An introduction, a few questions, and experiences
Hi, everyone.
Some (relatively... :p) recent, very pleasant experiences with lucid dreams made me want to have more of them. I hope this will be a good place to look for advice, or just a chat about the experiences.
I conveniently have it typed up, so first I'll recount one of my dreams here:
Last night I had my first (semi-)lucid dream in over 10 years.
I was in some ruins at the top of a cliff overlooking a lake. There were tombstones and monuments about, like in a churchyard. There was something about my late grandmother... either she was there, or one of the tombstones was hers, I can't remember.
Then I noticed a town of white houses on the bay on the far side of the lake, with a huge arch of white stone bridging the bay, like a gate, glittering in the sun.
So I flew down to the lake. Down I saw birds flitting out of the mangroves that bordered the lake, and since I now suspected I might be dreaming, I verified it by unshaping one bird into a floating blob of silvery liquid (sadly, that was the only control I was able to exert).
Then I was joined by a girl that looked somewhat like Emily Browning in Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, both in dress and appearance, who was also flying. There might have been other fliers about the lake, but I'm not sure. We took each others' hands and flew to the town.
They had a church cut into the rock of the hillside at the back of the town, a bit like the ruins at Petra (although the design was much more modern). I knew it was a church transported from Boston, despite the fact that I've never been to Boston and that it didn't look anything like what I imagine Boston churches to look like.
Next scene I remember, I was with the Victorian girl in some sort of long, red carpeted hallway. Might have been a gallery, something like Louvre's Italian paintings wing, only a lot smaller. I kissed the girl on the cheek and the lack of sensation of her cheek on my lips snapped me awake.
Only it didn't, really, since I found myself explaining to people wearing 19th c. clothes how my first dream, with the ruins above the lake was not merely a dream, since I now possess some bit of knowledge (I cannot recall what it was now) I couldn't have gained through normal means, which means the dream is true. At that point, I was no longer aware that this is still a dream.
Then the evil wizard Christopher Lee shows up, and even though it's some sort of Victorian party and there's quite a few people around I recognize him and challenge him, and he cannot run, so I have a wizards' duel with Christopher Lee at the bottom of a staircase and me at the top. Every time one us is halfway through an arcane formula, the other counters him with another one, louder and accompanied by flashier special effects (ultimately, glowing runes and mandala-like patterns swirling around the caster's head).
I win and as Christopher Lee starts disintegrating into blue-white light, I grab him and rip his face off, and it is a mask, and it is not in fact Christopher Lee, but Ben Kingsley, and it is somehow me.
So I (who am Ben Kingsley who was Christopher Lee) go back to the ruin on the top of the cliff above the lake opposite the white city, and go through the first dream again.
And then the Christopher Lee dream again.
And then the first dream again.
And then I finally actually wake up.
My other lucid dream (that I can remember) has been something of a spontaneous WILD: just on the edge of sleep, I felt a sort of... rattling, I guess? and then a surge of awareness, like waking up, but also a disconnect from my body, no longer feeling myself resting against the bed &c.
Since then, I've tried to do WILD on purpose, but with little success. I can manage to lie still and awake enough to start feeling beginnings of sleep paralysis, lack of feeling in my arms and legs, but mostly I either remain too aware of my chest as I'm breathing until I seem to wake up completely rather than go into a dream, or just fall asleep. I've also had a few experiences where I'd see hypnagogic imagery and my eyes would start twitching strongly, and after some time I'd wake up, feeling rather rested, all the while staying more or less fully conscious, but without any dreams (barring hypnagogic psychedelia). Was this REM? Is it possible to be in REM without dreams?
In any case, even cursory reading suggests I'm skipping an important step, since I don't have very good dream recall. I could probably discipline myself to get up a couple of times per night, but are there any techniques to enhance results other than autosuggestion along the lines of "I'll remember my dreams"? I don't think I'm very suggestible.
One thing I've noticed is that I've had both of the dreams I've mentioned going to sleep immediately after reading, and they've been quite transparently influenced by the books. The first one was after H. P. Lovecraft's The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (the glittering city seen in the distance which turns out to have architecture transported from Boston!), the other one was after David Zindell's The Wild, a section which describes the main character's experience of cyberspace, in particular switching between sensing his physical body and surrounding, and the virtual ones. Should I read more weird books before going to sleep? This should reasonably stimulate the imagination, but I don't really see how it would help with recall or lucidity, but you never know. Has anyone found anything like this to help?
Well, that was... extensive. Thanks for reading this far. :) I hope to be posting more soon, questions and hopefully success stories!
