Thread: The Dream Lab

This time I didn't try very hard to lucid, or to remember my non-lucids. I didn't have any lucids, or even any remembered mentions of lucid dreaming. Here's all I bothered to remember:
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There was something resembling a glowing plume of smoke apparently coming out of the Moon, going down and to the left from my perspective. I suspected it was a galaxy of some sort. I found out it was.
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I was probably so unenthusiastic because I spent a large part of yesterday entertaining depressing thoughts. I don't know why I dwell on my fears and insecurities so much, besides that the freedom to take control of my real life is less familiar and therefore more scary. I have a trip coming up that's going to involve messing with my sleep schedules...it's probably a good opportunity to get exhaustion-related WILDs.

Today is gonna be the day that I start putting my "life is but a dream" principle into action and steering around all those fears and insecurities in my waking life. It may seem awkward, but whatever.

meh. More bad nonlucid dreams.

Tonight I tried putting the pillows at the other side of the bed and wearing a makeshift sleep mask (a fleece ear-warmer headband with a slit for the nose cut in one of the parts that goes over the ears, so that that part can go over the eyes), and using the candlelight and chamomile tea. Didn't make my dreams any more vivid.

Here's what I remember of them:
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I took this test, and got a 23/30 on it or something. I thought that was a bad score, and just wanted to curl up in a b/all and hide in shame.
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I'd taken a class with a bunch of guys, the most memorable of whom had very short brown hair and tan skin and may have resembled someone I knew from grade school. Sometime after the class, the guys went to the cafeteria to eat. I later heard, from an internet friend, that they were picking on girls or making sexist comments there via a discussion board on the school's website. She urged women to go to the cafeteria and represent themselves against the "predators." After eating some of my own food, I went to the cafeteria and looked at what they had. They were serving some kind of pesto pasta and I forget what else. Didn't look appealing enough, so I decided not to stay there.
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End of dreams.

What I try tonight will probably depend on my mood, and how well I overcome my existential slump of the last day or two.

My dreams seemed to be semi-lucid at times, but my recall of them was terrible! I thought I was going to remember much more than I did.

But here's what little I did remember:
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Church bells ringing throughout the land would set each other off simply by the sound wave of one church bell hitting another. So when one chimed low or high, other more distant church bells would follow suit. Many of the more distant low chimes were lower than the closer ones.

I visited some family, including a stepsister that I had allegedly never met before. She was sort of similar to my real-life stepsister but not quite the same. She was heavily pregnant, and talking about how her fetus was practically full-term size and could be born anytime even though it had only been in the womb for 7 months. I had this visualization of what the baby might look like.

Somebody ate some soggy Life cereal. I made some kind of remark about how Life cereal is always soggy.

A chess game was going on, with rather large plastic pieces, in a messy room. I was lying on my stomach looking at the board. [I woke up lying on my stomach from this scene.]
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Originally Posted by innerspacecadet

Somebody ate some soggy Life cereal. I made some kind of remark about how Life cereal is always soggy.

Isn't it, though? Gotta hate soggy cereal.

Another night of no lucids...probably as a result of not trying very hard, again, and also not really expecting to LD. Preparing for a trip with sleep schedule alteration involved, I wanted to get decent sleep more than I wanted to LD. In theory, I should be able to take advantage of the sleep schedule alterations on the trip and have some WILDs.

Anyway, what I remember from this morning's dreams:
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There were tiny snails that grew in damp, dark indoor places. They were pale orangish and edible, and their shells looked like shells and cheese pasta.

There were some kind of 24-item and 10-item lists I kept hearing about.
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[grr...even at 6:30 in the morning my recall of the first dream I wake up from is almost always terrible.]
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I went to the house of someone who reminded me of a professor I know. My first time there, I heard about people's projects (many people there wrote about various projects of theirs), watched TV, lounged around, and had some food. My little sister was cooking a stir-fried mixture of white cheese, eggs, and vegetables. When she went to the bathroom, I took over the cooking for her. The cheese hardened as I stirred the mixture. By the time she got out of the bathroom, the over-cooked cheese was as solid as if it were still cold. I apologized to her for ruining her meal when I found out that she hadn't wanted it that way.

I left, but then went back to deliver something or otherwise complete unfinished business. As I walked back, I noticed that the place was in a complex behind a metal fence some distance off the main street. I finished whatever business I had, then lounged in the bedroom for a while before I left again. I bumped into the owner of the house after leaving, and he thanked me for what I'd done, but told me I'd stayed too long - you're only supposed to stay 5 minutes if you forgot something or are making a delivery or whatever. I then realized I had to go back yet again, because I forgot my keys.

I was watching something baseball-related - in person, I think, rather than on TV. A baseball team consisting of many middle aged men and little boys (presumably their sons), with sky-blue uniforms and a name I'd never heard of, had gotten into the World Series one year and lost, and were apparently staging something like a protest rally. I thought that maybe that meant the World Series was actually more inclusive than the Major League Baseball system of the US and Canada, kind of like the Little League World Series.
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End of dream report.

