Lucid Time!

I seem to, ever so slowly be getting back on my game. My recall was sour last night, but in terms of lucidity, I was right on the money.

I started to become lucid when I looked at myself in the mirror. I seemed to have the saggy, wrinkled body of an old person. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. I looked away and looked back. I looked mostly normal but had little star stickers all over my body.

I questioned if I might be dreaming and did a nose pinch RC. Yeah, I could breathe, but not very well. I decided to look around for other clues to the state of reality that I was in. I walked around the house, everything was normal, not a hair out of place. My mom was the only other one home, and she asked me if I had recently seen her car keys.

I was still tackling the puzzle of my reality. I went outside and saw a green 50's pickup truck and a very odd orange sports car in our drive. This didn't seem too weird or dreamlike. There weren't any huge planets or multiple suns, though leaves on the tree in the front yard should have been a dead giveaway. I repeated the nose pinch RC. Still confusing results. I thought that maybe I wasn't pinching hard enough. I pinched as tight as I could, and I could still breathe a little.

I made my way back inside, and looked down at myself. I was still shirtless and covered in star stickers. My mom was still looking around for her keys. There was a green truck in our drive. I finally came to and became lucid. I manifested a white tank and thought to remove all the stickers and started to head outside. My mom asked where I was going. I told her that I was dreaming, and that I had to go. She followed out the door and yelled to me that the last time that I said I was dreaming, I had left her alone. She said that she needed her car keys and a hair tie, and she seemed sort of irritated.

"Okay, Look! This is my dream. You don't seem to get that." I put my hand behind my back then held it out with a black hair tie in it. "Here's your hair tie." I put my hand behind my back and thought of car keys. I held out a key in my hand. "Here are your keys." I then put my hand behind my back a third time. "And here's a book, I heard it's a good long read that will keep you busy for awhile." I handed her a thick beige paperback novel with a blue rectangle on the cover. She seemed really happy to receive these items.

Yeesh. Dream characters can be so annoying.

I got down to business. I thought that I should perhaps find Manei and talk to her. I got some good lucidity going. Then I got the dream ending feeling. I knelt down in the grass and tried to hang on to the dream, but it didn't do me much good. I woke up.

The thing that I have come to notice more and more about my lucidity is that it is not particularly dependent on how many reality checks or mantras I've been doing lately. Heck, it doesn't even appear to be very dependent on things such as bedtime or the day's activities. (That's not to say that these things don't impact it.) This could explain why on nights that I charge in, Mantras-A-Blazin, I get nowhere. And on other nights where I don't even give a crap, I can wind up with a rather long and effective lucid.

Instead, it seems to rely to a degree on simply being in the correct mindset for lucid dreaming. I can't really put my finger on what it is, because I only have a rough idea what I am trying to explain. But I do know that it is something akin to mindfulness. In essence, I need to be mindful of my true reality, that I am laying in bed and that what is occurring is a product of thoughts.

I've also found out how goals can be a little finicky, especially when you're not working with perfect lucidity. I've got quite a list of goals, and I've been completing them all out of order. It's best to just pick one (or at the very most, two) goals to focus on per night. I've also found that visualizing completing the goal is rather pointless because it is guaranteed that they way you complete the goal in the dream is going to be vastly different from what you imagined.

The mental state that I am trying to achieve, in general can be a little bit tricky. Staying away from tv/movies/computer games seems to help with my mindfulness. Drawing or writing seems a good way to organize thoughts. Meditation seems a step in the right direction, but overdoing it can throw me off. Same goes for Mantras.

The hardest part about this is falling asleep. I can charge in hardcore and try mantra myself to sleep, but that seems fruitless. I can just throw in the towel and just allow myself to think about random stuff, and that's about as useful as it sounds. I guess I have to go back to my old tactic of the 'cut off' technique.

I am also experimenting with polished stones and crystals that have been sitting in my drawer for years. Some people might see that as a wonderful idea, and others may see it as quack new-age spirituality. I made a small crystal grid back before Christmas, and constructed it around the idea of lucid dreaming. I'd also like to try placing crystals under the pillow or bed-frame. The only way I can really know if this is crap or not is to try it out myself.

In other news, my friend S made me a new avatar picture. I will be using his. I like it.