lucid

Achieved a lucid dream via SSILD and an internal mantra of "I will have a lucid dream". Ended finding the dream character I was looking for in the description that I imagined/expected and hugged her tight. Didn't have the joy of completion that I would have liked but better than another failure.

After that, I don't remember what else that happened in the dream. On a side note, finding things to do in a dream is a bit difficult because there are so many things to do yet I only get one delicate opportunity every 24 hours to try and achieve that goal.

Had a dry-spell and broke it suddenly by doing SSILD + Mantra. So I began seeing through my eyelids and knew instantly I was entering a lucid dream. However, during the transition I attempted to get out of bed and I felt that I was not 'deep' enough into the dream so kept doing SSILD cycles throughout the transition.

I lost lucidity and fell asleep.

Oh well. At least my dry spell was broken, almost.

Realized I was dreaming when I had more facial hair than usual.

One was a DILD involving me using my super powers to shoot a tornado out of the sky. Yes, strange. Second was a WILD induced via the greatest method of all time, SSILD.

The second lucid dream was interesting, to say the least. The transition happened with me losing awareness of the outside world. I knew I was in transition when I could vividly imagine myself in motion - spinning with my arms out on the same axis as a rotisserie. The spinning began to materialize a dream, my backyard. I immediately attempted to find Naomi, the dream character, but when I was at the entrance of the park, the dream began to fade out and end. Was this the fourth time I have failed after being so close?

The Elusive Naomi.

On a side note, looking at the dates of my previous entries, I have had 5 lucid dreams in a 7 day period. Still more work to do on the path of mastery.

Had another lucid dream this morning. Was in this gas station searching for and eating pastries that I love so much. I was going to pay for them but decided since I was dreaming I was not going to do a damn thing but eat the pastries. After a while, I figured it was time to stop messing around and complete my goal: Find the dream character named, "Naomi"

I went outside the gas station to find a vehicle that was going to transport me as fast as possible to the park where I expected Naomi to be. All I found were cars that were missing a wheel. This is significant because here we see another obstacle keeping me from finding Naomi. I find a car that had all its wheels so I stole it of course. I heard sirens in the background meaning out of the blue(no pun intended) the police were on my tail. Fortunately, the park where Naomi should have been was only down the street from the gas station. I swerved into the park and ran into a tree. I rushed out of the car and ran towards the park bench where I knew Naomi should be. I was getting excited to finally complete this dream task I have been planning for weeks.

I finally arrived at the bench.

Instead of finding a black/asian woman with long, black braids, I found my dad sitting on the bench.

NO, DAMN IT.

Mind you I was lucid at this time, so I tried to use my dream powers of expectation to sort of summon "Naomi". I saw my father morph and distort a bit but no dice. The dream ends.



RANT TIME: The Naomi Obsession

Why the hell am I so passionately obsessed with finding a dream character from several dozen non-lucid dreams ago? Because the mere act of finding Naomi, at a certain place, at a certain time, in a specific form, to have a specific conversation, vindicates my ability to control the dream scene. That will officially mark the beginning of all the adventures I aspire to have; all the adventures that are the reasons why I have spent 7 years dabbling, researching, fantasizing, and failing at lucid dreaming. I can't have these adventures and memories if I spend most of the lucid dreams I ever have doing mundane things in places I already have familiarity with in waking life.

I am talking about achieving Inception levels of adventure; at least 4 nights a week. This, in my view, can not be done unless through sincere desire, planning, and expectation as in the case of finding Naomi.

Techniques:

So the "Ambience Induced Lucid Dream" technique I was fantasizing about several days ago is garbage. However, the root of it, SSILD, still holds water and has yielded positive results. This morning, I got an idea about the effectiveness of SSILD. Perhaps it was not in focusing on a sense for an extended length of time - as outlined in the original guide - that increases lucidity. Perhaps it was the act of switching focus from sight, sound, and touch that created the conditions favorable to induce a lucid dream. So I quickly switched focus from sight, sound and touch in a steady cadence. I guess spending 1 second per sense would be an accurate statement. Sometimes faster. Sometimes I would slow down and focus on a sense for a bit longer. But I was trying to get in as many cycles as possible because I have been having a problem where I would fall asleep without getting much done.

But of course, this wasn't the only thing I was doing to induce this lucid dream. I was also using prospective memory to visualize me becoming lucid in a later time. I wasn't repeating a mantra 10,000 times. I focused more on the visualization of me becoming lucid with the feeling that remembering to do this was very important. Mind you, I wasn't doing MILD and SSILD at the same time. I was bouncing between the SSILD-variant and the MILD-variant. WBTB was longer as well. I was awake for about 35-45 minutes. It wasn't intentional, it was just that I had a hard time falling asleep again.

