An Extremely Long Journey
Last night I only had about 4 hours of sleep, so I became very tired in the evening and went to bed several hours earlier. While I fell asleep, I practiced MILD, imagining to be in a dream doing reality checks and becoming lucid. I think the combination of both factors, minor sleep deprivation and applying the technique, led to the extremely vivid and long experience I just woke up from. Looking at the clock, I had a total of six hours of sleep and approximately half of the time I was dreaming lucidly.
Of course two to three hours of lucid dreaming are every beginner's wet dream, there are a few drawbacks though:
1. It can get boring. Yes, there actually were moments when I asked myself what to do now and just walked around hoping that something interesting might happen.
2. It's hard to recall it. Most people have a hard time recalling the last three hours of waking life, so imagine how much harder it is to recall three hours of constant dreaming, lucid or not. Actually I prefer experiences of up to 15 minutes, so I can write it all down to read at a later time, which often grants me new insights.
I won't write down all that happened in my dream experience - I can't anyway. There are a few situations that stand out and which I can still recall, but it's hard to put them into context with the train of events. Generally, I was exploring places together with a group of dream characters. I recall a street with houses, each house representing a different age, style, emotion, idea or person. We went into the houses, examining the rooms, often discussing what we found. There were homes with rich furniture, colorful and plentiful, rather puritan ones, some narrow, others generously vast. Some say that houses represent a person's mind in dreams. If so, I've been exploring quite a few of those. Too bad I can't recall the conversations with my companions. That would've been quite an interesting read. There was one particular dialogue I had with an older woman that was very revealing to me, but it's too intimate to report.
There were a few occasions the continuity of the experience - which was astonishingly consistent - was interrupted by waking. I managed to slip back though, able to seamlessly continue my journey. As I know now, those were false awakenings and I'm a bit disappointed about myself not performing a reality check after assumedly waking up. It might have led to other interesting explorations, but on the other hand, it would have meant missing the ongoing events. During the interruptions, lucidity was lost - I thought I was awake when I was actually dreaming, but I reestablished the lucid state whenever I "fell asleep" again by performing reality checks. The last false awakening was particularly interesting. I "awoke" at the kitchen table with my parents in a flat I lived about 20 years ago and in front of me, there was a note that reminded me of that lucid experience I just had. It was clearly in my own handwriting. How could I have written it when I was dreaming? I just couldn't figure out the most obvious explanation - that I was still dreaming on another level - and inquired my mother about it who sat at the table, too. She replied with an answer that made even less sense. I got up and went to my room, thinking about the incident... and finally woke up.
I feel a bit exhausted now from what I've seen and done. I had several lucid dreams of that length before, usually facilitated by messing with the circadian rhythm. For me, it's nothing to aim for, but it's fine when it happens. One might argue that I could have forced myself to wake up anytime, making it easier to recall, but frankly, I didn't think of that during the experience and I'd never known what I might have missed then.
