where my memory begins to fail me, thanks to the unpleasant way the dream ended. I just know that I did go on many adventures and they were thrilling and satisfying to say the least. The dream tried to fade out multiple times, but I was always able to bring it back without problem. Somewhere along the way, that girl from multiple previous dreams was back again and we went on a lot of the adventures together. It was great.

But then the dream transitioned, and although I was still lucid, I decided I was done for the night because those adventures had ended so well and I didn't want to mess up such a great ending by doing something else, so I allowed myself to become non-lucid again and just watch the last few minutes of the dream.

What a mistake that was!

I was still in the same city, but I walked home, and everything there was still normal, further convincing me I was not dreaming any more. Then I got a phone call from that girl I mentioned, and she said she had to see me. I told her to come on over, but it turned out she was already just outside my door .

"What is it?" I asked as I let her in.

"I just had my first lucid dream!" She exclaimed. "It was amazing...I know you've told me about them before, but I didn't realize how incredible it really is! I even wrote it down in a dream journal just like you said you do. Here, look!"

She handed me her dream journal and I read it. It was the lucid dream I had just been through, but all from her perspective.

"I know." I said, handing the journal back. "I had this same lucid dream!"

That really blew her away. She was so excited she hugged me, and I thought I'd never let go. But...then I got another phone call. It was another friend of mine, asking if he could talk to this girl. She took the phone, but I could hear the voice on the other side saying:

"That guy is a moron! I know you care about him, but I just need to warn you. He's seriously messed up. I've got his dream journal open on my computer right now; he talks about a lot of really weird stuff and he actually believes it. I'm telling you, he says he found a Dream Room and can enter other people's dreams, and there's even these posts about using self-hypnosis for lucid dreams, or the theory that ghosts are lucid dreamers..."

I couldn't have been more annoyed. Or scared. I saw tears enter the girl's eyes as she slowly sank against the wall and slid down to sitting on the floor, and I thought she might try to run away, so I sat down as well and put my hands on her shoulders so she'd look me in the eyes.

"I can explain everything!" I said. "He's twisting the truth to make me sound crazy! I promise!"

The tears receded, but she didn't seem fully convinced, since she kept listening to this guy verbally murder every aspect of my reputation.

I woke up in a sweat and with my heart pounding...for a moment I still was afraid that that relationship was in danger, but of course I quickly realized I had woken up and all of it was not a real problem.

But aside from the unpleasant awakening, I'm quite happy with this MILD technique! I think I'll focus on it for a while longer now and see what I can do

Lucids in this color
Info/whatever in this color
Regular dreams/ non-lucid moments in thi color
Full control prt.1
So i was actually rocking out in a rock concert playing the guitar. (it was awesome) and i go down into the crowd when suddenly my guitar unplugs and every one else stops playing. Then someone I know from school wanted to sing so i was looking for something then i got out of the dream and had my eyes closed and i actually figured out right there i was dreaming and somehow forced my self back into the dream
So i get back into the dream and start rocking out again. Later i jump off stage and see someone i actually know in real life so i tell him i'm dreaming and he just stands there and freaks

Part 2 coming soon

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

[I apologize in advance for how much of the page this entry takes up. It was my longest lucid dream to date, though, and I wanted to make the best record of it I could.]

I'm at my old high school, outside the entrance to my mom's old classroom. The open-air entrance on one side of the classroom and the semi-enclosed atrium on the other side are reversed from the sides they're on in real life. I'm listening to an old woman [Betty J.? Aunt Edie? I'm not sure] talk about life. I also remember reading some text about how in the old days, we just lived together with love and respect for one another as a matter of course, without any need for external forces like social programs to manipulate or engineer good feelings between people. [Yep. That sounds like my mind, all right.]

I'm playing PackRat. [Again. I am so sick of dreaming about PackRat, and I know perfectly well that the only way to stop dreaming about it is to stop playing it. That'll happen at the end of this year, I hope.] I discover that the reason an old collection cannot be completed is that they created all the cards, with artwork and everything, but never actually made them available to players.

I'm looking through a rack of envelopes of photo prints, organized by the subject of the photos.

I'm reading a novel on a shiny, black electronic reader. The last page of one chapter has a small illustration of a rolling, bouncing boulder on it [this illustration is from a particular PackRat card]. The electronic reader has small, rectangular “previous page” and “next page” buttons in the lower right corner. It also has readouts in the lower left corner of the screen that show remaining battery life and how many inches from your eyes the screen is. It says that a distance of at least 9 inches is recommended. I see my reflection in its surface and am surprised to discover that I'm wearing glasses. [I don't wear them in real life, but I might have to, someday.]

