StaySharp
DreamDragon

Escape through a reflection: I don't remember what caused me to RC, but I got lucid through the classical nose pinch. I seem to have been escaping from something, but I can't remember more than that basic detail either. But there is one scene I remember vividly, which was moving up to a glass window or door which was closed. I've seen an incomplete reflection on it, mostly bluish like the sky, but there were wooden parts and also silhouettes blocking part of it, similar to how it might look like in reality. I instinctively focused on the reflection, completed it, then stepped right through without opening it, into the reality of the reflection so to say, after which I immediately flew, and it seemed to have been very high up. Unfortunately I didn't get to enjoy my free flight for long.
Some indecent stuff: Some time after that I had a false awakening and I was in a building, and somehow pretty quickly realised I was still dreaming and did a nose pinch again.

Spoiler for 18+ Stuff:

So... dreams being dreams and being random I felt a wave of horniness after becoming lucid. I've gotten some... weird and hard to describe interactive selection screen through which some possible partners were displayed (they could apparently see me through this dream UI too), and then I started publicly having fun with someone in a restaurant... It is what is. After that the dream derailed into pointless conversation but I remember someone being repeatedly misgendered, without caring.

This was a different dream, but same day.
Suicide mission in space: So this dream had a weird melancholic component to it. I voluntarily went on a suicide space mission with 100% chances of suffocation from a lack of oxygen, I was in a missile in an orbit around earth, but I didn't focus on the panorama. I had breathed out of a sort of bag but as previously indicated in the dream I ran out of oxygen soon. Except that I kept breathing in the vacuum of space without issue whatsoever. I probably would've realized I was dreaming if I hadn't woken up at that point.

So this here is a big deal for me. A REALLY big deal!
It's been a little more than 6 years since I started with lucid dreaming, and like many other hopefuls I was also aiming at WILDs. Suffice to say they were very elusive to me for the longest of times. Painfully slowly over the past years I had more experiences giving me insight, like waking up unusually slowly out of a dream, basically an unintentional reverse WILD and all sorts of things like that.

So then today was the big day. I got into bed, decided to get out again and read a couple of things on WILDing again as I was planning that for a while anyway. Set my alarm for a bit more than an hour, sleep, get up briefly and put in earplugs.
They were a bit uncomfortable at first but rolling over and pressing my head into the pillow actually helped. They were just noticeable enough to give me an anchor while shielding me from outside sensory input.
As I was laying there I felt a heavy and tired sensation quickly, the one that's been dragging me back into sleep all sorts of times when I wasn't supposed to remain sleeping, but at the same time I felt my mind be decently alert and awake.
Maybe a minute or so after seriously lying down I start getting intense feelings of motion, I patiently feel into them and wait for them to pass, then I get up.

I'm in my room, it's dark and everything looks normal, and this surely would've made for an FA, but I didn't lose my consciousness at all, so I immediately reality checked with a nose-pinch, and sure enough, I was in a dream. Incredibly smooth and direct transition too. Perfect.
I open the balcony door, and as I wasn't exactly dressed I grabbed a t-shirt and quickly put it on while strolling through the neighborhood. It was very close to my actual living place in K, but there were some differences. I strolled through the place, and there were 2 persons, I levitated up on a building and then jumped down in one swoop close to them, like I often did in a Power Armor in Fallout 4. They did give me a weird look and I made a small impact but it wasn't much.

I conceived a plan to test out more stuff so I thought why not try summoning some beautiful girl? So I went into an apartment building, around a staircase corner and there was someone waiting who was very likely inspired by someone I knew from real life. Had red short hair like my wife currently but looked otherwise a lot different. At least the concepts, proportions, facial structure and the like were a compound of actual people known to me. She wasn't what I was looking for though, so after a few words I got out and repeated the same process (enter an apartment building, go around a staircase corner, meet someone) 2 more times.
The next time was a person that was inspired by one very particular person I know and remember from real life. I asked her about her height which just cemented my realization that she was directly inspired by person IN I knew from many years in my past. Again a few words and I moved on.
The third and last time there was yet another person in the same line, sort of okay looking, but not what I had tried to summon as eye candy, leading me to the realization that somehow my summoning parameters must've gotten restricted to known persons and looks.

