side notes

I woke up remembering a whole bunch of '80s songs. Or at least I think it was more than one... The last one I had in my head was a fully formed song, every instrument, vocals, lyrics, everything, and I'm not sure if it even exists in real life. I've had this before over a decade ago, when I dreamt a complete Depeche Mode song that did not exist. Not unlike what generative AI does these days, except better. Anyway, this latest song had "don't stop" as a repeating lyric, but that's so vague it was impossible to find on Google even if it existed.

I'm noticing more dreams in which 'my character' has certain memories of past events which happened in the universe of the dream, but never actually happened in the dream. Like in my last dream, I recalled meeting a DC before, but that event never actually happened in the dream. It's like I'm a bodysnatcher and I take over a character's body and mind, and their memories as well.

This has happened to me on several occasions now. I can dream while 100% awake and walking around. All that's needed is being tired enough. These episodes only last maybe two seconds, but enough for a random image, thought or sound to manifest. If there was ever a case for 'time compression' in dreams, it's this.

On one occasion, I saw people through my closed eyelids because I took a little bit too long to blink. Extreme exhaustion.

On another, I saw a street scene on our coast. And cars. It all looked so real, and yet I was awake and walking around. Not just minor hypnagogia, but sights and sounds.

Years ago, I was on the bus when I was suddenly 'teleported' to a street not far from there. I manifested in the middle of a street and a car had to brake really hard to avoid hitting me. We drove past that location later.

I'm in some outdoors location near a barn. Some guy is there, and he bites my fist for some reason. I assume he's kidding but he's biting quite hard. Doesn't hurt too much, though. We crack some jokes, but suddenly the mood turns darker and the things he says turn quite nasty, and almost threatening. At some point he crosses a small wooden bridge, and I think we end up pointing shotguns at each other. I decide to back off, unwilling to die over such a petty matter. Suddenly, a zombie rushes in from the left and knocks him to the ground. As it starts tearing him apart, I calmly walk away. Prick deserved it.

A bunch of stuff happening in a GTA V setting. I drive a bunch of criminals around, swap cars to a parked police car, then hide under a bridge until the heat dies down.

I was awake but still in bed. My alarm was about to go off, but not quite yet. I closed my eyes and promptly started hallucinating. I manifested on a train. The railway car I was in was completely white (and very well-lit), with some bits in bright red. It was completely empty. No seats, no nothing. I had no body and could only look around. There was one person standing to my left. To my right, another. Every time I looked from left to right and back, the part of the train I'd looked away from had changed. Like, it changed shape. The people around me freaked me out. They didn't move at all, and showed zero emotion of any kind. Worse yet, they changed too, just like the train. You look at someone in the distance, look away, and when you look back it's another person standing much closer to you. Freaky stuff. At some point one of them got so close, I tried to give him a telekinetic push to make him back off from me. Instead of sending him flying, he just 'teleported' back a few meters, completely unfazed. Suddenly, that weird person looked like my grandmother (oma). That's when my alarm went off and I had to get out of bed.

Interesting side note. That alarm was for a job interview. When I got to the office where I was to have my interview, the interior immediately caught my attention. Minimalistic, with the two dominant colors being white and bright red. Not saying this 'means anything', just saying it's... curious.

I wonder... why don't dreams traumatize us? The nightmares I've had this past week were so profoundly awful, if these scenarios happened to someone for real, it would surely cause deep emotional and mental damage. Murder, being murdered, horrible torture, frightening 'hauntings', ... stuff that really makes your stomach turn. Yet when I wake up, it takes only a good 10-20 seconds for the fear and horror to 'wear off', and then it's like nothing ever happened.

Does it have to do with memory? Dreams are generally easily forgotten, but even the ones I still remember perfectly (like when I've just woken up) feel like they're immediately covered in a kind of "haze" that robs them of their power over me.

Or is it just that we consciously know the events weren't real (those aspects of higher consciousness are generally turned off during regular dreaming), and when our consciousness 'boots up' after waking, it dispels the hold the dream has over us?

I had this thought because I realized I must have died a million times at this point in a million different ways, and have been hunted down by more demons than there are in Hell. But when I wake, all is hunky-dory.

Techniques

I'm listing some techniques I've tried throughout the years, what has worked and what hasn't.

Thruster hands

Basically, you imagine you're Iron Man, and your hands are jet or rocket engines. This involves holding your hands down by your sides, like Iron Man, or it won't work. That's an unfortunate limitation. It's worked for me once or twice, but it's not instinctive as I like having my arms in front of me in the Superman-pose.

Verbal commands

Much like how some LD'ers shout "increase clarity" to improve the stability of their dreams, I've found other dream abilities are equally susceptible to verbal commands. While flying, I shout "faster!", and I actually feel a burst of acceleration propelling me faster. And it works almost every time, up to ludicrous speeds.

'Reaching' forward

Pretty such the Superman pose. I find that by "reaching out" in front of you, it's kind of like a mental cue that you want to head towards this thing you're reaching out to, helping "mental propulsion".

Problems

Gaining altitude/transitioning

After all this time, I still have trouble gaining altitude vertically, maintaining altitude when flying horizontally, and especially transitioning from vertical flight (straight up) to horizontal flight forwards.

Perhaps I could try verbal commands to make it easier? Like "higher!" to climb, "forwards!" to go from vertical to horizontal.

Or avoid this problem entirely by not going straight up, but by taking a running start and climbing gradually. It's a lot easier.