I go to say good night to my dad. He shows me that he's discovered a way to screw this cylindrical part onto his guitar so that it still has its protective plastic cover.

WBTB at 3:58 A.M. I stayed up for 10-15 minutes, taking notes on the dreams I recalled so far. Then I listened to the second half of my binaural beats file and continued doing affirmations, this time including remembering to stabilize my dream as one of them. I then spent about 45 minutes being kept awake by my coughing and sneezing, but eventually, I managed to get back to sleep. I think I even experienced sleep paralysis for the first time ever; I remember a moment when it felt like my body was vibrating or shaking really fast.

When I find myself in House #1, I immediately know I'm dreaming. [Since I was lucid from the very beginning and can remember a little bit of the sleep paralysis, I think I may have just performed a successful WILD, even though I didn't originally intend to.] This time, I succeed in remembering to stop and take in the scene before doing anything else, in order to stabilize the dream. Once again, I gaze around in awe of the fact that my mind can create such a detailed and realistic environment. Everything looks real, even though I know it's not. I walk around the house a bit, and when I get to the sinks in the bathroom and kitchen, I look at the faucets and quietly expect them to turn on, and they do, without my touching them. [I think that's pretty cool.]

I go out into the study, which looks pretty much just as it did in reality, except that the space inside it is entirely filled with spiderwebs. I turn back and go back into the house, with spiderwebs sticking all over me. When I come back in, I accidentally let a spider into the house, too. It has a big, nearly spherical body with stripes in two different shades of gray. I squash it while it's walking along the wall in the master bedroom. Then I discover another, even bigger, red spider/crab thing on the carpet, and squash that one, too, saying something about how sorry I am for making a stain on the carpet. [The carpet I squashed the spider into was light brown and semi-shaggy. House #1 never had carpet like that; that's the kind of carpet we have in House #3. I didn't notice this until after I woke up, at which point I found it highly amusing that the details of the carpet had been off in one of my dreams and I hadn't noticed. ]

My mom is there in the house. [I don't really remember the specifics of this part, but] I lie down on the bed in the master bedroom and get under the covers so that my parents won't see that I'm quivering and shaking in the throes of SP. [I don't even know.]

I decide I want to leave the house and go explore other parts of this dream world, but I feel obliged to take leave of my parents first and tell them where I'm going, but I want to keep it a secret from them that I'm dreaming. I say to myself, “If I told them I was going to school, would they believe me? Given the setting, they might.” As I say this, what I have in mind is that I'm going to pretend to be setting out on foot for my junior high school. [Funny; that was the only school I ever took the school bus to. I did walk from my house to the bus stop, though.]

I walk through the side yard toward the front gate. I find my parents in the corner of the yard, where the wall with said gate in it meets the wall of the neighbors' house, doing some kind of yard work. I say, “I'm going to school. Bye, Mom!”

“Bye, (Emiko)!” says my mom, and it sounds exactly the same as it always does when my real mom says it. [Obviously, an unaltered memory.] “Have a good day!”

“You, too!” I say, or something like it. I walk out through the front gate and down toward the street. The neighborhood seems more spacious and spread-out than it is in reality. Now that no one is looking, I begin flying, taking off from the middle of the street and traveling parallel to it and upward from it at an angle, like an airplane taking off.

As I fly higher into the air, the dream and my dream consciousness start to fade away. Now, having read the DEILD tutorial, I had some idea of what to do. I lay absolutely still in my bed and concentrated intently on the dream I had just been having, willing myself to start dreaming again. It worked. [First successful DEILD, too! I was really on a roll last night!]

I end up in a group of interconnected, upstairs rooms in a building somewhere. I seem to have flown there. The rooms are white, and there are chairs, upholstered stools, and bookshelves in them. From reading a plaque on a wall near a doorway, I learn that these rooms are reading rooms dedicated to a strange alternate take on Christianity, centered around an alternate set of gospels written by different people. [I didn't recognize it as any sect that exists in real life.] One of the rooms has an analog clock on the wall. It doesn't have numbers, just a circle and two hands, all made of the same rough, gray metal. Even though I already know I'm dreaming, I deliberately look at the clock, glance away, and then look at it again to see if the hands have jumped. The first time I try this, they seem to be in pretty much the same position they were in, so I try again. The second time, they've jumped to a totally different position. I am pleased with myself; again, I was expecting that to happen, so it did.

I leave these rooms and start walking down a flight of stairs. The dream starts to fade again, but again, I manage to stay in it through sheer willpower.

The stairs end in a wide hallway. There is a set of double doors to the right, leading into a room. Judging by the decorations and items outside these doors and inside the room, it looks like there's a wedding going on. Am I the bride? I wonder, but when I enter the large, rectangular room and see the retail-style displays of clothing and stuff, I think, Oh, good. Just a fair, then. I see a real-life friend [I forget who] to my right, who says to me, “Cute dress, (Emiko)!”

