Thread: Tony's Workbook

Nice LD series there Tony! You solved some challenges, so use that to bolster your dream control confidence. If you can fly to space where others have trouble doing the same, then you know that other dream controls do not have to be difficult either! That is one concept I really locked into early on. I remember reading how some great LD'ers had trouble with something I found easy, so I knew that the items that I found more difficult didn't have to be and dream control was much more unlocked than previously. I still run into challenges from time to time but I solve them quicker typically. Nice job!

I had a neat series of LDs the other day that I don't want to share specifically because they got kind of sexually explicit but I would like to bring up the question of... Does anyone else find that when they go lucid it's kind of a baseline lucidity where your lizard sex/fighting/flying brain takes over? I have all of these lofty goals but when i get into the dream I'm constantly either flying or trying to fuck something...

also I had an interesting DEILD that I will share...

In the gray I'm holding still and try to see if i can deild. My body forms and I'm walking in a nondescript foggy landscape. I remember I want to smoke a lucidity blunt and just put my fingers up to my mouth like i'm holding a cig. I'm smoking and I can taste something that's not smoke. I exhale smoke but when i look at my fingers there is nothing there. My fingers are also fading like back to the future. I wake up.

I see what i could do better there. I could have stabilized to calm it and started thinking of a scene. I went straight to my goal.

Were these "lizard brain" dreams lucid enough to where you acknowledged that you were dreaming? I have quite a lot of what I call "semi-lucids," where I do not explicitly acknowledge that I'm dreaming, but know I can do things like fly, phase through walls, and typically go into "caveman mode" (girls), etc. like what you're talking about (I had a couple just last night in fact).

I find that in LDs where I get a higher lucidity level to the point where I remember dream goals, I manage to hold on to goals for at least a little while. When the lucidity starts slipping is usually where caveman takes over. Recognizing these urges may be a good way to try and boost back up lucidity to a higher level. It's quite hard fighting them, but it is possible if you make a firm "no sex!" intention. I've been able to stick to that a few times.

Does anyone else find that when they go lucid it's kind of a baseline lucidity where your lizard sex/fighting/flying brain takes over?

I seek out a fair amount of sexual relations in the dream world while fully lucid. It is a fairly calm, collected and very deliberate thought process. I have had the other kind where I am not really in control of myself and only semi-lucid at best and those are what I consider caveman mode.

Last couple of nights I've been having some amazing cinema dreams that are totally personal in nature with people I know so i've been journaling but I haven't been posting... One of the best images was walking into a strip mall karate class for infants, there was about 100 infants sitting on the floor of a dojo in Ghis. These haven't been LDs but they have been vivid and fun as shit.
Thanks frying man for the tips on recall.

I did a wild attempt last night but it didn't take. I've been doing the frequent anti RC of Sageous but I think i'm losing some of the conviction. Like I'm not feeling the excitement of a couple of days ago? how to we keep that UMPH feeling going? Is it important to take breaks? Do we read more Journals? what are your techniques?

You could always just use initials in DJ entries, that's what I do, but I also have stayed anonymous here so I can post just about all my dreams.

Congrats on the vivid/fun dreams! That's the best, really. Lucidity is icing on the cake but awesome dreams almost every night is the absolutely most wonderful thing!

It's important to tailor your practice to your goals and life. I go through times of lower motivation and less daytime effort, but I try hard never to reduce the practice to zero on any given day.

Working in general mindfulness and state awareness to your life helps you maintain the practice. If you make a lifestyle change to always strive to stay tuned in, after you do it for a while, you don't feel like stopping.

Sure, reading journals of other dreamers is a great way to maintain interest and get ideas on dream control, etc.

My general attitude is that I want to have awesome , vivid (and lucid) dreams with excellent, detailed recall on a regular basis. I know that this takes effort expended over months and years. Since I want to always progress, I know that I always need to spend effort.

Just think of those vivid, cinematic dreams, and how you'd like to keep having them on a regular basis. That's enough motivation for me!

I had a couple of interesting fragments last night. I did a wbtb and wrote about a place that I wanted to go when i dreamed.

working for a medical research lab. helping make a decision to build a person that would be powerful and live for a short time or weak and live for a long time.

I am a caterer trying to make an octopus out of chicken parts. The drumsticks are the tentacles and i am trying to mold chicken breasts to make the head. I think i'm going to use olives for eyes.
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Here is the dream I want to visit.