Last night I experimented with B6 - not in a multivitamin like before, just on its own. I bought 50 mg pills and, seeing that even they were megadoses, decided I'd dissolve part of the pill in water and then just ditch the rest.

I tried to mix it with my chamomile tea, but that didn't quite work. It all ended up on the bottom, because the pill didn't fully dissolve...it fragmented. So I figure next time (i.e., tonight), I'll dissolve/fragment the desired amount in a small spoon, consume the contents of the spoon, then drink some water or tea.

And once again...no lucids. I don't think my vividness or recall were all that much better either. But, again, I think it was because I wasn't trying hard enough. Tonight, I've got plenty of time, and plenty of tiredness, to stoke up the passion and seek out my dream guide. For now, here's my report of what I remember of last night's last dream:
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Overall lighting of the dream: dull brownish.

I thought my glasses were too weak, so I bought another pair to make up the difference. The new glasses looked like small safety goggles. When I put them on over my regular glasses, things looked sharper but a bit uneven. I told people that it corrected me back to the level of my too-strong old glasses.

I walked down city streets, and various alleys.

I heard something about the Senators baseball team [I can't remember what sport they are IRL] and about a baseball rivalry that had cooled down and maybe even turned into an alliance.

[the best part]
I found myself lying in a sort of spa or pool or pond surrounded by little shops and stands and completely filled with plants growing white daisy-like "lotus" flowers, each plant having many blooms on one stalk. There were some buds toward the top of the stalk, beneath the most fully bloomed flowers. The flowers grew in a sort of dome-shaped or cone-shaped pattern. None of the flowers had stamens open with loose pollen. I told someone that the reason they all bloomed at the same time like that was so that little harm would be done if something came and ate some of the flowers. I tried touching some of the flowers toward the middle, and they felt kind of plastic-like, with no loose pollen spreading as I moved my hand over the flowers' centers. I took some pictures of the flowers close to me, and wanted to get a shot of the whole expanse of them. Then my camera started to malfunction - first it was stuck in movie mode and I couldn't figure out how to get it out of movie mode, and then the scene changed on me and the flowers came to be replaced with squares depicting underwear and pajamas as if in an advertisement or displayed on a table. I was really disappointed.

I ended up in something like my room at some point, with pajama bottoms and underwear strewn about, all displaying the Hanes logo on their waistbands.
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End of dream report.

It is too bad that you can't actually take pictures of your dreams, even if you dream that your camera's actually working. That flower scene was just really beautiful.

Last night, I tried the B6 again, first consuming what I'd "absorbed" in the spoon and then washing it down with chamomile tea. I also set my alarm for WBTB's (but didn't need to after the first time, because I kept getting up to pee), and did lots of visualization and thinking about lucid dreams and my goal of meeting the former lucid dream character, whom I called "Big Red" due to his long red hair and big build, as a dream guide and asking him how to control my dreams and my emotions.

I had lots of dreams, two of which included DILD sequences when I met Big Red. I wanted the second meeting precisely because I forgot what either of us said in the first meeting. Alas...I didn't remember what he said in *either* dream, and in the first dream I didn't even remember if I'd asked him the key question, "How do I control my dreams?"

My dream reports are below.
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Earliest Dream:
vague semilucid territory. I'd heard about certain ways you could recognize dreams as dreams, but they were counterintuitive - for instance something in a dream turning out too big when I would have expected it to turn out to small in a dream. As with most earliest dreams, no specific details remembered.
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Spirit Guide Dream #1:
I was in a hotel room with my bf. [Supposed to be my current hotel room, but...places are never the same in dreams. My bf actually isn't here with me - I missed a big dream sign there.] I decided to try to see if I was dreaming yet. I jumped toward the celing light [my hotel room actually doesn't have a ceiling light] and I felt like I floated a little. That was weird, I thought, but maybe it was my mind playing tricks on me and gravity was acting normally. But then, when I was back in my bed, I saw an unclear, almost pixelated-looking very bright meteo out the window. It moved seemingly slowly for a meteor, and seemed to retrace its tracks once or twice. I was at once awed and frightened, and kept babbling on about it. I told my boyfriend, and he saw it too. Soon I realized that I was probably dreaming after all. "Yay! Finally lucid!" I thought. So I flew away.

I remembered that I was supposed to find Big Red, my "spirit guide," as I called him in the dream. I went to an indoor red wolf sanctuary, where the wolves were kept behind glass in a display, and found a heavily built red wolf and brought him out of the display. I figured that wolf was probably him. Sometime after I brought him outside, he turned into a human. I don't remember what he looked like as a human - I wasn't paying much attention - but he had a deep voice with low emotionality. He told me he had things to say about love, but I told him I had questions to ask him first. I asked him the questions, and he answered...but I don't remember what they were, or what his answers were.

Sometime after that I lost lucidity, and next thing I can remember from the dream sequence is that found my little sister in the wolf sanctuary building or someplace similar, having problems with her glasses infecting or injuring the bridge of her nose. I asked a lady if it was the same problem I'd been having, but she said it was a bit different.

[place in sequence not remembered:] Somebody called the wolf sanctuary, and a lady who works there said they only make toy stuffed animals, not stuffed real animal skins.
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Nonlucid sequence: classes and stores.

