side notes

Awake, Non-lucid, Lucid, Half-awake, half-dream state, [Commentary made while awake]

While out of the house somewhere, I put on a navy-blue, stretchy headband [that I have in real life], and make some kind of wish. This causes me to suddenly have long hair again [I cut my real hair short at the beginning of this month]. My hair is down to my shoulder blades, which is still a little shorter than it was when I cut it, and seems thinner and wavier than it used to be when it was long. I don't want my mom to see me with my hair long again, because if she did, I would have to explain to her about the magical headband. So, when I return home, I do my best to avoid letting her see me.

I consider re-cutting my hair myself, but decide I don't want to, because it wouldn't come out very neat. I decide instead to go back and find the stretchy headband and make another wish to reverse the effects of the first one. I ask my mom if I can use the car to run an errand. She asks what it is, and I answer that I'm going to a vacant lot to look for something I lost. This is true, but it's not the whole truth.

I get into the brown car, and someone is in the front passenger seat. [My dad, I think.] I say to him, “Watch the street signs. I don't even know my own neighborhood in these dreams.” And they'll probably change, I think. I back the car out of the garage, turn it to my left, and continue backing in that direction all the way down to the corner, where the street turns 90 degrees. [In this dream, this corner is now a 90-degree turn like it is in reality, not a four-way intersection like it was in the first dream described in my dream journal entry dated 10/08/10.] Sure enough, as we drive down the street backwards and then back up the street going forward, each street sign says something different the second time we pass it than it did the first time we passed it. The street signs are all blue with white letters [not green with white letters, as they are in reality]. Eventually, I find the street I'm looking for and turn left onto it.

The next scene seems to take place in a fast-food restaurant. I find the headband I was looking for and restore my short haircut. [For this part of the dream, I was in “video-game-controller” mode again, as I described in my dream journal entry dated 10/21/10. I was kind of removed from the action and aware that it was all going on in my mind/imagination, and at the same time, I was fully aware of my real body.]

Woke up at 1:36 A.M., took some notes on my dream, went back to bed.

My parents and I are attending a wedding at the estate of some really rich people. The estate has a little re-creation of a neighborhood from old-timey New York, and the little church in that neighborhood is being used for the ceremony. In one room, an old man, the father or grandfather of the groom, I think, is lying on a hospital bed, all dressed up for the ceremony and being included in the festivities. After the ceremony, they make everyone attending the wedding pose for a group picture. My dad wants to put some sand in containers to use it to stabilize some photography equipment, so he gets out a bunch of sand toys, and I help him shovel sand into buckets. The people who own the estate are originally from Thailand, and they've recreated the beaches of Thailand on their estate. The sand we're shoveling is filled with beautiful blue-and-white seashells, colorful stones and jewels, and gold dust.

Woke up at 3:36 A.M., took some notes, went back to bed.

I'm at my old high school, walking across campus, looking for the classroom of one of my old teachers. I get to the western edge of campus, where the furthest-out portable classrooms used to be, and discover that there's a sort of ravine there, with concrete stairs leading down the near side and up the far side. On the far side of the ravine stand the furthest-out portables. I'm not really surprised that so much has changed in the years since I've been away.

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An aside:

When I cut my hair short in reality, it was after many years of having long hair. I've been wondering for a while whether or not my dream self (if I may steal some jargon from the Matrix universe, my residual self-image) would still have long hair. Not surprisingly, thinking about this over a period of time caused me to dream about it. I find it interesting, and reassuring, that after only three weeks of having short hair in reality, even my dream self apparently feels that that's the norm, and that having long hair feels wrong.

Also, I'm pleased with the increasing frequency of my lucid dreams, but disappointed with my lack of control. I keep realizing that I'm dreaming and either not trying to do or change anything at all, or trying and failing. I will continue trying to improve.

Awake, Non-lucid, Lucid, [Commentary made while awake]

Last night, my WBTB went on for nearly fifteen minutes, due to my trying (and failing) to figure out what it was that had gone thump and woken me up. I think it helped me attain lucidity. I should do WBTBs that last that long more often.

I'm bicycling along a sidewalk that winds through grass along the side of a street. Every so often, the sidewalk rises up and becomes a little bridge that allows water to go under it. It goes up-and-down and side-to-side so much that it's a little difficult to bicycle on.

