Adi's Workbook

Adi's Workbook

Hello fellow oneironauts, let's lucid dream our way into the stitching of reality and ignore all the babble, yes?

Reality Checks
- Nose pinch
- Reading
- Digital Clock

Dream Signs
- Gorgeous girls (:shadewink:)
- Paranormal presences/thoughts
- Strange landscapes

Short Term Goals
- Have at least one lucid dream a week
- Have dream recall every day

Long Term Goals
- Lucid Dream at will (ya, pretty ambitious)
- Total dream control (this maybe more so)
- Increased awareness/mindfulness in waking life

Lucid/Dream Recall History
I've been dreaming most of my life (like most of y'all I hope), but recently realized that sometimes I am experiencing what is commonly known as lucid dreaming. Since then I've been trying to keep close track of my dreams, and reading others experiences is fascinating and inspiring. There truly is a world within ourselves that is dormant throughout most of our lives. I would love to find that place, and maybe take you there too.

Current Techniques
- MILD
- WBTB
Starting out WILD (through Sageous lesson) and checking out Dream Yoga as well

I'll start testing for recall tonight, and write my motivations in a following post as well.

Welcome, Adi :)

Why I Want to Lucid Dream
To spend a time I would normally spend with slight drool coming out the side of my mouth in a world of adventure and intrigue :D
To increase the associational awareness that I already have, losing inhibitions in both my waking and dreaming imagination
To do things I normally couldn't do in real life (everything from alchemy to sexing up supermodels)
To find a dream guide/animal, to help piece together an overarching narrative for my life.
To become more aware of sides of myself that are suppressed by time and social chains.

Some of the above items are not necessarily dependent on lucid dreaming, but I have a feeling that lucid dreaming will be synergistic in the achievement of these goals.

12/26/12

Bed Time: 12:00 AM
Waking Time: 6:00 AM

Unfortunately last night my insomnia decided to rear its ugly face. Pity because I was going quite a long time without it. Even though I went to bed at 12:00 I was tossing and turning for quite a while afterwards. When I woke up at 6:00 I was dead tired, and couldn't remember any dreams. I decided to fall back asleep and see what happens.

Nap: ~6:15
Waking Time: ~7:45

I have vague recall of this dream, mainly a fragment.
Fragment #1: I walk with my friend J into his apartment (it is not his actual apartment, but it is in the same complex). The room we enter is scattered and unorganized. Papers of all sorts (mail, magazines, newspaper, ect.) cover the floor, and the whitewashed walls are dimly lit by a small yellow hanging light. There's a small glass table topped with littered ashtrays and we both sit down. He pulls out a bag of meth from his pocket, and I guess today I'm feeling rather ballsy because I tell him we should smoke it.

I find doing drugs in dreams very, very unusual. The effects of the drugs are unlike their real-life counterparts, and they are obviously much shorter-acting (being that one has a limited time in a dream).

After taking an acrid, sulfurous hit from a small, glass pipe, I feel a tingling sensation lurch my body over like a strong, ocean wave. We both stop moving or talking for a minute, taking hits from the pipe, just staring at eachother. I say "Wow", over and over again, the only thing I guess I can say. Suddenly there is a commotion outside, and as we go out to investigate my recall starts to fade.

The dream does not end however, I have strange curios of memory left from what happened after we exited the apartment. I have an image of walking downstairs, entering someone else's apartment, and meeting someone with a very large, developed beard. I remember jumping out of his window for some reason. Hmm, who knows, wish I had better recall under fatigue.

Well that's that, this dream wasn't what I would call a lucid dream. In my lucid dreams I generally try to exercise some of my stored up magickas rather than doing boring stuff I could do in real life :P, in my next dream I want to end up on a Pacific Island, and perform a ritual with the natives there, I feel that would be fun and exciting. Until next time

-- Adi

12/27/12

Sleep Time:1:00
Waking Time:9:30

Supplements Mugwort (tea from my own pickings), Valerian (1.5g capsule)

I had a lucid and a non-lucid dream last night. But my lucid dream faded away quite quickly. My non-lucid dream on the other hand, lasted a while but I can't remember all of it. Here's what I remember.