I was frequently sitting in on a class consisting mostly of older or disabled women, although one person in the class was a rich boy I knew from grade school. I sat in on that class simply because it was near my "homeroom" and so I often passed by the area while it was in session. One woman in the class had a weird backwards-S-shaped nose, with the bridge protruding. The teacher was gray-haired and slow-talking, reminding me of a teacher I'd had for a college class.

I often went to various little stores in the area, one of which had some very small bettas in bowls. One baby betta was pale blue/green, the other dark blue. They were about half the size of adult female bettas. I kind of wanted one, but thought it would be cooler to breed my own baby bettas, given that I had males and a female at home. [The female is actually at my office IRL, but I could carry her home if I wanted.]

Someplace or another had a tall betta bowl that I thought was similar to one I previously owned.

There was another store I went to with other interesting things.

After visiting the stores, I went to see that class again, and they were discussing a report/project they had to do. I thought that some of the questions being asked were hard, or that I was thinking of a lot of wrong answers to them. I talked to the teacher afterward, and told him that through sitting in on various parts of the class, I was vicariously living my nightmare of taking a difficult but interesting class - one I wanted to do well in but couldn't.

A late middle-aged woman was teaching a class full of troubled little children. One of those children was a little girl who was labeled "a pedophile" (which I figured must mean in this case that she sexually assaults other little children). She came up and talked first to me, then to the teacher. She was very friendly to me. As I started to walk away, the little girl admitted she really liked me. I figured it must be because I was younger than the teacher, and that if she's "a pedophile," she likes people better the younger they look. I made a quick exit so as to avoid causing any trouble with the teacher's operation of the class due to the little girl's attachment to me.
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Spirit Guide Dream #2:

I was at my office and noticed that my fish bowl, usually occupied by just my pale blue adult female betta, contained a small guppy (male, I think) and a little dark blue baby betta with white or light blue fins. I was excited about the baby betta, the son of my adult female, and rushed to rescue it from the guppy and put it in a little plastic container. I was worried at first that it had fallen out, but then I discovered that it had landed safely in the container. There was a plastic bag covering part of the top of the container, and the baby betta swam into this covered region and kind of peeked over the plastic bag. I was concerned he might end up stuck on the bag out of the water.

Sometime later, in a place similar to my hotel room, some skinny brown-haired guy I'd been talking to in a larger group earlier was hitting on me. I was in no mood for it, being "taken" and not liking his style, so I kept rejecting his advances and eventually hit him on the forehead with my palm to knock him back down onto the bed. He got up, and onto the floor walking towards me, and his response was like, "Ooh, fight, fuck, fight, fuck, fight, fuck...I like that idea." I left the hotel room to get away from him.

But then I thought the whole fight-fuck-fight-fuck idea would be kind of cool after all. What if I'm dreaming? I asked myself. Then, I thought, I could do what I want and wouldn't have to worry about cheating on my boyfriend.

Soon I found myself in a hotel room without the brown-haired guy, doing reality checks. I decided to try pushing my hands through a window. It wasn't working, and soon the window fell out. I recovered what I could - the screen and about half the glass - and replaced it. I considered jumping out the window as another test, and removed the window again, but then thought it too dangerous because I didn't know whether I was dreaming or not yet. So I put the screen back in place.

So I went to the center of the hotel room and tried that jump-and-float test again - the one that had failed in the last lucid. This time, I floated long enough to be convinced I was dreaming. So...time to jump out the window and pursue my agenda - spirit guide first, maybe that brown-haired fighter-fucker later.

When I jumped out the window, a city park was below me, with green grass, green leafy trees, and people playing. I glided slowly outwards and downwards. I wondered what would happen if I didn't think I could fly...and sure enough, I fell much more quickly to the ground and stumbled a bit as I landed. So then I tried being confident in my flying abilities this time, and sure enough, I was able to float toward the green leaves of a tree, partway curled up into a ball and feeling a light and tingly feeling that I associate with flying and using other dream powers. Off I went to find Big Red.

I landed on a city street with many pedestrians - a side street facing the main street just ahead. I looked for Big Red among them. Soon I glimpsed him coming from a smaller side street to my right, in his original human form, recognizing him by his long flowing red hair, which I think was tied back on the top but not the bottom, and his big build, which I think was even bigger than in the original Big Red dream, bordering on fat. He was wearing a T-shirt, of a pale color, I think - white or light blue or something. I walked quickly toward him as he headed toward the main street, calling out something like, "Hey, you!" He ignored me. "Big Red," I called, as he was starting to cross the main street and I was still following behind him. No luck. "Sir!" I yelled, almost up to him now, both of us crossing the main street now. Then he turned and faced me.

We went to talk, walking down what seemed like a path from a forest nature park. I told him that I sought him out again because I forgot what he told me last time. "I know that," he said, in the same low, calm, unemotional voice he had in the earlier dream. I very carefully and deliberately remembered to ask him, "So, how do I control my dreams?" Again, I forgot what he said after I woke up...but what I do remember is that he insinuated that something about my attitude, as manifest in my previous dreams of the night, was getting in the way of my dream control. I can't remember whether I asked him how I can control my emotions in general.

