senses are dulled while LD, and dream transitions are forgotten

Around 4:30am, I decided to try to WILD since I was awake. It took awhile and I would start having dream scenes but would snap back. Anyways all of a sudden I realized I could see my room but my eyes were closed, and I seemed to be floating above my body. I started to instantly panic, and told myself to hyperventilate to get out of the SP, but then I realized I was probably on the cusp and to just relax. I remember it being a struggle to swing out of my body. Now this is so different from my last WILD, is that normal? Is every WILD different?

Also I wanted to ask if it's normal to not be able to control the dream transitions and to forget them? I go from one dream scene to another and won't remember how I got there, but I'm still very much lucid. Some transitions I do create but the ones I don't, I don't remember. So I was outside on my sidewalk in my neighborhood, this happened right as I swung out of my body. So I tried to stabilize by licking and touching the sidewalk. My hands met the concrete which felt hard, but not cold which is what I expected and my tongue kept going through it, finally it landed on it and I tasted nothing. I ate ice cream later on in the dream and still tasted nothing, and same when trying to lick a wall. ( I sound so weird, like a willy wonka wannabe!) So I'm luring around my neighbors house and notice they are eating dinner by the windows and I was naked so I walked away so they wouldn't see me.

Ate ice cream with the neighborhood kids, mind you I'm 30 and these kids were like 7 or 8. Then I was in a restaurant and some kids were trying to beat me up, I could stop them with my intent and I formed a wall of people that loved me and they draped over me and that worked, I kissed someone from high school, that I always thought was cute. Then a girl flew through this tiny slot in the wall, and I figured I would do that too. At this point I tried to stabilize again by licking/touching the wall and repeating my name, and reminding myself I was dreaming. Then I flew through the mail slot, and I flew up into the sky but it was sunny, and I wanted night skies, so I closed my eyes (briefly and reminded myself to not do it too long since I sometimes have an issues with that and it wakes me up) and knew I would see night skies and I did. I soared and dipped to skim the water, then I zoomed straight up with the intentions of going into space, above the clouds. The acceleration made me gasp with giddiness, no matter how many times I do that it still takes my breathe away! I was up by the planets, and I touched them, but they didn't seem to awesomely beautiful or that crazy to touch. I was a little let down, so I was like oh well, I'll fly around. Well the skies kept turning to bright skies and I kept having to close my eyes to regain the night sky, I'm not sure why my dream was so intent to have a sunny sky? At once point I was coming straight down, and thought parachute and pulled my hand downward like you would with a parachute and one magically appeared, I thought how cool my intent was barely formed and by me moving my hand like that it just happened. The chute was out to the side and I at first thought it wouldn't open but then I realized it had not caught the wind yet, and sure enough it did, and then I was floating downward with a bunch of other parachuters. Then I woke up. I was still in SP so I tried to dream-chain but I wasn't successful this time.

So is it normal for every WILD to be different? My first was crazy with the lights, sounds, vibrations, movements and this time it was nothing until I was floating and scared!
Why can I not taste anything? Why does my tongue often go through the areas?
Why didn't the planets and space look amazing?
How come I don't remember my dream transitions if I'm not directly making the next scene appear?
How come the sky wouldn't stay night?

Thanks for bearing with this damn long post!

I lucid dream with DILD, but I can say it is pretty normal for transitions to occur like scene changes in a movie. Heck, people change on me or rooms change. Your subconscious is in control to a large degree. Some senses work better than others...I think with time and practice that can be improved.

There are, in my experience, and this seems to be supported by what I've read on these forums through the years, varying levels of lucidity. There very well may be transitions that you don't remember, because you weren't lucid during them, or were at a low level of lucidity. Or maybe there were no transitions at all, and you were constantly lucid.

And I never had super frequent lucids, and am very much out of practice, but I do remember, in regard to questions like "why can I not taste anything?," that I very often had to anticipate and forcefully create sensory data for my dream environment right after becoming lucid. Afterwards, my brain would do it naturally and of its own volition, but I essentially had to prime the engine. Perhaps something like that could be of value to you?

WILDs will be different. For me, it is usually a gradual float-out-of-bed/sink-through-the-bed experience. But sometimes it's a hard snap like a bolt of lightning that zaps me into a dream scene. As you have more WILDs, you'll probably notice each transition fall into one of a few categories like that. I think it's often the case that we are asleep sooner than we think and the transition experience is more dream than hallucination. So those first few moments of a WILD can often be like a false awakening where it seems like you are still awake/hallucinating, but it is actually dream content and dream logic, so anything might happen.

Why can't you taste anything? Just perception and expectation. You're probably moving your dream head close to the thing, so that it moves out of your field of vision. Because vision tends to dominate dream senses, it can be the case that anything that falls out of vision will disappear completely from other senses too. So just practice engaging other senses. Try to slow down and be deliberate about it. You could also try extending your tongue way out, like a frog, far enough so that you can lick the thing while still looking at it. Or you could try chewing and swallowing the thing too, so that you engage the expectation of feeling it in your mouth and down your throat.

Or you could give your senses a whimsical expectation, like: "I wonder if the concrete tastes like chocolate?" and then lick it. It might taste like chocolate or it might not. But if you don't have any expectation then it might just taste like nothing or you might expect it to taste like realistic concrete (I'd guess a very unpleasant dusty, chalky flavor) which you might not really want to experience so your mind avoids any taste at all. By the same logic, this is often why we don't feel pain in dreams. The mind anticipates something that might feel painful but it doesn't want to feel pain so it shuts it out and you experience no feeling at all.

Why don't you remember the scene transitions? Just dream logic. Even if you're lucid, it doesn't necessarily improve your memory or dream recall. Like recalling a non-LD, your recall may have gaps. Plus the fact that dream content can change instantly, particularly when you're excited. And actually, your real memory isn't always as good as you think. Do you remember walking into the room you're in now? Probably. But do you really remember it? Or is the room so familiar and you've walked into it so many times that maybe your memory is lazy and fills in the gaps with "stock footage" from days or weeks or months ago? In real life, we don't often notice this "abridgment" because the real world conforms to the rules of physics and time and change. But in a dream, the illogical connection of events means your brain can't find the right filler for those gaps.

Why didn't space look amazing and why wouldn't the sky stay dark? You can only directly control what you focus your attention on. And even then, no one's control is perfect. For everything outside your focus, your subconscious fills in the rest. It's not a problem, I think. You can enjoy the randomness and creativity of your mind. But you can also look into indirect control techniques, like archetypes. Archetypes are a way to cue your subconscious to follow certain rules, even without your direct attention.

I believe, with perseverance and practice it will become clearer as well as recalling the entire transition :)

Thank you! Everything you say makes sense. When I bent to the sidewalk, I wasn't looking directly at where my tongue would be touching. I will work on that. Also can you point me in the right direction to finding more info on archetypes and indirect control techniques? I did a search and I'm not coming up with anything beneficial or related to what I'm looking for.

Here's two links that I was thinking of in particular:

Archetype Control: An Elegant Tool - Lucid Dreaming - Dream Views
http://www.dreamviews.com/dream-cont...m-control.html