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    28 Visitor Messages

    1. View Conversation
      Hey AstralVagabond! It's great to see you

      And what a coincidence, I was just thinking about you yesterday.
    2. View Conversation
      And where in the fekk have YOU been
    3. View Conversation
      Happy to see your lovely face on my news feed again! Hope life is great for you!
    4. View Conversation
      Come back and get some wings, AV!
      Missing your presence.
    5. View Conversation
      That's good to hear! I've fallen a bit out of practice as well, need to get back in gear

      You should come join us on the IRC, it's a lot of fun chatting with everyone on there ^^
    6. View Conversation
      Hey AstralVagabond, I haven't seen you around lately
    7. View Conversation
      He lives! Welcome back!
      The position is most certainly still open.
      Feel free to make comments!
    8. View Conversation
      Oh, by the way, even the most experienced lucid dreamers have dry spells sometimes, so don't despair! The great thing is that LDs spark more LDs, so once the dry spell is broken, you might be hit with a wave of them if you're lucky!
    9. View Conversation
      Done! Let me know how those techniques work for you.
    10. View Conversation
      Will do soon! I have something else that might motivate you too, hang tight! I'll try to send them tomorrow.
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    About AstralVagabond

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    Recent Entries

    Contemplation/A Study In Pink - My first ever Task of The Month lucid dream

    by AstralVagabond on 03-30-2014 at 11:30 PM
    I presented an excerpt from this dream three days ago in the Task of The Month for March 2014 thread, which, if you're in the right month, you'll notice has won me my luxurious wings. (Though I don't plan on letting a month go by without completing at least one task-of-the-month from now on, so you should probably be seeing wings above my avatar regardless. ) But now, I've gotten around to posting the story of the entire dream from that night, starting from when I turned lucid.

    I was in my bedroom. I've noticed that this is a recurring pattern - a lot of my lucid dreams are either triggered when I'm my dream bedroom or I'm immediately transported to my bedroom in the dream after becoming lucid. I never see my body in the bed; but then, I don't look there much. I also have a higher tendency to become lucid in areas in relative proximity to my bedroom and/or my apartment in general, which I suppose makes sense, with me performing reality checks in places I know in real life and spending most of my time and going to bed in my bedroom in general.

    Also, most of the time when I become lucid in my bedroom, that bedroom is dark. Either lights-off-and-curtains-drawn-in-the daytime dark, lights-off-and-curtains-drawn-in-the-evening/twilight dark or lights-on-but-fairly-dim dark. In this dream, it was the former of these cases. I didn't bother to turn the lights on.

    Side note: Another thing that I've noticed in my lucid dreams - the proper ones that are clear, fairly long and provide me with some degree of control - is that, without me directly thinking about it, my course of action in the given lucid dream will follow the sort of course of action I was thinking about and wanted to undertake that time before I went to sleep. Before 'Flight of the Oneironaut' (a previous dream journal entry of mine), I wanted to have a lucid dream where I explored different dream scenes and did cool things, in contrast to the lucid dream I'd previously had, where I felt that I hadn't done enough. And this is just what ended up happening. I suppose autosuggestion and dream incubation really are important in terms of thinking about how the dream will go!

    Before this dream, I instead wanted to spend a long time in one dream scene, not going anywhere and instead just focusing on the lucid dream, working on making the scene as vivid as possible, entering as high a state of consciousness as possible, experimenting with the senses and just taking it all in. However, I also really wanted to complete a task-of-the-month before March 2014 was over. And that's just the course of action I took in this dream.

    I looked around and in front of me, mainly to the left side of my room. I looked at the shelves of books that are present above the drawer in my real bedroom and that are the most detail-filled part of my room, hence my wanting to explore it. Another thing that I've noticed in the lucid dreams wherein I'm in my bedroom is that my bedroom is (probably) never actually structured just like my real bedroom and doesn't have the same things in it; but I never notice this until the dream is over. Looking over the books piled up on a low shelf, where my stacks of school notebooks and textbooks should have been instead (my literary works are on the shelf above), I noticed a series of books with imagery focused on blood and bone that were supposedly very grim, warlike and for mature audiences. I remembered that my father had gotten this series for me when I was quite young and the material was clearly too mature for me to handle at that age and that it was fortunate that I had never read that material.