I'm in a building with a group of my Literacy AmeriCorps friends. We're in an open, interior space that runs through several stories of the multi-story building, and has lots of staircases and landings in it. My LAC friends are standing around on the staircases and landings. We're talking about the party that's going on in a room upstairs. One of my friends says that, in order to get in, you have to bribe the guy watching the door in a “touchy-feely” way, e.g., by touching him in a sexual way. I absolutely refuse to do this. At some point during this conversation, I realize, “This is a dream. I can't really be talking to these people.” [I haven't seen any of them in reality since the program ended; we don't even live in the same state anymore.] Then, a bunch of unidentified guys come up a flight of stairs from deeper in the building and start trying to molest me and the other girls with their hands. As they begin to surround me like a flood, I realize this is turning into a nightmare, and try to leave the scene by closing my eyes and turning around. Once again, it does absolutely nothing. The guys start getting their hands on me, and achieve their goal of discovering where my erogenous zones are. I'm scared and shocked and I wish it would end, so it does. I wake up, and go back to sleep shortly afterward.

I'm in a room where I and three of my LAC friends, one other girl and two guys, have been staying. I find a guitar in the closet. A tall guy I don't recognize is also in the room. One of us asks, “Who in this room plays guitar?” and the other answers with “Lisa C.” and one or two other names. [I can't remember now who said what, or what the other two names were.]

I'm in a giant, room-sized aquarium. It's rectangular and about twelve feet from floor to ceiling, and all but the top three feet are filled with fresh water. One wall of the rectangular room is covered with small, enclosed plastic boxes, each containing a different kind of fish. You can open up the doors on the front of each box to let the fish out into the larger aquarium. I'm swimming in the water and can apparently breathe under it. I'm playing with the fish that are out in the larger aquarium, trying to get them to act out some scenario, but it isn't working out too well because there's this one carnivorous fish with big, pointy teeth that keeps eating most of the smaller fish. Eventually, it even starts eating another fish that's bigger than itself. I swim up to the very top row of little boxes, one of which contains a Blue Tang. I think about letting it out, but decide not to because I'm not sure if this one is a freshwater fish or not, and because I don't have very many of that kind. At this point, I discover that I suddenly can't breathe as easily under the water, and I realize that it's because the top three feet of the room are now filled with water, too. [Yes, I realize that doesn't make much sense. No, I didn't realize this during the dream, nor did I realize I was dreaming.] I go to the end of the room and start trying to get the door open so I can breathe the air outside the room. It has a wheel on it that you turn to open the door. While I'm still trying to open the door, before I can either drown or get it open, I wake up. [Dude. That was pretty cool. I wanna go back and play in the aquarium room again sometime.]

Awake, Non-lucid, Lucid, [Commentary made while writing journal entry]

[Fragment] I'm at junior high school, going to class and learning what my class schedule will be.

The next dream starts out like a documentary about Canada. In the dream, I remember that I visited a city in Canada once, and my strongest impression upon arriving there was, “Wow, I'm in a foreign country!” [I've never actually been to Canada. These are most likely straight-up false memories, but I also got the feeling when taking notes during my WBTB that they might possibly have been memories of a previous dream that I'd otherwise forgotten about. Weird.] According to the documentary, Canada has a “Mexico City,” a concentrated population center of Mexican immigrants.

The dream then shifts from a documentary to an episode of “The Red Panda Adventures” that involves all of Canada being hypnotized/brainwashed into hating a man with the last name of Campbell. I remember a long text document [don't ask me why a dream about an episode of an audio series generates a dream image of a text document] that goes on and on about what a despicable person Campbell is. At one point in the text document, there is a warped and twisted version of the Canadian equivalent of the Pledge of Allegiance that also mentions his name and says something bad about him. [I was curious, so I looked it up, and it turns out that there is no Canadian equivalent of the Pledge of Allegiance. My mind just made one up. Cool.]

Woke up at 4:00 A.M. at the end of a sleep cycle and needed the restroom, so I used it, then took a few notes on my dreams so far, then went back to sleep.

I'm in a really big library with white walls and lots of light wood. The word “dream” crosses my mind somehow. [I don't remember whether someone said it, or I saw it on a sign, or I was just thinking about it; I think it was probably the latter.] However it happens, it makes me realize, “Hey, I'm dreaming! I did it!”