I entered one of these apartment buildings again and basically entered a separate space with no way to get back, and it was bigger on the inside too. Hammer space time.
The place was very dimly lit and the architecture was almost persistent, changing just ever so slightly with every passing minute of me strolling through the corridors. I opened doors and explored rooms.
One of the rooms I distinctly remember was a storage chamber, and while looking into it and the vicinity I heard some disembodied voice talking about inheriting riches and getting through an awful time in an awful city, with him thinking he wouldn't have made it otherwise.
Odd but okay.
I also stumbled upon a room that was described as my classroom, with me being the teacher, but no one was there. It also had elements of a kitchen, a train station and not enough chairs.
Here I'm not perfectly sure about the chronological order, but some time before or after those rooms the dream sort of dimmed, and thinks became hard to see, I had the feeling of slipping away. I really focused on everything I was feeling, similar to ADA exercises, and a pulse ran through everything, giving it an invigorated and strong color for a moment. Also the corridor I was in when I did that had some mixture of grass and tiles on the floor.
Towards the end of the dream I heard a screeching sound to the left of that corridor, a terrifying cacophony, which only after a couple seconds I recognized as the train delivering my students.
I went to the room again where I saw them, I think like 5 or so. There was some Yu-Gi-Oh theme to them (for whatever inexplicable reason), and one of them was a snake dude, with scales and weird eyes.
Upon looking into his eyes the dream ended somewhat abruptly as I felt myself waking up, I knew there was no going back so I got up and happily started writing down this entry.


Now I'll see if I can repeat this semi-reliably. Sure, I might not be able to pull it off every night, but this was to deliberate and specific for me to believe it to be a fluke. I can do it again. And more importantly I then should be able to actively incorporate Ryuuko into these dreams.

I was in a dimly lit building, and I know there was someone with me, but I don't know who. Outside there was something huge and grey rotating in the distance, at first it looked like an tornado. But then it turned out to be a huge weird steel structure and it flew right over the building I was in.
That was so bizarre I instantly turned lucid. I flew into a long corridor and tried to morph into Ryuuko, trying to change my hands, but the dream wouldn't let me. I only saw some red scaly stuff on my hands. I turned 90° left and there was a weird red dragon which I... made disappear with a weird handchop. It was really glitchy and it was all in plain sight.
I turned 90° right after a couple of meters and there were 2 girls, going at it with a strap-on. And that's were I woke up.

To me Ryuuko is a major part of what motivates me to pursue lucid dreaming nowadays. She's a character I created for a shared dreaming RPG way back in early 2014, it's called Dreamsphere chronicles. I even made a forum for it but it just never really took off. Kinda bad, but it was a good and valuable experience anyways.
This journal is both a place for me to keep notes on her development, and to give context to my dreams involving her when I post them here.

The concept of Ryuuko has stuck with me through all the years though, up to this day, and will probably stick for many years to come. So I started working on her and establishing her in my dreams outside of said dream RPG.
When I created her I came up with a couple of requirements after which I designed her:
1. A very different personality from mine. From the beginning I wanted a character that had a substantially different way of living and looking at anything than I do, so it would give me a truly fresh perspective.
2. A very complex body. Rather than having a body that is simply humanoid (2 arms, 2 legs, 1 torso, 1 head) and thus easy to use I wanted something that would pose a serious challenge to control in it's entirety.
3. In accordance with the game I needed many different skills I could learn as time passes.
4. And obviously I wanted a body and person that would be pleasing to my personal aesthetic standards. Who wouldn't want that when designing a Dream-Alter-Ego?

In order to get something that was truly different from me, I first gave her the opposite gender of mine (so she's female), and then created her background and story in such a way to make her a 'blank slate'. In short for her story this means she's been created, was never meant to develop her own personality, but eventually did so anyway due to flaws in the experiment. At some point she develops a taste for freedom, escapes her birth place and that's when I would start seeing things from her perspective. Since it'd be considered amoral by the creators to restrain her, and since she'd be useless for her original purpose anyway they just let her go and started over.
The point of this weird story is to let her experience the world with an adult body, an adult set of predefined knowledge, but no actual experience and no real personality, so that I could witness the forming of her personality firsthand. And I'm doing my best not to set a direction myself.

Next was her body. Since I wanted something that would be truly interesting to use in a dream, a simple human body wasn't an option for me. So I designed her as a Dragongirl/Ryumimi, which adds 1 tail and 2 wings to the equation. Since that didn't seem enough I also threw in 6 auxiliary limbs, which roughly look like tentacles, which then again brings her total amount of controllable extremities from 4 all the way up to 13 (2 arms, 2 legs, 1 tail, 2 wings, 6 'tentacles').
Also she hears with her horns as opposed to hearing the way humans do, because I wonder how a notion like that might affect the senses in dreams.
As for her skin, her entire body is actually covered in thick armor-like scales, which in turn are covered by skin or even thicker exo-scales, so she has some decent protection even without separate armor (I tend to be invincible without any intervention in dreams anyway, so it makes sense to come up with a concept that explains the sturdiness to some degree).
All those features give her a whopping mass of around 185kg. In reality mass generally equals weight but since it's not about reality I placed her weight at around 30kg.
If you're not aware what such a sharp difference in mass and weight would cause, it allows her to fly and keep her altitude much easier as she would only need 30kg of lift, but she still needs to put in the effort of getting 185kg moving in the first place. She can reach high top speeds, and she can turn around on the spot quickly, but she's neither going to make sudden dashes, sudden breaks or U-turns.