    My father had never actually bought me this particular series of books. This was not a literary series that existed in this world; it was a made-up concept by my subconscious. But, despite me being fairly conscious in this lucid dream, that is not something I realised until after I woke up. The dream provided me with false memories. In fact, the idea of this series was based on the fact that my father did provide me with books that were long and mature for my age when I was younger - just not that particular series. I read Ender's Game when I was eleven years old and a giant tome titled 'The Chronicles of Amber' sits upon my second-to-top shelf, untouched for years. This was probably a combination of the two concepts.

    I looked around. I touched my surroundings. I touched the wall/closet and tried as well as I could to see what it felt like. The sensation felt quite real. Actually, I spent a lot of time in this dream touching my surroundings, though I don't write about it as thoroughly here. I was really focused on taking in the dream scene and making it as vivid as possible.

    And for most of my time in my dream bedroom here, it looked very clear. The visuals looked as clear as real life when I have my glasses on. A bit later, I noticed that the scene was getting a bit less clear - not really blurry but instead about as clear as real life when I don't have my glasses on. So I did my best to ramp the vividness back up.

    Then I thought of experimenting with some other senses. I instinctively turned to the air conditioner and tried to see if this would work. I wanted to change the temperature I felt in the dream. So I shouted at my subconscious, as well as I could, "Make the air cool!" Or something along those lines. I heard the air conditioner start working. At first, I didn't feel anything. I moved toward it and stretched my arms out. In a few seconds, I felt a mild rush of coolness touch my hands from that direction. But it wasn't perfect. So I shouted again. "MAKE THE AIR COOL!"

    And surely, this time, the dream fully obeyed. The air suddenly felt cool from all directions. It felt. I felt. Genuinely cold. The sensation of cold. Even though my sleeping body wasn't undergoing any external circumstances causing it to be cold, I felt cold. That's the first time I've experimented with that sense in a lucid dream and it was... Well, what can I say? It was pretty cool.

    Another thing I wanted to do before this lucid dream was to talk to/meet my subconscious in the form of a dream character (preferably a mirror image of myself). So I tried to go further with commanding my subconscious and shouted, "I want to talk to my subconscious!" Then I turned around to see if there was anyone there. There wasn't. So I turned back and tried again. "I WANT TO TALK TO MY SUBCONSCIOUS!" I turned around. There was still no-one. Nor had I gotten a reply of any kind. I suppose I wasn't well enough into my lucid dreaming yet. Though maybe if I'd persisted further...

    After spending some time in my bedroom, I realised that I should do a Task of The Month. So I should get out of my bedroom and go somewhere where there are dream characters. Actually, I'd remembered my objective to do a Task of The Month before that, not long after I became lucid, but I kept putting it off. Yet, at some moment, I said to myself, 'Hey! You've got to do this soon! You don't want to wake up and not have done your lucid task in time, don't you?' So I changed locations. I actually don't remember what the original location that I saw in front of me then was, nor did I will or notice the transition as it happened. But soon into that, I was climbing a tree. As I was climbing it, I focused on how it felt - whether or not it really felt like a tree - and on how it looked and reminded myself that it was a dream and thought of the fact that doing certain things in a lucid dream can boost your consequent ability and/or self-confidence in waking life; and then I wondered about whether or not I was actually making myself more confident or physically capable or anything in waking life by climbing this tree.

    When I finished climbing this tree, I stepped on a solid platform. I was in an elevator. One that was going down, I think. Standing in front of me, in the elevator, I saw a gang of thugs. At first it may have been one or two but then it became three. At least one of them was masked and armed and they were threatening my life. Confident in my dream control abilities, I tried to punch one but found that, as was often the case, it wasn't easy moving my body quickly and powerfully in the dream. So I decided to stop focusing on thrashing them through physical force and just imagine that they would die. I had a psychic power that could and would kill them without me needing to move a finger. As my hand was already in motion towards one, I used my fingers to dent his skull and take him through the head. Then I imagined the other two just getting holes in their heads and dropping to the ground. It worked. Everyone dropped to the ground but, as I had a little nib of doubt that I had been able to defeat them that easily, I looked down to the ground and saw one or two of their bodies, in suspended animation, partially projecting and jerking through the elevator floor. It looked extremely video-game-glitch-ish.