“Thank you!” I answer, even though I think this is an odd thing to say, because all I'm wearing is a damp, clammy black blanket wrapped around me. It feels like it's made of swimsuit material. I continue further into the room, turning to my left and walking that way. I look down and to the left, between two racks of clothing, and see another real-life friend, Eleanor B. She's wearing a royal-blue bridesmaid dress [the one she was wearing the last time I saw her in real life, which was at the wedding of some mutual friends]. I call her name twice to get her attention. She looks up, sees me, and stands up to talk to me. I come over and talk to her. When I take a closer look at the clothes hanging on the rack we're standing next to, I say something like, “And are these the new Christmas sweatshirts from Target? Cute! I want!” The sweatshirts are white and have patterns on them of snowflakes made up of narrow lines, either in shades of pink or shades of teal. They also have hems and seams in those colors. I take one pink one and one teal one off the rack and carry them with me. They feel soft.

I leave that room and find myself outside. In the distance, I can see big mountains with snow on top of them. I continue exploring and somehow [I don't remember the exact route I took] make it into an old Japanese temple (or residence, or something). It has a very old, very traditional room with tatami mats on the floor. I pry off each of my sneakers in turn, using the toe of the other foot (suddenly, I'm wearing sneakers, I think). [Yes, I actually thought that while in the dream. Now that I think of it, I think I was suddenly wearing regular clothes, too.] Leaving my sneakers (the exact same ones I have in real life, I note) out in the passageways, I enter the room with the tatami mats and walk around in it. I can feel the mats and my socks under my feet. I say aloud to myself, “Wait – we're allowed to walk around in here? Oh – of course we are; that's what I was expecting.” Yet again, something is so because I expected it to be so. [In all my real-life experience visiting historical tourist sites in Japan, we were never allowed to actually enter the rooms with the tatami; we were only allowed to look into them from the outside. I always wanted to walk around inside them, though, so now, in a dream, I got my wish. Cool.]

Outside of this room are some passageways that are all painted a dusty shade of teal, and have wooden signs hanging in them. I walk around in here for a few minutes. One of the signs says “Telephone,” and indeed, there is a pay telephone on the wall in a wooden box. It looks like an old tourist facility.

One of the doorways within these passageways leads into a spacious, modern restaurant that I recognize as the one inside the onsen [hot spring] that I visited while I was living in Japan. There are a few people sitting at tables here and there. I walk through the restaurant, looking for one of my real-life friends [I don't remember which one now]. I don't find her there, so I decide to head for the restaurant's exit and go somewhere else.

The way to the exit is through a long passageway with a wall on the right side and an upholstered bench on the left side where guests can sit and wait for tables, which separates the passageway from the rest of the restaurant. There are two people sitting on the bench. As I approach the door, I think, What shall I do next? Task of the Month – cell phone – oh, yeah! For a split second I think of getting out my cell phone to text somebody, but then I remember the new Task of the Month for November. I turn to one of the two DCs sitting on the bench, the one sitting nearest the door, who happens to be a black, pregnant woman. “Hey, can I tell you what I'm thankful for?” I say to her.

“Okay.” She straightens, sitting forward on the edge of the bench, listening to me.

“I'm thankful for my family, and [something else I can't remember now], and my computer, and for being able to come here!” I say. [Meaning, to the dream world.] Unfortunately, the dream starts to fade again just as I'm finishing my sentence.

FA in which, instead of being me, I'm Cobb. Mal is there when I wake up, the real one. [They're characters from Inception.] We talk about something, probably the dream I just had. [I don't remember now exactly what it was we talked about, but dude. That was a really weird FA.]

FA in which I count my fingers while they're spread out against the legs of my jeans. When I find I have a sixth finger on my left hand, my reaction is, “Oh, damn. Gosh-darn it!” Apparently, I really want to actually be awake. But I'm still feeling sleepy, so I lie down, sprawling over the sides of the white, wooden bench I'm sitting on.

When I woke up for real, I just lay there for several minutes because my body still felt heavy. I recalled my dream and was pretty impressed.

--------------------------------

Side notes:

That was the longest lucid dream I've ever had. I'm also very impressed and pleased with the number of times I succeeded in controlling what happened just by expecting something to happen. I really got the hang of that skill last night. Finally, I'm amazed that I managed to stay lucid for that long, and to force myself to keep dreaming so many times when the dream threatened to end. Wow!

Awake, Non-lucid, Lucid, [Commentary made while writing journal entry]

[Fragment] I'm at junior high school, going to class and learning what my class schedule will be.

