non-lucid

Sep 8

Long NL. I'm in my apartment complex's front yard and office area. My manager from work is there, along with some coworkers and random DCs. We are in school sdesks arranged in the parking lot, doing work on laptops. I see an email in red letters that says "failed", although I know the test was successful. The email gets sent out again with SUCCESS, and mentions something like "good job everyone", but I notice that it's not just an email, it's a meeting invite. My boss comes around and pats people on the back, telling us to "enjoy the long weekend" and mentioning that we can work from our beds. My fiancee is there as well (either as a worker or just as my fiancee) and calls this out as bullshit as we were already working overtime. Before or during there is also the understanding that I have to assassinate someone.

Dream scene changes and I'm in a room walking towards a door. My dog is there and so is my fiancee. I am holding my dog as I pass through a door. I become lucid! I keep telling myself "I'm lucid" and "I'm dreaming" but don't do any RCs. I see a small door (like a dumbwaiter) and consider using it to teleport to my dream world I've been incubating, but for some reason I hesitate and don't (don't know if this was a conscious decision). Instead I go with the flow of the dream.

The scene shifts. I'm still holding my dog, and I think "he's the best". I'm in a somewhat cluttered room now, and I understand that I need to kill all of the DCs here. I do some jedi mind tricks to make sure they don't resist, and they work. I tell them I'm dreaming and they all react in a friendly way. Each time I go to kill one of them, it seems like they go through the 5 stages of grief for themselves in front of my eyes, always ending up at "acceptance" before dying. I kill 2 of them, and then decide to use ice powers*. At first I was intending for Skyrim ice shards, but it came out as more of a stream of icy powder/wind from my fingertips. My thumb and forefinger are pressed together and the way the stream of ice comes out is something like when you put your thumb over a garden hose to spray pressured water at someone. As I'm pondering this I go into intense visualizations of the streams, and there are 3D mesh outlines of the stream and its "weather patterns" overlain on my vision, like a series of oblong lines. The visualization shifts to a long sawblade with teeth marked with numbers. As I mentally change the number from 8 to 2 and adjust it by notches, I see the angle and strength of the stream change.

The scene shifts to a security cam view, and as I press my left thumb and forefinger together, I can send ice shards from the camera, although they're not reliable. The camera reminds me of the show Person of Interest. After this I'm transmitted into the room. There is a blue tint to the room, and I look around and see some DCs. I walk out of a door behind me and peer into the hallway (very bright incandescent light and white walls and floors), then I go back into the blue room. I tell the DCs "I'm dreaming" and again as I approach them they go through stages of grief. I do this to a couple of DCs then walk through a doorway/archway. Above the archway are two drill bits. I jump up and grab them. I test one on a wall and it drills right through, despite having barely any threads (it was basically an ice pick). I go up to an old lady DC and say "I'm dreaming". She looks at me with sadness and says "We'll take care of each other/ourselves", then I wake up.

The dream lasted around 2-3 minutes and was very vivid. I was lucid and aware the whole time, but it still felt like a guided/directed dream.

Longer NL -- I'm a young boy who is somehow a vertical venetian blind(???). I am on a quest with a young girl, we're descending into a deep level of some underground building, with a furnace and monsters. Her face doesn't seem real, more like a porcelain doll or something. We arrive and there's a giant hydra in a brightly lit room. It has a "cement burning rocket" that's burning me and melting my armor. The girl is wrapped up in one of the hydra's necks or tentacles. I back away and reach a closet with the venetian blinds. They tell me or some other voice tells me that I am one with the blinds.

I had a few other NLs and fragments. In one, I'm in my grandpa's house and there's a weird square baby with thin, posable arms. It reminds me of BMO from Adventure Time. It was a premature. The parents are proud. There's an old lady to my left who looks like my aunt, who's wearing a white shirt with gold lettering. I note it, it's in different languages (Chines, Latin, Greek) together. At some point I had my midget intruder FA again, but it was very hazy and I yelled "Fuck you!" or "I'll kill you!" loudly and it fades quickly. In another fragment, I'm Dexter and Rita is dropping in the pool next to me. I'm supposed to be enjoying it, but I'm Dexter so I hate it. I say something like "Rita, the water is going like 20 mph". Scene shift to Deb and Quin, Deb's in a room playing with a reclining bicycle for toddlers and Quin comes in and says something while smiling and laughing. Next scene, Deb is driving a bus, Rita and I and the kids are in there. She's taking a risky corner under an interstate high rise. I don't see the bus flip, but I understand it does. Rita scolds Deb in that annoying way she does. Finally, I have the transparent eyelids effect, I can see my room clearly and thought I heard my fiancee calling me, when I move my waking body my head is under the blanket and I go downstairs to find my fiancee watching TV, turns out she didn't call me.



*I don't know if this counts as the "Breathe an element" goal

Sep 7 2018

First dream of night: I'm at childhood home. I'm younger, I think. There is a party or gathering coming up, and we're discussing it in the backyard. My mom wants us (fiance and I) to wear a giant Barney suit. We tentatively agree. I try on the suit and can't fit the headpiece on. It's a rectangular oblong plasic open box (thinka tupperware container, but oblong. It was in no way the appropriate size for my head. On the two, I think there was a felt cap or something (driveR). I think the torso had a separate piece from the legs for the costume. After trying the headpiece on without the tupperware "structural mask", mI found that I could shift my focus and see myself in 3rd person (still non-lucid). I remember it looked nothing like a Barney head or any formed animal costume head for that matter; instead it was like a purple ghost outfit (i.e. loose draped rag with eye holes).

The dream shifts and we're all in a parking lot. My mom's request for us to work during the party has come up, but it turns out she wants us to work for 5 hours each. I say that's bullshit, she wsays "well you agreed, you just idn't specify timeframe or current ball timeframe". We were in some kind of parking lot, I was in a white van I believe. I was trying to pull out of the spot and around the corner. I fought with my momm about this and eventually resigned us completely from doing the ball.

Before getting in the van I believe, I was walking around a version of the parking a lot that was fused with my backyard. Off towards the far right/forward corner of the yard, there's a system of roots that went on for a few fet in either direction. I didn't realize, but some of them are completely rotten. I step over them and they collapse, while the healthy parts remain intact. The rotten roots fall away into a large grave-sized hole.

The dream shifts and I'm inside the house, in a false version of my room. My fiance is there with me, but is playing the role of a sister (posibly step sister or family friend, it was vague). The mood was fierce and rebellious. We are talking about how best to approach the Barney situation and my dad ends up walking around the corner. He has a few guys with him and he cracks some inappropriate jokes, and some of the guys with him say some stuff that's way out of line. My zipper is down. Before this my "sister" and I were watching TV or in the kitchen.

Dream fragment about "how to meet your heroes" or something similar.

Edit: In the main dream, I remember at multiple points having to swat away both lovebugs and wasps.



*Note: Seems like in my dreams, I usually get in huge fights with my mom (way more intense than anything ever IWL), and my dad is always laid back (innappropriately so).

Sep 6 2018

Not enough sleep. Have been having to work late.