There was some more non-lucid stuff after all that, but I don't remember it.
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End of dream reports.

I may have to improve my dream recall before I can properly do something like I attempted here - getting advice from a dream character. So, I will consider this mission a partial success - I summoned Big Red and asked the most important question but forgot his answers - and move on to goals of improving dream vividness. Next agenda: to use the sensations of touch, taste, and smell in a lucid dream. Preferably all of them in the same dream.

Random notes:

I'm gonna be staying up all night tonight...if I can. Chances are I'll enter a Stage 1 nap at some point or another. I often do at times when I really want to sleep but can't sleep deeply, e.g. the afternoon when I'm bored.

Sometimes exhaustion means WILDs, so I'm looking forward to that. Over the course of the night, I want to keep smelling, touching, and tasting in mind. I almost think I should think of another lucid goal as well, because my lucid dreams seem to last at most about as long as my goals, based on recent experience. Once I finish all my tasks, I lose lucidity.

And...I wanted to note that I've nicknamed that "jump in the air and see if you float" reality check the "Princess Toadstool," after Princess Toadstool's ability to float when she jumps in Super Mario 2. I might use that terminology in future dream reports: "I did a Princess Toadstool and floated long enough to realize I'm dreaming." I don't remember if it was The Lucidity Institute or here where I read about that reality test, but it's often one of the first ones that comes to mind these days in my DILDs. I've had at least 3 lucid dreams now where I've Princess Toadstooled, with one failure (or you could call it a delayed partial success, because the PT results combined with the meteor and other weirdness kind of added together to make me go lucid).

Eh, i've pulled all-nighters (for school) many times, and two results came out of this:

1.) Most of the time i'd be so tired i'd straight pass out and not dream.
2.) Once, only once, i had a crazy dream that i really don't remember from the lack of REM

Well, I'm optimistic about this one because the first time I stayed up all night, for similar reasons to why I'm doing it now, I had my first WILD, and my first lucid dream in a year. It may not occur when I first fall asleep, but there's a possibility sometime afterwards, if I'm really exhausted.

Not a very good dreaming session. I kept getting up to pee every few hours, and this time, it was annoying, as I really wanted to sleep well, and wasn't sleeping well. Maybe that's because I was trying to sleep in the daytime, and also in a strange bed. Last few times I've slept in a bed other than my own, I've had to get up to pee a lot, including one time before I started experimenting with B6.

I want to see if stopping the B6 helps, though, because I'm thinking that maybe my body wants to pee to get rid of the extra B6.

The only dream I bothered to remember a significant amount of:
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There was an organization called the International Virgin Alliance for adolescent and young adult women, which I'd been involved in some time ago. In recent years, they'd changed their mission to disability awareness and advocacy for young adults of both sexes. College kids were often the most active in the organization, and each college class had prominent members associated with the organization. Some of these members had disabilities. I saw these people at times, but didn't really talk to them.

One white female in the organization had a black father who was highly permissive, and she was spoiled. When she acted out, someone - possibly my dad - commented that she really had no father, and that the father figure was brown, which I took as insinuating that she had been adopted by or a foster child of the black guy.

I said in another setting that in all my years of schooling, not once had I had a roommate who was NOT able-bodied (lacking physical disabilities) and neurologically typical (lacking cognitive, learning, or psychiatric disabilities), despite the efforts of the organization.

I dug up some kind of internet connector box lodged next to a wall and under a rug, that kept my region connected to the advocacy organization's internet. It was light brown and maybe a little longer and skinnier than my hand, but considerably thicker. I noticed that the connector box had the logo or markings of the original International Virgin Alliance.
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End of dream report.

I didn't try hard to lucid this time, because I needed the sleep. And, of course, I didn't lucid. My main problem lately is that I'm worried I'll get too excited to sleep if I try to have LDs and get all psyched up at the first signs I'm falling asleep. Perhaps I can try implementing relaxation techniques along with incubation techniques (MILDing, basically) to overcome that issue.

Here's what I remember of this morning's dreams:
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There was a famous rich tycoon and motivational speaker/author [not real] in town. He had a name, but I forget it. Some friends [all not real] and I would hang around him a bit and try out some of his tips on having a professional style.

I had a meal in a place with a pitcher in which you would drop payments and tips for the food. The pitcher kept the dollar bills on top, and had holes in the top compartment through which the coins would fall to the bottom. I put in $5 and some change to pay for my food. And then, for reasons I'm not sure of, I experimented with putting gravel (small river rock pebbles similar to what I have at the bottom of one of my fish bowls) and some liquid from my meal (melted ice cream?) down the pitcher. The gravel blocked up the coin holes, and the liquid made a mess of the bills. I decided to clean out the gravel and liquid afterwards.

I saw my boyfriend with this really weird haircut that he adopted to try to implement the famous rich guy's ideas. He had parts of his head shaven, and the shape of the haircut was comically odd. I told him something along the lines that something always goes wrong when he tries to imitate normal people.

