Xiertic

So, there’s nothing to report. Nothing. Nadda. I don’t remember any dreams from the last two days. Talk about a serious difference from how things were on that first day back at it, eh?

My theory is that I just lost my dream recall in the time that I was away. My recall used to be very poor before I started practicing all this. The other day, obviously, was a bit of a fluke. Going lucid perhaps helped me to remember it more than I otherwise would have as well. So now I’m back at square one, and all I’m remembering when I wake up is flashes. Quick images and sounds, and that’s it. So quick in fact that I haven’t been bothering with writing them down.

But it occurred to me, just now… My first day of practicing dream recall, that’s all I had then too. But I still focused on them. Still wrote them down. Despite them being quick flashes, I took them seriously and recorded them. The next day, things went a bit better.. And so on, and so on.

I think my problem is that I’ve become used to remembering so much that I’m not taking this flashes seriously like I did when I first started this whole thing. So tomorrow, and going forward, I’m committing myself to writing down everything. Even if it seems small and completely pointless. Because that’s how I started, and it’s what I’m going to have to do to get back on track I think.

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Work On:
–Write down every dream the moment I wake from it. Every time. Even if it’s just a simple flash.
–Dream check more at home. Make it a habit at all places, at all times of the day. Not just at work.

At a glance, today’s results seem so lacking after the wonderful thing I went through yesterday. That said, I’m reminding myself that yesterday was likely more a stroke of luck than anything. After how much I’ve slacked on everything lately, today’s results are much more similar to what I should be expecting for the first few days back.

Just a few scattered dreams. Nothing more. On the bright side, I’m reality checking very often without having to even think much about it. Even at home, which had been hard for me before yesterday’s lucid dream. A little encouragement goes a long way, I suppose.

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I remember nothing about my first dream except that there was some girl, and there was something about pictures of her that were really old. Yeah, that’s it.

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The next dream, oddly enough, had me hanging out with Angry Joe in a very clean-looking living room. There was light colored furniture with a glass coffee table, and lots of lights coming in through large glass windows. Don’t recall what we were doing or talking about.

Somewhere in the dream it became apparent that I had stopped doing something that was important for me to be doing (no idea what it was). Also somewhere along the line some person who I can’t remember started to make threats against me. Serious threats, though we didn’t seem to take them serious. Nostalgic Critic was there soon after that, and he was trying to figure out why I’d stopped doing my important thing. He theorized that something was stressing me out and keeping me from doing it. He then concluded that the threats I was getting might have been the cause of the stress.

I find this dream interesting because I feel like it was my mind directly reflecting on how I’d stopped the reality checks and dream journaling, and working itself through whatever stress was causing me to do that. The threats I was receiving I can’t quite figure out, though.

And I woke up from this one hearing Animals by Maroon 5 in my head.

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In the last dream I was in my grandmother’s house with Willow. We were getting ready for some sort of gathering, and Willow was making food in the kitchen. It’s not clear to me if we were living there or just using the house, but it seems that Maw had passed away. The first part I really remember from it was me coming out of the bathroom and very quickly walking back up the hall into the kitchen with her, because I found the back area of the house incredibly haunting/scary.

She felt the same and we started to talk about how spooky the house seemed. We talked about how we keep the doors to the back rooms of the house closed and locked at all times ‘cause it makes us feel safer, yet despite the locks we found ourselves constantly feeling anxious that we’d hear one of the doors open. One time during the dream there was some odd noise that Willow thought was one of them opening and it scared her.

After that convo I went into the room adjacent to the side door and was putting on my boots, and joked with her about how I definitely preferred it when she was between me and the back of the house. She laughed with me, though we both still felt really uneasy.

We theorized that maybe the house had a slow, sloth-like energy to it that was sapping all the positive and clean energy from the house, which was generating the anxiety we felt. We then debated on if slow energy really would devour “fast” energy, or if it wouldn’t be the other way around.

