Duality

I haven't been keeping up very well with my dream journal as of late, mostly because I haven't been dreaming.

And the reason I haven't been dreaming is because I haven't been sleeping nearly enough.

I'm not entirely sure what's caused this, but in the past weeks it has been exceedingly difficult to fall asleep and stay asleep.

At some point, during a stint of 72 hours with fewer than 4 hours' sleep, I began to have very mild hallucinations, where stationary things would seem to shift around, and white flashes of light would suddenly appear in my periphery, often startling me.

My vision has become blurred, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to perform reality checks because reality doesn't seem so real anymore...

This sleeping pattern is more than atypical. I'll find a solution soon.

I feel the need to make a note about last night, as it was extremely atypical.

As usual, I took an hour-long nap in the early evening, around 6 o'clock, during which I had two dreams, neither of which are worth mentioning. And, as usual, I didn't fall asleep again until 4 AM the next morning.

The unusual thing is that once I fell asleep, I slept for an entire seven hours, without waking up. I can't remember the last time I slept soundly for that length of time without waking up once. It's been months or maybe years.

I had around five dreams total during the night, none of which were lucid or worth mentioning. This number is atypically low given that I slept for so long, and without the use of alcohol or over-the-counter medication.

So far, this is my masterpiece.

I began where I was beginning many of my dreams at the time, in the living room of my parents' house. It was night time. The moment the dream began, I suspected I was dreaming, and looked at my hands. This confirmed it for me. I sprinted out the door and went outside. By this point, my default action in lucid dreams was to steal a car. My favorite at the time was a 1971 Dodge Charger, so I began trying to will one to form behind the garage. I walk around the side of the garage, telling myself I would see a Charger when I rounded the corner. What I saw wasn't a Charger, but was sufficient for my needs. It was a Massachusetts State Police Cruiser; the Crown Victoria model.

I got inside [because the door was unlocked], and started the ignition [because the keys were inside] I unfortunately couldn't find the switch for the lights and siren, as I had never been in the front of a police car before. So, I turned on the headlights, then shifted into drive and hit the gas, kicking up gravel behind me as I peeled out of the driveway.

As I barreled down my street I saw a similar police cruiser, which had evidently lost control and veered off the road, crashed head-on into a ditch. I couldn't see if anyone was inside, but there was no one standing near the vehicle. I kept driving. I was a man on a mission and I wasn't going to let myself be flung out of my fantasy world just yet.

I brakes hard and cut the wheel, fishtailing onto the main drag before I shifted into top gear and punched the gas. The tires squealed, but quickly regained traction. The vehicle accelerated to an extremely high speed; well over 100 MPH, but I was somehow able to effectively steer, for a while.

I eventually felt myself losing control of the car. I flung the door open and dove out as the car continued forward, wrapping its front end around a lamp post, causing it to buck and sway a little before leaning over with a creak, the light flickering and dying away with a few sparks.

The crash site was near a small lake in town. I got up to my feet and walked toward the lake, staring at the moon's reflection in the ripples. Suddenly, I heard a voice behind me. "Hey!" I turned. Two police officers, one shining a Mag-lite in my eyes, were approaching me, both with their hands on their holstered firearms. The first officer, wielding the Mag-lite spoke again. "What are you doing down here?" They had seen the crashed police cruiser(s) and evidently followed me.

I didn't bother to answer the officer's question. I raised my right arm in his direction, with my hand balled in a fist. I opened my hand suddenly. The flashlight-wielding officer exploded in a fantastic display, his skin flaying open in all directions as bone and organ tissue flew like shrapnel, coating one side of the second officer, now terrified. I watched the second officer as he turned, and without firing a shot or saying a word, ran away.

I turned back to the moonlit lake. I raise both arms, with my fingers curled up toward the sky. Little blue "fire-demons," each about a foot tall, rose from the lake and began to dance and play on the water. I smiled. They knew to follow me as we walked toward the town cemetery.

Myself and my new sprites arrived at the cemetery by somehow shifting the universe around us [I didn't feel like walking all that way]. Once there, I stood amongst the tombstones and just watched as my sprites danced around a tree, igniting it in blue flame just by touching it. I rose my arms again. The ground shook around me a little as the grave sites began to each bulge individually. Rotted, almost-skeletal arms began to punch their way out of the earth. I was raising the dead.

Unfortunately, I woke up.

[Placeholder. I don't mean to spam, but I want to keep my posts in chronological order.]

[Placeholder. I don't mean to spam, but I want to keep my posts in chronological order.]

I do not recall the exact date of my second lucid dream. It was memorable, so I didn't feel the need to write it down.

