April 30 - Final Night
2 dreams: 2 pts
1 lucid (7 min) : 5 pts + 4 pts
Lucid
During the dream, I had been in school working on a project but now was time to take the bus back home. I left the building and surprisingly, I was home, just outside. Funnily, this was troubling because I was going to miss my bus back home (This is a recurrent theme for me: transit. The logistics are often wrong in dreams and it always induces confusion and stress, that I'm gonna miss the transport and gonna get to the destination late or never). I was starting to be nervous about how I was gonna resolve this problem (funnily enough, all I had to do was go home, I was there already, haha, but it just made sense that to go from A to B, I needed to take the bus even if I was already at B). Then, a neighbor I use to take the bus with passed by in a yellow race car, telling me to follow her. Relieved, I run after the race car, At every intersection, she would speed through each branch and surprisingly come back to take another branch. Running behind her, I had the aha moment that I was dreaming so I tried to speed faster, yet, I could only run slowly. Arriving at the last intersection, I was still slow and concentrating on the car hoping not to lose it behind a corner. I'm used to objects not having permanence once they're out of my sight. Luckily, as I came around the corner, I saw the race car with all its particular details still intact. We're in my neighbor's driveway with her friend. She tells me the bus will pick us up here. We talk about a few things, and the scene changes a bit. For example, soon, I am explaining how I feel to the friend in Spanish, telling her normally, to go home, taking the bus, we'd take the bus from school, not from home, but suddenly now, we're at home. How odd. During this scene, I'm focused on my Spanish and the environment is gone. It's just me and the friend, but once I'm done this segment, we're again in the same environment. Soon enough, cops arrive. (Generally cops are a pattern in my dreams when my logic and the logistics of the dream are not congruent and I feel guilty. A second pattern is that when things are odd, I often try to make sense of things by expecting a danger (as if oddness was a bad omen). My intention regarding these patterns is to accept weirdness in dreams as neutral rather than negative, or dangerous). So here in the dream, I don't expect anything regarding the cops. I simply sit on the porch with the two girls. The cops, which are no longer necessarily cops install things on the lawn and set up really loud music that make the porch vibrate and we bounce as a result of the sound, our heads inconsequentially hitting the ceiling. This mellows out and now the music is less impactful. The people on the lawn (the ex cops) are serving barbecue type lunches and snacks on paper plates that we pass along on the porch. We are a few now enjoying the picnic and we talk and eat until I wake up.
Competition Final Total: 77 pts
Total April Lucid Time: 17 min
Competition Take Away
Something I found interesting with this competition was the measuring of time. I hadn't been measuring my lucid dreams time before and because I can think through a dream memory so fast, I'd often assumed they were just about 1 min. While many were for sure just 1 min because I woke up instantly, this competition has made me realize my lucid dreams are quite longer than I imagined. I'd even want to start estimating my general dream times, but it's so odd. For example, my first hint that my dreams were longer than 1 minute is that dream recall takes me a long time. Going through each of my dream when I wake up takes me minimum 10 minutes if not 30 minutes. So I thought, they're probably longer. And maybe a way to measure the time is measure how long it takes to relive the dream. So the first dream I measured, I did by going through it and trying to do it at the same pace as I had imagined. My timer counted 4 min. But then, how much did I rush? How much did I lag? Today, I used a different technique. I divided the dream into parts: Chasing the car, talking with neighbor, cops arrival and transition, barbecue party. I then estimated each section, in this case 1 minute or 2. Whatever felt right. But, I know any of these scenes, would have been longer in real life. For example, the car chasing scene which I estimated 1 minute. I know it takes me 10 minutes to go that distance in real life. In the dream, I was running, but in slow motion. I do believe dreams do not require full motion through space (a lot is just filled in by the mind). So walking a 10 minute distance is probably just 1 minute worth of walking with the gaps filled in by your mind. The dream seemed continuous but it did not feel like 10 minutes to me. The scenes when there is conversation, I assume they are longer because conversation often feels like it passes faster. So, that's what's been going on in my mind, calculating the times. I think it's an interesting exercise. Measuring dream time is quite something. If anything, I think it's shown me my dreams can be longer than I thought and hopefully this will give me the confidence to make them longer / more stable. So thank you for this competition Nfri, and all the participants!
