Nerefa
Member

I was at a convention, about to make a sale, and was in a bit of a hurry. I was nonlucid.

Suddenly out of nowhere, my grandpa walked by, as though just passing through. It didn’t fit with the scene and was a noticeable interruption from my current state of mind, but not because he was trying to be noticed. I got the feeling he wouldn’t have even looked at me, had I not initiated eye contact.

He smiled with genuine happiness, the way he used to smile at me. It was real, I thought. Something I hadn’t seen in a very long time, and never thought would happen again. I was instantly lucid.

There was something peaceful about him. He was ready to just walk by without interrupting the show, but I greeted him and we walked away from the convention into what appeared to be a Denny’s booth (with dark gray carpet on the floor, the wooden table and bench, and the red fake leather seatbacks).

“How are you doing?!” I asked, addressing him by his first name.

“Doing good! Its so nice to see you!” he said with a jovial lift in his voice like he used to have. I’ll never forget the joy he had.

“I’m glad to hear it.” I answered. “How is the real one doing?” I asked, referring to his physical self.

He frowned and seemed more dubious on the subject. “I just wish I could wake up…” he said with a sort of frustration and disappointment that was dwarfed by his happiness to be here. It seemed like he had been dealing with something lately.

That was about it for this one. I purposely woke up to write it down.

Had a dream in the same world as my previous “No Outside” dream: https://www.dreamviews.com/blogs/ner...outside-94602/

I didn’t realize it until later in the dream. It started out in waterways between tall (concrete?) buildings that had no visible windows or doors.

There was a hole-in-the-wall market. At the entrance, a man sold goods to customers (literally it was a hole in the wall of one of the buildings, it was well hidden). He sold everything from foot to housewears to electronics to drugs.

He asked me what I was looking for (his products were in the back mostly, customers stayed outside and he brought things out to them). I knew I was dreaming so I though “Sure I could go for some dream drugs.”

But I knew there was something I wanted to remember to do tonight that could be applied to this moment. What was it…?

Then I remembered. I was trying to figure out how to be truly happy again (been feeling off lately). So I told him I’d like something that’ll make me happy. He handed me some drugs and I took one. Nothing extraordinary happened, I just felt sorta drunk/high afterwards.

As I left, I noticed there were cameras watching just outside. Other customers told how to sneak around them.

Through dream scan, I realized this whole city was being watched by something and people lived in secret within the crevices. These people were surrounded and trapped.

I went out to look at the cameras and realized they were the same drones from my “No Outside” dream. Same world, different location. The drones were trying to recapture people who escaped.

I ended up letting the drones capture me out of curiosity to see what would happen but woke up (either SO woke me up or other natural waking).

After the wake up, I went back in but appeared in the woods. I was standing in a path when all the sudden about thirty soldiers in light gray uniforms showed up, but most of them were noticeably drunk.

A couple others appeared behind me with a higher ranking officer in green. The soldiers flanking him moved to join the group and they all looked at him as he spoke to the group.

I just happened to be there and was in the way, so I moved off the path and watched.

They were about to go home, which I guess was why he didn’t care about some random bystander being there, or the drunken murmuring. Everyone seemed tired, done, and eager to leave. Happy, in a way? Eh.

I suppose that’s what I’ve been feeling lately, whatever the hell it is. I’m done fighting, I’ve lost my entire family, everything I thought I knew was a lie, the world has been turned upside down and will never be the same. Time to go home and live life like none of it happened. I don’t know who I am anymore but everythings fine now and I’m supposed to be happy. I *want* to be happy. If I’m broken, that means they won. All they ever wanted was to break me. I’m so angry that I’ve let them win.

(crossposted from my DJ last night)

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It’s 3am, been awake for 30-60 mins, mind racing with worries about things. Forgot to do dream recall because im so preoccupied with these thoughts. A dog has been barking in the distance.

i stop and think, none of these worries have happened yet. Why am i obsessing over them?