Lucid Dream: My lucid dream starts, when I find myself in a long, rolling green field. The sun is shining, and the grass looks quite textured and soft. That's the cue that I'm dreaming since it's the dead of winter up here in the North-east, so I shift into lucidity. Unfortunately as soon as I do that, the dream begins to fade, and the scene blurs. I focus on my hands (Castaneda technique) and my other sensory perceptions, to try and ground myself in the dream. It's too late, I fade out. :(

Non-Lucid Dream: This takes place in the apartment complex I was in, in my last dream, but in a different apartment. I'm alone this time, there's this girl I know, K, who is walking behind me. I stop at a friends door, and she stops there with me. I smile at her and say, "Seeing V too?". I knock on the door to my surprise, my friend W answers. I haven't seen in him in a while so I grab him in a big bear hug. He laughs, and invites me in. He's a great guitar player, and he's playing with some people right now in my dream (V and M). The rest of the dream is pretty mundane, I listen to them try to piece together a cover of a Jimi Hendrix song (can't remember which). I help out a bit, since I'm a musician, but I don't know the particulars of this song. The girl K sits on a couch, looking with sparkling eyes at all of us. I want to go talk to her, but I don't know what to say. The dream ends when I wake up and realize I've overslept =/, guess I'm paying for last nights sleep deprivation.

Congrats on the lucid! :party:

When the lucid faded out, did you wake up? Or just drifted off into nonlucidity? Sometimes, we wake up because it's the end of our sleep cycle. This can also be the reason why we get lucid, because we gain awareness as we are slowly waking up. But waking up at this moment will be inevitable, though you can always try to salvage it by doing a DEILD. Cheers!

I faded back into non-lucidity, though generally I'm a pretty light sleeper, and can pry myself awake even during a very vivid dream, so sometimes its hard to say whether I'm in some awake, hypnagogic state or drifting in a sleep cycle. What's the difference between a DEILD and a DILD?

DILD (Dream Induced Lucid Dream) is when you dream normally, and get lucid some time along your dream. DEILD (Dream Exit Initiated Lucid Dream) is when you wake up from your dream, then reenter sleep but this time you maintain awareness so you go back into the dream lucid. In DEILD, it is recommended to move as little possible and to keep your eyes closed as to avoid waking up completely and in order for you to stay in that dream-like state.

Hey guys, I've been having several dreams and recording them actually, but have been lazy about transcribing them back up to the site. I figure I'll put up my journal entries now

12/29/12

Sleep Time: ~12ish
Wake up Time: 7:30

NLD: I have a memory of a girl driving me along a wooded backroad in a van. We're having some sort of row, we stop at this house and she wants me to stay there. As we walk up towards the house (she's helping me move my stuff), a group of 20-30 people walk out of the house and start towards me. The girl draws closer to me, until they're revealed in better light, and I see some of them are my friends. One of them (C) comes up to me and tells me that theres a party going on. I walk on and the scene is a little too loud. I go cool off by the fridge and see this guy with a big grizzled beard sitting drinking something by himself. He says his name is Brain Jones. I quip "Oh, like the Brian Jonestown massacre?" He responds "Yeah, I was there when it happened." I pause and say, "Oh, I'm sorry, and try to comfort him. My memory gets a little fuzzy from here, I know that somehow I humiliate myself and run away, jeez what a late dream..

1/1/13

I had two NLD and an LD from this night

Sleep Time: ~12ish
Wakeup Time: ..?

NLD: I unfortunately have a very vague memory of this dream. I'm at this small, run of the mill suburban house with my friend J (a botanist with dreds), and a bunch of girls. My friend J goes off to another room to work on some herbal tincture, while I'm left talking to the girls. I don't think they're very interested in me, they all leave me with one girl with a horrible unibrow who wants to make burgers.. J comes back, and he says we should get out of here. We wander the streets and by the enhanced luck of a dream find another group of girls, much more attractive than the first. We seem to be hitting it off pretty well. Then the dream ends.

NLD: It's a short NLD, more vivid than the last, but more fragmented. I'm on the beach, the skies are overcast grey, and the waves crash into round grey rocks with increasing fury. I walk along the beach for a while until I see this Japanese girl with long hair and a pair of sunglasses, she's pretty cute. She tells me her name is Yoko, and we chat for a while about what's going on. We walk to her small wooden cabin thats on a small hill overlooking the beach. Dream ends.

WBTB LD: This LD was quite short, but perhaps one of my most amazing ones. Before going back to sleep I was reading posts here about Tantric Yoga states, so perhaps this dream was influenced by that. Shortly after going back to bed I feel a deep humming and vibrating sensation. I think I'm dreaming. I sit up, in my bed, and I look up at the ceiling. A strange soft, clefted portal opens up above my head and a female hand reaches out. It's hard to describe the hand, the best I can say is that it was made of pulsating orange energy, but to be honest it evades description. I reach out and grab the hand, and it jerks me up into its strange realm. I wake up all too suddenly, but I have this curious sensation of bliss and well-being filling my body to the brim. It was as if I experienced some life-transformative event inside of the portal, but was not privy to its secrets myself! I woke up energized, with an awesome sense of happiness that listed for quite a while after I had awoken.