First dream segment. There's a guy with a giant (2x2 or 3x3 inch) black square earring. The place is like a video gaming convention, and it's sort of simultaneously indoors and outdoors. I'm maybe drunk or something, I remember talking to a lot of DCs. At one point, I lean over the edge of a display to the concealed camera section (used to record the event or maybe for use with some kind of Kinect-like game) and I say something like "you can't stay here/keep playing forever". I think at some point, coworker A shows up and accompanies me and my group of DCs.

In the next segment, we're on the road with my mom. She's driving us somewhere, an old vacation home maybe, telling embarassing stories. Coworker A is in the backseat driver side, I'm passenger side. There are other DCs shotgun and middle backseet. We talk about various things, such as A being a bartender at a restaurant I used to work at. The subject moves to "romance" novels written by women. Eventually my mom puts an audiobook on or maybe reads aloud a passage, and everyone critiques it harshly, but halfway through I realize due to some turns of phrase and nicknames used that she must have written it. I feel guilt but don't say anything. We pass a couple of very shallow interstate exits (an interesting feature that's kind of hard to describe, but I know it when I see it -- possible dreamsign). Eventually we arrive at our destination.

I'm now in a house, it's an old vacation home I used to visit, but not with my mom. I think in the dream, the other DCs were my "real" brothers, and somehow my mom was a step or non-biological mother; the general feeling was that I had some long-forgotten history that I was reviving. After walking around the house for a bit and looking at different things, I came across some large scrolls! They were proably 2 feet long (including handles and such) and reminded me of a Torah scroll, but less formal looking. When I unrolled one, I could see that the letters were a mix of Chinese symbols (although I interpreted them as Japanes kanji and understood them) with smaller Hebrew and latin characters mixed in and surrounding them. The text was distinctly red. Everything in the scrolls made complete sense to me, and I talked them over excitedly with my brothers for a long time. This was what was meant for my life. My mom was in the kitchen or somewhere else; I could tell that she was happy for me, but at the same time sad that I was so excited about a life besides the one she had given me. Coworker A is in the house but not near and my brothers, off in the kitchen maybe.

Sep 5 2018

I'm in the front yard of my childhood home. It's dark out, a long while before dawn. My parents are there (we're all sitting on ice chests or plastic/yard chairs, I can't remember seeing them) and we're preparing for a party or get-together of some kind. The song "Sweet Child of Mine" is playing, and for some reason I have to learn the solo (I know it vaguely from playing it IWL in high school). This could be from the fact that my parents always wanted me to play guitar at family gatherings and I always hated it. I wrote down something like "just...play it" in my DJ but don't remember the significance. For some reason my high school girlfriend who I dated for like 3 weeks was going to be there, and I remember her name in loopy script. Can't remember if I wrote it or someone else did.

Very vague dream fragment in a restaurant. After that, a vivid dream where I'm on the patio/balcony of my current apartment. I had a "profound sense of acceptance" to quote my DJ.

I woke up around 5am into pretty good paralysis and decided to try a quick WILD attempt (my fiance gets up at 5:30am). Unfortunately my dog got up, flapped his ears loudly, and sat right on my arms/chest, which pulled me out if it. I lay awake for the remaining time and let my fiance sleep, but I heard some weird soft sighing. At first I thought it was her, but as she was leaving I brought it up and she said she heard it too. The only rational explanation is that it was our dog, but it sounded like a human female...

I walked the dog and looked at the stars, pushing my alarm back a little and resolving to get lucid.

In my next dream, I'm on a computer and for some reason I have to download a set of 128 bit pixel smileys. They're coming from a website called Jered/Jerek's World, or Site. The smileys are crude in an "early internet" kind of way. One of them was a picture of exaggerated red lips, another is more orange and is laughing, and my fiance laughs at them. I open up the windows search bar and paste what I had, into the search. It pastes the words "Jerek's World", and as I read the words in my head, the desktop background starts alternating between some tiled images, one tan one saying Jerek/Jered's Site and another grey one saying "Jerek's Billion Dollar Software Company". They transitioned in horizontal and vertical screen wipes.

Next, I'm in a long kitchen stretching out maybe 10 feet to the left and 20 to the right. I'm not aware of anything behind me, but I understand that in front of me past an archway is the living room. I'm standing at the sink, looking for something or someone. Possibly my fiance is there. I was just walking around with a Brita pitcher, and now I see that there's a second, rounder one on the counter. I try to find the lid for it and I see it's in the sink, but the inside of it is covered with a greasy layer of spaghetti sauce.

In my next dream, my boss's boss is giving advice on business lunches, i.e. where to take clients. She suggests some other restaurant, but her favorite is the hotel restaurant. She hands it over to a younger guy who looks annoyed and seems to be a drier, more monotone version of a WL coworker. The room is tinged with blue lighting. He hands out a textbook. We're going to go on a business lunch with him, which he's not pleased about. I pull my phone out and subtly try to voice-record him, but no such luck. I end up taking notes on paper and draw a vivid picture of lips (was one of the smileys). I think at this point I was trying to record my dreams in-dream! Should capitalize on this. I woke with slight headache.



*Note: Analyzing my dreamsigns from the entries I've posted on DV, I think I can safely say my strongest ones are a) childhood home b) fiance c) family members. Hopefully I can add trying to dream journal as a new one, we'll see if it keeps manifesting.

Sep 3 2018

Woke 3:35. In a fight with parents and grandpa about cooking or setting up something (possibly speed-reading). Daylight outside, long tables (possibly crawfish boil).

Woke 5:05. Long fragment in a stadium, receiving some sort of business presentation from coworker. After it's over, I'm picking up my laptop bag and I stand out of the way for a coworker and an unnamed DC, who say that they have a "merge request in the morning". The presenter (another coworker) is kicking us out.

Awoke directly from FA nightmare. My dog barked and I could tell instantly that it was serious, not just him barking at another dog. The door to the bedroom is thrown open and the midget from Twin Peaks season 3 entered with a small gun. He approached the bed, not looking directly at me or anyone, just at the wall behind us. He said something vague and I tried to lean up in bed asking something to the extent of "What do you want?". As I tried to move, and in some sense solve the problem, my vision blurred and the dream started to fade. He was wearing a blue shirt with the pattern of "I (heart) N Y" but the letters were "? (eye symbol) T Y" in white. The room's layout was completely realistic and accurate unlike other false awakenings. I woke up and said "holy shit" aloud. Very scary experience, but very vivid -- would have been invaluable if I could have gotten lucid and converted it.

Before that, I was in my childhood home, on the phone with my manager about something that needed to get done. The screen was black with red nubmbers and dial-screen graphics, and an orbiting globe outline. The call got dropped. I was worrying about this with my parents but they seemed to think it would all work out (it was nighttime). My sister was in my room on my computer, looking for the first book in a series my fiance is currently reading. I suggested that she can just read my fiance's copy rather than buy it herself. I end up also giving her a japanese manga volume and another poorly translated japanese book, I remember the engrish being hilarious in-dream. After this, I went to the kitchen (all of the lights were out). I was trying to write down my dreams in ink on the wood floors. In the back of my mind I knew this was a terrible idea and that my dad would be furious, but in the moment I wasn't worried about it. There were some drops of water on the floor and it was smearing the ink, so I started wiping it up, making the smearing even worse. I was also worried about cockroaches.