So. I want to meet my Dream guide. I need the proper setting to wild into. I'm going to a meditation garden. a cobblestone path in a green meadow of close cropped st auggie grass. small round dark gray rocks with large flat white rocks marking steps up a small hill. Under a single lotus tree is a meditation booth, a cushion and a small gong. There is a pool with lilly pads off to the side. It's a clear day with a light breeze and slight sweet smell in the air. Next to the bench is a small brown sack. In that brown sack is everything I want. Behind the bench about 10 feet away is a door frame to nowhere. behind that door frame is anywhere and anyone I can imagine.

The next time I wild, I'm coming here. I'm taking a moment to take in my surroundings, to look at my hands, to touch the water, smell the flower and breathe deeply. I will stabilize. then i will reach inside the bag and retrieve a root of pure lucidity. I'll walk over to the door. Take a big bite and say. "behind this door is my dream guide. Tonight we are going to meet."

I did not get the REM i was hoping for and tried to wild anyway. Probably a mistake. No luck but I did get to practice my new mantra. "launch point, dream guide"

all i got was a tiny fragment about my daughter having a very short haircut and me being surprised about it.

one fragment about being on the Big Brother house helping the HOH who had descended into paranoia. My daughter was very restless and slept with me in bed with many punches and kicks. I"m not sure how much of that was a dream. I took a break from the nightly work to watch some BB live feeds and sleep.

Maintaining motivation is a problem that I have in lots of areas. About a week ago I had 2 massive lucid dreams about 2 days apart and afterwards, my motivation starts slipping. i can feel my RCs getting more perfunctory, my sense of excitement waning. I know I want this. this is one of my biggest goals but the light in my eyes is fading. I know this process is cyclical. I still wake up every day and journal but my journals are fragments when not too long ago I was dreaming epics.

This too shall pass. I will be an expert onieronaut

Saul set up an indiegogo campaign for his son who has cancer.

I am in the bb house.

You can do it! It may help smooth out the bumps to think of LD practice as continuous. "Expert" is not so much a destination as a journey that you pursue long enough and with enough effort and reflection. I'm in a low recall point now and I know it's due to my disastrous sleeping patterns at the moment. Try your best to continually find the source of blocks and eliminate them, and stay positive because dreaming is so awesome!

I thought about what FRY was saying regarding figuring out the blocks and Last night when i couldn't sleep with the thoughts running through my head, I realized i had some outside stressors that are holding me back right now. Some new additions to my day work include, Gratitude excercises, LD confidince mantras and boosting awareness... I'm going back on the alarms for a little while. Gratitude because I have a fucking wonderful life but if i get stuck worrying about what's not perfect then I don't have time to live in what's awesome about my world, so i want to actively direct the focus back to the positive in my life that exists today.

Dream from last night. Working a high powered corporate job and I'm looking for someone to fire. I have developed a very elaborate system of who is deserving and people are Hiding from me.

It's weird, kind of like a nightmare except I'm the monster.

^^I really like the outlook in that first paragraph!..and some interesting fragments!

Dreaming about LD. That's a sign that I'm close.

part of a LD support group where we talk about our dreams. I had a lucid dram that I'm describing to the group under the guise that it was for someone else. it was murky dream with flying in a purple fog. Afterword I'm trying to remember where the website for the group is so i can get that dream for my journal.

my wife is working with a shaman to fill a blank book with notes about the history of LD. She shows it to me, it's a purple spiral bound with a hard cover filled with postits.

visiting people in an old house i used to know with my daughter. I walk down a hallway where a woman is half naked wearing a green shirt and nothing on the bottom. SHe's not doing anything about it but looking at me funny. she gets into a shower with about there of her roommates. I look at them for a second. I'm looking around at the house and some of the furniture is very niced brushed wood and some of it looks looks like a crack den. The people who live there are leaving and i ask if i can get a ride to town and they say yes but i remember i have my 2 year old and she doesn't have a car seat. Then i remember that i haven't seen her in a little while and she comes in the room wearing panties. I ask her if she peed on the floor and she says no. we find her dress and her socks. I send a facebook message to my wife asking her to pick us up but it doesn't work. then i try to find my phone.

staying with family including dead grandfather.
he gives me a copy of ronald regan's signature from when he was a kid
I give him a kiss on the cheek and say we should talk more about history
I go out wandering the streets of Laf/Nat
End up at my old house of Pavie
people are sitting on the porch
I chat for a couple of minutes then wander around some more
realize i forgot my shoes and go back to get them
I'm at some kind of a restaurant
I find the person in charge, black guy with blonde hair
I ask for a bus boy job
he asks if i can be a waiter
I say sure and he gives me that job
I'mm asking various people what time to show up for my shift
nobody knows
then the kitchen manager says I'm surprised you don't want to work in the kitchen. I says sure, wh ynot.
I'mm leaving with somebody I know. trying to figure out where i'm going to live now then realize i can just stay with family while i figure it out
i go back to my grandfather's house and watch a movie
suddenly it's morning.

big dreams... I think that a few of these dreams were smashed together my my brain and not one continuous thing. Dead people, old places I've lived melded together, it seems like a boring dream but it was pretty interesting to me.