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Work On:
–Write down every dream the moment I wake from it. Every time.
–Dream check more at home. Make it a habit at all places, at all times of the day. Not just at work.

Current Dream Signs:
–Work
–Amy and Andy’s House (Perhaps Amy and Andy themselves as well? Unsure.)
–Yylvis, The Fox

It goes without saying that I’ve slacked off lately. On this journal, for one thing. I’d also completely stopped even trying with the dreaming, for another. In fact the more I think about it and question it, the more I realize that my life in general was starting to fall back into the same old rut that it always does.

But yesterday, I started trying the reality checks again. Not as religiously as before. I had taken no B6. Hell, I wasn’t honestly even planning on writing down my dreams when I woke just out of pure laziness. Yet, somehow, after all this time away… And after my first day “back” being such a half-assed effort… I had a lucid dream.

Well, first I had a dream about being lucid. Like that first one, awhile back. And now I’m sure beyond a shadow of a doubt that they were just dreams and not actual lucidity. Because the lucid dream that followed was so different, so amazing, so absolutely unbelievable that there can be no doubt in my mind that the other two weren’t lucid.

And it left me so excited, so amazed, that I know there’s no going back now. I’ll take all this more serious than ever before. I read somewhere once that once you have your first one, everything changes and you’ll never want to return to not having them. That your dedication and drive will multiply after just the first experience… How very, very true that has turned out to be.

I remember nothing about the first dream, other than the fact that it was about me being lucid. I didn’t write it down when I woke up you see, because even after that I had no intention of writing/trying too hard.

I question if maybe me dreaming about it was me trying to become lucid, and then somehow failing, but my subconscious continues to build the dream as though I’d succeeded. Just a thought.

Anyway, on to the lucid dream…

I don’t remember exactly how this dream starts, or at what point I decided to reality check. Though I’m feeling that it was probably very soon into the dream. Because I was laying in bed, and I was very tired. My suspicion is that the rule of reality checking every time you wake up is what got me (which is funny because I barely ever remember to do that, which is something I now intend to remedy), because I think that in the dream I’d just woken up. It’s what all signs and images in my memory point to, anyway. I did the pinched nose reality check, and it was seemingly succeeded. Despite being a bit excited at this discovery, I was so tired that I convinced myself that it hadn’t really worked, and I almost went back to sleep. Then I checked something else though, despite the tired haze. My hands, I believe. I looked at my palms. I don’t remember how they looked like but I do remember that for a brief moment this strobe light type effect started to happen around me, and that was the point where I realized I was definitely dreaming. There was a whoosh, a pop, or something. I can’t explain it. But when that happened, everything became much more in focus.

I guess it’s the rush that I’ve read about. They say you get a surge as your senses and mind come alive in the dream, the moment you realize it’s a dream. Now I finally know what that feels like.

Anyway, I was still overwhelmingly tired. So much so that it felt like a huge weight was on me. But I knew I was lucid, and I wanted to get out of bed. I did so very, very slowly. Both for the sake of attempting to keep myself very calm, and also because the tiredness was getting to me. Once I was up though, the tiredness vanished instantly.

I walked out of the bedroom and into the living room. This house was, in many ways, like my actual home. The rooms were in a slightly different position. The living room especially was an almost mirrored version of mine, with two bedroom doors on the right wall (facing the front door) and a door opposite the front door leading into the kitchen area. There was a little bar/low ceiling thing int he kitchen area near the back wall, though it didn’t take up the entirely of the back side of the room. Just like 1/3 of it, or so. I remember locking the bedroom doors ‘cause I felt frightened like something might come out of them. Not sure why.

Now that I think about it, it was my brother’s bedroom that I was sleeping in at the start of the dream. I lived alone. Not sure what was in that other bedroom, ‘cause that room doesn’t exist in this house. I never went in.

Two things happened next, and I can’t remember which came first.

One of them is that I wanted it to storm. So I closed my eyes, commanded the dream to give me a roaring thunderstorm.. And it did. I could hear the thunder, see the lightning through the windows, hear the rain pounding down. It was so very wonderful.