After the ink, I found myself in a distinct dream scene. I was on the ground looking up at the side of a cliff maybe 4 or 5 stories high. There was a good bit of dirt caked on and I thought to myself how nice it would look if I could get the dirt off. I grabbed a wedge-shaped piece of reddish slate and scraped as much dirt as I could off and stepped back, and noticed how nice the geometric patterns were. I remember the thought-phrase "cliff face". When I looked again, one of the rock formations sort of looked like a nose, and the one below looked like a mouth! When I started examining the rest of the cliff, the whole thing was taken up by face structures (abstract and Easter Islandish). The ground went from being solid dirt and rock, to having some cracks in which curved red boards were shoved and prying the cracks apart. In the cracks were green cylindrical vegetables (I thought of okra or fat asparagus stalks). As I moved forward towards the cliff, I noticed a mesh oyster bag of sea urchins, which were moving around each other in the bag, sort of like you expect spike balls to in a metroidvania or platformer. This was a really vivid and overall nice and creative dream that's simple but feels profoundly peaceful, the kind of nonlucid you generally want to have. So of course this scene transitioned directly to the nightmare FA.

I woke again at 8:59. My fiance was in trouble. We were in some sort of college sign-up, car buying, or other related scenario. There were DCs everywhere, and specifically several DCs with deep blue eyes and short hair meant her harm in an insidious way (they were outwardly friendly). I became more and more adversarial over the course of the dream, eventually hitting them and throwing things at them. We moved from the student union/indoor car lot into a side hallway which transitions to a long house with lots of corridors and small rooms arranged in pretty much a straight-shot, but almost labyrinthine at the same time. I was thinking somehow they were hypnotizing her, and she was getting more and more bruises on her arms and abdomen. Eventually I get in exaggerated physical fights with them and I somehow manage to get 2-4 of them to defect to my side as allies and stow her away under a sliding hole in the kitchen (sort of a drain hole in the floor, like you see in restaurant kitchens). She escaped succesfully.

I'm unknowingly in an FA but think I'm fully awake. I am having the "transparent eyelids" effect, and I'm looking around my bedroom at the closet door, but it's the wooden closet door from my childhood home. I'm etching a human face in it with my mind.

After this, I'm in my childhood home and members of my family as well as random DCs are dressed in "starship troopers armor" -- white and blue, and white and red. It was a long and in-depth dream, but I don't remember much of it. I finally escaped the fray and sat back on my bed, but then my father entered my room with his gun held high, and I remember thinking "oh good, you'll just be my bodyguard". When I thought this (non-lucidly), he changed his course of action from running forward to attack me to climbing in bed next to me with his rifle held out (think Fullmetal Jacket "This is my rifle"). I got up from bed* and started walking towards the hallway. Almost instantly I became lucid! I didn't say "I'm dreaming!" or do any RCs or stabilization unfortunately. I walked down the hallway towards the bathroom, and it was daylight outside, maybe early morning. I walked into the bathroom and looked at the mirror, seeing a girl in a dress instead of myself. In this moment, I started to think of the "bad guys" in the starship troopers armor and then banished the thought from my mind, knowing that if I thought of them I would encounter or summon them. So instead I took advantage of the situation -- although I was seeing the girl in the mirror, I felt my dream body as my own physical body. So I turned away from the mirror and decided that I would become the girl in the mirror. I turned back around and I was!

Spoiler for nudity:

My body had changed competely and I was naked. Naturally, I touched my arms and chest to test sensation (it was dull, sort of semi-numb as my dream body sensation usually is). I did a little twirl and

inspected my face further in the mirror -- my face was sort of ugly and homely**, and as mirrors in dreams usually do, my face shifted quite a bit. I leaned in further to inspect myself and kissed the mirror (it was cold). I then leaned back out and decided to try my "Clear sight. Clear sound. Clear touch. Grounded. Calm, confident. I can stay here as long as I want." stabilization phrase. However, as soon as touched my thumb and forefinger, I accidentally said "Clear mind" first! It rejected me from the dream instantly. As I began to feel my waking body, I realized my thumb and forefinger were touching here too; maybe this triggered the waking?

I laid awake for quite a while after that, as I had already slept more than usual for the night, and for the whole weekend basically. I was also still excited about the lucid and hoping to drop back into it. Eventually I went back to sleep and had some more non lucids. In the first, I was with my fiance in a rest area/cabin in the woods. In the next, I felt as though I dropped into the dream as a visualization from waking, but it's possible I was only visualizing from an FA. I was imagining tall waves, and how my body bobbed up and down in them. It felt incredibly nice and peaceful. I was at a beach, and my sister was standing on a board of some kind zipping up a life jacket. I think my fiance was bobbing up and down in the water too. When I looked at the shore, I couldn't quite see the sand but I could see tall buildings above the waves, which I identified to be my apartment buildings from WL. A distinct black shape was swimming towards me, and I thought it might be a shoe or a fish (I thought it could be a dangerous fish but dismissed the thought instantly). After another waking, I had a final dream of being in a wood panneled shop with an old woman who was offering the shop to me (inheritance?). Her wares were laid out on a long wooden table, which after looking away and looking back turned out to be a giant Knorr pasta packet. I believe this all happened in 3rd person.



*I think getting out of beds in nonlucids is a lucidity/awareness trigger -- will have to investigate how to encourage this).
**This is actually the second time I've transformed my body into a woman's in a mirror while lucid, but for some reason I always turn into butterfaces. Also not sure why I keep doing this. Why, lucid mind, why?

Sep 2 2018

I went to bed with strong intentions to become lucid, as well as a solid plan for what to do once I became lucid. I was trying the anchoring method I mentioned in another thread, anchoring positive and confident memories with the sensation of touching my thumb and forefinger together. I had a phrase burnt into memory to repeat nonverbally once I became lucid (to replace "Clarity now!"): "Clear sight, clear sound, clear touch. Grounded. Calm, confident. I can stay in this dream as long as I want" (in retrospect this is extremely long, but I think I'll try it out for a few new nights anyway). I also used my standard mantra "I will become lucid in my next dream"/"In every dream tonight" in combination with "In my next dream, I look at my hands and realize that I'm dreaming". In the future I will stick with only "IWBLIMND" since it's more succint and sets a clear intention for the immediate future, rather than a broad concept of "every dream".

I awoke at 1:18 am in a somewhat strong paralysis with extremely vivid imagery (not dreamlike, more like imagination). There was a man, possibly me, conjuring lightning circularly all around him. The lightning was blue, white, and green. I awoke again at 2:47 am. I remembered several dreams involving my fiance and my dog. In the first, I was at the elementary portion of my high school (it's K-12) and I swerved my car to narrowly miss my dog, who spontaneously started running out at me in the street. I got out of the car and was rubbing his front leg and paw. I noticed that his paw had too many joints and was curled in too much. Somehow this felt connected to a drive through.

In the next dream, I'm in a living room with a wrap-around bar counter. I think I've been here in a dream before. I'm watching Bob Ross on TV painting thick brushstrokes -- X's, C's, and U's -- over an already finished landscape. My dog jumps off the counter. I'm trying to remember what to do tomorrow, two important things in the morning and night.