Wait

Is there a barking dog? Is that just a sound distortion from my noise machine? A hallucination?

I stop and listen carefully. Sounds real.

I lift my head off the pillow to listen from another angle. Still real-sounding. I swear, it's as realistic as anything I've heard, not coming from my mind.

But then I stop to think and realize it has been the exact same two barks every time. Dozens of times. The same two barks, spaced exactly the same, identical tone and pitch on repeat.

It’s not real.

I proceed to adjust the volume and sound of the two barks with my mind. The hallucination follows my adjustments. Still the same spacing between the two exact same barks, but I can slow it down, adjust the timing, and change the volume with my mind.

There was never any barking dog.

The things I'n worrying about aren’t happening either. I still hear the same barking on repeat and my worries are still there, but I know what's in my mind and what's not. I'm going back to sleep.

This dream was from the night before last.

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I was lucid through the whole night (WILDed back into it after each natural WBTB). Most of it was one big dream (there was one smaller lucid dream at the start of the night, but I forgot it).

I traveled around a world made up of holograms. The people were real, and they had a system where if they wanted an object that they could pick off the land, they had to purchase it through a system. The purchased replaced the hologram with a real object.

For example, if they wanted a to chop down a tree to build something, they had to purchase that tree for it to materialize fully.

They had big cities for people to live, society, all built with stuff that’s real from past purchases off the land. It was mainly the rural areas that were holograms.

The boundaries of the world were in the ocean. The ocean didn’t get too deep, it just cut off at after a certain point and I could see the boundary's edge in the distance.

The forests were symmetrical. They looked like normal forests, except the trees and the animals, everything in them was perfectly lined up. You can walk a certain number of steps and find the same bear next to the same rock next to the same tree stump on repeat. Each forest was shaped like a pie this way and had its own unique stuff on repeat.

There were many different holographic landscapes. They were solid and I could interact with the holograms, but I couldn't use or take them.

I at one point tested this by getting a bear to chase me. It only chased me a few yards before going back to its spot where it was locked in with an "invisible" tether.

The people in the city were nice, good people, but I didn’t like the way society operated. I forget why, but they had some sort of societal problems.

I went off into the rural landscapes and found nomads living off the land on the rocks by the edge if the sea. They got by with what little they had. They had escaped the main cities and didn’t want to go back, even though life was harder for them.

I found a nice lake hidden away in a beautiful grove. The water was no more than four feet deep and crystal clear. There was a rainbow of beautiful rocks at the bottom.

One of the nomad women rowed a small boat around the lake and I spoke to her in private, enjoying the scenery and company. She told me that entertainment, play, and any forms of self expression or leisure were frowned upon in society even amongst the nomads. They needed to work 24/7 and should not have nor desire anything more in life.

She told me that she liked to come here to this lake to be at peace. This was her haven, a secret place she could escape to, and goof off. To live and relax. This was her freedom, no matter how small it was.

I told her I wouldn’t tell anyone, that I was from somewhere far away and this was my escape, too. I’m also just looking for somewhere to relax and be at peace. I told her how blessed I am to have this time to myself in such a beautiful world.

I didn’t tell her this was my dream since that usually gets complicated and I have to explain how that works, which I didn't feel like doing.

But we had a nice time.

I had a dream last night that led to a mind-blowing discovery about happiness.

I've been sad lately, don't get much joy out of the things I used to love. It feels like the light inside of me has gone out.
I have plenty of "reasons" for why I'm sad, like depression and life struggles that are real and understandable.
But that doesn't change anything. I'm still sad.

Last night, I decided to try using my dreams as references for visual art. I wasn't trying to find the grand solution to my relentless despair, but I thought maybe I'll be happier if my drawing skills improve. Or maybe I'll make money off of my art if it looks better, and the money will make me happy.
idk maybe it'll just pass the time, worst case scenario.