I was some kind of distinguished guest at an event in an auditorium, along with a bunch of other people. We all waited in line in the middle of the auditorium to go up to a microphone and introduce ourselves. One of the guys before me said something about my last name and messiness. [I think my last name had some special meaning that applied only in this dream and not in real life.] When I went up to the podium, I said that the guy before me was right - we [my last name]s are very messy. People laughed. Then I finished my intro with my first and last name and what I do. My voice sounded as it tends to sound to me through a microphone.
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End of dream report.

Originally Posted by innerspacecadet

My main problem lately is that I'm worried I'll get too excited to sleep if I try to have LDs and get all psyched up at the first signs I'm falling asleep. Perhaps I can try implementing relaxation techniques along with incubation techniques

If you figure out how to pull it off, let me know, because that's my problem exactly when WILDing. Just can't fall asleep.

Ok...I'll let you know if I ever do figure it out. I think WILDing at will is a long way away from me, but I may figure out how to do some MILD-ish thing.

Having gone deep into a period of lack of enthusiasm, lack of lucid dreams, and frustration, I haven't updated this journal in a while. I even skipped a couple days in my dream journal, and had poor recall throughout much of this period. But I finally had my first lucid since the 10th!

My preparations tonight were as follows: went to bed early (had gotten sleepy early from doing some boring work and probably from having gone to bed late the previous night), meditated and visualized and did some reality checks throughout the day as much as I could remember to, based on BillyBob's "dream yoga" tutorial, spent some time on here, did a WBTB period, and recorded dreams over the course of the night. I also avoided chamomile tea and my sleep mask lest those deepen my sleep too much. It wasn't until I'd gotten about 7 or 8 hours of sleep and was nearing my usual wake-up time that I finally had a long-awaited DILD...and it was pretty short. But I accomplished my first goal of touching, tasting, and smelling before fading into false awakening.

The false awakening part makes me want to make a habit of doing RCs as I awaken.

Here's the last dream sequence (I'm not going to bother to share the earlier sequences, from which I remember much less - I have all dreams I've bothered to write down in my paper dream journal anyway). The lucid part was actually quite short time-wise, but it was very vivid and fairly productive.
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I was heading downtown to go to a very popular colloquium. One person, a young man of black/mixed origin, had arrived early. Someone asked why he was there, and he said he'd gotten an invite. I was curious if I'd gotten an invite too, so I headed toward my office to check my e-mail for one. As time for the colloquium was nearing, I decided to check it out anyway, even if I wasn't sure I had an invite. As I got there, it was crowded with no seats left and many people standing around, so I figured I'd stand and listen in. It was held in a building that seemed like a church. I saw a sidebar somewhere with the names of mailing lists that had invites, and thought maybe I was on one of them, but I wasn't sure. The speaker was a woman, and the topic was something related to planets and life.

I looked outside through a window on the far end of the room as she was speaking, and there was a skinny tornado off in the distance, seemingly stationary, with a squiggled but non-forked lightning bolt going through the middle of it. It was dark out. There was no other sign of bad weather. The speaker soon explained that it was part of an experiment by "Elizabeth" or something like that, related to the topic of life and planets that she was speaking about.

I eventually went to a bathroom and looked out the bathroom window. There were now three tornadoes with lightning bolts going through them, one of them heading towards the building. It approached and passed through the building, creating a little bit of shaking and some blurring but otherwise causing no harm. Soon I saw part of the opening to the children's book advertisement show "Reading Rainbow." I saw the bright colors and pretty cartoon images and heard the sugary strong voice of the singer of the theme song. Next, I saw a miniaturized, cartoonized version of the colloquium speaker, a short-haired woman, with pink butterfly wings on her head appear roughly where the window was. Then things faded, and I sat down beneath the window. I said aloud to myself, I'm in a dream, aren't I?

I soon recalled my main lucid goal: to touch, taste, and smell. Next place I found myself in was a remarkably good replication of my mother's and stepfather's kitchen at their former house, which they'd moved into when I was in college and moved out of recently. I was in the kitchen with a black microwave, finished golden brown wooden walls, and a large refrigerator near the doorless doorway to the dining room. I started by touching a clear drinking glass on the counter with my hands. It felt cool and smooth. Then I decided I should try textures. I took a piece of paper towel or facial tissue or something of that sort, and could feel its texture just fine - dry and mostly gentle but with a little ruoghness. Then I decided I should try a more complicated texture. I went into the dining room, with its pink yarn carpet, and tried a long (unnaturally long for the carpet) strand of pink yarn. Its texture was a bit rougher than the paper towel. Then I figured I should try feeling textures with something other than my hands. So I rubbed the yarn and whatever else I had on my neck. The texture felt a little blunted compared to my hands.

Then it was time to taste something. I looked in one of the cupboards, wishing for something to taste, and came across some barbecue soy nuts in a long rectangular clear plastic container. I opened the container and grabbed a handful of soynuts, making sure to get lots of barbecue powder for strong flavor. I put them in my mouth and started chewing and noting both the pure taste and the part of flavor that's actually smell. I also noted their texture in my mouth - sort of like real nuts, a little hard but not making very loud crunching sounds. I could sense some of their spicy olfactory flavor drifting up into my nasal cavity from my mouth, but it wasn't very strong. They tasted salty, but I realized I could not seem to taste their tanginess/sourness.