The next dream starts out like a documentary about Canada. In the dream, I remember that I visited a city in Canada once, and my strongest impression upon arriving there was, “Wow, I'm in a foreign country!” [I've never actually been to Canada. These are most likely straight-up false memories, but I also got the feeling when taking notes during my WBTB that they might possibly have been memories of a previous dream that I'd otherwise forgotten about. Weird.] According to the documentary, Canada has a “Mexico City,” a concentrated population center of Mexican immigrants.

The dream then shifts from a documentary to an episode of “The Red Panda Adventures” that involves all of Canada being hypnotized/brainwashed into hating a man with the last name of Campbell. I remember a long text document [don't ask me why a dream about an episode of an audio series generates a dream image of a text document] that goes on and on about what a despicable person Campbell is. At one point in the text document, there is a warped and twisted version of the Canadian equivalent of the Pledge of Allegiance that also mentions his name and says something bad about him. [I was curious, so I looked it up, and it turns out that there is no Canadian equivalent of the Pledge of Allegiance. My mind just made one up. Cool.]

Woke up at 4:00 A.M. at the end of a sleep cycle and needed the restroom, so I used it, then took a few notes on my dreams so far, then went back to sleep.

I'm in a really big library with white walls and lots of light wood. The word “dream” crosses my mind somehow. [I don't remember whether someone said it, or I saw it on a sign, or I was just thinking about it; I think it was probably the latter.] However it happens, it makes me realize, “Hey, I'm dreaming! I did it!”

I decide to try doing a scene transition. [I don't remember how I did it, but] I find myself sitting in front of a computer monitor, which is displaying a command prompt against a black screen. The program that's running is a text adventure based on the novel Watership Down. I can't do anything right in it – I try entering a couple of commands, but none of them make any progress. Even the inventory command yields a response that goes something like, “You can't have an inventory with only one!” It means that you have to have more than one rabbit in your party before you can check your inventory. I quickly discover that the program is tied to the computer's clock, and that if a certain number of seconds pass without the player making any progress, the program just gives you a Game Over saying something about how you just got eaten (you, the rabbit, in the game, that is). After I get this Game Over, I think: “I don't have to sit here and play this text adventure just because I ended up here. If I want to, I can get up from this computer and go explore the building.” So I do.

I'm still in the library, because that's where that computer is. It's near a second-story interior passageway that's open and more like a balcony, overlooking the ground floor of the library. I follow the passageway over to where it ends in a flight of stairs going down, then descend the stairs, holding on to the handrails the entire way to keep myself focused on and grounded in the dream, and to make sure it remains stable. It works. The whole time, I'm marveling at how the sensations of walking, descending stairs, and holding the handrails are exactly like they would be in reality. The stairs have handrails running up the middle of the steps, but they aren't parallel to the ones running up the sides of the stairs; they're at an angle, so I have to go through a narrow space between two handrails on the last few steps of the staircase. I say, “Why did I have to design these stairs this way?”

I exit the building, and am outside on a dream version of my college campus. It's sunny and beautiful, and all the buildings are big and white and slightly old-fashioned [in real life, most of them are various shades of brown, tan, or orange, and none of them date back further than the 1940s]. Also, the St. Louis Arch and another, light-brown arch with some words on it in black, marking the entrance to some area, are there. [I can't remember what the words said now, but there were two of them, they were the name of the area, and they both started with S.] I go, “Ahhh, it's so good to be here.”

I notice that the beach, with its light-colored, soft sand, is down at the bottom of the cliff. I decide to try something. I think to myself, “When I close my eyes and turn around, I'm going to be standing on that beach down there.” I close my eyes, turn around in a circle (not too fast), and then open them again. I'm now on the beach, not quite at the exact spot I had been shooting for, but pretty close. “It worked!” I say aloud.

I stand on the beach for a moment, but the waves suddenly start coming up really close to the cliff, so there's not enough dry sand left to stand on. I decide to spin around again to go somewhere else, but this time, I'm thinking, “Just take me wherever.”

[In retrospect, that wasn't a very good idea.] I end up on the porch of an old, slightly spooky-looking house made of wooden boards, that seems to be floating on the ocean. It's not abandoned, though – there is a couple living in it. Also, I now have a friend with me – no one I know in real life, just a random, unnamed female dream character.

I look out from the porch to the east at the surrounding landscape and see a world that is ending. The sky is filled with thick, solid black clouds, with streaks of bright red and orange here and there because the sun is rising behind them. The entire landscape is flooded, and a jumble of disconnected buildings stick out of the water here and there. Some of them are on fire, some are falling apart, and one is being ruled over by some sort of dictator, whose enormous figure I can see looming over the building and gesturing with his arms in a way that means “work, you miserable peons!”

