side notes

Another sludgy dream last night. The clarity is picking up a little, but not much. I'm sort of on a dry spell. I was driving with S to my college and I pulled over and made S get out because we were running low on gas.
I then drove about half a mile to a gas station, and pulled up. I was ready to pump the gas and realized that I had to go pee. I was also thinking that I should go back and get S where I left him, by the side of the road.
I went into the gas station and in the bathroom, for some reason, there was no toilet, just a large PVC pipe sticking out of the floor. The gas station was doing maintenance or something, and I figured It was where the toilet was supposed to attach, and that I could just do my business in it.
So I'm doing my thing and I realize that this situation is actually rather absurd, so I start reality checking. For some reason it takes two nose pinches and a host mental questions for me to properly become lucid. When I became lucid, I realized that if I was having dreams about peeing, that I might have to get up and go to the bathroom, otherwise I could wet the bed. So, I simply woke myself up.

Well I didn't have to go to the bathroom in WL. Kind of wasted a lucid there.

I was thinking about something on the drive to college. When I started lucid dreaming, three and a half years ago, my goal was nightly lucidity. I would sometimes say to myself that I wanted to 'become' a natural lucid dreamer. To be honest that is still my goal, and I getting closer. I have about one lucid dream a week now, and no shortage of close calls and partially lucid moments in-between. I'm really not that far off from my goal, but there is still work to be done.
Late October was a good time for me, and now I seem to be in a bit of a slump. Probably due to stress in WL. I was thinking about holding off on lucid dreaming a little bit this next week or so, letting the dry spell blow over and focusing more on issues in waking life. Because for me to be truly happy, both my waking life and my dream life have to exist harmoniously. So I might be a little less active in this next week or two. By no means will I stop posting, but I might only log on once a day to lay out a quick nonlucid DJ entry.
Back on the topic of my nightly lucidity goal. I was thinking about how all too often I forget that I shouldn't just be focused on the end result, but perhaps the journey along the way, too. This hasn't always been an easy mindset to have for lucid dreaming. To me, I always thought of 'completing one level before moving onto the next'. By that I mean, attaining nightly recall before I started practicing lucid techniques. Then, attaining nightly lucidity before practicing stabilization techniques. Then, I with a consistent means to lucid dream, I could learn stabilization and dream control with no shortage of windows to practice. But that isn't the way it's happened for me, or anybody else. I've been developing all of those skills little by little. So I'm going to try and change my mindset; lucid dreaming is an adventure to be had, in all of its stages.

This was a long dream, and I can't recall how all of these plot elements tied together. It started off with me going to some kind of frat party at my college. (Something I would NEVER do IWL, my introvert powers would make sure of that.)
I expected the party to be wild but for some reason, everyone is dressed up in fancy suits/coats and wearing those feathery eye masks. The party is mostly men, but there are a few women as well. The setting is fancy as well, the inside of the frat house is decorated in a sort of modern/oriental way. I recall the walls have this wood paneling and there is this beautifully carved bamboo furniture.
At some point or other, I was approached by some of the masked people. These were the leaders of the frat or something and they have masks that cover their entire faces. I think one of the guys is wearing Amon's mask from LOK. They are holding a silver tray and on it is a paper cup filled with this steaming yellow liquid.
They say that I must drink it... no reason why really... I just have to drink it or bad things will happen. I reluctantly pick up the cup, and hold it to my mouth. I can smell the fumes. The liquid has a nutty, oily aroma. (Oooh, I smelled something in a dream, that's a first.) I then cautiously take a sip and instantly feel very sleepy and pass out on the floor.
...
What followed were a couple of vague flashes of me trying to leave the college.
...
When I came to, I was driving my family's old van up to my house. I had the worst taste in my mouth and I knew it was from the yellow oil stuff I had drank earlier. I parked the van in the driveway and got out.
A police officer pulled up. He was a tall, muscular man with short black hair and a full beard/mustache, probably in his 30's. He told me in a kind voice that he wanted to talk to me about my driving skills.
I asked him if he could give me one moment. My voice was muffled and I felt like I was gagged. I felt my cheeks and I was, with my bandanna. It was tied very tightly around my head. After a minute or so of finagling with the knot, I was able to get it off, and then spit out some of that nasty oil that I had drank earlier. I felt very sleepy and unfocused. I wasn't drunk, but defiantly under the influence of something.
The officer said he wasn't going to write me a ticket, but what he had in store for me was much worse: a lecture on safety and driving. He started lecturing me about driving when I drink these substances, but I had some intense motivation for driving the van home in this half awake state and I was fighting to explain it to him. But I couldn't recall what the motivation was.
...
This somehow blended into a dream scene where I was home. I think this was the next day. The police officer had come in to have breakfast with us. I had been grounded from driving by my parents. In the dream, it was Friday, and I realized that I needed to get to my drawing class, but I couldn't drive myself.
For some reason it was my mom's friend who was supposed to be driving. She was having breakfast with us too. (We were all sitting in the kitchen and my mom was making waffles.)
I was a bit anxious to go, and the clock read something like 11:93. I thought that meant that it was broken and it was really 12:33.
So great... I've already missed half my class.
And, almost as if it were put in the dream just to annoy me, my mom's friend is eating the waffles in super slow motion. Eventually I just figured 'forget it' I'm going to miss my drawing studio class anyways, and just went up to my room.