I decide to try doing a scene transition. [I don't remember how I did it, but] I find myself sitting in front of a computer monitor, which is displaying a command prompt against a black screen. The program that's running is a text adventure based on the novel Watership Down. I can't do anything right in it – I try entering a couple of commands, but none of them make any progress. Even the inventory command yields a response that goes something like, “You can't have an inventory with only one!” It means that you have to have more than one rabbit in your party before you can check your inventory. I quickly discover that the program is tied to the computer's clock, and that if a certain number of seconds pass without the player making any progress, the program just gives you a Game Over saying something about how you just got eaten (you, the rabbit, in the game, that is). After I get this Game Over, I think: “I don't have to sit here and play this text adventure just because I ended up here. If I want to, I can get up from this computer and go explore the building.” So I do.

I'm still in the library, because that's where that computer is. It's near a second-story interior passageway that's open and more like a balcony, overlooking the ground floor of the library. I follow the passageway over to where it ends in a flight of stairs going down, then descend the stairs, holding on to the handrails the entire way to keep myself focused on and grounded in the dream, and to make sure it remains stable. It works. The whole time, I'm marveling at how the sensations of walking, descending stairs, and holding the handrails are exactly like they would be in reality. The stairs have handrails running up the middle of the steps, but they aren't parallel to the ones running up the sides of the stairs; they're at an angle, so I have to go through a narrow space between two handrails on the last few steps of the staircase. I say, “Why did I have to design these stairs this way?”

I exit the building, and am outside on a dream version of my college campus. It's sunny and beautiful, and all the buildings are big and white and slightly old-fashioned [in real life, most of them are various shades of brown, tan, or orange, and none of them date back further than the 1940s]. Also, the St. Louis Arch and another, light-brown arch with some words on it in black, marking the entrance to some area, are there. [I can't remember what the words said now, but there were two of them, they were the name of the area, and they both started with S.] I go, “Ahhh, it's so good to be here.”

I notice that the beach, with its light-colored, soft sand, is down at the bottom of the cliff. I decide to try something. I think to myself, “When I close my eyes and turn around, I'm going to be standing on that beach down there.” I close my eyes, turn around in a circle (not too fast), and then open them again. I'm now on the beach, not quite at the exact spot I had been shooting for, but pretty close. “It worked!” I say aloud.

I stand on the beach for a moment, but the waves suddenly start coming up really close to the cliff, so there's not enough dry sand left to stand on. I decide to spin around again to go somewhere else, but this time, I'm thinking, “Just take me wherever.”

[In retrospect, that wasn't a very good idea.] I end up on the porch of an old, slightly spooky-looking house made of wooden boards, that seems to be floating on the ocean. It's not abandoned, though – there is a couple living in it. Also, I now have a friend with me – no one I know in real life, just a random, unnamed female dream character.

I look out from the porch to the east at the surrounding landscape and see a world that is ending. The sky is filled with thick, solid black clouds, with streaks of bright red and orange here and there because the sun is rising behind them. The entire landscape is flooded, and a jumble of disconnected buildings stick out of the water here and there. Some of them are on fire, some are falling apart, and one is being ruled over by some sort of dictator, whose enormous figure I can see looming over the building and gesturing with his arms in a way that means “work, you miserable peons!”

The couple who live in the house we're at start talking to me and my friend. They say that we have to get back to safety by sailing back the way we came. I think, “But we didn't sail here! We teleported!” I don't say so, though. [I don't know why not. Either I didn't get a chance to say anything, or I didn't want her to know about my newfound teleportation abilities, I'm not sure.]

[From this point forward, my recall is a little less clear in that I remember all the scenes, but none of the transitions or connections between them.]

The next thing I remember is facing away from the house toward the west, where there is a sort of path leading away from the house, but it's made up of a bunch of vines (or tree roots?). I try to get to the other end of the path by spinning around and closing my eyes again, but this time it doesn't work at all. I say, “Okay, if we can't do that, we'll just get there the hard way,” and start climbing over the vines.

Somehow, I end up on the deck of a ship, and there are waves coming up onto the deck I'm on, over and through the metal railing to my left. One of them doesn't look very big (it's about the same height as the railing), but it breaks right on the deck I'm on, tilting the ship over but not capsizing it.

The next thing I know, my friend and I are being escorted through the flooded landscape in a boat. There is a tank-like, armored boat with lots of guns in front of our boat, and another one behind ours. I take it they're there for our protection, but I quickly figure out that they're mostly just there for intimidation, and they're not even doing a very good job of that. There are lots of dangerous things trying to attack us, including exploding police cars, but we and our boat are passing through all of them as if they were air. What's really protecting us is a magic spell, one which, I know in the dream, comes from the Incarnations of Immortality universe.