The couple who live in the house we're at start talking to me and my friend. They say that we have to get back to safety by sailing back the way we came. I think, “But we didn't sail here! We teleported!” I don't say so, though. [I don't know why not. Either I didn't get a chance to say anything, or I didn't want her to know about my newfound teleportation abilities, I'm not sure.]

[From this point forward, my recall is a little less clear in that I remember all the scenes, but none of the transitions or connections between them.]

The next thing I remember is facing away from the house toward the west, where there is a sort of path leading away from the house, but it's made up of a bunch of vines (or tree roots?). I try to get to the other end of the path by spinning around and closing my eyes again, but this time it doesn't work at all. I say, “Okay, if we can't do that, we'll just get there the hard way,” and start climbing over the vines.

Somehow, I end up on the deck of a ship, and there are waves coming up onto the deck I'm on, over and through the metal railing to my left. One of them doesn't look very big (it's about the same height as the railing), but it breaks right on the deck I'm on, tilting the ship over but not capsizing it.

The next thing I know, my friend and I are being escorted through the flooded landscape in a boat. There is a tank-like, armored boat with lots of guns in front of our boat, and another one behind ours. I take it they're there for our protection, but I quickly figure out that they're mostly just there for intimidation, and they're not even doing a very good job of that. There are lots of dangerous things trying to attack us, including exploding police cars, but we and our boat are passing through all of them as if they were air. What's really protecting us is a magic spell, one which, I know in the dream, comes from the Incarnations of Immortality universe.

I'm on foot, indoors, running away from something. I run into what appears to be a bathroom. I wonder if the protection spell is still holding now that I'm off the boat.

[I'm not entirely sure whether these last two scenes were in this order, or the reverse order:]

I'm a student sitting in a classroom, on the first day of school. All the other student seats are full of preteen or teenage Japanese girls, but the teacher is white. She explains that all we'll do in her class is make these little hat/hair accessory things out of tissue paper, which must be very trendy, because many of the girls are wearing them in their hair.

I'm standing on some rocks in the ocean, near the beach. I'm still lucid, so I think, “Okay! Text-messaging! Task of the month!” I go to take my phone out of my pocket, but then think, “No, better not do that here – I don't want to get my phone wet.”

Woke up and was delighted to have had another lucid dream. While thinking back over it, I laughed out loud at that last part – I was concerned about my phone getting wet? It wasn't even my real phone! :-D Then again, I realized that that makes sense: my dream cell phone would have been just as damaged by dream water as my real one would be by real water. After all, that's what I expect will happen when cell phones get wet.

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Commentary:

Last night, I listened to about half of my binaural beats file at the beginning of the night, did a five-minute WBTB, did a lot of MILD affirmation and visualization both when I first went to bed and when I was going back to sleep after the WBTB, and had a new cardboard-square bracelet, one made with a smaller square of thicker cardboard than my first one, on my wrist the entire time. Something helped me have a really good, long lucid dream. I don't know what. How very unscientific of me, I know. I'm sorry, everybody.

On a more positive note, I'm getting a little better at this! I had more lucidity than ever before this time, and I thought about and actively tried out some dream control techniques while in the dream. I've moved out of the “what is this new world?!” phase now, and into a phase that can be characterized by these thoughts: “Okay, I get the idea of what lucid dreams are, but how do I shot web?” That is, I'm just starting to learn to use those dream control abilities. It was one thing to read about the spinning scene-change/teleportation ability, but as with most skills, now that I've done it for myself, I truly understand what it's like. Note to self, though: I should never spin around to transition to a new scene without first deciding what the new scene should be, because if I let it be random, I may not like what I get.

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

When my 6:30 alarm went off this morning, I was still sleepy, despite having gone to bed just after 10, and I felt somehow sure that I'd have at least one dream that I remembered if I slept in for another hour, so I reset the alarm for 7:30. Luckily, before I fell asleep again, I remembered that REM cycles take 90 minutes, so I reset it again for 8:00. [I'm not entirely sure in what order I had the following dreams, nor am I sure whether the first one took place before or after the 6:30 alarm, but here they all are.]

I open my eyes in my bedroom and immediately notice that the light fixture in the center of the ceiling has a square cover over the lightbulb, like the light over the shower in my real bathroom, not a round cover like it does in my real bedroom. I say right out loud, “That light is wrong, so I must be dreaming! HELLS TO THE YEAH!” I get out of bed, but then stand just inside the door for a few moments, trying to figure out whether or not I can still breathe through my nose while pinching it shut. It seems I can, but only a little bit. Confused, I give up trying to figure it out and leave the room to say good morning to my mom. She's there, just like normal. I go back in my room and, still hopeful that this might still be a dream, try to walk through one of the walls. Again, it doesn't work; the wall and I are completely solid to each other.