    I tried to force them all the way down. Then I decided to ignore them. Remembering that I had a lucid task to complete, I decided to get out of the elevator. I escaped through an opening in the walls. It just sort of wound up existing there and it wasn't physically big enough for me to normally fit through it; but I was able to squeeze through with the power of dream control. As I was doing so, I thought of finding a character on the other side of the opening upon whom I could perform Basic Task ii - St. Patrick's Day: Pinch a DC who isn't wearing green. Report his or her reaction. On the other side, there was a well-lit room and I saw a sort of old-looking woman. She was dressed in pink. Nothing too colourful; just a plainly pink shirt and long skirt. She certainly wasn't wearing anything green, so she was the perfect candidate for this lucid task. I ran up to her, got close, hoping that she wouldn't move away, and pinched her in the arm. In response, she simply looked up at me and coldly said, "I don't feel comfortable with you doing that." 'Boy, who knew my dream characters were so chillingly uptight,' I thought? I may have expected her to run away or be angry or ask why I had done that; but this result felt exceedingly unsettling.

    I apologised awkwardly to the woman and somehow ended up having dinner with her family - her, her husband and their teenage daughter. I hadn't tasted any of the food and decided to leave the dream scene, as I was no longer getting anything out of it. (If only I'd remembered Basic Task i - Middle Name Pride Day: Ask a DC what his or her middle name is... and that I could have done it on those same people as well...) I got up and went to walk my way to another scene. However, at that moment, my alarm woke me up.

    I heard the sound of the alarm going off a moment before the dream ended and I opened my eyes. With the speed and immediacy at which I normally did so, I jumped out of bed and shut it off. Then I made sure to muster as much dream recall as possible and got ready to take on my day at school.

    Updated 03-30-2014 at 11:46 PM by AstralVagabond

    Categories
    side notes , lucid , memorable , task of the month

    Flight of the Oneironaut Apprentice

    by AstralVagabond on 03-13-2014 at 01:58 AM
    Last night, I had what was probably the best, most lucid dream I've had so far in my journey as an oneironaut. It was visually vivid, I was at a pretty good level of consciousness and I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to do. If only I had been able to carry it on for longer!

    I became lucid after having dreamt of having been in a terrible fight with my mother. This is something that, to my appreciation, has been a recurring element in my lucid dreams recently - my lucidity having been triggered by something so unusually negative happening that I couldn't believe how it ever could have happened and then realising that it was literally too bad to be true. (Sort of even makes me want to have more bad dreams than I do now, when I think about it. ) When it happened, I was alone in my bedroom. And so, when I started to suspect that I was actually dreaming, I took the same route as I had once before in the same situation - I checked the clock that's normally by the side of my computer. When I look back on it, I recall that it was a different form and colour from my real one; but these details were not necessary for me to have my suspicions confirmed by this reality check. In the upper-right quarter of the clock face, which is easier to inspect than the whole clock in a dream state, just for a moment, the numbers only stretched from 12 to 2 instead of 12 to 3. Then, they went to normal. Then, it stretched from 12 to 4. Then, the 2 and 1 switched places. It was enough for me to catch on.

    I don't think I ever got so excited by the realisation that I'm dreaming that I immediately woke up or anything of the sort. All the more so, I wasted no time after coming to this revelation. Withdrawing from the clock, I could see that I was still in my bedroom; but this time, the lights were off and it was dark, as if it'd probably be evening-time outside as well. (Shame I didn't think to try flipping the light switch to see if it would work.) From then on, I would be playing a game called 'Let's See If This Dream Control Wish Works Or Not Depending On A Seemingly Random Probability of Success.' I wanted to change the dream scene to something more interesting so I decided to try imagining something different behind the bedroom door and opening it. I opened the door but only saw the rest of my apartment out there, in correct order. It was dark in there as well. I tried closing the door and opening it again. Received the same results. So I decided to try it again with the front door of the apartment. Since I didn't really have a particular scene in mind with the door portal spell I'd just tried, this time, I decided to try coming up with something specific. For no particularly superior reason, I thought of a plane in the Mario universe in first-person, 3D view. (I just wanted to get the scene change to work.) I looked around for a moment to check how vivid my surroundings looked. I made the evaluation that things looked pretty good. I opened the front door of my apartment. Unfortunately, I failed again and saw the gated community in which my apartment is located in real life. Again, in the right order; and with the door gate that was there in real life as well. It was evening-time, predictably dark outside as well.