I think this was a completely separate dream. This one was pretty vivid. I was visiting some beach area with Manei. We have parked far away and have to hike through the woods to get there. Supposedly we are investigating alien activity and other planets.
Okay, that is like every major dream sign that I have in the first paragraph. I guess I was semi lucid though, so we're getting back on track... slowly.
We hiked through the woods until eventually we came to this sand dune. We climbed up it and all of the sudden we were out in the open.
I recall this scene very vividly. There was a huge, broad, sandy valley with a river running through it running into the sea out in front of us. To the left are some mountains. Down in the sandy valley, just to the right of the river is a massive grey alien head (looking to be about 40-50 feet across), face up, eyes open in the sand.
Manei gets all excited because this shows a connection to what is on Mars. She get out this futuristic Ipad device with a clear screen and shows me a picture, from pretty much the exact angle we are looking at. The topography looks very similar, though it is on the polar ice cap of mars. The valley looks the same and the alien head is in the same position and some orientation.
I think that the alien heads were like telepathic nodes or something, but I can't remember...

Spoiler for Marcus:

And completely out of the blue, here is a drawing I did of one of my persistent DCs, Marcus. (I am by no means an art god, but I think this came out pretty good. My roommate thinks he looks like Walter White. I think he looks more like a combination of Steve Jobs and the guy from Vsauce. But that's basically his character,so, yeah.)

Sorry, I couldn't get it to not be tiny. I'll try and fix that later.

No recall. Just some vague fragments. Something to do with my cat bringing an animal into the house and me trying to catch it.

I had a fairly long nonlucid dream ready to go but it faded not long after waking up. Just checking in.

I have been inactive for several days now, Primarily because my laptop is damaged and cannot receive a WIFI signal and if I want to connect to the internet I have to move downstairs and unhook the eathernet cable from my dads' computer. (That or undertake the difficult task of posting via my phone or tablet.)
But while I have been in this inconvenient situation I realized something. I skip on many dreams or portions of dreams because they are awkward or contain information that I would rather remain private, so I have decided that even when I get my laptop fixed, I will not continue to upload daily posts. I'm sick of beating around the bush whenever there is personal stuff in one of my dreams. I will only post DJ entries for dreams that don't contain any personal content, (Literally, every dream in the past four days has been personal) and I have opened a new dream journal in a folder on my desktop.

Fragment: City Map

Somebody was showing me a map of a city built on a couple of islands. They were in fact showing me two different versions that were a couple decades apart and showing me how the city had grown over the years.

Late For Class,Forgotten PowerPoint,In my Underwear

You know, I've gotten so attuned to the "typical" dreams of being late for class, forgetting homework, and being in those sorts of embarrassing situations, that I was legitimately surprised that I didn't get lucid here.

I was running to get to my social studies class, and the bell rang. It was just down the hall, and the teacher was standing outside the class, he just sort of gave me a scolding look and went into the classroom. For some reason, my walk was real clumsy, and I sort of staggered down the hallway to the classroom.
When I got into the classroom, I noticed that I was hot. I had a jacket on over a hoodie and a t-shirt. I also had on two pairs of pants. I took off both the hoodie and the jacket. I then tried to take off one of the pairs of pants, but accidentally took off both and was in my underwear.
The teacher facepalmed appropriately and everyone in the class was laughing at me.
All of the lights were off and the projector was on (one of those digital projectors that can project a computer screen.) The teacher asked me if I had my PowerPoint ready.
"What PowerPoint?! I don't know what your talking about."
And he tells me that before break he assigned us a big project that we have to make a PowerPoint. He says I can turn it in tomorrow but if I don't I get no points in the gradebook.
The dream ended with me putting my head down onto my desk thinking about how the heck I am supposed to do this project in one night.