The Dream King is talking to me. [Not the one from The Sandman; it's the gryphon from the Rankin-Bass version of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”] He says something along the lines of, “When you summoned us for fun times earlier, you bounced and lay down. The next time you do it, could you lay on your back first so the palace doesn't get shaken around?”

I'm in a park somewhere with P. We have to go through it to get home. There are all these dogs running around, and she protects me from them just by knowing how to act confidently and politely toward them. At some point, we end up riding bareback on a horse through the park. I can feel the horse's hair. Eventually we get to an escalator and start riding up it (yes, still on our horse). It goes up into an enclosed chamber with animatronic figurines in it, designed to look like the riders of the escalator are coming out of the mouth of some giant creature. There is some kind of audio narration playing, thanking us for visiting this attraction. When we get to the top of the escalator and exit the chamber, we're on a street.

The 8:00 alarm went off for real, and I recalled all of the above. I went out of my room and talked to my mom.
Me: I just had a really confusing dream. Is this the first time I've come out to say hi to you this morning, or the second?
Mom: The first.
Me: I thought so. That's what I dreamed about.
After I'd confirmed it, I started feeling happy and proud about having another lucid dream.

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Meta-commentary:

The WBTB+MILD technique seems to be working well for me, at least giving me interesting dreams with good recall, if not consistently giving me lucid dreams. I've found something that works for me, though, so I'm going to keep it up. I was making the effort with my MILDing again last night, but I could be putting even more effort into it. Also, I had my cardboard-square bracelet on for most of the night, but I think I took it off when the 6:30 alarm went off because I was tired of wearing it. I'm not sure, though, so I can't say whether or not I was wearing it when I had my lucid dream. Finally, I shall have to remember not to rely on the nose-pinch RC so much; it served to confuse the issue rather than to clarify it. Next time, I'll try the finger-counting method.

Awake, Non-lucid, Lucid, [Commentary and notes written while awake]

Last night, while going to sleep and attempting to MILD, I stopped to pray. I had stopped to pray the previous night, too, and had had no dreams that I could remember, so I almost didn't want to do it again, but I told myself, Post hoc, ergo propter hoc much? You know that doesn't make sense. Just go ahead and do it. So I did. [I'm only writing this part down because it relates to the first dream I had last night.]

[Dream #1] On the corner of the street my house is on [a corner that doesn't exist in real life – the real corner is just a 90-degree turn in the road, but in the dream, it's a four-way intersection], in the front yard of the corner house, there is a big, tall tree with bright yellow leaves like the leaves on a maidenhair tree. There are also some gourds with faces hand-carved on them hanging from the tree. The house belongs to an old woman, who did the carving. I am reading a newspaper article about this house, in a newspaper called The Syntax. According to the article, a few days ago, a strong wind picked up and blew all the leaves off the tree. Immediately thereafter, people in the neighborhood started having various strokes of both good and bad fortune, and they all claimed that it was because of the wind blowing the leaves off the tree. This sparked a neighborhood-wide controversy: were the good things really caused by the tree, or the bad things, or none of them? Someone who was interviewed for the newspaper article argued for the “none of them” position by quoting the Bible verse about how no one can tell where the wind comes from or where it is going. [John 3:8, for the record.]

[Dream #2] I'm walking through an indoor hallway to get to some kind of high school sporting event that is being held in a high school gymnasium. One of the teams is called the Blue Meanies; they have two mascot outfits, a male and female Norse warrior. The other team has someone in a mascot outfit, too. [I don't remember now what it looked like, or what their team name was.] Each team has also brought just a handful of cheerleaders to the game.

[Dream #3] I'm playing PackRat. [Again.] There are two different limited-release collections pretty much right at the same time, and they've re-released a whole bunch of retired cards for the recipes in the retired collections. The images on one of the limited-release sets are of pipes or cables, and they extend across multiple different cards. They're making it even easier than they did with the jigsaw-puzzle set, I think. [The jigsaw-puzzle set exists in reality; this limited-release set does not.] I find that my pack has been erased and refilled with 5 cards from the other limited-release set, the one with normal art [in Doug J.'s signature style], one of which is the top card.

[Dream #4 – seemed to segue directly from the above, but how, I couldn't say] I'm outside somewhere, apparently in the yard or garden of some manor house or something, and it's nighttime. I see a fireworks show starting up a short distance away; the horizon is low and flat, so I can see it with no obstructions at all. My mom is there, and I tell her that if she turns around, she can see the fireworks show.