My next set of dreams came after WBTB. In the first, one of my cousins was referred to as "3". There was an interesting story about diving, and D&D. I vividly remember descending in a well, looking up as the light was blocked out by the silhouette of a monster (Demogorgon?), although I didn't feel fear. Next, I was in an arcade or bowling alley, some sort of indoor entertainment place. I left my fiance to go to an adjoining room from the lobby and get ice cream. There was a girl there who was going in the same direction as me, and called me a "creeper" jokingly. She was trying to be funny or cute in the way she was getting her ice cream. I was friendly but not overly so. I got maybe 4 flavors of ice cream, in sort of a flight. In the next dream, I'm an intruder in a man's house. He has a lot of weapons strewn about, some intricate compound and traditional bows, swords, guns, blowdarts, etc. I go through room after room and find the man, he's in his mid 50s or 60s. He threatens me with a long, thin, metal pole, and I think he threatned to castrate me with it. He transports me back to some memory of 1950's New Orleans with a McDonalds, and a small building with an advertisement to "teleport you to the Science Museum". The visuals are faded, blackish, and all the buildings look like plywood.

In the next dream, I'm at Sonic at night/early morning with my fiance. She's handed me a cup, but I threw it away; there are two crumpled cups beside it. I understand it to be sonic, but it's more like someone's backyard, there aren't any lights or servers or menus, just the standard sonic table and trash can, as well as an overhead cover. A group of foreign men walk by, talking about wanting some cervezas. In the next dream, I'm going over some train tracks covered in water, in a swamp (I've been here before as well). The waves are rounded like tiled hills -- at certain points they are covered in grass, at other times they're just water/waves. I see the sasquatch.

My old boss is giving me cryptic hints about something, laughing about it. We're in the woods, sort of. Something about eating a spider/the dust that comes out when you crush the spider. Possibly my fiance was warning me not to eat it. I eat the dust, and then eat the crumpled spider husk too.

Next I had a dream about DreamViews! It was something about inline comments/spoilers; I remember red and purple text. There were other sites too -- DreamBattles and DreamWars (reenactments, maybe I read about this before).



*Slept for a really long time hoping to get lucid, and kept trying to go back to sleep. After this frustration, I decided to not get bummed out when I don't get lucid. It doesn't help. And there's always tomorrow night

Sep 1 2018

The night started with some visualization of a dream I'm trying to incubate, which lasted probably 30 minutes to an hour. After that, I set my intentions to become lucid and headed to sleep.

My first dream of the night involved some kind of network TV teenage vampire drama plot, which took place in a neighborhood similar to mine from childhood. In the next dream, I was in a trench coat placing high-stakes bets using a 90's era cell phone. At the end of this dream, all of my cronies were in a room, facing forward in rows, and I was facing backward. We were all peeing on the ground (I think it was a power play).

Next, I'm in a huge convention center. I had just seen the newest Avengers movie (I haven't seen it IWL). I was ranting to others about how Thanos had all of the Avengers on his side and wasn't even fighting, but was just using the Avengers to fight. The convention center was huge (should've caught that, since disproportionate structures is one of my dreamsigns). We (a couple of DCs and I) were walking through the ground floor when we ran into

Spoiler for nudity:

three girls in fishnet shirts, whose nipples were poking through the fishnet. I or one of my DC friends picked the middle girl's girls up and examined them like a fine connoisseur, asking "These are same-size, no?". I remember they had a lot of moles and sort of looked cancerous? The girl on the left had red fishnet, but the other two had dark grey or black, and all of the fishnet was thick, like yarn or wool rather than thin like you would typically think.

The dream shifts and I'm walking with some old high school friends and acquaintances. We come across M, who's sitting on the floor in front of some people trying to take a picture. We tell her to get up and stop blocking the picture, and she says "This is a picture?" in a way that for some reason made me give out this awful dolphin-like laugh. I remember thinking in my non-lucid state, "stop that, you'll wake yourself up!". Sure enough I did.

After this dream sequence, I got up as my fiance left for work. I walked my dog so he wouldn't bother me for the rest of the session and drank a little apple juice. I MILDed with "I will become lucid in my next dream" and "The next time I see a person, I will look at my hands and realize I'm dreaming". The first dream had very low lucidity. It was sort of a western setting in a two or three story house. Outside I could see a desert/grassland with tall grass growing and mountains in the background, and the sky was really beautiful (should have RC'd here also, abnormal sky is a dreamsign). I walked around the house and looked out of the windows.

From this dream, I awoke into a false awakening. In the FA, I was trying to get back to bed to LD (didn't catch this). At some point I opened my dream eyes and saw a shallow, long, white plastic sink on the wall. It occured to me that I was dreaming because that doesn't exist in my room, but it didn't "click" until I got up and reached for the knob. At this point there was a shift in my consciousness that almost threw me off balance, like flipping a switch. I walked to a nearby mirror on the wall and experienced what people say -- the properties of my face were changing and twitching, especially my nose, jaws, and lips. I didn't say "clarity now!" like I usually do, and I really need to stabilize. I had some feeling throughout my dream body, but felt numb, so I started slapping my face and pulling on my lips, tongue, cheeks. I was incredibly focused on engaging my tactile senses. I tried to summon my dream totem associated with stabilizaiton, but for some reason I didn't have pockets. I decided I would summon a DC to help, so strangely I called out the name of an acquaintance from high school (I haven't even consciously thought of this person in years). At first I called aloud, and I could only get out the first name since my voice was garbled as it always is. So I used non-verbal commands! I looked towards the doorway and she appeared! It was awesome to see this work, as it's only worked for me in the past in a semi-lucid. I think I told her to give me a massage so that I could feel my body better. She had a serious face on and nodded agreeably. I was wearing a red t-shirt and a thin, dark blue jacket like the band kids used to wear. I started to take this off, and sat back on the bed as she approached, at which point I woke up.

The first thing I did upon waking was an RC (I've been trying to train myself to do these at each waking), but it wasn't a dream. I was really pissed at myself for not thinking of the ways I've stabilized in the past ("clarity now!", breathe in and focus on senses, pry eyes open, etc.), but I was happy to have an LD after about a week-long dry spell. I reflected on what I could have done better and visualized it, then MILDed again and went to sleep.

I had a chain of FAs/DILDs at this point*. In the first, I was in a lit version of my bedroom. I got up, became lucid, and walked around briefly before losing lucidity. In the next, I'm in a grocery store on a higher staircase. I see a lot of DCs around the corner of the opening, and I look at a clock that says "08:00". I become lucid, feeling off-balance like before, and walk around the display, looking at some bread before losing lucidity. In the next dream, I'm on the street of my childhood home looking at a large white column in the middle of NOG's yard (one of our neighbors). There's moss or dirt up to about shoulder level on the column. My sister and mom are behind me and commenting on the small car parked in middle of the yard, trying to make out the license plate. I become lucid and start looking at some huge leaves on some plants that appeared spontaneously. We're looking through the leaves, arguing whether the license plate is UWP 117 or 116. The dream fades slowly out and back in, then fades completely.