    I walked through the gate. Phasing straight through the gate, that is. I knew that this was normally easy and even effortless to do in dreams but I was still happy to see it worked. I jumped onto the guardrail and then jumped off it, having decided to fly my way to a new dream scene instead. I flew over the street and past the other buildings. Standing beside one, I noticed two disproportionately large people, one of whom was almost half as tall as the (six-story) building and the other being a bit more than half as tall as the first. I successfully flew over them without interference. They never really seemed like giants despite how close I got to them, since a dream is like a work of abstract art, but I still noticed that it was strange. I landed on the wall around my compound's swimming pool, taking a moment to look over it. There were a bunch of people there. I took off again. A bit later, after flying through my building compound, I landed on a plane of grass behind one of the buildings and resolved to try taking off again; but at a powerful, kryptonian-like super-speed. But instead, I only took off at my normal speed of flight - a kind of relatively swift and direct floating.

    Next, I flew over to the pool again; but this time, I had landed right inside the pool, surrounded by dream NPCs. (I know dream characters are called 'DCs' for short themselves but I like using the term, 'NPC.' :3) I have no memory of the pool feeling wet. Although I know that confidence is the key to making it work out and things don't have to go badly, I have a natural apprehension in lucid dreams of dream characters surrounding me, being a bit concerned that they're going to mess things up and preferring to stay away from them until the situation is opportune. So as I caught myself thinking these thoughts in the pool, I went on to think that I was now making it more likely for the dream characters to turn on my with every progressing second. In a bit of a fuss, I then decided to deliberately keep thinking of the dream characters turning on me and wait for them to do so, seeing how it'd go and planning to defend myself with the retained knowledge that they couldn't do anything to hurt me. However, as there weren't any/many signs that they were going to do this in the next few moments, I resolved to take the opportunity to avoid that situation altogether and fly out of the pool. I did so.

    I don't recall how the transition happened; but the next thing I knew, I had changed my dream scene. Of course, since dreams are so shifty and lucid dreams are normally still at a lower level of consciousness, all it really takes for the dream circumstances to change is for one to stop paying attention to them for just a moment. I was still flying, headed into a house I'd never seen before through the window. I phased through the window, either floated or landed on something to keep me close to the ceiling and observed from above the stranger's room that I had just entered. It was a messy room that seemed to be full of things cluttering it. Fairly broad in area. The room was deserted and the lights were off, as they had been in my own home, but there was a television set on a stand that was on at the end of the room. It was broadcasting something between football and commercials. This was another time when I stopped to just pay attention to the dream scene around me, enjoying the details and apparent vividness and whatever was happening on the TV screen that lit up the room and enjoying the fact that my brain had created all of this imagery for me, which I was now in a position to learn to control.

    Still, I was just a bit concerned that the dream character who resided in this house could come in at any moment and cause conflict - as I have a schema that houses are usually owned by people and people are usually in their houses, especially when electronic devices are on (though less frequently when the lights are off), and people are usually unhappy and react aggressively to finding people whom they don't know in their houses. So I flew out of this house and on to another one.

    As I was approaching the windows of the next house, I reaffirmed to myself that I was still dreaming, as I recalled that one should do that every once in a while to retain lucidity (especially novices like me). I also remembered BillyBob's dream control tutorial that I'd read earlier on DreamViews. I remembered that BillyBob had said that it was better to avoid using too many super-powers and reality-warping independently of a rational storyline in lucid dreams if one wanted the lucid dream to be stable and last longer and instead to use rationalisations for anything crazy that one may want to do. Therefore, as I was approaching the window, I decided to crash through it and break the glass instead of phasing through it like a ghost. I did this successfully but without any hindrance to my movement.

    I landed in a room on a high floor of someone's house - a second floor, at least. I could sense that this was a big house. This time, the lights were on. The room seemed to be broad and clearer than the last one; but I didn't pay much attention to it this time. Instead, I had a thought. While I was having a good, clear lucid dream and didn't seem to have much to do at the moment, I could finally fulfill one of DreamViews' current tasks-of-the-month as I'd been meaning to do for a while now! Naturally, at this point in my lucid dreaming journey, I'd go for one of the basic tasks first. I resolved to find someone who wasn't wearing green and pinch him/her.