Had a lucid dream this morning. I was at my old elementary school when I realized that this must be a dream. I walked out to the parking lot and did this spin technique to teleport back to my house because I wanted to complete a dream task: finding my dream guide. I made it back to my house and walked outside to see it raining extremely heavily and I noticed I had no shoes on. Now I'm thinking, "I don't want to spend the majority of my lucid dream trying to walk to through rain and mud". So I decide that I am going to go into my backyard and climb over my fence to find the dream character I am looking for.

I mean, I understood that dreams function off of expectation. My expectation was to find my dream guide at the park which was a bit of a long walk from my house. However, it was raining so heavily so I changed my expectation to find my dream character in the house that was behind mine so I only had to get over the fence and travel a shorter distance to find her. Dream ended unfortunately.

This isn't the first time an obstacle has stopped me from finding my dream guide. The first time it was this heavy wind that blew me away as I was trying to make my way down to the park.

Now how did I induce this DILD? It could have been several factors. For starters, I was more awake and active during my longer WBTB period. I mean I had turned on lights and written in my dream journal to the point where I had trouble going back to sleep. Secondly, I did my method of "Ambience Induced Lucid Dream" which involved me lying in bed and attempting to meditate, quiet my mind, and be aware of the ambient space of the room. In other words, suppose you had to navigate a room with your eyes closed. What senses would you need to focus more to get an idea of the space around you? I would say this is in a similar vein to SSILD that has you shift awareness to each of the major senses of Sight, Hearing and Touch. Other factors could have been my intense motivation to have a lucid dream; motivation being a big trigger for lucid dreams as explained in ETWOLD.

Went back to what worked in the first place: SSILD. Realized I was dreaming and decided to complete a dream task. I have been telling myself for the past week and a half that my "lucid adventures" will not start until I find a particular dream character sitting on a park bench near my house. So as soon as I became lucid, I wasted no time in trying to execute this goal. I managed to get out my house and into the street. When I was half-way there, a powerful wind started blowing in the opposite direction making it obnoxiously hard for me to keep moving forward until I started flying into the air.

I immediately tried to resort to my classic dream control tactics of using expectation to get everything under control but to no avail. I was so close too, unfortunately. I don't recall if I woke up later on but I do remember being in Dubai during a terrible sand storm that was pinning me to the side of a building wall.

WARNING, RANT:

I was reading a comment on reddit about the possibility of SSILD being so effective because it takes you outside of your head and quiets the mind whilst trying to fall asleep. This motivated me to try the technique again because I had came to similar conclusions in previous journal entries featuring lucid dreaming had post-meditation. So when doing SSILD, I made sure to go through the cycles as normal but to be aware of the fan that was running in the background of my room. My intention was to get my awareness 'outside' of my head and have it hone in on a distant object. This is mostly easy to do with hearing. For sight, since I was facing the fan, I simply relaxed my eyes and acted as if I was lazily looking through my eyelids and at the fan in the distance. For touch, it was a normal body scan of various sensations but I did lazily try to be aware of the ambient temperature of the room, if that makes any sense.

What I am getting at here is that 'Awareness of Ambience' may be MY key to consistent lucidity. Some of my previous lucid dream inductions seem to attest to this. To anyone reading this, it may seem like I am trying to reinvent the wheel considering so much scientific research has been done to conclusively say that prospective memory and autosuggestion are the critical components of lucid dreaming.

I have no refutation to the work that has been done in the field, it is just that I find 'brute-forcing' my way into lucidity via mantras/hypnosis/autosuggestion/binaural-beats/visualization tends to ruin my sleep and end up barely working. In the past 7 years, I have had FAR better success with simple dream journaling and meditation during a WBTB cycle.

If I can have 4 more lucid dreams this week , I can perhaps begin to form my little pseudo-scientific hypothesis about "Ambience Induced Lucid Dreaming". If I find good results within a 30-day time frame, I guess I can get around to authoring a guide not necessarily about a new technique, but a general approach/tweak to the SSILD method.

After a long dry spell, I went back to what worked in the first place - meditation; particularly with a focus on absolute presence, calmness, and clarity of the mind. I did this before I went to sleep at night and had a lucid dream this morning about visiting a neighbor's house.

I feel like the crux of my meditation is a focus on, "I am". There is nothing more present than that statement. It's not a mantra I repeat 10,000 times, I am just simply aware of my self and my breathing in the moment without being distracted by other thoughts because nothing else matters in that moment except that, "I am". Looking forward to more success via meditation.

Of course dream journaling is important too. I am becoming more diligent in writing down my dreams every single time I wake up.

Had a DILD this morning. I dreamed I was at work and music was blaring out my laptop. I tried to find the mute button but could not find it. At that point, I figured I was dreaming because of the foolishness of my macbook not having a mute button. I explored a little bit and I think I lost lucidity along the way or something.

Had another lucid dream this morning featuring me attending a football game and running around with a clock in my hand. I felt my left foot was asleep in the dream. Saw many people like I was on campus again.