I'm on foot, indoors, running away from something. I run into what appears to be a bathroom. I wonder if the protection spell is still holding now that I'm off the boat.

[I'm not entirely sure whether these last two scenes were in this order, or the reverse order:]

I'm a student sitting in a classroom, on the first day of school. All the other student seats are full of preteen or teenage Japanese girls, but the teacher is white. She explains that all we'll do in her class is make these little hat/hair accessory things out of tissue paper, which must be very trendy, because many of the girls are wearing them in their hair.

I'm standing on some rocks in the ocean, near the beach. I'm still lucid, so I think, “Okay! Text-messaging! Task of the month!” I go to take my phone out of my pocket, but then think, “No, better not do that here – I don't want to get my phone wet.”

Woke up and was delighted to have had another lucid dream. While thinking back over it, I laughed out loud at that last part – I was concerned about my phone getting wet? It wasn't even my real phone! :-D Then again, I realized that that makes sense: my dream cell phone would have been just as damaged by dream water as my real one would be by real water. After all, that's what I expect will happen when cell phones get wet.

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Commentary:

Last night, I listened to about half of my binaural beats file at the beginning of the night, did a five-minute WBTB, did a lot of MILD affirmation and visualization both when I first went to bed and when I was going back to sleep after the WBTB, and had a new cardboard-square bracelet, one made with a smaller square of thicker cardboard than my first one, on my wrist the entire time. Something helped me have a really good, long lucid dream. I don't know what. How very unscientific of me, I know. I'm sorry, everybody.

On a more positive note, I'm getting a little better at this! I had more lucidity than ever before this time, and I thought about and actively tried out some dream control techniques while in the dream. I've moved out of the “what is this new world?!” phase now, and into a phase that can be characterized by these thoughts: “Okay, I get the idea of what lucid dreams are, but how do I shot web?” That is, I'm just starting to learn to use those dream control abilities. It was one thing to read about the spinning scene-change/teleportation ability, but as with most skills, now that I've done it for myself, I truly understand what it's like. Note to self, though: I should never spin around to transition to a new scene without first deciding what the new scene should be, because if I let it be random, I may not like what I get.

Awake, Non-lucid, Lucid, [Commentary made while awake]

When my 6:30 alarm went off this morning, I was still sleepy, despite having gone to bed just after 10, and I felt somehow sure that I'd have at least one dream that I remembered if I slept in for another hour, so I reset the alarm for 7:30. Luckily, before I fell asleep again, I remembered that REM cycles take 90 minutes, so I reset it again for 8:00. [I'm not entirely sure in what order I had the following dreams, nor am I sure whether the first one took place before or after the 6:30 alarm, but here they all are.]

I open my eyes in my bedroom and immediately notice that the light fixture in the center of the ceiling has a square cover over the lightbulb, like the light over the shower in my real bathroom, not a round cover like it does in my real bedroom. I say right out loud, “That light is wrong, so I must be dreaming! HELLS TO THE YEAH!” I get out of bed, but then stand just inside the door for a few moments, trying to figure out whether or not I can still breathe through my nose while pinching it shut. It seems I can, but only a little bit. Confused, I give up trying to figure it out and leave the room to say good morning to my mom. She's there, just like normal. I go back in my room and, still hopeful that this might still be a dream, try to walk through one of the walls. Again, it doesn't work; the wall and I are completely solid to each other.

The Dream King is talking to me. [Not the one from The Sandman; it's the gryphon from the Rankin-Bass version of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”] He says something along the lines of, “When you summoned us for fun times earlier, you bounced and lay down. The next time you do it, could you lay on your back first so the palace doesn't get shaken around?”

I'm in a park somewhere with P. We have to go through it to get home. There are all these dogs running around, and she protects me from them just by knowing how to act confidently and politely toward them. At some point, we end up riding bareback on a horse through the park. I can feel the horse's hair. Eventually we get to an escalator and start riding up it (yes, still on our horse). It goes up into an enclosed chamber with animatronic figurines in it, designed to look like the riders of the escalator are coming out of the mouth of some giant creature. There is some kind of audio narration playing, thanking us for visiting this attraction. When we get to the top of the escalator and exit the chamber, we're on a street.

