pog
Member

Woke early and drifted in and out of sleep/dream - a number of times I couldn't tell if I was awake or dreaming ...

Last night I recall the following:

I had to go to town to buy books. I travelled to a smaller town that I remember from my childhood, but it is not the same. I need to get a bus from here to town before the shops shut - it is already 4pm and Sunday. the shopping centre where I am closes, I get asked to leave - but am sent a back way so I am late for the bus I need. I see it drive away, but I am not too bothered nor do I make any effort to catch up with it or stop it.

I wake - and suspect (for some reason) that this dream is to do with my career and work life ....?

So, a 'normal' dream that would have Freudian psycho-analysts falling over themselves to offer me interpretations.

All very blurry until the part where I am fighting against 3 or so people who are trying to castrate me! I fight quite viciously but am losing, and am trying to reason with them. Even more oddly (perhaps) the three trying to pin me down are UK magician/mentalists (Drew McAdam; colin McLeod and Pete Turner). Seriously; wtf?

Anyway ... I think it best to forget this dream

So, last night I had a range of dream phenomena linked together.

First, I had 'normal' dreams that blurred into an especially vivid and convoluted 'dream-within-a-dream' (I dreamt I was dreaming etc). Secondly, I then awoke and started checking because I was really unsure as to whether I was still dreaming or not. I became satisfied I was in reality, but a minute later I realised I was in the 'wrong' house - I was dreaming. It starts to get a little blurry here, but I think I then tried to initiate a WILD or WBTB or something similar even though I had recognised I was dreaming (odd) - but it seems that it 'worked' in that I entered another dream (or dream-within-a-dream, or continuation of the original dream, however you want to see it) where I knew I was dreaming ... a round about way of doing it, I guess, but lucidity reached nevertheless

Knowing I was dreaming I started to panic a little about losing lucidity, so I tried to stabilise. People had posted on here that one method to stabilise was to concentrate upon the senses, and this advice had obviously struck a chord with me because I concentrated upon the feel of a sock I was holding (don't ask). This worked; although I did not have the elation-sensation or the hyper-real sensation I'd had with previous LDs, I was dreaming in a dreamscape that was as 'real' as the waking world, I knew I was dreaming, and I had stabilised it.

Lucidity didn't last as long as I wanted, and soon I was awake (I think something disturbed my sleep from outside, grrrrr!), but all in all a successful LD.

O.K, last night I had a really bad and fitful night's sleep. The silver lining was, though, that with many interruptions and night-time disturbances I was able to try WBTB (or something similar) quite a few times

The result was that I had a lot of time with some great (and often quite beautiful or surprisingly clear) hypnogogic patterns/images. It seems that since practicing LDing I've had more and better pre-sleep imagery like this (another cool effect from greater dream awareness). A few times these patterns seemed to bleed into full dreams, and on a couple of these occasions I was lucid. The downside was that even though I was lucid I seemed weak and unable to control much, and that these dreams were so unstable that they lasted only a very short time (dreamlets?) before I woke again. I suspect this was because of the bad night I was having and how tired and stressed I was.

Oh well, at least I've learned that a) greater dream awareness enhances hypnogogic imagery, and b) that pre-sleep hypno stuff can be turned into LDs.

All I need now is a decent night's rest with unbroken sleep!