lucid

I had a slew of dreams last night but don't remember a lot of details. The lucids were a couple sleep cycles back, so even they're a little hazy. Still, the dreams were pretty action-packed last night. The first one, I went lucid while flying some kind of open-air helicopter, and it was the biggest "A-ha! I'm dreaming" moment I've had in a while, with the landscape just slamming into vivid detail. I don't remember much beyond flying around. In another one, where I was still lucid, my sister gave me a little 'baby orange,' one of the tiny wedges from the inside of some oranges, for me to eat so I would remember what she'd told me when I woke up, but I woke up right after she handed it to me, before I could eat it. I did remember what she'd told me at the time, but don't anymore :/

My last dream wasn't lucid, but was pretty awesome. It started in this little hobbit-hole of a bar where people organized illegal road-races. I got into a race with two other vehicles and was in 2nd most of the time, behind this big pick-up truck, but then I drafted him and sling shot past, and left the other two in the dust (actually, the last leg of the race was curvy as hell and covered in snow) and beat them back to the bar.

So, for once "summon hottie" actually promoted some new lucid experiences, or at least interesting ones. I slept in quite a bit today, and so I was in and out of REM numerous times. What kicked off the lucid string was a dream set in a bizarro version of my old workplace. There was a new employee, this petit, dark-skinned Asian girl with a really loud, almost Jersey-accented voice. I woke from the dream and thought, "I'ma hit that," and dove right back in. I got back in pretty quickly, and this first time around the dream was pretty stable. I took her hand and we went upstairs to the guest rooms, all of which had been used the night before. We found some still in use and the rest all rumpled--it was kind of cool in that the rest of the dream seemed to be continuing around us, and we were dodging the guests and the boss to avoid getting sidetracked. After checking out all the guest rooms, we took the most serviceable one and got it on. As dream sex goes, it was good, not great.

I woke while I was still in bed with the girl, and tried for another re-entry(...). From here on, things were less stable and there was a lot of waking and re-entry, and attempts to stabilize and tweak the dream, but what sticks with me and fascinates me now are the transitions. Each time on the way in, and many times on the way out, I passed through a sort of limbo state that I've been familiar with since childhood. It's maybe a form of hypnagogic imagery, but mine is almost like the ant-fight static on a black-and-white TV, with forms precipitating out of it and gradually solidifying into the dream. What struck me on waking and re-entering in bed with the girl was how the dream sensations sort of shut off, replaced by the sensations of my bed, PJs and blankets, then I was in the ant-fights with a vague sense of the girl beside me, then there was a clear moment where we were spooning again, her body pressed against me and her breast cupped in my hand. I woke and re-entered at another point in the dream, and rinsed and repeated 4 or 5 times, summoning two more women but not getting far before waking or other DCs intervened, and experiencing the transition over and over again, from that limbo state to *BAM* I'm in, and then everything breaking up into static again and the sensations of reality returning. At a point where the dream-states were pretty short and unstable, I tried closing my eyes and spinning to stabilize the dream, which sharpened things up once, sent me back to ant-fights another time, but it was interesting that even in the spinning I could either spin in a disembodied way or use my feet, like spinning in your socks on a linoleum floor.

All in all, it was a pretty productive exploration of the dream-state and the states surrounding it, and I got laid

New LD!

It started as an anxiety dream at work, with people piling up in the restaurant and nothing ready. Then I realized it was a dream (this kind of anxiety is a dream sign for me). A DC of a guy I knew in college walked in, and I spent much of the rest of the dream telling him this was a dream. I did use a technique from the boards: at one point I insisted so excitedly that I was dreaming, I almost woke up, so I closed my eyes, spun around, and thought "Higher level lucidity," and when I opened my eyes, everything was more vivid and solid.

I also had a dream that I was sitting at a coffee shop having a live discussion of last night's "Nature of perception" thread

I had another weird, dark, plotted-out dream, where I was a young guy who had just bought a house. It was a quiet suburban neighborhood full of plastic-looking landscaping and identical houses, but the neighbors would babble nonsense and shoot at each other with shot-guns. Another neighbor just filmed everything with a big movie camera. I was outside snooping around, and the former owner of my house appears, ends up stabbing me in the shoulder with this huge knife, and him and the camera guy take me back to the house, where they keep me as a hostage/slave for the rest of the dream.

I also had a dream set in my hometown at some indeterminate time, maybe seven years ago. I ran into this girl I haven't thought of in ages. She's probably in pretty bad shape in waking life...last I knew she had a degenerative disease that required the periodic removal of chunks of her intestines.

(Update: thanks to Facebook, I now know this chick lives an awesome life driving race cars and jumping out of planes in Colorado )

1. This one was long and detailed, covering several days of dream-time, with some on-the-ground action, some movie-screen views of other characters, and even some back-story. It all took place in the little town in PA where I grew up. It started with the story of Altrip Jones, a man from my town who went out and made a fortune in the city, then came back and built this weird monument of a public building, with huge, white marble gargoyles jutting from the corners. It was some kind of culture/community center. So I saw this as if in a documentary, then I was back in my hometown, but a weirdly prosperous version where this guy had infused all this money into it.

2. I'm attending a funeral in my hometown, and it's a big family gathering, but it's a dream family, not my real family, and pretty much a dream-town, too. Mostly I'm interacting with two little brothers who have never met me before, because I've been away that long, and I"m working to protect my little uncle (real person) from professional assassins, including a 40-something Gene Hackman. These guys really like to rapel down buildings. I'm not resisting them violently, just tracking their movements and evading them.

3. At some point, I'm taking a walk with some dude I don't know, and he lights up a j. We turn a corner and here we are at a big, sandy beach (nothing like this in my real town). We pass it around and a few people join us, then security comes sniffing around, so I have to evade them and end up alone way down the beach. I start running back toward the crowd (now leaving--it's night-time, and they're closing down the beach), then realize it would be much faster to glide over the sand, then think "Well, why don't I just fly?" So I'm flying down the beach, and I stop and think, "Wait a sec, am I dreaming?" The dunes and everything look pretty real, but I do an RC (my first ever deliberate RC--thanks DV), which for me is kind of a karma-probe to see if objects around me have history and depth--dream objects are more transparent, have less presence than waking objects, even if visually identical. So anyway, I'm lucid, but everything stays pretty solid. I walk around and come to a pliant barrier where the beach just stops, but recalling some stuff from the forums, I try to dissolve or push through, and manage to get my hands through, like pushing through saran wrap. I didn't get to do much else before I woke up. Still, that's two LDs in a 10 days, after many months without any. Whoop!

I was snooze-alarming before work, so I noticed right away when I went from laying in my bed to being in a room full of people. I looked around at all the dream characters, and decided to talk to someone, so I went up to the cutest lady in the room (who else?). She was very friendly, and shortly things got down and dirty. My lucidity was spotty from there on, then I woke up rather happy.