Again, this was during my senior year of college. I had no particular dream sign at the time, and my method of realizing I was dreaming was to simply look at my hands. I went to bed with a rubber band on my wrist, and if the rubber band wasn't there, I was dreaming. This worked for a while, but after some time my mind adapted to this and began to produce the rubber band in my dream, giving me a false-positive for a reality check.

The dream began in the dead center of the main campus. I arrived, I looked at my hands, and I realized I was dreaming. I wasn't sure exactly what to do, so I decided to will a porn actress into existence and have sex with her. My favorite at that time was an actress named Mindy Main.

I began walking in an arbitrary direction. There were several buildings on the campus that didn't exist in reality, and I made note of this. One of these buildings was once a one-story building made of brick, but was severely damaged and appeared to have been abandoned. The black-singled roof was caved in, as well as parts of two walls. I walked around this building, and found a man, a stereotypical redneck, relaxing against the far side of this destroyed building. He was sitting down with his back against the brick wall. I stopped in front of him and examined him. He was clad in a white-and-blue flannel shirt, torn jeans, and a tattered straw hat, and was chewing on a long piece of straw. He wasn't wearing shoes. I asked him if he knew where Mindy was, and he said he didn't know.

I paused. "..Are you sure?" I asked, with a smirk.

The man seemed to realize he was a figment of my imagination and that he had to give me the response I wanted. "Well, now that you mention it, she's over there, behind Herbert Hall."

I nodded in thanks. "That's what I thought," I replied, and began toward Mindy's location. When I found her, she was standing timidly, silently. She was wearing a jean skirt and a white halter top, accompanied by black sunglasses with large lenses. I walked up briskly and took her my the wrist. "Come with me," I commanded, and proceeded into the building. As soon as we entered, she began to mutate into a cat-woman. "Fuck. Hurry." I ran toward the stairs, which led up to a bell tower which didn't exist in reality. By the time I led her to the top, she had fully mutated into an orange cat-human hybrid.

Frustrated, I pushed her off the edge of the bell tower and woke up.

Today I found a few pages from three consecutive days sometime in the fall of 2009, just after I was formally introduced to lucid dreaming. What follows is a compilation of those notes. They are regrettably not dated.

Here, I stray from my promise to only post the interesting dreams, but since this is the oldest physical record I have of my dreams, I feel the need to compile and post it for my own purposes.

Day 1.

1. The setting is my undergraduate college, near my apartment senior year. I am backing a Volkswagen Touareg (belonging to a girl who lives three doors down from me) into an empty space. One of my professors is standing off to the side, in the grass, providing direction and satirical commentary.

2. I am attending a presentation on job-hunting, being held in my room. My friend, Mike, who is a midget in the dream but taller than me in real life, operating as projector, which is projecting from a square hole in my wall (which don't exist in reality) onto the wall of the stairwell. Some concierge driver I met some time ago is conducting the presentation.

3. I am a politician of some kind; I am blatantly corrupt, and walking around in my penthouse apartment. The TV is on, and there is a newsreel about scandals surrounding me and my activities. I walk to the coffee table, just in front of the TV, and examine a pile of journals and magazines, for which all of the cover stories are about me skimming money from the taxpayers. I look up at the TV and see a VCR, and in my mind I know I stole both the TV and VCR from some forensics lab.

Day 2. These notes begin to become unclear; almost gibberish, looking back at them. I can't really recall any of these dreams, except for the lucid one.

1. I was an "officer" in a certain country, and passed the qualification exam for a job. The exam involved the reflection coefficient formula from transmission line theory.

2. I was playing Battlefield Heroes (an online game), as a member of the Axis. I turned the game to our team's favor by destroying two Sherman tanks with a bazooka. A Raggety Ann doll started running at me, swinging a sword (there are no swords or giant dolls in the game). I shot and kill the doll for the winning kill.

3. My first lucid dream. This dream started in my parents' living room. One more I interrogated my parents, asking them if I was dreaming. Again, neither of them provided a satisfactory reply. I look at my hands, and convinced myself I was dreaming. I therefore ran outside, planning on trying to control the dream. Unfortunately, I was "ejected" from this dream; it ended early.


I will continue this post later, but since it is basically just a list of several uninteresting dreams, the task cannot hold my attention as of right now.

The next decade or so is a little hazy for me, but I distinctly remember at least two dreams in which I asked my parents and various other "authority figures" whether I was dreaming or not, and I never received a satisfactory reply. It never occurred to me that I might have to figure out the answer to this question on my own, or that their insubordination might be the answer in itself.

It wasn't until my senior year in college (2009-2010) that my room mate formally introduced me to the concept of "lucid dreaming" I was naturally fascinated by this, and having nothing better to do at the time (aside from drink) I decided it would be well-worth a try.