I decided to taste and smell something else as well. I opened the refrigerator, wishing for something to eat again, and found a grapefruit half. I sniffed it before eating it. It had only a mild fruity smell...but I kind of thought that made sense given that it had been in the fridge and so was cold. Then I ate it. It felt cold and wet in my mouth, as refrigerated grapefruit should. It was sweet, but again, not all that sour.

I thought I had some other plans after that, but the dream had started to fade, and I figured I could do the other plans in another lucid sequence.

I "woke up" in "my bed," with a guy in the room with me. I told him that I'd broken my dry spell. I proceeded to grab my dream journal and a pencil and write down my dream, which I labeled "Simpsons Lucid!" As I was writing, he said something about wanting to share, and sat down beside my bed watching me dream journal. I was somewhere in the middle of my bed writing away.

I later found myself working on a jigsaw puzzle with small plastic pieces about half as long as those of a normal 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle. The part I was trying to assemble was mostly white, but with some small green stripes sometimes appearing in sets of 3, and a large (compared to the puzzle dimensions) Interstate highway shield logo (can't remember the number, but was something like 93 or 103 I think) in the middle. I first worked on a small white area, but later moved on to working on the whole structure, which was already largely assembled. This part had its own edges, and was supposed to be the floor of a greater puzzle or game board or something. Other people were around, working on other parts of the puzzle in a large, carpeted living room.
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End of dream report.

Noting the relative bluntness of touch on my neck compared to my hands, and thinking that might be a real life thing, I tried rubbing a paper towel against my neck this morning, and compared it to how it felt in my hands. Sure enough, the sensation was more blunt on my neck. I guess it has to do with the relative nerve densities in those areas.

Intrigued by my inability to taste sourness in my dream, I tried savoring the sourness of my yogurt as I ate breakfast this morning. The sourness felt quite intense at times as I let it linger on my tongue.

I want to pay attention to taste, and smell/flavor, a lot today. And also to sight, of course. If I want to clean up my eating habits eventually, it might help to remember the tastes and smell/flavors of favorite foods, and get used to paying attention to taste and smell, so I can eat like a queen in dreams and save myself some money and health in waking life.

No lucids. But I had a prelucid moment. I was in my bed, and my roommate, who's supposed to be gone for Thanksgiving, came into my room to do some kind of prep for her own day or something. Finding this weird, I sat up in my bed and asked her, "Am I dreaming already?" She replied, somewhat angrily, "No!" and went about her business. I just took that at face value and continued on to a dream riddled with dreamsigns but where I was able to rationalize away just about everything.

From now on, since I write the nonlucids in my paper dream journal anyway, I'm only going to write dreams with lucid moments in full in here, and for the nonlucids I'll just write down all the weird stuff. This will allow me to turn my nonlucids into lists of dream signs, which I can review before going to bed or during a WBTB session.

Weird stuff from the last dream of the morning:
-In a faraway country in the Southern Hemisphere, which I'd never heard of before.
-Country had both deserts and swamps.
-I saw a fish swimming out of water - I just thought of that as *rare.* It's something I've seen in dreams before, too. Note to self: if you see fish swimming out of water, you are dreaming. No exceptions.
-The fish eventually returned to water, in a fish tank with tulips growing in it. (I rationalized the tulips as being there because it was spring in the Southern Hemisphere.)
-I met a rock star. And he knew me and my family! And furthermore, he turned out to be a doctor instead of a rock star.
-I hugged that rock star/doctor much the way I would hug my boyfriend.
-I had this toothbrush holder the likes of which I'd never seen before, with parts that snap together to close it. I also saw a bunch of them strung together as a sort of toy.
-I saw a little girl playing video games in a wheelchair that was (a) unlike any wheelchairs I've seen in real life, more like a giant luxury office chair, and (b) was playing video games on a TV-based game console seemingly attached to the wheelchair. Not one of those little handheld things that people play on the subway.

Man. The fish swimming in air was a classic, and I missed that. I'd say asking my roommate if I was dreaming was pretty classic too - I never ask that question aloud when I'm actually awake. I should have been even more skeptical. People will probably always deny that I'm dreaming, so I should rely on physical reality tests if I'm ever suspicious.

I used the sleep mask for that crazy dream, but that's because it was late in the morning and I was having trouble getting back to sleep after an earlier, shorter dream following my WBTB period, so I figured the sleep mask was my best shot at getting one last chance at dreaming.

I think I'm going to delay my "fly through the galaxy" plan, for which I prepared during my WBTB by playing with Google Sky, in favor of another stabilizing/empowering technique to explore the nature of the dream state in depth. I want to get a better sense of what the legendary "dream feeling" is like. I already have at least some idea: I'm usually quite comfortable physically. No bodily itches, no wind, no overall feeling of being hot or cold (although individual objects can be hot or cold), no tiredness of the eyes and desire to close them, and no physical pain, or if I do have physical pain it tends to be very blunt. Emotions can sometimes be different in dreams too.