From here I had a series of longish NLs:
I have a collection of wood carvings/sculptures. One in particular is of Spyro, the others are small people. The house I'm in reminds me of a previous vacation house.
There is a mouse running around the backyard at my childhood home. It runs up to the door and allows me to pick it up. My parents' dog and mine both just sniff at it when it approaches. It's almost cartoon-like, but is very real. We all fall in love with the mouse. At some point my sister finds a "water snake" which looks like it's breaded with panko bread crumbs until she places it in a bucket full of water and cleans it off (now it looks like bread dough). There is a 1ft dark green toady that walks through our back porch in the midst of all this, as well as some small slugs. My mom is sad/angry, lashing out passive agressively (this is practically a dream sign).
The next dream is in an urban fantasy setting (by this I mean full-out fantasy that just happens to pass through some urban sections, not vampires and werewolves in modern clothing). I am tasked with delivering something. I have to walk around these long, curving, somewhat cyberpunk blue corridors in the middle of the city. I'm wearing peasant's clothes and have a sword. Whatever it is I'm delivering is in a brown sack (possibly the remains of something or someone?). I have to double-back at some point (this could be a dream sign, going down the same path twice). Eventually I arrive at the base, which is a fraternity or sorority house. I meet with the buyer/receiving party, and they say that it's not what they expected. Don't remember much after this and my pen ran out of ink, so the world will never really know.



Overall, it was a pretty good night! Summoned a DC and learned to use non-verbal commands. Will need to practice and visualize how to stabilize VTA (visual, tactile, and auditory) senses more.

*Because of their short nature and the fact that they were pretty much chained together, I'm going to count all of these short lucids as 1 in total, for a grand total of 2 LDs tonight.

Aug 31 2018

I'm in a house that's based off of my current apartment. I'm running around the room, possibly with a baseball bat/umbrella/wooden sword, opening closets and doors trying to find an intruder. I'm yelling the whole time. I'm trying to protect my fiance. After some time I'm outside under the vine-covered wooden pavilion.

I'm walking with my fiance down some way in an old world city, vaguely European. There is tan, smooth brick all around, reaching up on the immediate rightin a wall maybe 4 or 5 stories high. There's a similar wall far off to the left, with a canal inbetween. I'm walking down the cobblestoned sloped path, and affixed to the wall to my right, and there are stepped/gradated rails along the wall, one high enough for my hands as well as one that's ledge-like for my feet. I climb up and remember the vivid feeling of the thin rails cutting into my hands as I maintained my grip while my fiance just strolled beside me.

Had some more nonlucids during this time but can't remember them/can't decipher my DJ (I write in the dark). I awoke at 5:30, went to the bathroom, walked downstairs and drank some apple juice. Went back to sleep around 6:15.

I'm talking to my boss and the receptionist at my desk. A coworker (D) says "Hey bro," and my boss tells him not to call me bro, but Tyrannosaur. Transition, and I'm reclining in a bed in a warm red room with incandescent light. Either the boss or the receptionist comes into the room (nothing weird). We talk.

Dreams are more vivid after this point.

I'm in the office and a mentally challenged classmate from college is telling the cleaning people not to spray cleaner in our four-way cubicle, because he has "smell sensitivity".

I'm sitting on the floor at the side of the bed from before, showing my sketchbook to D from earlier. He notes how finished everything looks (I internally note this too -- I never finish anything IRL). As I flip through the book, there is a series of 8-15 pages of detailed, beautiful (stylized) waves moving subtly with each picture. As I flip pages, eventually a woman appears amidst the waves. She changes poses once or twice, then becomes a younger (late teens or 20yo) girl. In the dream, I question whether I drew this. D comments "oh wow, lots of girlies in here". As I continue flipping the pages it switches from a paperback sketchbook to a bound hardback, and at the end there are ads (sort of like at the end of a manga volume).

I had a false awakening about writing down my dreams which was also vivid, although mostly I just rolled around in bed.

Awoke for real at 7:25 dreading work. Had some waking images/a daydream of a thin woman with small eyes and a stern look, wearing red and white leaf print dress. I think her name was Riah (short for Mariah?).

Aug 30 2018

Long NL, the first thing I remember is walking up a staircase or ladder and entering a dark basement. It is finished and in some memories it extends lengthwise to my left and right with no windows, but in others it's small and box-shaped, closing in all around with a window in front of me under an eave. In both memories, there are cardboard boxes all around, and right in front of me there is a broken light bulb. I'm yelling downstairs to someone that the bulb is broken (I remember there are two lit floors below me). It felt like several others were in the house with me.

Short NL when I fell back asleep after dismissing my alarm in the morning. I'm at a table in France. I'm a spectator, possibly without physical manifestation or presence. To the left is an american couple, to the right a french couple from another region of france. Both are travelling to this region and sampling some food. The backdrop is empty whiteness. The americans are making fools of themselves, and the french are snooty about it. I remember being both of them, and cutting open some toasted bread. There was also red sauce involved somehow (were these meatball subs?), and the dream ended with the frenchman laughing.

Aug 28 2018

I'm in my childhood church. On the altar there's some kind of human sacrifice of women going on. I remember also being around the sound booth (I was here a lot as a teenager). There are scenes in the youth room and parking lot as well, and they're all very dark, but I can't remember what was happening.

I'm in college again, but my curriculum is changing. I'll have to take a lot of advanced math classes I didn't have to take before. I'm really concerned but my fiance is trying to convince me it'll be easy, she starts drawing squiggles with her pencil on some paper in some sort of parallelogram (squiggles all going out from one point or line). I consider changing my major to Psychology, but I'll have to start with Psych 113 (whatever that is).

Aug 29 2018

As I was falling asleep, I did progressive relaxation, thought about a couple of new mantras* to see which felt right, and then started meditating on my breath, focusing on the tip of my nose. After a while I realized my body was mostly paralyzed. I decided to make the most of it and try to WILD. When I first thought of this, I got some pretty in-depth HI and imagined visuals, very vivid. But after that I spooked myself or something, and I couldn't get it to the same level of vividness for the next thirty or so minutes. So I MILDed on one of my new mantras and eventually moved and broke the paralysis.

In the first dream I remember, I was driving around my WL car. It was hard to handle (like trying to legally drive a car in video games) and I kept bobbing and weaving and turning around. My viewpoint was shifting between first and third person. I was driving around a warped version of the city I live in, and ended up running some stops signs or red lights. At some point some cops pulled out of a parking lot and started following me, but didn't turn their lights on. I lost them and went to an interstate ramp, but I didn't want to get on the interstate for some reason, so I was stuck between the ramp and the exit (it was on the left, whereas they're usually on the right). I had to wait for the lanes to clear out so I could back up and get off the ramp -- quite stressful. I think this happened twice.

In the next dream, it felt like an FA although I don't think it was. My dog was in it, which is odd because although I see him all day (probably more than my fiance) I've only ever seen him in my dreams once. We're in a darkened bedroom/living room combination. I walk downstairs and we're talking about somewhere we need to go. I'm possibly worried about an intruder? Slight shift and I'm going outside, I open the door and my dog almost makes it out but I grab his hind leg and put him back inside. Before or after that I caught him eating some crumbs off the ground.

