wRembrandt

The only lucid dreams I've had have been me leaving my bed and going outside for 30 seconds then losing lucidity and not remembering the rest of the dream. The majority of my non-lucid dreams have been me at my old elementary school in various scenarios. The major question I'm asking these days is: why?

Why dream about an elementary school I haven't attended in a long time vs. the number 1 thing I'm trying to incubate. Better question: How do I have a person, place, thing or idea from waking life appear in my dream at night?

My educated guess about the cause of dream content is problem-solving. From this, I've developed a model to hopefully yield positive results in dream incubation.

1. I will think of a goal in the form a person, place, or thing.
2. I will break this goal into three parts: the desired outcome, the problem(s), the possible solutions.
3. Before bed every night, I'm going to fully focus and fantasize the solutions to the problem that are preventing me from reaching my desired outcome. The ultimate goal is that my subconsciousness will take over the problem-solving element during sleep leading to a dream about the topic.

To put this into practice, let's say I'm looking for Naomi Grey, a dream character from many dreams ago. I want to find her(desired outcome) but I don't know where she is (problem #1), what she necessarily looks like(problem #2) and she could be in one of several dozen places(problem #3). So before bed, I'm going to think hard and meditate on where Naomi could possibly be(solution #1) and how I would find her (solution #2). The key here is that my solutions should inconclusive, none of them should actually answer the problem - just creatively keep my mind busy until I fall asleep. The focus should be on the problem rather than the desired outcome.

The paradigm shift is making Naomi into a mystery to be solved instead of a person I hope to see in my dream one day.

Mindfulness. Presence. Here & Now. Important things to keep in mind. Don't get distracted and discouraged with other techniques.

Dream where I was visiting my old college professors and hanging out on my college campus.

Had a lucid this morning via the fundamentals of lucid dreaming. Dream Journal, Reality Checks, WBTB and MILD.

Had a lucid dream this morning. I don't know if it was via MILD or this meditation technique I'm playing with. The meditation technique is Sam Harris' "Imagine you have no head" meditation. Anyway, I find myself in a lucid dream in the usual spot, outside of my house. It was raining heavy. I turn my face up to the sky and attempt to part the clouds with my dream control. No budge. A small rift of blue appears. Why is it always cold, wet and raining my lucid dreams?

...works. Had a short lucid dream. Woke myself up because I tried to scratch an itch.

Realized I was dreaming when I was trying to get into my car and escape a zombie. It wouldn't start so I willed the car to start.

"Oh, I must be dreaming. Better not think too much or the dream will end. "

Realized I was dreaming when I was trying to get into my car and escape a zombie. It wouldn't start so I willed the car to start.

"Oh, I must be dreaming. Better not think too much or the dream will end. "

I had 45 minutes until it was time for me to get ready for work. I thought, "aw what the hell, let's get a lucid dream for the fun it." I lay in my bed and focus on the center of my head. The center being if you were to stab a skewer into one earhole and out the other; the midpoint of that skewer would be my point of focus. This is right around the area where the pineal gland is inside the brain. The transition happened and I was stuck standing next to my bed for 30 seconds without any motor abilities. My body would not move and my eyes would not open but half way.

My room was different. It felt very empty.

Got lucid, went outside. It was overcast, cold and raining so I sit on my porch in a half-lotus position and attempt to meditate like I intended. It felt weird. The dream didn't get any more vivid. In any case, the lucid part of the dream ended after like 30 seconds and it was non-lucid randomness about being a japanese salaryman from there.

Meditation + WBTB procured me two lucid dreams. Throughout one lucid dream I was rubbing my hands to stabilize. It worked to some extent. When I walked outside my house, everything was overcast like it was a rainy, depressed 7AM in Texas. It felt quite cold as well. Tried to change the sky, but things just got darker. When into some houses; I was looking for someone.

Onward and upward.

Listening to the sound of silence. Same old meditation during WBTB to go straight into a lucid dream but this time I am focusing on listening to the sound of idle noise. This idle noise in my ears; more like in my hearing. If you plug your ears, yes you hear nothing but you also hear a slight ringing, hum, buzz, or whatever. It's an idle sound if you pay attention close enough. So I just sit and focus on this sound for about 10 minutes then retire to bed; still focusing on this noise.