My small, simple goal was to improve my anatomy skills, especially eyebrows. I have trouble visualizing eyebrows and putting them onto paper. I thought "Well, my dreams look just like real life. The human brain is incredible, capable of coming up with elaborate scenery and imagery that look just like real life. Perfect reference material, right? I can study anything I want in dreams."

So I entered a lucid dream with WILD and started studying a simple painting of a woman facing to the side. I could study the curve of her chin and lips, the size of her forehead relative to her chin, the shape of her eyes and eyebrows. All of the shapes and proportions. It was as if I was looking at a real painting for reference.

But this didn't help because I can already draw something like that from memory when awake. Side-views are easy for me. I've already memorized the curves and proportions. If I was going to improve, I needed references for more complex angles and expressions that I haven't memorized.

So I stepped away from the painting and started to look around at everything in my environment, marveling at how vivid everything was. The grass, the trees, every grain of dirt on the ground. I leaned down to examine the petals of a purple flower.

But again, I could draw a flower like that from memory. Neat, but not what I was looking for.

I needed to look at things that I have trouble visualizing when awake, because I don't know the finer details of what they look like.

So I found some people to study. I tried to examine the face of an older man who looked perfectly vivid and realistic at first, but upon close inspection, I couldn't wrap my mind around what his face was supposed to actually look like in finer detail. What's the exact curve of his eyebrow from every angle? Do all the hairs go in the same direction or do they curve out in separate directions? Where exactly on his skull do the eyebrows meet the orbital bone? I can't remember, I don't know these things, but I thought they would "magically" appear properly in my dream. For some reason, I thought my brain must've had this "secret highly detailed memory" storage that only dream-me could access. After all, my dreams are so vivid and realistic.

Seems kind of obvious that I was wrong, now that I think about it.
I couldn't make out his finer details in my dream any better than I could without a reference when awake. It wasn't even necessarily blurry, but it was like I was seeing the ambiguity of my mind failing to form an objectively correct visual. I was seeing all of the "possibilities" at the same time (not literally, but the illusion of my flawed perception was clearer than ever).

This is also what happens when I try to visualize his face when awake.
I still need a reference.

But it's mind-blowing that I didn't even notice the illusion covering up these deficits until I started looking for them. My unaware mind had convinced me that everything looked normal, when it didn't. That makes way more sense than my old magical assumption that we could somehow dream in 4K but not access this massive underused capacity for detail any other time.

So I can't use my dreams for art like I wanted, but this has even more incredible implications.

First, awareness is a much bigger aspect of our sensory perceptions than I previously thought. Everything you see is filtered through your awareness of it. You're not getting the real thing. Visual artists are specifically skilled to increase their awareness of visuals and a lack of awareness of visuals is reflected through their drawings, but we otherwise may never notice the awareness we lack (whether an artist or not).

We go about our whole life thinking we see things that we're not fully seeing. Our minds are filling in the blanks and we don't think twice about it.

Secondly, this is a huge difference between waking life and dreams that I never noticed before. Removing the "filter" like I did in this dream could help you recognize the dreamstate by reflecting on your level of visual awareness.

Third and more incredible to me is what this implies about happiness in general. I posted this on the Omnilucid discord, and a fellow dreamer pointed out how this happens with other things too (not just visuals) like when you dream of a funny joke, but wake up with the realization that it wasn't funny (your mind just thought it was). Or in waking life, the experience of a garden being extra beautiful knowing the labor and love that went into it VS just seeing a garden in a dream that was easily created on the spot.

I've had countless dreams that replicated the experience of something, without having the actual experience.

Like nightmares about things that aren't scary, or losing love for a person I've never met. It was just a trick of the mind, an illusion of having an experience I didn't even have... There's a pure essence to our experience of things that can't be seen, heard, touched etc. It doesn't seem to exist outside of our consciousness. It's invisible and intangible, but it's very real.

I think I've been getting wrapped up in the illusions of "stuff" and have a better understanding of what that means now. I'm feeling much more hopeful. Maybe I can find happiness again now that I'm seeing past the filters.