    At that moment, I saw a child enter the room in his (not green) underwear. Upon seeing me, I think he cried and ran away. Probably downstairs, I thought. 'Well,' I thought, 'I was thinking the person I'd pinch would be someone more mature. But if I run into the kid again, whatever gets the job done!' So I made my way downstairs to check out what was going on there. I imagined there would be parents down there to whom the child had been running but I hadn't expected what I saw next. Hanging onto a white grate outside the room I was looking into, looking but hiding, I saw a couple of green-skinned, big-headed aliens populating the downstairs region. (I'm looking at you, Xanous.) I decided it was best to avoid them and get out of the house, moving onto another location with a dream character to pinch, but to play it cool if I ran into one of them on the way.* Which was good because I ended up having a passive encounter with one. Avoiding interaction, I willed myself to lift off the ground and phase through the second floor and ceiling, directly ascending out of the house. But as I did this, the alien followed me, staying on the exactly same level as I was. Yes, it all looked very video-game-glitch-ish. I was in a hurry. Also, as I moved through two ceilings expecting to wind up atop the house, I instead ended up on another, high floor, like the basement, still not having escaped the physically archetypical alien. I went on to phase through the ceiling of that room as well and wound up in another, higher room. I then phased through the ceiling of that room and successfully ascended out of the house and evaded the alien.

    Another transition. At first, I may have been flying through the low skies or a wide-open room; or running into another building. But as I looked back and then again looked ahead, before I knew it, I was moving in a dim, wide-open tunnel space through/to a network of glowing, floating cubes, arranged with four forms opposite to each other, as if to connect a square, with the same pattern repeated forward, as if to connect a cuboid. I think this may have been reminiscent of the battle room in Ender's Game movie adaptation that I watched a week or two ago. (I noticed that this was strange and different, though.) I continued to fly through into a wide-open, indoor location, giant in all dimentions, where I landed and ran into the wall. Placed against the wall were four or five large cardboard boxes that were packed with something. So, to find a direction to fly further in, again I decided to play the form-a-portal game. I imagined that there was, behind the middle of these boxes, a hole in the wall. A doorway or window or tunnel. Which would make itself visible once I removed one of the middle boxes (or two, where one was stacked upon the other). I lifted the box and moved it out of the way. It felt heavy, though I knew it shouldn't have to. At first, I didn't see what I'd intended to. Just a wall behind the box. But, not to lost or swayed that easily, I put the box back and tried it again. The second time, it worked. I saw a black, rectangular hole shaped something like an open vent. It didn't look like it was big enough for me to fit through; but I knew that didn't matter and jumped through it.

    Unfortunately, once I'd jumped through the hole, I found there was a problem. Again, I hadn't specified a location to which I wanted the hole to lead; and it wasn't a recognisable place leading to another predictable, recognisable place that I already had a map of in my mind, as it had been in the beginning of the dream. In the hole, from outside, I'd only seen blackness. And that's all I saw when I jumped into it as well. Suddenly, I was struck by dream blindness. And thoughts started popping into my mind of where I had gone - that I had jumped, through the rabbit hole, for no particular reason, to a webpage on a site that I used to frequent very long ago. I thought about whether or not this made sense. I knew that I should probably clear this darkness up and set a visual dream scene for myself. But alas, it was too late. For suddenly, out of the blackness...

    I woke up. Jolted back into my waking body, in my bed, back at home. The darkness had been the bard of doom, the herald of the end. I felt my body profusely sweating for some reason, wrapped up in my bedsheets. With immediate memory and understanding of what had just happened, I only wished I could pop back in; but I have no successful experience with DEILDing whatsoever, so that was not the case. At first, I kept my eyes closed. But as I realised nothing was going to happen, I opened them, did a simple reality check and settled down, focusing on thinking about the dream I'd just had, knowing that I wanted to salvage as much recall from this as I could. After a few minutes or maybe half an hour, my morning alarm went off and I had to be off to get ready for school. So, although I hadn't gotten up to check the clock before that, I presume it hadn't been too long before my forced awakening anyway.