Lucid Dream #70: Good Practice

This was an overall good lucid dream. I liked that it felt more stable than some of my previous lucid dreams.

I feel like I just sort of get "plopped" into my school's gymnasium, and my mind was sort of blank. This was similar to the first time I was lucid dreaming, as I got to see the dream begin. So this might have been as I was entering REM sleep.
The gym was ultimately empty, and it actually seemed different than my schools gymnasium, but it sort of had the feel of my school. I stabilized the dream by rubbing my hands together and decided to try out some dream control.
And let me just say that this dream felt way more vivid and stable than my last few lucid dreams.
I had no real plans, so I just wanted to have fun. I jumped, and managed to go fifteen or twenty feet into the air. But I wanted to go higher, so I focused on the metal support beams in the roof of the gym. From there, I was able to start flying in a very slow controlled way and began soaring around the gym.
A bunch of other dream characters began filtering in, but none of them familiar. There was this one boy who was also able to jump relativily high, but not fly as I was. But he kept on jumping up in-front of me, and I would hit him. It almost seemed like he was doing this on purpose. Each time I hit him, I would sort of have to hold him and lower him back to the ground slowly. I apologized and let him continue. But this was getting annoying. We eventually decided to each stick to our own sides of the gym for our activities.
I eventually stopped flying and grabbed onto one of the metal support beams. There was enough room for me to stand on a horizontal beam and hold onto a vertical beam with one of my hands. Viewing the gymnasium from the roof was a rather odd experience.
There was this floating platform that came into the gym with this girl who was trying to look all attractive for me. But for whatever reason I thought to myself that I didn't want to try sexy things with dream characters right now.
I opened a telepathic communication with her and told her that perhaps in a future lucid dream she could visit me again. But for now, no.
After that, I took off flying again, did one more circle around the gymnasium. As I started to lose the dream, I was taken into a third person view of myself flying. The view was from behind and above me, and I was flying forward, kindof like superman. But I had a long black cape and hood on, and had no way of getting a look at my dreaming self.

Side note: I've been trying to figure out what my "dream self" looks like for some artwork I've been planning on doing. Black cloak and hood is a start.

Okay, another ATLA-esque dream. This time I was a firebender, and rather than having some plot, I was simply going between my bedroom (more space) and my bathroom (wall mirror) practicing my powers.
After a few minutes, I figured out I could use electricity as well. After that, I got really obsessed with perfecting this one move. I can't remember what it was called, I think it was the "thunder kick", but what I would do was essentially do a kick while spinning 360 degrees around me, and the electricity would whip off my foot and hit all of the opponents around me.
I wasn't able to perfect the move, but I was able to make enough progress that I was satisfied with myself.

I had some dream about living in some city called "Green City". (Green City is the name of a fictional city from one of my comics.)
The city however had two really different architectural styles. One side of the city had red brick buildings that looked to be tall and square with small windows. They were almost like castles and fortresses. Some had smoke stacks and brick arches going over the streets.
The other side of the city had these sort of futuristic buildings with angled rooftops and glass facades. For most of the dream, I was more to the brick building side of the city, so I never really got a good look at this side save for seeing the towers off in the distance. I could tell that that was the wealthiest part of the city.
A few other notes about the city. (I remember alot of details.) For one, I was looking at the sun on the horizon, so I was either looking east or west. (It was west because as the dream carried on it got darker. West was also the direction of the futuristic district. The city was surrounded on all sides but the north by mountains covered in forest. The north side had sort of a bay.
Since the city's name was "Green City" and based off my comic, I was thinking about my comic, and in a way I was either mildly lucid or executing some sort of non-lucid dream control. I was thinking about this plot where a meteor hits the center of town. There was this big crater in one of the city blocks and bunch of buildings had been knocked over.
After a few minutes, I got bored of the plot idea, and realized that it didn't really fit in with my comics all too well. So I executed my nonlucid dream control and patched the crater in the center of town.
I walked about two blocks west, and on my left was this industrial compound. It looked like an oil refinery, but was very small. (Perhaps only about a hundred feet on edge.) The entire lot was surrounded by a chain-link fence, but a section had been bent over and I was able to walk in.
I started thinking I heard an animal, and began looking around. I climbed a metal ladder onto a catwalk about 15 feet above the ground. I was still following the animal sound when I opened a valve on a metal pipe , about a foot wide. A trapdoor on the side of the pipe opened and i reached inside.
I pulled out a cat. He/she was very skinny, and I could see its ribs through its fur. It had sort of tiger markings, with stripes and was brown and black. It had notches in its ears where it had been clawed, and was covered in grey dust that I assumed was ashes.
I somehow was immediately at home with the cat. When my mom saw the cat, she couldn't believe her eyes. She told me the cat's name was "Shipping Crate" (that's a stupid name) and was her own cat when she was a little girl. She went on to tell me that she had lost him/her in that same oil refinery 25 years ago. (I don't think cats can even live that long.)
I watched as Shipping Crate began to interact with the other cats in my house. (We have three cats.) He/She didn't seem interested in picking fights or anything. My mom went on saying she was going to get him/her some food.

