Thread: What exactly do DEILDs feel like? Or: What the hell happened last night?

Last night I had a really strange set of dreams within one sleep cycle.

The simplest way I think I can describe it is... well maybe there is no simple way. What seemed to happen was, my sleeping consciousness got ahold of the lucidity mindset, whatever that is, and refused to let go, while at the same time my dream world kept trying to reset or shake me out of lucidity?

To be more specific, I don't remember at all how the whole sequence started, but at some point I became lucid. I have a good dozen flashes of imagery or memory from different scenes and things I did, all while completely lucid at the time, but now generally lost. I think it started out in this creepy fancy museum with these weird ass hideous stuffed big cats around. At some point, after doing a few interesting things here and there, I got stuck in this sort of degenerative state where I'd start to feel like the dream was collapsing, sensation and vividness falling away like I was about to wake up, but I kept managing to pull it back through force of will. Most of the time this involved rubbing my "hands" together, a decidedly weird experience because it seemed I was able to feel my awake hands and had to choose to rub the dream hands together rather than the 'real' ones. I specifically remember one, and I think there were a couple like this, where I was... I specifically remember being conscious of sort of just lying still in bed, but not at all awake, this sort of distant awareness, while this image slowly starts to form before me in the darkness, and slowly becomes this vivid doorway in a stone wall, and through the doorway I can see gardens like a dream scene, and it's slowly rising up into the air away from me, and I had to ... in the same way that I had to sort of use a 'imaginary' hands instead of 'waking' hands, I had to consciously will my 'imaginary' body to jump up and through that door before it was gone, and when I did that it got me directly into a vivid lucid. Likewise there was one where I seem to remember having to leap forth into this screen of text that was forming.

Each time this'd bring me back into some new dream, where everything was new, but my memories or mental state retained continuity, so that I was still lucid and still remembered the whole sequence as it was happening (though, of course, losing most of the details). Each dream I found myself in was, although completely lucid/vivid, substantially more weird and nuanced than my lucids usually are (in other words they felt much more like non-lucids). It seems each of these dreams was quite brief, though I think some ran on longer. Included in this whole bout were two false awakenings, one obviously not in my bed (I woke up in my friends car and immediately began describing the lucid dreams I thought I'd woken up from), and another that was in my bed.

I'm not sure how long this whole thing ran on but I suspect it must've been substantially longer than my average lucid dreams are, and that's part of why I lost so much of it. What I do have is completely awesome stuff, but I'm more curious about the whole... nature of the snarl I seemed to be in. I've not really been very successful at trying to chain LDs yet. Is that what I was doing or was I just experiencing some kind of strange dream transition? I've also never been able to hold onto a contiguous consciousness through separate dreams that well; the whole time I was determinedly lucid, like my mind refused to give it up. A couple of the dreams were literally moments long, I'd come crashing through into some space, struggle to stabilize it by tasting and grabbing at everything around me, and then shortly thereafter fall back into the nether.

EDIT: Possibly worth mentioning that when I finally did really wake up, it was far more final and clear than any other point where I felt like I was returning to waking life. That is to say, at those points where I felt like I had to consciously choose not to move my physical body, I did not feel wholly awake.