    *Hold on. Could this... have possibly been... my mind unconsciously feeding my desire to also eventually fulfill the bonus task of the month for March of 2014 - be abducted by aliens and report what they do to you - without me ever realising it?? Wow. Now there is an idea. And, imagining that I would have had the right amount of dream control and stability to go through with it, what an opportunity missed! And I only just realised it. What a fascinating thing the subconscious mind is.

    Lucidity Flicker

    by AstralVagabond on 02-21-2014 at 03:40 AM
    This has been a rather strange night for me. Firstly, I had a mnemonically induced lucid dream, though I was still at a fairly low level of awareness. I soon consciously oversaw this dream collapse into blackness; but that was not the end of it. In retrospect, I'm not sure if I really retained memory and consciousness of my dreaming throughout the experience or if I inadvertently performed at least one DEILD or just a WBTB; but after I believed the dream to be gone, I became lucid again in the next dream - and, in a way, the same dream - several times. And becoming more and more aware each time.

    In the first of these dreams, I was in my home, getting ready for school and my mother was packing my lunch for me. With apparent spontaneity, I then realised that I was dreaming. I tried to exercise my dream freedom and act with the truth in mind that nothing I said or did before a dream character had any real repercussions. So I approached my mother's dream character and, taking note of her complacent reaction, took her arm and, after a brief delay, passed my hand/finger through it, for no reason other than to check the power that I had. After this, the dream was broken.

    I felt myself lying within my bed, remembering that I'd just had a lucid dream but now seeing naught but blackness. I wanted to go back to the lucid dream. I tried not moving in my current position and going back to where I had just been. In the next dream, I was already aware on some level that this was a dream, though I'm not sure if it was from the very beginning.

    Upon performing some kind of reality check, I made sure that I was dreaming once again. Also, I saw this dream beginning in a similar way to last time, as if it was that dream happening all over again. This time, however, I decided to build on my previous, faulty experience. I tried transporting myself away from my current location, which was then in my own bedroom and with my mother’s dream character, in which I had no interest and who was inhibiting my ability to think freely without worry of consequences.

    I thought of where a good place to transport myself inside my dream might be and, at least in part remembering the bonus task of the month that's in place right now on this website, I tried transporting myself to a mountain covered in snow. But instead of changing my environment, all my dream did was put me in front of my computer monitor, still in my bedroom, and turn it into a video game that was set atop a snowy mountain. It wasn't even that fun of a game but I went on to play it anyway, rather than protest or attempt to go bigger, because I imagined that I had myself made some sort of mistake and that that was the best my mind could be expected to do under the circumstances. This shows that I still didn't have the brightest level of dream awareness.

    In what was either my next dream or a distant continuation of my current one, I endeavoured to truly go to the snowy mountain once again and shouted at my subconscious, as a dream control method I'd learned, to turn my scene into that. However, I could only partially manage the transformation. When I looked around, there were still my mother's dream character and some pieces of furniture from my own house standing there. Soon, I lost my grip on the dream again.

    These times when the dreams kept fading were not something that felt like they could be stopped. I don’t remember seeing any warning signals before they fell apart to keep my grasp on the dream; at some point, sooner or later, I simply saw my dream environments disappear and be replaced by blackness, followed by an apparent realisation that I was lying in my bed. Yet every time, I retained that light of dream lucidity.

    Every next lucid dream I had, I seemed to gain more and more lucidity and dream awareness - though it still wasn’t as impressive as I’d have endeavoured for in the end. In my next dream, however, after performing a reality check by observing the anomalous face of a clock, I remembered the goals I'd formed long before to use in-dream techniques to increase my dream’s lucidity as much as possible. I was in my living room, where I saw a couple of superheroes hanging out (without finding it strange) and I rubbed my hands together. As I did this, my dream really did come to look more vivid. This was the first time I've ever used this hand-rubbing technique, along with a direct shout to my mind to increase the lucidity, in one of my lucid dreams.

    This technique turned out to be successful. The scene before me had become clear and vibrant; but then, for some reason, I kept seeing momentary interludes of blackness in my vision, as if I had been blinking very rapidly or as if frames in the dream movie were breaking up. One of the dream characters who sat before me noted this. The dream then broke again.