Her abilities involve all sorts of things that are fun to do in a dream, flying, fire-breathing, exploding fireballs... stuff like that.
So yeah, the concept is probably kind of over-the-top but in order to make her the most interesting to implement in dreams that's exactly what I was going for.

As implied she's my Dream-Alter-Ego. That means that when I have (lucid) dreams I try to turn into her, experiencing the world around me not with my body, my thoughts and my perspective, but hers instead. So far I had some limited success in doing so, but typically there are many months in between any Ryuuko dreams, so I have a lot of work in the dream realm ahead of me.

So this was probably the most stable and most vivid lucid dream I've had so far. Maybe not the longest but it was rather long too.

I'm not entirely sure how exactly I got into the dream. I had been drifting back and forth between sleep for hours in the bed, always trying to think about visualization and WILDing, but never really managing as I always fell asleep quickly. I think this time I lost consciousness just for a very short moment and snapped back at just about the right moment.

So I was lying in a bed, had my eyes closed, and saw mostly normal phosphenia. I didn't feel entirely normal and I wanted to open my eyes and be in a dream.
So I opened my eyes, being in a state of what I'd call skeptical lucidity, I believed that I was kind of in between dream and reality. What I saw in front of me was a massive cupboard that covered the whole wall, though it was composed entirely out of drawers. My vision wasn't normal either, it's like I saw a correct main image but then much weaker and transparent copies of the main image slightly wavered around.

I left the small room and went down a hallway to the left, it was dark outside and the light was very dim. My vision normalized somewhere here. A bit down the hallway I turned left again and entered a very large staircase (5m x 5m or so, the structure was very similar to my first boarding school). Around here I tested my powers for the first time, summoning a faint green glow on my fingers. I also heard some unintelligible voices from somewhere else in the building, but I didn't really care. I wanted to fly but I still didn't trust my current state completely. Then I summoned some weird stone, it was beige and glowed somewhat white and it had levitation powers focused in it, and this is when I trusted my lucidity. Then I did something I didn't ever do before, instead of looking for an exit point or breaking the glass, I just phased through it, and by that also through one of the steel bars that were between the glass panels.

Now I was outside, floating around a bit. Either it quickly turned bright or I have a memory gap here, I'm not completely sure. Now I was in a place that was kind of city, kind of village, kind of medieval, kind of modern. Imagine a small clearing and a raised plateau in front of me, there were tables there with some stuff on them, parts of the ground were neatly layered with stone, parts were grass. Around the perimeter of that clearing were buildings which seemed kind of medieval, but the further the buildings were away, the more modern they seemed. There even appeared to be tall apartment blocks in the distance.
I remembered I wanted to do stuff with Ryuuko in my dreams. I suppose this is the time and place to elaborate on her, refer to this place: Ryuuko Drakisu | Dream-Alter-Ego and persistent DC
So I landed close to the tables on a small free patch. I remember a bearded man standing there. Think of a Nord from Skyrim, just looking better, more realistic and having less of an annoying aura. He greeted me shortly I think.

So I summoned Ryuuko kind of as an empty DC, like a model with only the most rudimentary understanding and behavior possible, which is pretty much what I wanted at this point. I think she appeared in plain sight but I'm not entirely sure. Also there were a lot of details that were wrong. Her horns were reddish and on her side, her face was just wrong and from someone else, the hair was too short and had a wrong light brown color, her skin was too dark, had freckles and actually on all places of her body except the face the skin texture was missing, it was like Vantablack. Though parts of her natural scale armor, that is on the arms and legs, seemed to be present and mostly correct, I didn't focus on their details all that much though. I think I saw her wings in a folded state too, but again didn't pay enough attention to them to tell for sure.
I told this Ryuuko model to start fixing the skin color. What it did was a bit bizarre, it touched its face with its hands and then kinda rubbed the skin color all over her body, gradually replacing the blackness, albeit the revealed skin texture was still wrong and covered with freckles, I wonder why.
At this point I also noticed she was naked and was missing her clothes.

At this point the bizarreness of what I saw made me think about what to do, and it seems my focus slipped and I lost my lucidity. Somehow me and the Ryuuko model walked into a nearby shop, where I remember seeing her one last time, still not completely fixed up. Then some people were quite frankly talking about completely irrelevant shit, some stickers and some glitter was around but I hardly want to bother remembering. I know that for some time I just observed, then I ate some of the glitter. Then I woke up, much to my dismay. Had my focus not slipped I bet I could've still done a lot more in that dream.