Scene shift again and I'm sitting on something or laying on the grass on the side of the house, looking up at the sky. I notice some lights in the sky, like heat lightning. Then (separately) I notice I can see lights on the clouds, and realize they're coming from my phone! Even with dream logic I'm amazed that my light can travel so far to the clouds from my phone (I recall a similar experience from my childhood with a high-powered search flashlight). I try to shine the phone's light on a tree that's hangning overhead, and I see the patterns of the leaves on the clouds above! I also notice 2 moons, then 3, some redder or foggier than others, but mostly the same size. I wouldn't call it semi-lucid, but I was seriously questioning the world. I think I should try to add looking at the sky to my dream routine, since most of the time I'm looking at the ground or my immediate surroundings, and seeing these inconsistencies may help with getting lucid.

In the next dream I'm in a fitness center or some similar place. I'm sitting or laying down in these lanes, aiming my feet to sort of louge through the lanes. This is coupled with a video game-like view with arrows showing which direction I should go. At some point I turn around and lie prone, trying to go backwards, but my feet are dragging so I have to manually push myself. I'm sort of in a cobra pose with my back underneath this large pullup bar type thing (black metal wrapped in foam). Eventually I reach the end with a lobby or something similar (carpeted, reminds me of a Chuck E Cheese). I see someone I went to school with who I didn't really know, and I'm sort of embarassed. I say something stupid like "I'm having a Shiatsu massage**". She responds with something nice but is clearly weirded out.

The dream shifts again and I'm in some kind of locker room. Another less-than-acquaintance from HS is there and is trying to convince the coach that he should recognize/remember him. He kept saying "I'm Double-D! Don't you remember me?" and the coach humiliated him. I think my dog may have been eating crumbs off the floor here too.



*"I am a master/natural at lucid dreaming" - meh; "I look at my hands and realize I am dreaming" - solid; "I calmly take control of the world I've created" - good for focusing on stabilization, but it's a mouthful.

**Of course I pronounced "massage" the british way, probably because I just watched S1E3 of Black Books, "Grapes of Wrath", which is arguably the best episode of anything ever.

Aug 27 2018

In my first dream I was in a compound of some sort with steel floors, walls, and ceilings. It reminded me of the early Fallout games. There were some doors with alternating red and green lights on them (stop and go, not Christmas). The ones with lights felt like they held danger behind them. There were some NPCs but none got too close and I think I could see grey status bars/informational popups when my vision hovered over them. There some connecting tunnels with walls that were like large fractured thin chitin or shell material. I kept having to go the back way through this facility so I would knock down the barriers, but each time I came back that way, they would regenerate and I'd have to knock them down again.

The next dream, I was in a bomb testing facility. My fiance, parents, and I (along with some anonymous coworker DCs) were standing atop a huge white metal ball-shaped plant. There was an "exhaust tube" a few feet away and each time the bombs would be detonated, a huge faux mushroom cloud would emerge. But it was as if the mushroom cloud itself was the bomb, rather than their being some actual explosion. I went third-person and showed myself leaning my face very close to the exhaust jet as another one exploded, and said "It's perfectly safe!" My third-person view changed and I was high up looking down on the clouds. They were wisping away sort of like those leaf tornados that spin up on the sidewalk sometimes. These wisps would carry on for a short while on the desert dunes.

Finally, I was in a large white building reminiscent of the fellowship hall at my childhood church, mixed with the middle school building at my old school. In the back there was a kitchen, going forward a connecting hallway, and through there was a huge white room. To the right there was a large open hallway, and all the rooms had high ceilings.

I'm sliding around on my socks through the different rooms on the white tile floors. I see one of my neighbors, and some girls from high school. They are all happy that L (fat girl from high school) was made prom queen. I suggest a toast with Nestle Drumstick ice cream cones. I think I toasted to "taking a bite before you toast".

Aug 26 2018

I went to bed at 1:15am and woke at 5:45am. The first dream I remember was an NL. I was in a store at their early morning closing time, and there were only 3 workers present. I was on the frozen aisle. One of them said they would help me once they're done buffing the floors. I waited outside with an umbrella near the open back door of a van (I think they were going to help me load something). After this, I wrote something else in my DJ about a WW bus where I was dying and had to plan my escape. Not sure whether WW stood for WWII or Weight Watchers, both seem equally appropriate.

Before sleeping again I got up and went to bathroom (I find it's easier to return to sleep when I walk around first). Tried to focus on HI and WILD, but no success yet. Ended up MILDing with mantra "I will be lucid in my next dream".

Next time I woke was 7:35am. I had just had a long NL with a huge cast of DCs (was a family reuinion/party). I was hanging out with one of the non-family guests who I didn't know. For some reason it seemed like my family would or should have been angry at me for doing this, but they weren't. The dream transformed slightly and instead of being in my childhood home, I was in someone else's large house (I think I remember this house from a work party my Mom brought me to as a kid). I was now in a hallway that seemed like a bathroom but was filled with people. The doorway connected to the living room. I was speaking to Uncle B, who greeted me but was unusually curt (he's my godfather and is always very warm and talkative IWL). Somehow this triggered me to become lucid.

I looked at my hands and said aloud "I'm dreaming!". I looked at my uncle who had become sort of an expressionless robot (not literally but he looked confused, blank stare, furrowed brows). For some reason I poked him in the chest jokingly. His body turned towards me and he started approaching me menacingly. I felt fear at first, but then a surge of confidence. I put my hand out in front of me and said "You can't hurt me, this is my dream!". His face instantly turned friendly and he leaned back and laughed. He smiled and said "That's right ZAD! Excellent!" and he reached out and hi-fived/shook my hand. I walked around the party for a bit looking at the other DCs. They were all ignoring us and carrying on their own conversations. I don't remember if I lost lucidity or the dream faded, but I awoke after. I had a huge grin on my face when I woke up, it was awesome to have such control of the situation! I've had hostile DCs before and usually they kick me out of my dream, so this was a win for me.

I went to sleep with the same method again, trying WILD then resorting to MILD. The next time I awoke was 8:59am. I remember being in my childhood home on the couch, trying to fall asleep next to my fiance. Earlier my dad had come in and thrown at me making a joke about a roach crawling on it. Within the dream, I was actually trying to WILD! I felt my dream body fall asleep just as my waking body does, and was moving my dream-dream arm (i.e. visualizing the sensation of moving my dream arm without actually moving my dream arm). I kept waking back up and couldn't fall asleep in the dream. I remember being afraid of roaches crawling across my face.

At some point I was able to WILD in my dream -- I latched on to some HI that placed me in the same exact room but without the couch or my fiance. I looked at my hands and became lucid! The room was dark and I felt like I was losing visibility in the dream, so I walked to the light switch unconsciously expecting it not to work. Sure enough, it didn't. I was losing lucidity so I dropped to floor and felt the coolness of the wood with my hands. I also tried to use mirrors to stabilize, but I don't remember even seeing my reflection. I should have transitioned to another dream, but I didn't. I "woke up" in the previous dream and lost lucidity. From this dream I tried to DEILD in the dream, and the HI was really close to completing each time, but never materialized. It would be black and white outlines, with the camera moving in a similar fashion to the opening scene of Ocarnia of Time where the camera follows Navi through the village.