    In my next dream, I started back at my bedroom and looked at the clock, as I remembered having done last time. The numbers were wonky and the hands were off-centre, which was well enough to clue me into the fact that I was dreaming yet again. My mother's dream character actually came along and helped show me how strange it looked, now aiding me with the reality check. I picked myself up where I left off, with rubbing my hands to increase lucidity (which eventually faded if not cared for enough) in the living room, with superheroes on my couch.

    I appeared on the balcony of my home and decided to fly off. As I was flying past one of the tall buildings in my neighbourhood, I detected supervillain activity inside of it (to the superheroes on my couch?) and resolved to confront it. I also detected some kind of note from the villain - like a ransom note. But, since reading tends to be so difficult in dreams, I struggled to make any sense of it. I paid so much attention to trying to read the note, not taking this important detail into mind, that I must have been losing awareness points by now. And my dream broke once again.

    Next time, I knew right away that I was dreaming and I became extra-wary to preserve my dream and my awareness and to avoid confusing situations that I couldn’t control. Also, this was the first time when I started off in a different setting. I was in a school environment, one that was in chaos. There were people running around in the classroom and there was a teacher standing in front of me, who clearly was not happy. On the desk beside her were test papers and each one seemed to have a bad score on it - as well as vastly varying score denominators. One of them had a score of only 5 of an unrealistically large number, with too many zeroes to count. This, the teacher, was the score I had gotten on her last test. I was trying to not let this dream get to me and retain my lucidity; but it wasn't always easy. This scene was particularly dark and intimidating.

    I remember having other dreams that succeeded this one; but I doubt any more of them were lucid. I don't have much recollection of these dreams anyway, so there isn't much more to say.

    Although I'd looked forward to lucid dreaming as this night began, by the end of it, I was feeling kind of drained - even a little turned off to lucid dreaming the following day. Hopefully, as I gain knowledge and experience, dream control and retaining awareness will be easier in DILDs that I experience in the future.
    Categories
    lucid , nightmare , memorable

    The Doorway at the End of Childhood

    by AstralVagabond on 02-20-2014 at 01:56 AM
    This is a non-lucid dream that I had four days ago. I had recalled and recorded other dreams from that day; but this seemed like the most interesting to me.

    I was in a large, tall building, sealed off without windows and multiple levels of giant rooms, which I knew to regard as a great kindergarten. That’s what I thought of it as, although it was more like a giant playground, as there were no teachers or supervising adults there - nor were there any other children. I can’t remember my surroundings in good detail but I know that the lighting was fairly bright and the walls were a gold or gold-ish colour. In contrast, imagined play equipment was painted in varying and vibrant colours.

    I don't recall actually spending any time playing here; instead, I remember meeting my mum and agreeing with her to go somewhere else in the playground. I didn’t actually realise until just then that there were multiple levels, when we went down the stairs one floor (I think I'd been at the top floor initially) and then looked down and saw that there were still several floors beneath. The structure of the building was such that every floor was built at the edges of the room, with railings at the edges and a hole in the centre of each floor.

    Then, I believe we jumped off the ledge, as we skipped all the levels and dropped down to the bottom floor, but with no expectation or reception of injury. The bottom floor was an empty one, save perhaps one piece of furniture and one or two doors. Then I found that I was looking to leave, so I asked my mum where we could leave the kindergarten, even though I already had an idea of where it could be. I thought it was the door – or one of them, as I simply knew which one – in that same room. My mum confirmed that it was the door I was thinking of.

    I started walking to the door and going to open it; but as I did so and as it was opened by my mother instead and I saw the outside of the kindergarten palace and she walked out there, I felt taken aback and no longer wanted to leave. The kindergarten as I was there previously felt so warm and safe and insular and childish, reinforced in this sense by the quality that there were no windows to the outside world and nothing existent except a lot of indoor playground rooms.

    I saw that leaving this place, I would not return. Not ever. It was as if I had spent my life in this kindergarten previously. And leaving it felt like it represented leaving childhood, as a child lives so heavily insulated from the dynamics of the real world by his own home and school and wherever his parents take him, knowing hardly anything of it but play... to maturity, which was full of difficult and confusing ideas and choices that would never end, after which I could never go back.

    I thought that this was just like something that had happened to me in real life, when I was a child and I physically left a more realistic but still literal place in just the same way for the life that I am living now. Even though, of course, no singular, literal event like this truly ever happened.