Woke up at 2:32 A.M. Took some notes on my dreams so far on a notepad, then went back to sleep, attempting to MILD again. It worked!

[Dream #5] I'm in the house I grew up in again. [Although this is a known dream sign for me, I don't remember specifically thinking, “hey, if I'm here, then I must be dreaming.” Nonetheless,] I'm lucid enough to decide to walk around from room to room of my own volition. When I get to the bathroom, I try to walk through the back wall of the white tile shower, which would take me out into the patio. [Yes, the real house is laid out that way.] It doesn't work; I only get part way into it, not through it. I don't feel anything. I continue walking through the house, and one of my parents sees me. [That's all I remember, unfortunately.]

[Dream #6] My family and I are on vacation in Key Largo. [Apart from having tropical beaches, it's absolutely nothing at all like the real Key Largo, which I've been to once.] It consists of a couple of islands connected by a bridge. On the first one, there is a high, tower-like hill. We climb the stairs to the top and look out at the ocean and the other island, which is where the town and the boat launch area are. I exclaim, “Guess what I forgot! Sunblock!” Then we go down the hill and over into town.

The town, or at least the downtown, consists of one big continuous building with corridors lined with shops and restaurants running through it. The entrances to the corridors are numbered and are rounded, making them look more like tunnels. We go down corridor #8 and pass a lot of shops. It's obvious how small and rivalry-filled, yet close-knit, the community here is by what's written on the signs people have in front of their shops: one of them says that their food is better than the food at another shop (even specifically naming the other one!), and another contains a proposal of marriage. Eventually, the tunnel ends in a rounded food court, like in a mall. My parents and I go over to a coffee shop/bakery toward the far side of the chamber and a little to the right. There are breads and pastries displayed all over the back wall and in long glass cases.

[Very abruptly, the scene changes and] My mom and I are driving in her car back toward the main highway that runs through the Florida Keys. (The two islands mentioned above that make up Key Largo stick out from it at a right angle.) I see the high-rise buildings of Key West [the what now?!] in the distance. The sun is either rising or setting, and the way its light is hitting them is making them glow with amazingly brilliant neon colors. [Some of which would be impossible in real life. It's surreal, but really beautiful.] I tell my mom to look at the light on the high-rises, and she does. In order to get a better view of it from further back, she turns the car so the front windshield is facing the high-rises, then starts backing it up, across the sandy beach and into the ocean. Somewhere around here, I shift to viewing the scene from a third-person perspective, up above the car. The car keeps going across the water for a pretty good distance before it sinks into the ocean and we die. Then I think to myself, “Only not really, because this is a dream.” Then the scene rewinds [on its own, not because of anything I did, thought, or willed]. The car drives forward, back over the surface of the water, with me still watching from my third-person perspective.

On our way back toward the town (I'm back to first-person perspective now), I look back and can see where the main highway is by the telephone poles and elevated bridges on the horizon. When we reach the town, I can see that there's a small railroad that goes all the way around the outside of the building, and every shop has a back door that opens onto the railroad track. This is how they load and unload things. Of course, I think; there's no room for cars or trucks on the island. [Then what are we doing driving our car there?] We re-enter the coffee shop/bakery from before, through the back door, and now we order food: cinnamon rolls out of one of those canisters you get from the refrigerated section at the grocery store. The shop attendant opens the canister behind the counter, and the vertical stack of cinnamon rolls expands, the frosting running down the sides. I say aloud, “Do want!” We proceed along the outside of the glass cases to where the coffee machines are. The signs on the coffee machines show that they contain a milder and a bolder version of Dunkin' Donuts coffee. I start getting myself some coffee, and then the dream ends.

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Some meta-commentary on the lucid dreaming journey:

One of the things I'm really liking about this experiment with dream journaling and lucid dreaming is that it's finally broken me of the bad habit of staying up past 11:00 every night that I developed when I started college. I was still doing it up until a week or two ago. I always used to want to stay in bed until well after sunrise, but the sunlight always woke me up, so I got a sleep mask and got into the habit of reaching over and putting it on as soon as the sunlight started to wake me up, then continuing to sleep, or trying to. I've been in this habit for at least a year, and I'm finding that it's so deeply ingrained that I'm still doing it, even though I'm now going to bed earlier and getting up at or before sunrise. I would be annoyed by this if I hadn't realized that it's useful – I have a natural, biological WBTB alarm set.

Last night, I read this thread and decided to adopt the mantra “I lucid dream” for MILD purposes. I decided to put that sentence in the same mental categories with such sentences as “I play the clarinet,” “I speak Spanish,” and “I write novels:” the categories of “ongoing, recurring action” and “learned skill.”