I believe the other dream (me on the couch with fiance trying to fall asleep) continued for a while. At some point the lights turned on and we were watching TV. A tall man in a white shirt and red shorts walked in front of the TV and my fiance asked me for some type of food from the kitchen. I yelled out at him, calling him Rob and asking for the food, but he didn't respond. So again I got up from the couch and walked towards the kitchen. At this point I became aware, looked at my hands to confirm, and became lucid. I don't think I said "I'm dreaming" like I usually do, but it was incredibly vivid. I walked towards Rob who was in the kitchen. He had that same furrowed brow and broken robot look about his face (his eyes and mouth looked like they were scribbled in). I approached him since he was standing in the way of the fridge, and he started walking menacingly towards me. I felt confident from my previous encounter, so I simply said "Rob, you were going to get me some "X food", right?" He instantly turned friendly and apologetically let me know that there wasn't any of that here. That was fine since my fiance and the couch had disappeared. I felt his shirt to stabilize -- it was now one of mine, a casual tan button-down. Feeling the texture stabilized the dream. I walked away towards the living room and the layout had changed. The hallway was gone and the curtains took up the entire back wall now. There were also more windows now. I looked out them and when I looked once, they would show night, when I looked again, they would show morning or daylight.

I started losing lucidity, so I turned around and faced the kitchen and curtains (there was no furniture in the living room now). I focused on my breathing. The visuals improved a hundredfold. All of the colors enhanced and felt like I was looking out of a kaleidoscope or a stained glass window -- especially with the curtains, which IWL are very bland. Although the visuals improved, there was a white bar blocking the bottom quarter of my field of vision. I tried to imagine that it was like eye black so I could peel it off, but I couldn't. So instead, I tried to take it out like contact lenses, and my eyes naturally rolled up. This almost caused me to lose lucidity, so I just accepted the white bars for now.

I approached the back-left window and opened it. I imagined that it was light and would slide right up. It did! But it was so light that it easily slid back down. I crawled up (and felt my legs here, something that rarely happens in LDs for me) and put my body through the window, continuously sliding the window up as I went through. I could see that there was an awning coming down from this window, and instead of being ground level, I was four or five stories up. It was a hotel, it reminded me of the Arlington in Hot Springs for some reason. The awning was more like a giant blue tarp, and one corner was tied to my window, the other corner being tied to the ground. I decided I would fly down. Unfortunately I unconsciously doubted myself and as I fell I started losing vision. I tried flapping and that helped a bit, but I ended up landing on my back. The dream almost completely faded, but I sort of DEILD'd (still within the outermost dream) myself back into it.

Now I was on a suburban street where I had landed. There were biggish houses lining the street, and a few houses in front on the right, I saw a man and a wife in a truck, possibly about to back out of the driveway or just arriving back. I manifested Animal Mother's gun from Full Metal Jacket (I think an M60) and started shooting at them. I could see the bullet holes in the cars and buildings, but I didn't hit them. Then I walked over to a group of teenagers on their phones outside a nice house. I pointed the gun at them and told them to get inside. I wanted to kidnap them and see if the police or someone would come to fight me. They sarcastically said "Oh no" and started walking into the house. From here the dream faded pretty quickly. I wrote all this down immediately with a huge grin on my face. I think this last lucid must have lasted at least 1 to 1.5 minutes, which is the longest I've had yet. Overall, awesome night!



*Note: The visuals overall in these lucids were the best I've had yet, but I forgot to enhance my sense of touch! I need to work this into my mantra or my memorized list of steps of things to do once I become lucid. So when I was holding the M60, I was really just positioning my hands as if I was. I actually couldn't feel or see it either, I just believed it was there. I don't think I actually pulled a trigger, I just made sounds with my mouth

**Other note: I think the dreams where I was on my couch was a type of false awakening, just not where I actually was IWL.

***Edit: Forgot to mention that in my last lucid, when I was walking through the living room the second time, I asked aloud "Subconscious, how do I make my dreams longer?", but got no response.

Aug 25 2018

Went to bed pretty late. Woke up at 5:30 or 6:30 and remembered that I had 3 long NLs, but couldn't remember them.
First dream I remember of the night was lucid. I don't know what I was doing and don't remember much about it. I was in a library, possibly on a college campus. I spontaneously became lucid and looked at my hands, and I remember saying "I'm dreaming!" excitedly. I then walked around and tried to push my fingers through my palm, but it didn't work. The dream started to fade and I remembered the advice to meditate in your dream. Instead of really meditating though, I sort of just focused on my senses for a moment (just vision and touch) and the clarity came back. I tried the finger through palm RC again and it worked! I remember walking around a little more but that's it. I think the dream continued but I lost lucidity. Vaguely remember bragging to DCs while not lucid that I could lucid dream (how did I not catch this ).

NLS:
Had another dream about two cacti in a pool house or greenhouse, and at some point they fused together into one (possibly connected with my lucid one).
Had another dream about college campus murders with some pretty gruesome mangled corpses. I think I was the murderer but was also investigating.
Had another dream in my childhood living room where my cousin dropped himself down through the beams (we didn't think he could).
Had another dream where I bought $50 dollar tickets for my fiance in some kind of stadium, but I couldn't find her and wanted to ask to use the loudspeaker.

Throughout the night, each time I woke up I tried to WILD using hypnagogic imagery. Didn't work but came close and had some cool HI. MILDed each time then using the mantra "I will be lucid in my next dream", and also tried to remind myself to RC each time I woke up, but I forgot to each time.

Aug 24 2018

Yesterday afternoon I discovered SAT which pretty much describes what I called "relaxed ADA" in previous posts. I did this throughout the day, and started doing more consistent RCs (noseplug, question surroundings and past actions for ~30 seconds at least, then finger through palm to make sure) throughout the day. Before bed I didn't do meditation or anything, just progressive relaxation and a little MILD. I also did some autosuggestion that I would do an RC every time I woke up, since I've been having a lot of FA's lately and wanted to convert them. Then I fell asleep pretty quickly (and pretty early).

My first dream was of a huge, squarish/adobe-style mansion. I had the understanding that it wasn't mine, but rather I was staying at it. My fiance was staying there with me, and we had some R&R in our shadowy corner of the mansion, where we could still see some sunlight on the terrace. She was wearing an outfit I'd seen recently IWL. Occasionally we went on the main grounds and met with others staying there (non-WL DCs, but they were friends, not random lodgers). I remember semi-consciously shaping events and character actions, but I definitely wasn't fully lucid and never did an RC. It was a fun dream though, one of those simple and joyful NLs that you remember fondly afterwards.

I woke up after this dream and didn't do much MILDing, fell asleep pretty quickly. I'm a kid with three sidekicks, young Hermione and two other kids our age. We're all walking around an outdoor/indoor farmer's market that morphs into an oversized shopping mall. We start avoiding Darth Maul and his gang, they're trying to catch and kill us, or rather wipe out our existence. At one point we're flying around near the ceiling of the mall, dodging slow-flying homing darts. We're also avoiding the big stinky guy from spirited away (not noface, the stinky guy that turns out to be a river spirit). He apparently has the power to reverse-age us if we get to close to him. We eventually find our way into a room with a closet/armoire named Percy. He can take us back to some years ago before this happened. I think this part of the dream happened twice, in different ways. The first time, we all got in and were saved. The second time, only I made it into the armoire and shut the doors tight, with Darth Maul's fingers gripping the edge of the door. He was making some kind of persuasive argument, appealing to my emotions, and I felt sorry for him, but in the end I was able to shut the doors and I made it out. Flash-forward to several years later. My friends who didn't make it out were reincarnated and are the same age as me now (several years older). We are all at a smaller outdoor farmer's market. They are all the opposite genders now. One of them has discovered a new strain of blueberry, which is oblong.