Side notes: These dreams were only strange to me because of how my dreams have gotten so chaotic and non-vivid as of late, and these dreams seemed to be slightly more vivid and congruent that anything I've dreamt in months. The firebending dream was particularly vivid. I'm taking this as a sign that hopefully I will continue to get better, and hopefully I can begin to lucid again. (I almost had a lucid last night, there's a good sign.)

Recalled a lot of frags last night.

I was at the grocery store with my mom. We were buying food for some event at my taekwondo studio. I recommended that we buy 20 packages of spaghetti. (A lot) But she said that would be too much. I had to remind her about the children class at the studio that has like 50 students.

I was outside the grocery store (same dream probably, but I can't remember how I got out here.) Still with my mom, and we were discussing how we were going to carry the groceries home. Apparently we didn't have a car. Another detail I recall was the sky was very weird, it looked like the sun was rising and setting at the same time.

I was actually at my taekwondo studio and the master was having us do this weird new thing with our kicks that was supposed to help us stretch out. When I started doing it, I was pretty bad, but I looked even worse because I was too far into the corner of the studio and didn't have requited room to move around.
After we were done doing 15 of the kicks (all of us) even though mine were pretty sloppy, he dismissed class and let us go.

I was in my math class. We were getting our tests back, and they were pass/fail. I looked at my test and (I kid you not) the number 99.99% was written on the top. Apparently I had dropped a negative sign somewhere on the test. I looked through it and found the circled problem. And when I looked at it, there WAS a negative sign next to the number, be it small and difficult to see.
A called my teacher to show her that she had graded it wrong, but she said that I had written the negative sign too high up, and she couldn't count it.
I started looking through my backpack for a pencil to change the answer. As I did, the classroom morphed into the backstage of a play setting, with people in costumes going on/off stage and people moving props and stuff. But I was still focused on finding a pencil. I never did find one but what I found was much more interesting.
I found a number of drawings, many of them of dream related things. One of them was of two of "me" one of them looked like me from real life. The other of myself when I see myself in dreams. Another was of Manei, my own dream guide sitting in a meditative position.
I actually became mildly lucid after seeing that drawing.
The third and final drawing that I remember seeing was of... I never told anyone about my recurring "Symbol" dream, but that will be discussed later.

Or maybe I'll completely forget to talk about the symbol dream.

And that brings me to the title of this entry. I have had really bad recall and haven't had a lucid dream in at-least two months. But last night I had recall for the second night in a row. It seems like good launchpad to start breaking down these mental barriers.
And that's because I think I finally figured out why lucid dreaming got so difficult. It's all in my head. It only got more difficult because I thought it was going to get more difficult, and It can get easier, too. I know how easy some of my lucid dreams came, and it's not a difficult concept to grasp. So I am starting a project called "breaking mental barriers" to try and reset myself to the mindset that lucid dreaming is easy. This next week, I'm going to act like a newbie lucid dreamer, and go back to the basics of DILD and the likes, with hopes that I can start lucid dreaming again.

In waking life, everything has been pretty crappy. My father just had a surgery to have a bone spur or some such nonsense taken out, and has been causing a lot of problems for the rest of our family. He blew his stack three times yesterday, twice at me and once at my mom. So... Lot of stress dragging down my already pretty crappy recall.