The 8:00 alarm went off for real, and I recalled all of the above. I went out of my room and talked to my mom.
Me: I just had a really confusing dream. Is this the first time I've come out to say hi to you this morning, or the second?
Mom: The first.
Me: I thought so. That's what I dreamed about.
After I'd confirmed it, I started feeling happy and proud about having another lucid dream.

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Meta-commentary:

The WBTB+MILD technique seems to be working well for me, at least giving me interesting dreams with good recall, if not consistently giving me lucid dreams. I've found something that works for me, though, so I'm going to keep it up. I was making the effort with my MILDing again last night, but I could be putting even more effort into it. Also, I had my cardboard-square bracelet on for most of the night, but I think I took it off when the 6:30 alarm went off because I was tired of wearing it. I'm not sure, though, so I can't say whether or not I was wearing it when I had my lucid dream. Finally, I shall have to remember not to rely on the nose-pinch RC so much; it served to confuse the issue rather than to clarify it. Next time, I'll try the finger-counting method.

Awake, Non-lucid, Lucid, [Commentary and notes written while awake]

Last night, while going to sleep and attempting to MILD, I stopped to pray. I had stopped to pray the previous night, too, and had had no dreams that I could remember, so I almost didn't want to do it again, but I told myself, Post hoc, ergo propter hoc much? You know that doesn't make sense. Just go ahead and do it. So I did. [I'm only writing this part down because it relates to the first dream I had last night.]

[Dream #1] On the corner of the street my house is on [a corner that doesn't exist in real life – the real corner is just a 90-degree turn in the road, but in the dream, it's a four-way intersection], in the front yard of the corner house, there is a big, tall tree with bright yellow leaves like the leaves on a maidenhair tree. There are also some gourds with faces hand-carved on them hanging from the tree. The house belongs to an old woman, who did the carving. I am reading a newspaper article about this house, in a newspaper called The Syntax. According to the article, a few days ago, a strong wind picked up and blew all the leaves off the tree. Immediately thereafter, people in the neighborhood started having various strokes of both good and bad fortune, and they all claimed that it was because of the wind blowing the leaves off the tree. This sparked a neighborhood-wide controversy: were the good things really caused by the tree, or the bad things, or none of them? Someone who was interviewed for the newspaper article argued for the “none of them” position by quoting the Bible verse about how no one can tell where the wind comes from or where it is going. [John 3:8, for the record.]

[Dream #2] I'm walking through an indoor hallway to get to some kind of high school sporting event that is being held in a high school gymnasium. One of the teams is called the Blue Meanies; they have two mascot outfits, a male and female Norse warrior. The other team has someone in a mascot outfit, too. [I don't remember now what it looked like, or what their team name was.] Each team has also brought just a handful of cheerleaders to the game.

[Dream #3] I'm playing PackRat. [Again.] There are two different limited-release collections pretty much right at the same time, and they've re-released a whole bunch of retired cards for the recipes in the retired collections. The images on one of the limited-release sets are of pipes or cables, and they extend across multiple different cards. They're making it even easier than they did with the jigsaw-puzzle set, I think. [The jigsaw-puzzle set exists in reality; this limited-release set does not.] I find that my pack has been erased and refilled with 5 cards from the other limited-release set, the one with normal art [in Doug J.'s signature style], one of which is the top card.

[Dream #4 – seemed to segue directly from the above, but how, I couldn't say] I'm outside somewhere, apparently in the yard or garden of some manor house or something, and it's nighttime. I see a fireworks show starting up a short distance away; the horizon is low and flat, so I can see it with no obstructions at all. My mom is there, and I tell her that if she turns around, she can see the fireworks show.

Woke up at 2:32 A.M. Took some notes on my dreams so far on a notepad, then went back to sleep, attempting to MILD again. It worked!

[Dream #5] I'm in the house I grew up in again. [Although this is a known dream sign for me, I don't remember specifically thinking, “hey, if I'm here, then I must be dreaming.” Nonetheless,] I'm lucid enough to decide to walk around from room to room of my own volition. When I get to the bathroom, I try to walk through the back wall of the white tile shower, which would take me out into the patio. [Yes, the real house is laid out that way.] It doesn't work; I only get part way into it, not through it. I don't feel anything. I continue walking through the house, and one of my parents sees me. [That's all I remember, unfortunately.]