Our curtain dropped IWL and I had to put it back. I went back to bed quickly after that. My next dream was an NL. I was in my high school gym and it was the last day of high school. I was in the top row of the bleachers joking around with my friends during an emotional and apparently important speech by Coach M. I got called out and cried in the dream. Several of my high school friends were there also, and they're some of my dream signs, so I should have recognized them. Despite this, I didn't question anything. I walked towards the exits and on the way out had a heart to heart with Coach M. Once I was out, I walked under the overhang and got made fun of by my friends for crying, but then we were all cool again.

Slight dream scene transition and I'm in the HS parking lot, where I see someone taking my dog into a black SUV. I run after them and I am flying on the street (I think I was semi-lucid here but I can't be sure; again, I definitely didn't do an RC or anything). I see one of my WL coworkers in the air on a flying machine (think chitty chitty bang bang). I ask him for help. As I fly forward and he flies towards school, I communicate with him telepathically and have him drop down some electronic turnstiles/gates to allow me access through where this black SUV is taking my dog. The gates and general scene remind me of the new Jurassic Park movies for some reason.

Somehow from here I end up in a version of Disneyland with fiance. Again, she's wearing an outfit that I saw IWL recently, a business-ish dress this time. Everything is frozen. There's a huge blue bioluminescent flower that's completely frozen. The entrance feels more like a shoddy amusement park than Disneyland -- the sign for it is like 8.5x11 and just says in small Denny's-like font "Disney". Fiance is wearing ice skates, I'm wearing her thin slippers from WL. I get a strong sense of deja vu as we enter and hop over a cold puddle. I can feel the ice crunch underfoot and feel the cold, but not in a bad way...very vivid. I make a comment about taking a swim or something similar

From here I end up at a pot luck that looks like a huge Thanksgiving feast. I brought my own meal though, and I feel bad about it because it's not enough for everyone. I say my hellos and then head to the back where there's a darkened living room (fireplace behind/to the righ of me) and I'm in a chair/recliner. There are some older folks and family members around me and fiance eventually joins me.



*Note: Mostly slept on my sides last night. I think this results in more vivid semi lucids and non lucids, which can be nice every once in a while Interestingly I don't think I had any FA's.

Aug 23 2018

Woke up at 3:30 am, remember bits of a long NL. I was a female (possibly jewish?) in some sort of relationship/society/sisterhood. My best friend or leader was dismissing me from the group sternly but also still loves me and was sad to see me go. I remember the words "Is it possible to always be a mama bear?" with no context (hey -- they made sense then). I also remember a DC from earlier in the dream that looked like an old (current) Seinfeld with white hair. I think I was returning to my family.

Was moderately relaxed but again had some trouble getting back to sleep*. Got up and went to the bathroom, then came back. Figured since I still couldn't get to sleep I would try to relax and WILD. No success after some time (although I had some pretty great hypnagogic imagery), so I SSILD'd and laid on my side**.

I eventually got to sleep about 45 minutes or an hour after waking. I didn't notice it, but my neck was strained because of the pillow's position. I then had a series of FA's where I would wake up in my bed and talk/move around, but my fiance would angrily tell me to go to sleep each time because she had work in the morning. Between the second and third FA, I woke up briefly and realized was happening. I resolved that if it happened again, I would take advantage of it.

Success! The next time I FA'd, I saw apple peelings on the bed, and went downstairs to get some apple juice from the fridge, and I thought about tryptophan and realized I was dreaming! I didn't immediately look at my hands and clarify the situation, but I was able to stumble through the dark dream living room (my movement felt somewhat staggering). There was a terrifying old (demon?) woman's face on the couch, so partly out of fear I decided to leave this dream. I pressed my dream head down into the "pillow" to change dream scenes and vaguely thought of a giant tree as a new destination.

I think that when I used this technique (pressing head back into pillow), I somehow became more conscious of my WL body and realized I was lying on my side with my neck strained and my left eye being pressed in by the pillow. As the new dream scene materialized, It came to me in portrait format instead of landscape, if you can imagine that -- and it was letterboxed (black bars on the left and right). This effect worked so well because I could only see out of my right "dream eye", so I didn't have the advantage of binocular vision to "3D it away". Because of my awareness of my neck strain, I also couldn't move my head at all, and the only thing I could control was zooming my vision in and out.

The dream scene wasn't a giant tree, but rather another, smaller version of the previous living room, only bright this time (with daylight coming in through the window and the indoor lights on). There was no one in the room. I understood that it went back some ways behind me and was dark that way. The couch was similar to my childhood couch (old and scratchy, had diagonal woven textiles, like thick yarn) but was grey instead of tan. There were some objects strewn about the couch. As I zoomed in closer, objects would "pop" out of existence, sort of the opposite effect of the Object Fade setting in video games; when I zoomed out, they would return. There was a largeish button, a cylindrical something, a box, and some other miscellaneous vague items.

I should have tried to change dream scenes again, but I think that would have been difficult considering I probably would have had to press left instead of back to fall into the pillow, and who knows if that would have worked. The dream faded very slowly and I probably could have held onto it longer.

Later I had another FA but failed to convert it. When I awoke I was feeling more relaxed and thought I'd casually try to WILD for a bit again. It was nice because I could feel the waves of vibration flow over me. I was doing LaBerge's "1. I'm dreaming. 2. I'm dreaming. 3. ..." method, trying to be a passive observer and let the dream take me in. Had some very vivid HI again and let it play out before me. I think I got partway there, because I remember my HI started integrating into moving imagery, then mini dream scenes, then almost a full dream scene. At the height of it, I was a point in space rotating around a stadium that looked like a giant thimble. I think I was fully aware, enough to at least call it a semi-lucid, but I don't think it was a dream as much as imagery; it didn't feel dreamlike, and I didn't feel as if I was really "in it" as much as I was just "seeing it".

Later in the night I had some more FAs and in some of them I was semi-lucid but not fully there. Once I was trying to WILD again, but got interrupted by a sudden and powerful fear of an intruder.

Overall, a pretty good night! I'm intereseted to know if anyone else has had this kind of "locked view" experience in their dreams, lucid or otherwise.



*I'm not sure why this is happening lately (waking up earlier and can't get back to sleep); I always considered myself a heavy sleeper and never have trouble getting to bed. Also, I haven't been setting alarms or autosuggestions to do WBTB, I think just possibly raised nighttime awareness after meditation is causing small disturbances to wake me. Any advice appreciated.

**I tend to lie on my back most of the time, which helps with vivid dreams and recall, but seems to be causing problems with getting to sleep and staying asleep if I'm not already tired from the day. It also makes me hyperaware of early morning hunger.

***Also just wanted to note that I've been abstaining from my nighttime tea (it makes me drowsy on weekday mornings) and any supplements (I sometimes use melatonin and/or valerian), but have been drinking half a glass of apple juice each night 30ish minutes before bed. Luckily I