I am 30 years old, a white male, and I live in Fairbanks, Alaska.
I only recently started the practices involved in lucid dreaming maybe 2 weeks ago as a result of a random search which turned out to inspire a great passion for the pursuit. I pulled my live-in girlfriend along for the ride and she started the practices as well only a couple of days later.
Aside from increasing recall rates and a noticeable increase in our prospective memories during our waking life, we had been unable to achieve lucidity in any dreams, but that was okay because we knew that it could take time.
Dream recall became very potent for me specifically as I began to remember as many as 3 very vivid dreams upon waking most mornings. It was rewarding enough in itself as I have always loved my dreams because they, almost without fail, play out like dramatic epics that seem fully formed with a beginning, middle, and end. I used to write them down a LOT as a teenager. I have a livejournal spanning several years that is probably 1/3 dream journal.
Anyway, I found myself lucid in a dream quite by accident, actually. I had just awoken from a particularly strange dream wherein my dog, Psycho (a little black and white papillon), talked to me whilst standing on the kitchen counter which is a place that he knows he aught never to be, but he is a little wild at times.
Anyway, not to get into that dream too much, when I awoke from that dream, I decided to try the WBTB/WBTS (Wake-Back-To-Bed/Wake-Back-To-Sleep) method, got up for a good Winter pee outside in subzero temperatures, got a drink of water, and then I stayed up for a few more minutes to think about my last dream and the SEVERAL dream signs that were present in the dream, determined to incubate the dream and return to it, this time to realize that I was dreaming.
Once I felt satisfied that I had done enough, I decided to go back to bed and focus on re-entering into the previous dream.
After a period of maybe half an hour or more, I knew that I was not going to make it back to sleep so, remembering the studies of dream telepathy I had been reading about in days prior, I decided to try to psychicly project the notion that my girlfriend was dreaming TO my girlfriend whom I found sleeping next to me, somewhat fitfully.
I began to focus on the mantra, "You are dreaming, Lynn. Know that you are dreaming."
I repeated this until...well, I do not remember stopping because my consciousness slipped right into a dream where I was still lying next to my woman only now my friend, Stephen, was lying on the other side of her, facing the flat-screen T.V. that is at the foot of our bed, watching some cartoon that I cannot recall now, but it was supposed to be funny.
We talked, but I could not remember what about once I awoke. He did say something funny about the cartoon which we both laughed about.
It was all rather odd because my girlfriend and I were completely naked as that's how we spend most of our time when we are home and we almost ALWAYS sleep naked unless it is just one of those -40 degrees Farenheight nights in which case Lynn will usually wear some light clothing to bed. So it felt normal to be there and to be naked, but not with someone else in the room and Stephen was fully clothed.
I remember thinking this was a bit odd, but I let it pass because Stephen and I had always been pretty shamelessly open with one another in the past and this sort of felt like it fit.
Anyway, after the joke about the cartoon, he suddenly grabbed my face, pulled my head close to his face so that my left cheek was close to his lips. That's when he began to kiss my cheek and say, "If only [My Name] were here!"
I didn't say it, but I was thinking, "Stop being weird and what are you talking about? I'm right here!"
Lynn was asleep between us for this entire interaction.
After he let my face go, I felt the urge to get out of bed, get dressed, and get things set up for Lynn and I to start our respective days so that she could just get out of bed and have an easy morning of it. I like to do things like that, at random, because I like her to know that I still care.
Upon getting out of bed, I realized that I was still naked and that I should get dressed or Stephen would be embarassed by my nakedness.
I reached for some clothes hanging over the back of our black recliner next to my side of the bed, paused in mid-reach, and decided that it didn't matter and opted to remain naked as I went about my morning efforts.
I remember noting that none of this illicited any kind of response from Stephen, who was still on the bed, watching T.V., and I looked back at him just to be sure he wasn't freaking out.
Instead of seeing Stephen's shocked face which I had been expecting, I find him rather casually sitting up, facing the T.V. and eating a plate of food which I had cooked the night before (Jasmine rice, green lentils, and black turtle beans all mixed with a bit of ketchup, egg, and hotsauce). It had been intended to fill a burrito, but he had spread it out like a proper meal and added some bread on the side with some tea.