The other was… Cats. I think there was already a cat in the living room when I entered, though I’m not positive. Either way, at some point I decided to add cats. I think it was my way of testing the water instead of just trying to add people straight away. I remember adding a lime green cat, an electric blue cat.. There were two others by the time I was done, making four total (counting the one that I think was there already.) Can’t remember if I closed my eyes and asked for them, or simply willed them into being.

With both of those things though, and the things that are yet to come, one thing I definitely noticed is that I didn’t always get what I wanted on the first try. If my belief that I could do it wavered at all, it wouldn’t work. And even if I believed I could make things happen but didn’t MEAN IT when I said what I wanted, it wouldn’t happen then either. I had to believe it and to mean it with all of me. It’s going to take some practice. Eventually though, I’d always get it. Some times on the first try, some times it would take two or three.

Another thing to note before I move forward is that I was never too much in control of my surroundings. I know I changed the weather (and will again soon), summoned the cats, and teleport once later in the dream.. But for the most part, I just let the dream world build itself around me. Then again, it’s worth mentioning that I couldn’t convince any of my dream characters that I was dreaming. Which in itself helps show that I wasn’t in complete control anyway. So of course the world was mostly building itself. Still, it was worth noting.

I went outside for some reason. I don’t recall why. The storm was no longer happening once I went outside, so I guess I lost control of it. Brian pulled up in the front yard in his truck. The front yard did not resemble my real one. A small lawn with one tree on it, and the road very close the porch. Brian wanted to hang out, and I talked him into getting out of his truck. I don’t recall how but I made him believe we were going to fly. I held him by the wrist, focused.. And up we went. Not very high, mind you. I never got more than maybe 20 or 30 feet off the ground. Not sure why. I’m wanting to think that going higher seemed hard for some reason. Brian, despite thinking that this wasn’t a dream, seemed to find this whole ordeal perfectly normal. I released his wrist at some point to see if I could keep him flying without me, and I could. So down the road we went, past street lights and trees, until we got into a town setting.

At an intersection, we came across a group of what I remember being strange-looking people. Jordan was among them though, and I stopped and said hello to him. I don’t recall much about our interaction, and I don’t remember where Brian wandered off to but he disappears around this time too. In fact this whole small block of the dream is very blurry in my memory. I recall flying low down an alley with lots of things hanging overhead, including several fire escapes.

Someone was joking around with me at one point about how I never walk, and that I’m always flying. So I land for a few seconds just to be like “see I can walk!” then I laugh, swear off walking, and go back to flying around again. I made it snow at some point during this, and I do remember that with a bit more clarity because it took me quite a few tries. That plus the blurred memory makes me wonder if the dream was trying to pull me back into it.

Whatever the case, things become clear again and I tell the dream that I would like to “return to home base”. After a try or two, I was back home with all my little multicolored cats. I decided that I wanted to try to summon someone that I wasn’t overly familiar with being around in person, as a bit of a test. So I closed my eyes and called out for Lilith to appear. At first I didn’t think it worked, but then I noticed her smiling at me from behind the bar thing in the kitchen. I started to talk to her, though she didn’t exactly look like her. Close, but a few things here and there were off. At some point during our interactions, a humanized Fluttershy appeared and started to hang out with us. Probably a red flag, since that’s a bit out there. Because soon after that, I felt the dream start to slip away from me. I realized it was happening, but my research on how to hold on slipped my mind, and very soon I lost control and woke up. I think I got too worried and worked up when I felt it starting to get away from me, hence the waking. I need to study more on how to hold on to it for next time.

Work On:
–Write down every dream the moment I wake from it. Every time.
–Dream check more at home. Make it a habit at all places, at all times of the day. Not just at work.

Current Dream Signs:
–Work
–Amy and Andy’s House (Perhaps Amy and Andy themselves as well? Unsure.)
–Yylvis, The Fox