side notes

As of 11-15: 50 since August.

11-17 (+1)
I'm in a huge indoor-outdoor area. It's the size of a football field, and I'm on a mezzanine-like structure. It looks like rock shelf as floor for the mezzanine all around, but also kind of perfect like a shopping mall (hard to describe). The whole area is overgrown with plant life, dirt, and rocks, and there is junk (think American Pickers and/or a garage sale or old barn). It also sort of feels like a hill/cliff I climbed on during my last vacation. I don't know what's below on the "ground floor"--maybe a small body of water/pond? I climb around a corner and see a large twisted black metal wire structure which I understand to be a pulpit. The first 8-10 feet are twisted into a very small spiral staircase, and the rest is twisted into a rectangular pulpit face with a cross shape twisted on top. My cousin climbs up the staircase and pulls himself to the top, looking like he's about to preach. I become lucid and instantly lose eyesight. I sping to clear it up and begin to feel wakefulness pulling at me. I try to remember something I read hear once about "resisting the path to waking" and it works. I keep spinning and yell "lights!" and suddenly my vision comes back. All I can see past my small corner of the mezzanine is a huge sunset-colored mushroom cloud and sky going in all directions. I believe the lucid went on for a bit longer but I didn't write any more down in my DJ.

11-18 (+1)
At a wedding, lucid pretty briefly. Had some familiar faces show up.

11-21 (+3)
See post "Couple of Lucids - November 21"

11-22 (+2)
See post "Some Cool Lucids - November 22"

11-25 (+4)
4-lucid-long dream chain. Each time, I would "wake up" in the kitchen of 9 and become lucid almost instantly. Then I would exit out to the back porch and do a couple of things for 1-2 minutes, and then "wake up" into the next one. Things I did:
Flew to the top of a non-existant tree in the corner of the yard, then ran along an extremely long wooden structure, ninja-style. Again with these crazy disproportionately huge structures.
Walked outside again, saw my dad and passed him by since I was lucid. Decided to fly again and flew to the top of the tree again, but didn't go the same direction (the tree was in the same place, but the wooden structure wasn't) so instead I flew out towards my neighbors' houses and had a nice windy flight past some real life and dream memories (some of it was the way the neighbors (or previous neighbors) had their houses set up when I was a kid, some was from in-depth past dreams that I had forgotten all about*).
Walked out onto the porch and tried to spin-teleport to my incubated dream location, even closed my dream-eyes which usually dooms me if the teleport doesn't work, but this time simply nothing happened. I was able to salvage the lucid though, and did some summoning/object manipulation which was fun.
Had another brief one in which I lost it quite quickly and tried to do counting method to stabilize, but lost.

As of 11-26: 61 since August. I'm really excited to have gotten this far!

This weekend I started using a more intense regimen for day work and night work to increase dream recall and lucidity. It worked (somewhat)!

Day work: relaxed ADA, i.e. every few hours I do ADA for an hour. During that hour, every 10 minutes I remember in detail what I was doing 10 minutes ago. Also, each time I take my dog for a walk, I do walking meditation and focus on all of my senses.

Night work: night meditation before bed and in bed, setting intentions for WBTB, and SSILD during WBTB. Started keeping a physical DJ instead of using my phone in the morning. As I'm falling asleep initially, I revisit past NLs and visualize that I do an RC and calmly go through my lucid checklist -- calmly state that I'm dreaming, get a good look of my surroundings, start moving through the dream, once I feel somewhat stable scream "clarity now!" (and expect it), keep setting goals for myself to move forward, and most of all, feel calm and confident with an expectation of success.

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Aug 17 2018 (morning of)

Begin day work, but no night work yet -- no LDs, but recorded several NLs.

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Aug 18 2018

Day work, begin new night work.
Two semi-lucids (SL) and one LD, as well as a greater number of NLs than normal.

SL: I'm in a bus. I can feel warm sunlight through the window on my left arm. I'm going down a street near my childhood home. At some point, I become semi-lucid and begin to drive instead of being a passenger. I shift to 3rd person view, and I'm able to zoom and rotate the viewpoint to behind and around the bus, lower to the ground, higher, etc. Eventually I arrive at the end of the street and turn down a shortened version of the waking life street--this place reminds me of the wooded area near where I send my dog for day care when we go out of town. There's an outdoor party under a pavillion that in waking life is used to shelter tractors. My fiance, mother, and sister are all there with other random DCs.

LD: I find myself in an opulent room with deep red walls. The beams and columns are wooden and gold, with gold trim on everything in the room. There is a wooden desk ten feet in front of me with scattered scrolls/books/papers and other golden/brass instruments sitting atop it. The room feels cluttered but I can't remember with what -- bookshelves, tapestries? All around me deep red, wood, and gold are prevalent. I look at my hands and each of my fingertips has a small twisted mouth on it, similar to the strange writhing creature on the tree in Twin Peaks Season 3. I instantly become lucid and say "I'm dreaming". I begin to walk forward towards the table and repeat again, louder: "I'm dreaming!" Then I scream at the top of my lungs "Clarity now!", however I may have doubted myself too much, and the words come out garbled. The visual intensity increases greatly and I physically rise up from the ground. I can see there is some sort of light source on the light beige/tan ceiling, and suddenly I'm dropped back to the ground, as if the dream is rejecting me and literally spitting me out of the dream. I don't pop out of the dream, but it fades extremely quickly. The total length was probably less than 10 seconds.

Other SL omitted for quadruple X rating and just plain bizarreness.

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Aug 19 2018

Day work and night work.
One LD, lots of NLs (more than normal).

LD: As soon as I enter the dream, before even examining my surroundings, I feel aware. I look at my hands and calmly say "I'm dreaming!" and feel pretty stable. The sky is reddish and very dark. I am standing on some igneous rock or basalt, with patches of dried yellow grass, some of which look as if they're illuminated by sunlight. There is also some gravel. I walk forward a few paces and set goals to walk to this patch of grass, then this one. I start to feel worried about the stability of the dream, so I drop to the ground and scream "Clarity now!" as I rub the palms of my hands and knees against the gravel and rock. As I was falling to my knees, the position of my legs and knees relative to my hands feels off--like they didn't exist before I dropped down. As I walk I realize that the rock that I'm on is sort of a cliff or hill, and that there's a dirt path on the ground level a few feet below the dropoff. I look up and see several houses ahead. The sky is darker near the houses. I'm level with the dirt path as the path rose up and the cliff dropped down to a point where they met. I stand up and pass the first, smaller one on my left. I believe the front door was open. The second house is larger and somewhat menacing. I feel some subconscious fear, and suddenly I dream bursts and I'm awake (or in an FA, which I really need to learn to convert). I think this one lasted somewhere around 30-45 seconds.

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Aug 20 2018

Return to daily regimen only -- no lucids, only about 3 NLs remembered.