I'm going to pay lots of attention to the sense of touch, including proprioception and internal touch, today, with a special emphasis on itches etc.

I think I vaguely recall dreaming of blowing my nose and sliming myself, but the feel of it probably wasn't quite the same as it is when I'm not dreaming.

No lucids. Possibly because I wasn't expecting to have them, due to not doing enough lucid-promoting exercises throughout the day.

Dream signs and weird stuff:
From early dreams:
-was seriously looking into buying a rodent. My apartment doesn't allow pets other than fish.
-Unusual location - a neighborhood that is not my actual one

From late dreams:
-overblown show of negative emotion - jumping in the air and growling out of frustration with failure at a simple task (classic dreamsign, especially in recent dreams!)
-task was weird: trying to hit a very tiny balloon while walking by it at 1 mph
-someone actually laughed at my display of emotion, rather than, say, telling me to calm down. I even thought that was weird in the dream.
-was taking a taxi ride, but the taxi driver wanted me to drive (driving in dreams is a classic dreamsign, 'cause I have no license and haven't had a permit for many years either)
-neighborhood where beautiful gardens signaled the presence of a fertile man or woman in the household, with bright colors symbolizing a fertile woman specifically.
-I shot a small doe with a tiny handgun, and put her in a plastic bag. (I've never been deer hunting.)
-The doe was there for a while, but never started to smell. (Lack of smell is a pretty classic dream sign...smell in dreams is very rare.)

That's cool how you found "Big Red" in more than one dream. I don't think I'm managed to find the same DC very often like that.

I had a fish swimming thru the air dream once too; actually it was weird because pj dreamed the same thing on the same night, a while back.

Originally Posted by Moonbeam

That's cool how you found "Big Red" in more than one dream. I don't think I'm managed to find the same DC very often like that.

I had a fish swimming thru the air dream once too; actually it was weird because pj dreamed the same thing on the same night, a while back.

I think it's a matter of determination and having an agenda. I've discovered in recent times that if I'm confident and determined enough, and have a specific agenda (short of something I've deemed impossible like orgasming in dreams), I can often accomplish it.

But, alas, my confidence flags easily whenever I try a technique and it doesn't work instantly. I've just gotta remember what does work for me: belief and desire, and frequently reminding myself of the dream agenda.

I also want to develop a WILD technique that works for me, because thus far I cannot induce a WILD. They can only happen spontaneously. I've also not been trying much because my early attempts at WILD induction techniques just kept me up all night cranky and miserable, or led to DILDs if I wanted an LD badly enough.

Another dry morning. Three days without a lucid is pretty normal for me...a week give or take a few days is, I guess...but I want to get myself to have them more often. Wanting them and having confidence I can have them seems to work better for me than any other technique...but the latter isn't always easy when you have a history of using various methods on here and having mixed luck or no luck with all of them.

Given that a typical sleep cycle is something like an hour and a half, to go from Stage 1 through REM, I wonder if waking up an hour after going back to bed, for just enough time that I'm able to register in my mind that I indeed woke up, will make my body want to finish the sleep cycle and go into REM very quickly? I was going to try it this morning after my failed FILD attempts, but it was too late and my mind and body would rather just stay up, even with a sleep mask on. There's just gotta be a way that I can "catch" my mind-body system in that special window where it can WILD.

Weird stuff from this morning's only remembered dream sequence:
-unusual location
-reference to school classes (classic dream sign for me)
-one class was almost all based on propaganda coming straight from a small nation's dictator
-I wanted to take classes to become a wizardess.

I tried waking up at various points after going back to sleep...45 minutes, 55 minutes, an hour and 10...or something like that. Then 2 hours, to allow for maybe one last chance at a DILD or something. Never created that special drowsiness that allows me to WILD easily, and no DILDs even after the last two hours. I don't know if I even dreamed after the last two hours.

So if I want to try induced WILDs, I'm probably gonna have to suck it up and wait a long long time to fall asleep. It would then be sort of like doing a WBTB but not really - taking an hour plus out of my sleep.

Weird Stuff:
-far away from home again...that seems to be a common dream sign as of late.
-ended up going from Arizona to Massachusetts in a matter of maybe an hour, and never boarding a plane! It takes at least about 5 on an airplane.
-Chewing tobacco looked like beef jerky.

I managed to avoid another week-long dry spell by having a DILD this morning. After previous half-hearted attempts hadn't worked, I found myself having to get up to drink water and pee a lot, starting at about 10 minutes to 8. I had gone to bed at 2. Figuring that I'd only slept 6 hours at that point, I could still have one more dream. So, keeping lucid dreaming on my mind as much as I could, I tried to sleep some more, but was still dry-mouthed and often wanting to relieve myself. By about 10 minutes of 9, I realized only an hour had passed since the first time I got up to drink water and pee this morning, and that sleep cycles are an hour and a half and are dominated by shallow sleep after you've slept for a while, so I figured that maybe I just hadn't gotten to my last REM phase yet. I went back to bed, sleep mask on, and found myself more comfortable now. Eventually I did indeed drift off to sleep.

