Technically, I actually had two -- but the first was only a few seconds long, as the bed-shaker prompt woke me up seconds after triggering lucidity. XD
After that disappointing first segment (which lasted only ~12 seconds, as supported by the log), I tried to fall back asleep, as I figured my brain still had rem-sleep queued up for that cycle (which turned out to be true).
Thankfully, that dream-reentry attempt succeeded: twenty minutes later, I had re-entered a dream, and I soon regained awareness/lucidity.
The below is the EEG log from the night, with markers added for the key events:
Unfortunately, the ip-camera recorder had a malfunction this session, so I wasn't able to 100% confirm the event times. That said, I'm pretty confident I pinned them correctly, based on the times and event durations I remember [eg. I know I woke at ~6:30 to check the time, prior to the lucids]. Regarding the malfunction, it seems to have been caused by the 30s camera-reconnect-time being a bit too fast this time for my ip-camera; I've since changed it to 65 seconds, which should prevent the problem in the future.
Anyway, this is my recollection of the lucid segments (written prior to checking the EEG logs and [frozen] camera recordings):
Spoiler for Dream journal entry:
First segment
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felt vibrating alarm; realized dreaming; tried to get up out of bed; bed-shaker intensity increased; woke me up, lying in bed again; confirmed awake; disappointed, but tried to go back to sleep
Second segment
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realized I was in-dream again; immediately went for the window; window hard to open, so went through house/apartment to front door; manage to get outside
see CW returning from somewhere; fly up; can't break through roof of building, as just increases with my height; go out glass doors; fly off to place in distance; it's some kind of large building, with parking lots nearby; I mess around with the people in the cars, flying around, with the pine trees surrounding
becomes evening; show in nearby building (theater) is starting; parents are there, and a friend (CL); I sit with friend, with old show on (it was kinda like Tom and Jerry, or whatever that cat and mouse one was); it's funny, but not as much as regular lucid dream content; I prompt friend to leave with me; he kinda agrees, though it gets confusing, and he ends up disrupting the show; we leave area, and I fly with friend around a bit; we talk about dream control, and I notice a storm brewing up as we get closer to an area, with about 5 huge tornadoes; I try practicing my dream control by trying to break up the growing tornado set, even while looking closely at them; I greatly reduce the intensity and speed, while visualizing it dispersing and/or reversing for short periods, but can't manage to fully delete it (it springs back after the focusing); I give up, and just leave the area, returning to theater
we see show has ended now, and most have left to upstairs room for "after party"; I follow, and find a group of people in small room; I see another friend there (DY); I talk with them a bit, finding it funny to see them so clearly in fake world; one of the characters seems more "in the know" than the others, seeming to understand my status as a lucid dreamer; they respond quizzingly; we end up moving to another, large room to ourselves as we talk, with the main contents being that below (one other part was that she kinda took on the identity of Cynthia, talking about her daughter a bit I believe):
Final portion (description taken from private-message)
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Man, there's something uniquely satisfying about talking with a dream character, which you know as such, as they argue about the afterlife, psi, etc. It's absolutely hilarious, and again, very satisfying for some reason.
Like, she was making an "argument" about how heaven would be a dystopia anyway if we had to live there forever. Because, she said, imagine if someone sent an enderman to heaven which killed everyone, then everyone would respawn, then it killed them again -- wouldn't that be worse than just dying? But I responded: that is a hypothetical which is incompatible with the definition/promise of heaven. That is, heaven is defined/promised as a place which is free from the reach of regular life chaos and negative forces. That is, it would be under God's sovereign control, so such hypotheticals would never come up.
She then acted like I was naive for believing in a spiritual side to the self. I found that hilarious coming from a dream character. I just kind of laughed at the situation, before resetting and beginning a serious response -- though woke up before I could fully go into it. (I was going to bring up the various psi experiments, and ask her how she makes sense of them in a materialistic universe, in a parsimonious and sensible-by-evolution [eg. species' not evolving to rampantly exploit it] way -- but only got as far as bringing up psi in general before the dream started fading)
Anyway, I had a lot of fun in that 11 minute segment, and am glad the prompts did not wake me during that second segment. In the future, I will attempt to resolve the "unwanted prompt wakeup" issue by having a specific eye-movement sequence one can perform, which will disable the prompts for a few minutes. (perhaps the motion of going cross-eyed! -- as this one is easy for EEG to detect, very fast to perform, and doesn't overlap with regular eye movements)
It's only one/two lucids so far, but the solidity of the rem-detector makes me confident that I'll be able to continue building on this base, to eventually form a full-featured "lucid dreaming assistant" which will help keep people on track for persistent learning. In the past, I've had trouble with my motivation dropping over the weeks/months, as my induction rate dropped off, leading to my ceasing induction efforts. That induction-rate drop-off may still occur, but at least now I have a solid rem-detector available to work with, and detailed recordings both from the camera and EEG headband, providing the nightly data I crave for to keep my motivation up. (that is, even failed nights are now interesting to go over, since they have a full record of my dream-states/eye-movements throughout the night)
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