    That's right. I thought that this was identical to something that had happened to me 'in real life.' However, despite imagining such a thought, I didn't even think to couple it with the thought that I was dreaming. It was as if I was operating on an extremely low level of lucidity; or I had very closely, almost entered a lucid dream but not quite. (Not to mention that the event I imagined happening in real life never actually happened, which further shows how unaware I was of reality in this matter.)

    I saw, in this imagined event, me being in my motherland, where I had lived up until I was six but no longer do, and the place I entered as I exited through this doorway was a street from that country. In fact, it may have been the street where my old home there was situated. For a moment, that's also what I saw outside the doorway where I was just then. Immediately after this, though, I saw a Western front porch, with some potted plants and a bench on a swing, where my mother went before I could catch up with her.

    I wanted to tell her, without going outside myself, without setting foot through that doorway, about how I was feeling in order to garner sympathy from her. This is a childish endeavor; and the reason for which I was so avoidant of stepping through that doorway was that it felt like it would force me to surrender my childish ways. In retrospect, I think this may have been symbolic of when I left my homeland when I was 6 years old - and, at the same time, graduated from kindergarten and went on to begin school in the country where I currently reside.
    Categories
    non-lucid , memorable

    Blessed in the sky; crippled on the ground

    by AstralVagabond on 02-19-2014 at 12:40 PM
    In my journey as an oneironaut, which has been going on for about 3 to 4 weeks now, this is the first lucid dream I've had that I've been able or thought to exert control over. It happened on the night between the 8th and 9th of this February.
    This lucid dream was a DILD, as well as a MILD. In the dream, lucidity was triggered by a hand-based reality check. I had just finished up some classes in my school that confused me and was standing outside in a long queue of students whose purpose I didn't understand. The yard outside was similar to the one from my previous school, rather than my current one; but in this entry, I'm focusing on what happened afterwards.
    Suddenly and out of nowhere, I decided to look at my hands. They were white, as is the colour of my real hands; but when I counted the fingers, I had trouble with counting five on one hand. At first, I wondered if I'd miscounted; and tried counting up the fingers on my left hand a couple more times. There was no mistake. I had six fingers.
    I recalled what this meant. I wasn't near full dream consciousness, so I doubt I remembered the significance of the event and I didn't remembered what I'd intended to do if I achieved dream lucidity this night. But I did think to control my dream as a result of this realisation; and naturally, my first thought was to fly. I found it fairly easy. I ran a few steps down the ground, kicked off it and took off. I soared high and fast above the heads of my dream characters, who now looked to be in my school's P.E. class.
    With a bit of a challenge, I lowered to the ground incompletely, without dropping, and then heightened again. I flew over something that was like a tall wall or hedge or mini-mountain. (Since I wasn't at full consciousness, there were still a lot of things I didn't think to question.) I flew to the top of a giant basketball hoop on the other side and sort of stood on it for a moment before taking off again. My schoolmates still see me perform all these feats at this point. Finally, I decided to give flying a rest and try something different.
    I lowered to the ground and attempted running at super-fast speed. I wanted to run as fast as I had been able to fly. Alas, I was not so fortunate in this endeavour, as running in a dream seems to often be frustratingly problematic. Once I was grounded, I struggled through a few steps and fell over. There, I saw a dark-skinned man who was a competitive runner and I wanted to pick myself back up and challenge him to a race, at which I confidently planned to annihilate him with my dream control. (I later discovered that this dream character was supposedly the fastest runner in the world, which indicates that he may have been based on Usain Bolt.)
    But this time, I failed as terribly as the last. The man, who now had a crowd of supporters with him, mocked me from above. I tried to pick myself back up and race him again. On the starting line, he blatantly stood ahead of me before it was time to start. I got upset but let him do it in the end because I thought that if I was going to win this race, I would do it regardless of the difference of a metre or two. As we began running, I was still behind; but steadily so. Though I still struggled to run, I felt like I was doing it better than before. And we were running at both the same speed – which wasn’t actually saying much. I found myself wondering then how this character could be the fastest runner in the world. But before any official finish line was crossed, he was gone and I’d crossed into a new territory – the actual yard of my current school. By this time, I had been too immersed in the race to remember that it was just a dream. My lucidity was lost and I went on to dream about classmates and a broken water fountain.
    Categories
    lucid , memorable