Because my brother decided to leave his radio on super-loud before leaving, my dream was influenced by this christian talk-show. I dreamed I saw a city in the sky which I thought was 'The Kingdom of God.' I also saw these sheep being slaughtered by these large, black monster looking things.

I stood under the monster and it dropped and large axe on my left shoulder and through me to the side. I met this man who was babbling to me about consulting the FBI for direction on finding the place where Jesus died because it is a government cover-up or something bullshit like that. I saw blood trails.

I also dreamed that I had my laptop in my bed I was trying to check Reddit for something important happening to day. I had trouble getting to the website and it is my own fault I was not skeptical enough of my reality. False awakening then?

No lucidity.

The bright side is that mindfulness meditation helps me fall asleep faster than normal and get these easy-to-remember dreams. Either way, I feel like I am on the right path to master lucid dreaming. The trade-off is that my non-lucid dreams are more 'adventurous' than my lucid-dreams which have mostly been featured in my own house.

I am trying out the WILD method I am confident that my WBTB skills are on point.I relax, I get all the way up to Hypnagogic Imagery but then lose consciousness. However, the dreams are really vivid.

Long story short, I dreamed I was in my bedroom with a flamethrower. I was expecting that a monster was supposed to come after me and I was supposed to kill it. A fun note about the flame thrower though is that it was a can of his athlete's foot spray that I have in my closet; it just shot out flames though. I felt confident in that moment.

But something was wrong; I heard a struggle in the hallway outside my bedroom door. I turned around and saw a large, dark man in a suit which I immediately knew this was the guy. I felt like a nightmare was imminent because something was off about this guy.

He comes into my bedroom and flame him until his clothes burn off and his skin is midnight pitch-black.

But it doesn't work.

The flames stop.

He tackles me and to be brief, he sexually assaults me. It wasn't some comical event like a lot of men like to joke about. It was slow and disgusting; it felt real, and I was powerless. At this point, the dream was lucid because as the man was pinning me down to the ground on my stomach, I kept trying to control dream to kill him in some form or fashion - to summon monsters on my side or whatever. But it would not happen. He just kept licking and biting my bare left shoulder as I was struggling as hard as I could to prevent him from penetrating me.

Eventually, he got off me and began to walk out the room. He was lighter-skinned and dressed in a tuxedo. I chased after him, punched him in the face and backed off. The dream began to collapse and the man smiled in my direction.

End.

Had two LDs this morning. All from the SSILD variation which I shall explain below plus a realization.

The lucid dreams were standard; I was in my neighborhood. The first lucid dream had me exiting a vehicle in my driveway and trying to go down my block. The second was me actually walking down my block during the evening time and into a house.

I spoke to a woman behind a glass window like I was in a office or something. I remember now, I was searching for a woman named 'Jazmyne Adams' and the office was a car directory or something. I wanted the secretary to do a reverse search on the name and find out information such as the where she lived, what car she drove, etc. She gave me something to sign and that was all that I remember.

I am always on the hunt for dream characters.

There was also another standard dream of me at school, at the end of the year. It is kind of ironic because right now it is the end of summer vacation - more or less - here in my part of Texas. School starts a week from today; on the day of my birthday. Anyway, I was in the principal's office collecting a trophy from an award ceremony that I missed.

It's August so it's back to school season here in the United States. It would only be appropriate to have a dream about a school I never attended in the last 10 years.

The lucidity part happened when I was told to dance in front of a security guard. I was thinking how humiliating it would be because I know I can't dance. However, during that thought line I told myself, "But this is all just a dream...there is nothing to be afraid of."

I knew I was dreaming so I had confidence to go with the flow of the dream.

Once again, SSILD proves fruitful.

Just woke up after having what I can tell you were two lucid dreams. To be brief:

1. SSILD is king. Hands down.

2. Setting a strong intention to do something in the dream world helps. For example, last night my intention was to find Naomi, this asian girl from a previous dream journal entry on this site titled, "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED". After I became lucid, I immediately when outside of my house and set a strong expectation to find this girl in this house I was about to enter across the street from mind.

I found her sitting on her living room under a blanket couch next to a middle-aged Asian man who I assume was her father according to my expectations. I shouted her name and I hugged her tightly because I was so overjoyed that my dream character summoning worked. She hugged me back. I asked her a very important question about a previous dream:

Naomi, how did you survive the monster attack from before?

I forget her response though


3. The Critical Reality Check has something to do with the way my body feels in a dream; particularly my entire lower body starting at the feet. I notice this 'weirdness' and it instantly lets me know that a dream is happening. Every last one of my recent lucid dreams has happened this way. The weirdness can be best described as some kind of static or numbness feeling in the ballpark of how the feet feel when they are 'asleep'.

In summary,

GREAT SUCCESS!!