My room mate assured me that very few people were capable of becoming truly lucid, and that it would likely take several weeks of training to achieve lucidity just once or twice. Evidently I'm a fast learner with regard to dreaming, and I achieved my first truly lucid dream in a few days.

I have to be candid; the year is a guess on my part, but I believe I was 9 or 10 at the time of this next dream.

Again, nothing particularly astounding was happening. My mother, father, and myself were all visiting my grandmother's house. However, the odd thing is that we brought the dog, Tippy, a long-haired, brown-and-white mutt who probably weighed about as much as I did at the time. I was a little frightened of him, as being the people-friendly dog he was, he liked to jump on people. Being as big as he was, he could easily hurt me in doing so, and was responsible for a few scraped elbows of mine.

Anyway, the dream began with me in the driveway, next to the family van. I noticed the dog was running around the house like a lunatic, as I would expect him to, but I found it quite strange that we would load a huge dog into the van and bring it to my grandmother's house for a short visit. This was my so-called "dream-sign."

I walked into the garage, whose bay door was open, and approached my father, who seemed to be working on an electrical outlet. I inquired, "Dad, am I dreaming?" He seemed to be somewhat irritated, and ignored my question entirely. "I don't know. Go ask your mother."

I went back outside and walked over to one of the many flower gardens my grandmother had at the time. My mother was pruning some bushes. I approached her, and asked, "Mom? Am I dreaming?" She seemed to have heard my question, and understood it, but was clearly reluctant to give me a satisfactory reply. "Well, I don't know. What do you think?" I paused, in thought, and looked at the dog again as he made another lap around the house. "I think I am," I replied, watching the dog.

I woke up.

I feel it only logical to proceed in chronological order here, so I will begin with the first lucid dream I remember having. I believe I was seven years old at the time.

Although I did not know what the word "lucid" meant at the time, I was evidently innately capable of lucid dreaming. Over several months of the year 1996, I had noticed a pattern to my dreams; I had never looked down to see what I was wearing.

So, I decided to perform an experiment. I resolved that the next time I found myself in a dream, the first thing I would do would be to look down and see what color my shirt was.

My tendency at the time was to sleep with my clothes on. Don't ask me why; I don't know. I still often nap with my clothes on, as it causes me no significant amount of discomfort. This particular night was no exception.

I entered my dream world. I was standing in my room; nothing spectacular happening. I'm not entirely sure how I recognized that I was dreaming, but I did. I started to look down, but I felt a force pressing against my chin, resisting my movement. I was resolute. I forced my chin down, overcoming this bizarre force, and noted that my shirt was the same as the one I had fallen asleep in: blue, with yellow and green stripes.

The instant I saw my shirt, I woke up. It was as though I was somehow forbidden from controlling my own dream.

For the next several years, the ability to control my dreams was put out of my mind. Another couple years passed before I decided to give lucid dreaming another go.

Hello there.

I'm a bit new to this site, but not particularly new to the concept of lucid dreaming. I have been attempting lucid dreaming on and off for the past couple years, with some success. I'm not sure how often I will update this journal, as I do tend to get busy/lazy from time to time. I think that now, it is time to organize my lucid and non-lucid experiences into a consolidated journal.

I hope to create a unique journal here, and as I can have up to nine dreams (which I can recall) per night, I will limit my records to the ones I find interesting, so that I might save myself a bit of typing. My sleeping schedule is extremely erratic, and as of recently I have been sleeping substantially less. Over the past couple weeks, the tendency has been this: I will sleep for about one or two hours at a time, and spent equally as much time awake, giving myself no more than five hours of sleep per night, typically. I'm more used to eight. Part of my new-found interest in lucid dreaming comes from an effort to achieve a deep sleep for shorter intervals, to feel somewhat restful after a restless night. This has proved largely successful, as I tend to dream even if I take a half-hour nap, and feel fairly refreshed afterward.

The uniqueness of my journal stems from that fact that I seem to suffer some mild symptoms of schizophrenia, though I have never officially been diagnosed, and nor do I care to. My mind, in itself, is dual in nature. It often seems that when I attempt to achieve lucidity, some part of my mind tries to prevent me from becoming lucid, or from doing what I want if I do become lucid. This point will become more clear if you care to read some of my entries.

To me, lucidity can become both thrilling and disturbing. It is thrilling in the sense that my mind always seems to be playing games with me, as if I'm playing chess with a clone of myself. The disturbing part, I suppose, is thinking of what might happen if someone ever actually won this game of chess.

As a side note, I am an electrical engineer (involved in research, currently) by profession, which may put some of my dreams into context for you, if you happen to be following along. I've kept everything truthful, as I find the truth is usually more interesting than a lie.