No lucid goals were accomplished, but that may be a mixed blessing, because the lack of goal achievement kept me lucid from the successful reality checks to the end of the dream. Dream report is below:
***************************************
I was walking outside on one of the roads along the way to my boyfriend's house. It was the crack of dawn...mostly dark, deep blue sky with a little light around the edges, and clear obviously. I soon thought to myself, "Why is it dark? I thought it was mid-morning." I decided to check my watch for the time and a reality check. When I tried to get it into alarm mode, it went blank - it doesn't normally do that, so I suspected at that point I was likely dreaming. I decided to try flying, and I quickly managed to get myself hovering on my stomach above the ground. I knew at that point that it was that last dream I'd been waiting for.

I remembered my goals: getting the feel of the dream state and flying across the galaxy. I thought the former was kind of boring and vague, so I decided to focus mainly on the latter, with a little bit of the former. When I was inside a house, I decided to try flying up to the ceiling and pushing myself through the ceiling into the attic - a sort of "walking through walls" exercise so I could remind myself how it felt. I got my upper body through. I decided to do a brief "dream feeling" exercise by sensing what it felt like to rub the sides of my hands on (or in) the semi-insubstantial floor of the attic. I felt a light sensation similar to water flowing around my hands when I'm swimming, but without the wetness. Next, I had to get my lower body through the ceiling/floor. It was stuck. I tried to push my left knee up through the ceiling of the room below, and I just felt the pressure (with no pain) against the hard surface. I knew I could do it, though. I decided to get myself to relax and try again, expecting that would make the surface become more insubstantial again so the rest of me could get through. I relaxed, and used my arms against the attic floor to stabilize my body, and managed to get my lower body through. The attic was empty and spacious, with lumpy ceiling-like material for the floor, a sunny window (it was no longer dawn), the angled roof above (as opposed to another flat ceiling), and I think wooden walls.

[Note: the rest of the dream, consisting mainly of attempts to get into outer space, may not be recalled in order.]

One attempt to get into space occurred outside on a lawn. I figured I'd start flying really high, higher than ever before. I flew, higher and higher, I think on my bely again so I could look down easily and keep track of how high I'd gotten. When I got to a certain height, though, as determined by the people and things below getting to a certain size, I got a little scared of heights and sank down again.

Another variation on attempted space flight involved imagining a UFO mother ship picking me up with a tractor beam and bringing me to outer space. I vaguely visualized the mother ship in my mind's eye, and let myself feel the sensation of floating upward with the imagined tractor beam, but then I ended up coming back down to a low hovering height again, just like with the spontaneous floating upwards.

Yet another attempt involved "swimming" upwards in the air, with my eyes closed, hoping that when I opened my eyes I will have changed the scenery to outer space. I tried that once or twice, and it didn't work. [The last time I tried it could have been how the dream ended.]

And there was one other attempt at getting into space: flying into a depiction of outer space in a television astrophysics documentary. I found an astronomy show playing on Channel 18 or 52 on a small flatscreen TV on the floor in a living room. The screen was taller than it was wide. I was on my belly on the floor watching the screen. In the show, pinkish-orangish nebula material was in the background, and in the foreground, the planets of the Solar System were depicted as rotating 2-D paperboard cutouts like those I had on an old decorative solar system mobile I got as a kid but didn't use 'til I was in college. I tried to will myself to push into the screen, but it wasn't working, and I soon decided the screen was too small to fit my body through. So I tried to get the TV show to play on the huge CRT (old-school) television off to my right, by turning the channel to either 18 or 52. All I got was some stupid Muppet concert. I was frustrated at that point. And furthermore, my stepsister was there in the room with me, yakking away. But I thought of the fact that it was still a dream and I could get away from her easily.

**************************
End of dream report.

I might have to spend more time looking at Hubble Space Telescope images or Google Sky or something before I can get myself to imagine space flight in a dream. I also just need more confidence. Maybe next time, I can look for a rocket launch area or a transporter or something, rather than just expecting myself to fly up there. Or, I can be more stubborn in trying to merge with images of outer space and become part of the space world that way. After all, I can pass through solid surfaces with only a little bit of easy-to-overcome struggle.

I'm glad I had this dream when I did, as I might not sleep tonight for more than a brief nap given that I have a deadline tomorrow.

Originally Posted by innerspacecadet

All I got was some stupid Muppet conert

Hey! Doctor Teeth and the Electric Mayhem rule.

Lucid space flight is a very difficult thing to do. The problem is it's so big and empty, you end up losing your frame of reference. You can't have movement without moving relative to something else.

hmm...My idea was to fly toward and past various objects in outer space, such as planets, star clusters, and nebulae, and use them as the reference points.

I don't think my mind is used to seeing much more than still images of space objects or short video clips zooming in on them. I wanted to model my space flights after those video clips, but I have no idea what the 3-D experience of passing by nebulae is like. On the other hand, I pass by things on the ground and see them from up high in many mundane situations, making Earthly flight easy to imagine in full 3-D.