My previous lucid experience back on the night of October 1 left me euphoric for the entirety of the next day, but this one just left me disappointed. While I was recalling my dreams after waking up, I thought: What did I just say about lucid dreaming being a learned skill? That was only my third time. What was it like the third time I played the clarinet? I know the answer to that one: I only played one, two, or three different notes, because that was all I knew how to play. It took lots of practice and learning before I could play all the notes. I hope, and intend, to master lucid dreaming skills via the same process.

So I have never done any sort of lucid dream and I am just getting into it. I keep failing at attaining lucidity by doing a DILD for the last few days so I decided to try a WILD. So what I tried was I went to bed at 12 am and set my alarm for 6:30 am, i woke up had a coke and some chocolate. I set another alarm for 7:30 am, once that alarm went off I went back in bed and lied on my back. I just relaxed and focused on my breathing as much as possible. I kept thinking I starting to vibrate but it was just my pulse getting stronger and stronger. I can literally feel that im not going into sleep paralysis for a long time when ive read only takes like 15 minutes. I get up and look at the clock and its been 45 minutes. I am now posting this in hope someone has some advise for me cause ive lost a little bit of lucid motivation. Any advice would help, thanks.

16.06.2010

110: 6.16.10; 9:52AM BREAKING NEWS: Police Arrest Off-Duty Officer, and the Minotaur is Dead! (MILD)

NON-DREAM DREAM LUCID

I had a rather lengthy lucid dream, of which I will relay two parts to ensure the details I provide are accurate and interesting.

I was at the end of my driveway (a recurring location in my dreams), and saw three police trucks speeding on the road, coming to a fast stop in front of my driveway gate, lights flashing in the warm daylight, arranged in such a way as to surround a black SUV, now stopped along with the police vehicles on the road. The police got out of their vehicles with shotguns drawn and aimed at the SUV. I put up my hands to show that I was there and didn't intend to interfere, but figured that as I was standing next to my gate behind a couple trees, I really didn't need to have my hands up like the man who was exiting the SUV, and stepped a little behind my gate to watch the events unfold.

The man stepped out of the SUV, a well-built man with dark clothing and a shaved head - certainly not a person to be screwing around with. His hands were still up as he got to the hood of his car and leaned over it, as the cops wanted. One of the officers drew a rifle that resembled the shotguns the others had, and shot the man in the chest three or four times. He fell to the pavement with no visible wounds, leading me to the conclusion that it was a kind of stungun, with non-piercing rounds.

The officers surrounded him, allowing just enough visibility of the man for me to see that he himself was wearing a dark blue jacket with police patches all over the sleeves and shoulders. I figured I'd see it in the next day's newspaper, seeing as he was an off-duty officer who's arrest I'd just witnessed. One officer looked over at me and said something, which I only took to mean that they were okay with me standing there close by, watching. They took the man away and the dream transitioned.


A while later into my dream, I was in an all-wooden room on a structure made of poles, almost like bamboo coloured a rich brown. I wasn't alone within this structure - I was fighting a minotaur. Yes, I know, it's awesome! This minotaur was a giant, agile skeleton with great horns affixed to the skull, with one nasty temper. He knew the structure well, a multi-level scaffold with no walls, since the structure was encased in an enormous and tall room.

He wasn't at all shy about flaunting his knowledge of the room's layout. He expertly raced about each level to get to me, forcing me to find ways to move up to higher levels to stay at least one floor away from the skeletal beast. My movement took me to a very high level of the structure, achieved by flying with my signature arms-shot-straight-up flying method through square holes I found in each level's floor, almost as if there was supposed to be a ladder for each, and of course, the minotaur was close below me. I knew what I could do at this point to stop him once and for good, and I let him reach my level.

He reached this floor quickly, and stared me down with a nasty smile - well, as much as a skeletal minotaur's human-shaped skull could muster - and proceeded to approach me with a slow walk. He was visibly smaller than his regular size, now matching my height. I would use this to my advantage: I drew him closer to me, and positioned myself behind the square hole in the floor, watching the minotaur walk toward me in a perfect linear fashion. He stepped into the hole and slipped down, both feet first.

I leaned over the hole and watched with a smile as the (relatively) miniature skeleton fell several stories to the floor and crash-landed on his back. Upon impact he returned to his full and giant size, leaving only his chest and skull (with those giant horns, now coloured rich brown like the wood surrounding me) visible from where I stood. I believe I saw some bones flying off him when he'd smashed into the floor, but he appeared now to be a perfect, flawless, unmoving skeleton. With horns.

Note: This was another lucid dream induced through simply requesting to have one prior to going to sleep. Is this enough to call it a MILD, even without RCs?