It didn't bother me as I consider myself to be a good host and I take pleasure from insuring that my guests have all of the comforts that I can offer/they can accept so I was merely pleased that he was enjoying a meal that I provided. It did sort of bother me that he hadn't asked, the dish seeming to have just appeared there.
He motioned to the slanted ceiling above him at the construction paper that we had cut out in big block letters using negative space on black paper so that the white of the ceiling would show through in contrast even when it wasn't very light in the room. We had made them to say, "What Was I Just Dreaming" in fancifully curved and varied ways so as to stimulate the artistic side of our brains while also stimulating the logical side. Anyway, that was the intention and I quickly explained it to him because he loves art and is an artist himself. He thought it was pretty cool how we had used blue for the "What" and deep purple for "Dreaming" in order to make those words stand out to the eye when all other words were on pitch black backgrounds.
I feel something tugging at my mind. I feel strangely about our interaction, but I can't place why.
I shrug it off and walk to the stairs at the far wall and, preparing to walk down them, I had a sudden urge to jump down halfway while holding the railing with my right hand. I have NO idea why I decided to do this.
So I jumped and, to my surprise, I began to float. I floated well past my intended landing place, continued past the final step before the middle landing, and then, as I was about to touch down on the middle landing, my body slowly spun around while, simultaneously, my arms and legs began to move into the position I knew that I had fallen asleep in. At that point, I had set down on the middle landing, on my back, and I could not move even a finger. Something was dawning on me as I thought about the thought of how I knew this was the position I had gone to sleep in.
I thought, how could I be aware of that when I was awake?
The floor felt cold and the darkened bottom floor beyond the middle landing was dark and forboding, but I felt courageous in the face of the twinge of fear that I felt when staring out at it. I continued to think about what had just happened and I realized that my friend, Stephen, was more than a thousand miles away and could, therefore, not be sitting in my bed, eating my food. Furthermore, I realized that the only time I had ever successfully floated was in my dreams where I had done it countless times that I could remember.
With a sudden and inexplicable surge of anxiety, it dawned on me. I was actually dreaming and lying in my bed in the exact position that I found myself in right then and there.
Now a strange thing happened to me because what I found was that, upon becoming aware, this world felt WAY too real to be a dream. How could I be dreaming when I felt my body, felt the all too familiar winter chill of a barren dry cabin ground floor, and I could neither see nor feel a single thing that should distinguish a dream from the waking world? My consciousness actually doubted the validity of my statement that this was just a dream, but I knew it had to be because I knew that I had just floated and I knew that Stephen lived in Juneau and not in Fairbanks. I HAD to be dreaming.
Once I became clear on this, the anxiety melted away and was replaced with the most intense excitement that I have ever experienced. I was lucid in my dream! I had done it!
"Okay, baby steps.", I thought.
You might think of baby steps and assume that I would merely lay there and grow accustomed to the realness of things, but, apparently, what I meant by "baby steps" was that I should try to unfreeze my paralyzed body and attempt to get up.
I felt my limbs loosen and a heaviness lifted off of me.
I stood up and found myself, awake, lying in my bed next to Lynn.
Wow!
What none of the literature or CD's or even other peoples' stories prepared me for was just how REAL it would seem. Oh people had said as much, but nothing quite conveys just how that actually plays out to your conciousness. I found the idea that I was actually dreaming so unlikely given the sensations of the world that I almost lost the lucidty due to it. I had even chided myself for making such a rediculous assertion in the face of overwhelming facts to the contrary.
More to the point, when I awoke from the dream, I actually did several reality checks because of how real the dream had been and I no longer felt any true certainty that I could be sure that I was ever truly awake. The dream had showed me how silly I have been in all of my assumptions about daily life and what I believed to be the "real world". How could I be so sure? Nothing and I mean NOTHING about that dream world failed to feel as real as anything else that I have ever experienced. The only things that exposed it for a dream was my complete recollection of my waking life circumstances and my understanding of the waking life "laws" of physics.
I will never feel the same way about being awake again. Not ever.
All I can think about is that I want more. More!
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