Even though I sometimes complain about "boring dreams," I don't think there is any such thing really, being aware of your dreams and recalling them well is such a wonderful addition to life, in a way you're extending your life by remembering your dreams so that the night's mental adventures are not wasted and forgotten...

boring is the wrong word, because it was pretty exciting to have these new jobs and such.. mundane is a better word becasue there were no real supernatural elements, no giant things missing, (except for the dead come to life)

Trying to shake off the bad week. 2 days with no recall in a row. I want my confidence back but it seems like everything i try to do to jumpstart it just makes things a little tougher. THis is kind of what happened to me the last time i jumped into this headfirst... I started building skill, had a couple of great weeks with some badass lucids, then it just stopped and i got frustrated until i quit. I dont' want to do that again but I can feel myself getting frustrated.

Don't let yourself get frustrated! Easy to say, I know, I'm in a really sticky low-recall phrase right now myself, and it feels like I have to dig and dig and dig for the memories instead of having them just ready to review upon waking.

Maybe this is a good time to practice extended, calm recall: try your best to stay quiet, still, and reach "softly" for the memories, asking (sometimes saying this out loud) "What was I just dreaming about?" If nothing comes after a while, try associating on common dream themes (school, work, girls, fighting, sports, anything you dream about often).

Sometimes you'll just get a flash of an incomplete impression or a single word/idea, when that happens try to hold on to it and associate until a more complete memory forms.

Sometimes you get nothing, but almost every time I do an extended recall session in the morning like this, I come up with at least some solid fragments, or even full detailed dreams at times. Spending more time on recall also helps to establish to your subconscious that dreaming and dream recall is important to you, so it should eventually cooperate more easily .

yes, project of the week, Thanks fry

Yes, do try to hang in there Tony. If you feel like you are trying too hard, feel free to ease up on the throttle a little. More consistent lucid dreaming is in your future if you are able to keep up some day practices even when you are frustrated and then ramping your practices back up when you are feeling better. We may have mentioned this already, but it is good to look at it as a journey without immediate results but with many benefits along the way.

What never fails to keep me motivated, beyond of course just a love for dreaming and waking up every morning having lived through new, wild, wacky, fun, funny, sexy, scary, thrilling adventures, is realizing that dreaming is just so awesome, that I'd always come back to it if I ever quit for a while. And knowing that consistent effort is so important for consistent progress, and since I'm no spring chicken any more, I have absolutely no time to lose. Why not just cut out all that lost time, and never quit!

And yes to echo what fogelbise said: it's a journey, love the journey, and have lots of awesome dreams along the way!

2 dreams last night with a wbtb. When i woke up i held still for-ever and finally there was this tiny flash way in the back of my mind that unraveled into a whole dream. Also, I can begin to see how my mind is stitching together separate dreams with common elements. I read a great passage in ETWOLD last night...

“The degree of awareness one is able to achieve while in a dream is in direct proportion to the degree of awareness one experiences in waking life.”

It's charging me up to get back to my day awareness practice with greater detail and clarity. I can even start to feel that excitement again.

Dominick cruz is asking me about takng over the UFC. The photo is blurry but that is because the person is blurry.

meeting r at a fast food restaurant at the end of my subdivision.
outdoor patio seating.
I order a burger at the counter and rusty steals a steak.
when it comes somebody cut it in half
I'm trying to get the attention of the manager to get the rest of my burger
Hannibal is there and we are hanging out
I see haji outlaw too for a seocnd
Pretty girls want to go out with us.
we are trying to call a cab
They keep lifting their skirts to show butt
I gget one on the phone but as it's coming we go back to their apartment.
I meet one of the girl's husbands.
I show pictures of my baby.
the husband straddles me
I realize i live in the same building

…

“The degree of awareness one is able to achieve while in a dream is in direct proportion to the degree of awareness one experiences in waking life.”

Yup, brilliant. In many ways, ETWOLD is really all you need. There is so much goodness in that book. Only took me about year to a year and a half to come to the realization contained in that quote myself .