10/27/2013: Nonlucid Waterbending
I can remember the night before last was an interesting dream. I can't remember the exact order of events, but I believe it started out with me at the school cafeteria. I was sitting, chatting with some acquaintances when I noticed I was quite thirsty.
I went up to the school lunch counter and purchased a bottle of some sort of fruit punch. I opened the bottle and chugged it down before I could even get back to my table. But I was still really thirsty, and was thinking about turning around and buying more. Also, the fruit punch was very sweet. (I have noticed that dream-food is very good)
But some dream character approached me and filled up the bottle with some magical power. It basically caused more fruit punch to bubble up out of the bottom and fill the bottle again. The dream character then told me to drink more slowly if I wanted to have the "full effect".
I obeyed and went back to my table. I started to drink the punch in little sips, but it was hard to show restraint when I was so thirsty.

The dream kindof jump-cut to my bedroom. I can remember it being dark. And one of the interesting things was that I reality checked and figured that I actually was in my room. (STOOPID)
So anyways, I was experimenting with some kind of power that was in fact very similar to the waterbending from TLA series. But it seemed very weak, and I could only control a tiny string of water, about half a inch around and maybe a foot long. I tried to control bigger bodies of water, but to no avail.
I also know that this was connected to the first portion of the dream. The fruit punch I drank may have been some kind of potion to give me the powers, or maybe it was the blurry dream character that had something to do with it.
I manipulated the water for quite awhile, trying to move it faster and move more of it, but my ability didn't seem to be improving much. I decided that (since I had been playing with this ability, my whole room was wet.) I decided to pick up all of the water using my powers and move it back to a large cup on my desk.
I began doing so, cleaning up all of the spills and such one at a time. I don't believe I finished before I woke up.

10/28/2013: Chocolate Crazy!
I was at school again, and there was some kind of fundraiser or bake sale or... I don't know for sure, but the point was, there was this stand that was giving out free chocolate chip cookies and hot chocolate to all of the students.
I went up to their stand and took a cookie and a small cup of cocoa. Also, these were very large cookies, maybe six inches across. They were delicious. I got about two thirds done with the one I had, and asked if I could take another one. One of the boys running the stand (there were two) told me that I was allowed to take as much as I wanted so long as I finished what I had first.
I obeyed, and then took another cookie and cup of cocoa, ate and drank that too. I was about to take my third helping when the bell rang and I had to go to class. But the stand was right outside the class I had to be in, and I wanted more food, so I grabbed my third helping and went into class.
After I ate my third helping I was actually feeling a little sick. But for some reason, I was still inclined to get more food from these people, so I stepped out of the classroom and took another cookie only to notice that the center of the cookie was all chocolate chips.
The boys running the stand told me that they had plenty of chocolate chips, but were running out of dough to bake the cookies. Apparently they had a small oven with them under the stand. I woke up.

I kindof went on an informal leave the last few weeks. My recall has been crappy too. Just updating my dream journal, so that I know that this is still a priority.

No dreams recalled last night. Just checking in to keep the habit of posting.

No recall the last two nights. But I like to check in to keep in the habit of posting in my dream journal.

Fragment

Something to do with my hair changing. My hair (that is normally a brown color was now black and blonde. The black and blonde hairs mixed in sort of a spiral pattern and my hair was fairly long.

Waking side notes:

I'm on vacation right now, and the internet out here is REALLY slow. I'm not sure how this vacation is going to affect my recall. But I want to try to have a couple lucids between now and then, maybe i can finally build my dream base.

I had a hard time getting up this morning. I can't remember this dream very well but it was a lucid.

Me and my supposed guide were sitting together. We were in a small stucco house, like one you would expect to see in Egypt or the middle east. We sat at a small wooden table by a window. Out the window, there were several more stucco buildings followed by a mountain range off in the distance.
Man, I would give anything to remember what she was telling me about. I can remember it being some really profound advice about my life. I woke up after we had talked for awhile.

Edited: Learn about my dream guide by visiting my "Ramblings" entry.

I've started working on Sageous's WILD classes, and read a great wiki about dream incubation, and how it can be used with MILD or WILD to incubate a lucid dream. I'm now using that in conjunction with a mantra and RCs.

I had to chose a location that was specific to my lucid dreams. I decided to use a beach, with palm trees. Because many of my first lucid dreams involved being on a beach, and it was where I first met my dream guide. I also thought that it offered many possibilities for a lucid dream.

My actual dream from last night consisted of me and my friends swimming at some lake. It was not really a tropical or beach setting, but for my first night of attempting dream incubation, it was close enough.
A bunch of friends from my school were there, and we were just sort of hanging around and playing in the water and stuff. It was not particularly interesting, but tonight I have the opportunity to go to bed much earlier.