Maneuvering in the air

I find it hard to make maneuvers, for example to dodge a building or other obstacle, while flying horizontally at speed. It's almost like real-life laws like inertia and aerodynamics apply to me. Turning feels hard, and I have to really physically turn my body and then apply intense concentration to make my body actually fly in that new direction (or inertia would just make me continue drifting in the previous direction).

Other

Speed. My flight speed feels very variable, and changes from dream to dream. Sometimes I reach speeds that feel like barely 200 mp/h. Sometimes closer a 800 mp/h, or even speeds that are completely impossible to real-world standards, like Europe-USA in 10 seconds. Not sure what causes these variations. Sometimes I just can't go beyond a certain speed, no matter how hard I try.

I've been noticing dreams in which I 'think' I am sleepwalking, but am not. It's hard to explain (as usual), but I think I am walking around in reality, but I know my eyes are closed but I can still see. But I think what I'm seeing is reality (as if I can see through my closed eyelids), not just a dream.

The other night I had such an experience, where I thought I'd woken up. My laptop was still turned on and next to me on the bed (sometimes I play ASMR videos as I fall asleep), and I reached over and clicked 'x' to close the tab. Then, I thought I woken up again, for real this time, and I'd reached over and clicked for real, except I missed the 'x' for closing the tab and clicked somewhere in the middle of the screen.

Now I think I might be 'misremembering' these events, and perhaps the dreams never matched reality at all, and it was a double false awakening.

Shortly before I woke up, I saw a number. 12:14. My vision was black (dreams had ended, I was in the process of waking up), and this was the last image I saw before I opened my eyes.

I looked sideways at the clock, and it was 12:14.

I still don't know if:

1) I imagined it, 'fake memories'?
2) A complete coincidence happened.
3) I've seen traces of a poorly understood mechanism in the human psyche, perhaps this 'human clock' thing that allows people to wake up a minute before their alarm clock goes off?

Edit, July 2018. I had another one. Shortly before waking, I saw a wristwatch showing the time. When I opened my eyes, the time on my laptop matched the time on the dream watch perfectly.

So in dreams, our abilities are typically limited, and we are bound to follow the "plot" of the dream, blissfully unaware that we are dreaming. When one becomes lucid, one becomes truly conscious within the dream, can break free from the plot and decide for themselves what to do within the dream universe. Typically, the dreamer gains a whole set of abilities, only limited by one's imagination, and dream control.

I had a fairly active period in which I had quite a few LD's, most of them induced on purpose using practice. Then I stopped, but still had one or two LD's per year, naturally. Until last year... As of late, it's as if my subconscious has found a way to "sabotage" me. I have dreams these days, quite a few, in which I think I am lucid, feel I am lucid, but am not truly lucid. I gain a subconscious awareness of my reality (that I'm in a dream and I have god-like powers), but this awareness stays "beneath the surface" - like I'm not really aware of it.

Another way of putting is this: in lucids, you break free from the plot. The plot created by your subconscious, whose "job" it is to keep you unaware and following the story of the dream. So it's almost like my subconscious, in an attempt to stop me from breaking the plot, invented a genius way to stop me from doing so. It made the act of "breaking from the plot" a part of the plot! I literally dream about thinking that I'm dreaming. It gives me a bunch of cool powers I would normally have in real lucids, except they work far better because they do not *really* rely on dream control (like they do in lucids)...

That's just a theory of what this might be, though. Most of these "fake lucids" do wake me up when they end - just like all lucids do. I don't think I've ever *not* woken up right after a lucid ends (mine usually end when I lose control, typically when I'm having too much fun to bother about dream control). So that's a sign they could be lucids after all.

Still, in these "fake lucids" I never *truly* feel like I was free. I do in the dream itself, but after waking, it still feels like everything I did was "on rails", determined by another - not myself.

Again, fascinating.

For the past few days, I've had more of these experiences that occur during the waking phase, right before gaining full consciousness. It's almost like I am speaking to myself. It manifests as an "inner voice", which feels alien to my character, but at the same time definitely comes from me. Like there are two of me existing simultaneously, but are separated. I have a potential explanation for this phenomenon.

During sleep (in non-lucid dreams), the "logical" part of the brain (the frontal lobe) is mostly shut down, and we are guided/motivated almost entirely by our subconscious (which is why we are less "restrained" in dreams, and tend to "follow the plot" without thinking things through properly). When waking, the logical part of us wakes up. Perhaps, for some reason, I don't sleep as deeply as I used to, and/or my waking phase takes longer than it used to. During that time of "ultra light sleep", my consciousness (frontal lobe) might awake while my subconscious is still asleep, and immersed in a dream. Instead of leading to lucidity, it might cause some kind of temporary "split" of my consciousness and subconsciousness, in which the former can give "advice" to the latter...

In both cases I experienced thus far, the inner voice was a "voice of reason" that gave advice on my dream experience, things that I would have missed if not for that hint. The voice has some kind of "meta-knowledge" of the dream. In one case, it told me something would not work - and in another case it outright told me to stop being a zombie and flee from the hideout of an obvious serial killer... something my dream character was blissfully unaware of until the voice told him... me... whatever.

Weird stuff.

This is something I've noticed in the past few weeks: my dreams have soundtracks. It only appears to happen when it's the last dream before waking. This could of course still mean *all* dreams have soundtracks but I only remember the last one. The music fits the mood of the scene perfectly, and it is unique - not a song I've heard before. It's entirely composed by my subconscious. A contemplative, hopeful ambient tune when I fell in love. Fast, heavy tunes during dramatic scenes. At one point, I even heard a complete song from Depeche Mode that didn't actually exist!

I have some lingering fragments of being able to fly, and Claire being hurt - so I had to carry her.

Side note: this was my first night on huperzine.