1/4/13

This one is very fragmented, but I'll post it anyways, it was two NLD's.

Sleep time/Wake up time: ??

NLD Fragment #1: I'm with my friend Wyatt, we're smoking weed, chilling and talking. For some reason I'm utterly and completely nerve-wracked. "Don't bug..." I hear my brain say to myself. Dream fades.

NLD Fragment #2: I'm at home with my family, my mother says there's a phone call for me. I pick up, it's my Japanese teacher. She starts asking me several questions and I have trouble responding in time, it feels like I'm stoned or disoriented, maybe this is just part of the same story arc as the last dream.. Dream fades

I don't know why some of my dreams have been drug oriented lately. I've been completely clean for a while now.. guess some things leave strong impressions on you.

1/5/13

I had three LD's today (via DEILD, but they were all in the same setting). Unfortunately I didn't write them down, but I do remember parts of them, think I'm just gonna count this as one LD for the count.

Wake up time/Sleep time: ??

LD Part 1: I'm walking down a road with my friend C, he looks at me and says he has no idea where we are. That's my cue to think about where we are, and before you know it I'm lucid. I try to fly by jumping for a bit, but for some reason it doesn't work. I get frustrated, and the LD ends, but I'm still on the cusp of REM.

LD: Part 2: I DEILD myself back in, C is there, but this time he has a car with a sunroof. Excellent. I clamber on top, and tell him to hit the gas. I lean out the sun roof and wait for him to speed up enough (by my rough estimate of what terminal velocity you need for liftoff in a dream :cheeky:), and jump out of the sunroof. It's a complete failure, in fact I ram headfirst into a tree, and the dream ends, but whatdya know I'm still in REM :D

LD: Part 3: I DEILD myself back in (this is getting old), no C this time. I decide to leave my flying for another day, and instead go into the woods that are along the side of the road. It's not too long before this green, papery/silky creature comes out of the ground and starts circling around me. The closest analogue I can think of in the real world is like a Chinese paper dragon, but this creature looks a bit more globular and solid, as well as having no head. After walking through the woods for the creature for a while, I think I've overstayed my visit, the dream fades, this time for good.

1/6/13

Oh, boy, long, long lucid dream last night. In fact so long, I can barely remember what exactly happened. I'll write one fragment I have a stronger memory of.

LD Fragment: I walk into this small inconspicuous door on the side of an inconspicuous street and it opens up into a grand concert hall. There's no one there, and there's a piano on stage. I haven't touched a piano in quite a while, but I think the dream will give me a solid assist here. I'm a little nervous at first, but I sit down at the piano and start plunking away notes and I guess I'm lucky enough to hit the right ones. Out of my own volition I start playing a Rachmaninoff piece, and I start to cry it's pretty damn beautiful. I'm crying and playing at the same time, and my hands are moving quite fast up and down the keys, very bizarre.

Adi, you are doing amazingly well right now! Thanks for sharing all of these great LDs and NLDs. You are really on a hot streak right now.

That LD from New Year's sounds amazing. Don't you love the ones that stick with you for hours (or days) afterward? The emotional lift you get from the truly great ones is just unreal. And I love that piano LD! Performing some sort of incredible piece of music in-dream is one of my (not accomplished) dream goals, in fact. Sounds like a wonderful experience.

I'm also impressed by how naturally DEILDing comes for you. You are clearly a natural at DEILD so it may be worth giving a try to DEILDing after you wake from a non-lucid. That could open up a whole new bundle of opportunities for you. It took me weeks of work to even become halfway passable at DEILD, so I appreciate the skill you are displaying here.

Anyhow, great stuff... keep up the excellent work!

Thanks for the feedback Canis! Yeah the New Years LD was incredible, I don't think I've ever felt a sensation that elating from a dream. The piano LD was fun too, maybe not as fun as real life though. I used to be pretty proficient at piano (could play Mozart/Beethoven/ect.) and although the music itself was beautiful, the gratification you get from actually working at playing a piece is wayyy better :P. Still, it gave me a lot of ideas and inspired me to start picking up music again (guitar). I feel that the LD space could be an awesome incubation chamber for ideas and creativity... exciting stuff :D.

As far as the DEILD goes.. I'm going to say that was beginner's luck, I just happened to be in the zone that night. There's been plenty of times where I try to do it, and I can barely stay lucid for a few seconds. Even these little snippets were only a couple minutes each at most. I definitely wanna get better at it, I just kind of go with the flow now and try to keep my mind clear while focusing on the feeling of the dream I exited, but I'm sure these many improvements to be made.

Thanks for the feedback Canis, GL with your own musical LD's.