The lucid dreams were stable for a while but when just collapsed despite me engaging all of my senses and rubbing my hands.

Had a lucid dream this morning via mindfulness meditation during a WBTB period. The WBTB was kind of long and..well more awake than usual. A protip to myself is that don't do meditation half-asleep hence the more active WBTB period. The transition into WILD felt weird. Sleep paralysis felt like some small gremlin jumped on my body. I started rocking like I was in a hammock to loosen my dream body. I swear these feel like what I would imagine OBE's to be. I did the same thing I did half-a-dozen times where I got out my bed and went outside.

The dream was amazingly stable. I was able to walk down my street and get to the park nearby; mind you, I was rubbing my hands throughout the entire experience. My right wrist was hurting in the dream however which made me think I had fell asleep on it the wrong way. I continued rubbing my hands until I ran into a tree branch. WOKE ME UP!

Had some non-lucid dreams after that.

No Naomi, lol.

Mindfulness Meditation during WBTB.

I was in elementary school again. My class was taking an exam. The exam had a weird perk where you had to submit the test within a composition notebook. I didn't have a notebook with me. So in the dream, I thought that maybe I would have one in my locker. I go to my locker and enter the combination that I somehow knew: 65 45 11.

Two significant things about that combination:

1) Master locks only go up to 39. There can be no 65 or 45 in a combination. Yet in the dream world, the lock had those numbers while still maintaining a normal sized dial.

2) That combination. I had written it down in my dream journal a while back. I had made it up. For it to just appear in my dream and be of use is very intriguing since I am in the business of trying to master dream incubation.

The locker opens and I have two composition notebooks inside, one blue; one black. I recognize these immediately yet I am not lucid at any point in the dream. The black one is my regular daily journal tracking my fitness and meditation practices. The blue journal is my physical dream journal in supplement to this on DV. I think to myself that I am not giving the teacher my blue journal because it has some embarrassing dreams in it, so I give her the black one.

That's all I remember.

Rant time.

Why is it that I dream about everything except the one thing I incubate to be dreamed about. My hypothesis is that my mind does NOT understand what a dream is exactly. It only understands real life and tries to replicate that. Perhaps why I can dream about Donald Trump with no incubation required mostly because I was reading articles about him the previous day. Yet, trying to summon a specific dream character after 2 hours of visualization exercises seems nigh impossible.

My second hypothesis is that I can and will ONLY dream about persons,places and things that I somehow have a waking-life interaction/attachment with. So elementary school mostly. But why elementary school? Why not middle school? Why not high school or more recently college?

If we dream about things we have a strong emotional attachment to, why not dream constantly about high school; a time of great emotional distress for me?

So I am with this girl in my car. Nothing sexual. Just sitting and talking. There is this inflatable mattress thing in the backseat which I know is a bomb. The bomb activates. I usher the girl quickly away from the car and into a nearby building. I am panicking because the bomb is going to blow up my car in a parking lot. Because of my ethnic background, I know in the dream that once that explosion happens and they inevitably identify me, I will be on the news as a terrorist.

So my next instinct is look for another girl that I somehow knew in the dream world. Her name roughly sounds like the word "Heylmun". She is a black girl I actually knew from high school under a different name. I frantically plead with Heylmun and ask her if she still had/knew the time travel magic that "we used to save [can't remember her name] back then." She affirms she does. I am a bit relieved. My hope is go back in time and stop past-me from putting a bomb in the back of my car.

Some time in the dream passes and I hear the car explode outside the building me and Heylmun are in. A crowd gathers near the windows to see flames and gasoline spewing everywhere and on other cars. The televisions in the building come on reporting on the incident in no time.

I run back to Heylmun and ask her if she has any "hiding places" for me to lay low while she gets the Time Travel Magic ready. She says yes, but first she needs my phone number. I give it to her. She gets two numbers mixed up much to my frustration and I have to correct her.