[Dream #6] My family and I are on vacation in Key Largo. [Apart from having tropical beaches, it's absolutely nothing at all like the real Key Largo, which I've been to once.] It consists of a couple of islands connected by a bridge. On the first one, there is a high, tower-like hill. We climb the stairs to the top and look out at the ocean and the other island, which is where the town and the boat launch area are. I exclaim, “Guess what I forgot! Sunblock!” Then we go down the hill and over into town.

The town, or at least the downtown, consists of one big continuous building with corridors lined with shops and restaurants running through it. The entrances to the corridors are numbered and are rounded, making them look more like tunnels. We go down corridor #8 and pass a lot of shops. It's obvious how small and rivalry-filled, yet close-knit, the community here is by what's written on the signs people have in front of their shops: one of them says that their food is better than the food at another shop (even specifically naming the other one!), and another contains a proposal of marriage. Eventually, the tunnel ends in a rounded food court, like in a mall. My parents and I go over to a coffee shop/bakery toward the far side of the chamber and a little to the right. There are breads and pastries displayed all over the back wall and in long glass cases.

[Very abruptly, the scene changes and] My mom and I are driving in her car back toward the main highway that runs through the Florida Keys. (The two islands mentioned above that make up Key Largo stick out from it at a right angle.) I see the high-rise buildings of Key West [the what now?!] in the distance. The sun is either rising or setting, and the way its light is hitting them is making them glow with amazingly brilliant neon colors. [Some of which would be impossible in real life. It's surreal, but really beautiful.] I tell my mom to look at the light on the high-rises, and she does. In order to get a better view of it from further back, she turns the car so the front windshield is facing the high-rises, then starts backing it up, across the sandy beach and into the ocean. Somewhere around here, I shift to viewing the scene from a third-person perspective, up above the car. The car keeps going across the water for a pretty good distance before it sinks into the ocean and we die. Then I think to myself, “Only not really, because this is a dream.” Then the scene rewinds [on its own, not because of anything I did, thought, or willed]. The car drives forward, back over the surface of the water, with me still watching from my third-person perspective.

On our way back toward the town (I'm back to first-person perspective now), I look back and can see where the main highway is by the telephone poles and elevated bridges on the horizon. When we reach the town, I can see that there's a small railroad that goes all the way around the outside of the building, and every shop has a back door that opens onto the railroad track. This is how they load and unload things. Of course, I think; there's no room for cars or trucks on the island. [Then what are we doing driving our car there?] We re-enter the coffee shop/bakery from before, through the back door, and now we order food: cinnamon rolls out of one of those canisters you get from the refrigerated section at the grocery store. The shop attendant opens the canister behind the counter, and the vertical stack of cinnamon rolls expands, the frosting running down the sides. I say aloud, “Do want!” We proceed along the outside of the glass cases to where the coffee machines are. The signs on the coffee machines show that they contain a milder and a bolder version of Dunkin' Donuts coffee. I start getting myself some coffee, and then the dream ends.

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Some meta-commentary on the lucid dreaming journey:

One of the things I'm really liking about this experiment with dream journaling and lucid dreaming is that it's finally broken me of the bad habit of staying up past 11:00 every night that I developed when I started college. I was still doing it up until a week or two ago. I always used to want to stay in bed until well after sunrise, but the sunlight always woke me up, so I got a sleep mask and got into the habit of reaching over and putting it on as soon as the sunlight started to wake me up, then continuing to sleep, or trying to. I've been in this habit for at least a year, and I'm finding that it's so deeply ingrained that I'm still doing it, even though I'm now going to bed earlier and getting up at or before sunrise. I would be annoyed by this if I hadn't realized that it's useful – I have a natural, biological WBTB alarm set.

Last night, I read this thread and decided to adopt the mantra “I lucid dream” for MILD purposes. I decided to put that sentence in the same mental categories with such sentences as “I play the clarinet,” “I speak Spanish,” and “I write novels:” the categories of “ongoing, recurring action” and “learned skill.”

My previous lucid experience back on the night of October 1 left me euphoric for the entirety of the next day, but this one just left me disappointed. While I was recalling my dreams after waking up, I thought: What did I just say about lucid dreaming being a learned skill? That was only my third time. What was it like the third time I played the clarinet? I know the answer to that one: I only played one, two, or three different notes, because that was all I knew how to play. It took lots of practice and learning before I could play all the notes. I hope, and intend, to master lucid dreaming skills via the same process.