dream fragment

Awake/explanation
Normal dream
Lucid dream

I have a slight dream fragment from the earlier in the night where I was moving around in some kind of winter tundra station filled with cameras and automated patrols. I don't know what I was doing there but I kept destroying/hacking cameras and trying to get deeper and deeper in. I think this was influenced by a recent playthrough of BioShock.

A more complete fragment from right when I woke up: An older (say, 60) white man enters into the office of a younger (say, 30) black man and they begin discussing some kind of manuscript for a book that the younger man has written. He offers it to the older guy, who sits down in a chair and begins to read, and quickly he tosses it onto the desk and seems disappointed. He says something like, "why are you wasting your talent writing something like this?" and I realize (as an outside observer) that the relationship between the two is that the older man was a mentor to the younger at some point, and he feels the younger man is selling out with this writing.

They begin having a back and forth discussion, with the older man suggesting things like that the writing is using a basic structure and that it's totally derivative, and the younger man pushes back pointing out great works that use basic structures, but he also seems like he is self-conscious about it too. At some point in the discussion there's a tipping point and he simply asks the older man to leave his office. The older man stands up sadly/angrily, and walks out.

I see him some days later wandering into a literature class at a community college. Now I'm with him, and as we enter the room there are 4 students sitting at a semi-circle table, with their professor in the middle, and they're all holding books and seem to be having quite a good time. There are three girls, one boy, and the professor is a woman. As we walk in, the older man apologizes for joining the class midway through the semester and the professor waves it off, saying that the focus in her class is more on finding your own way to connect with literature, and that you don't need to see some curriculum to pull that off.

At this point, the boy (wearing a backwards cap and a black t-shirt, he has some stubble as well) speaks up and points out that I looked like I had my reservations (I guess I did, any class I've ever taken that wasn't a strict teacher/student relationship has usually been a nightmare) and in response he simply held up a piece of paper with a watercolor spiral on it, blackish-green. I blinked, and he said, "when I first tried this I was embarrassed, but I found out that something that helps me focus on a book and think more deeply about it is to draw or paint something simple like this with one hand while I'm reading it. I don't think it's really art, it's more like a fidget toy, but sometimes I choose colors that remind me of the story."

The older man seems impressed by this and we exchange looks, then the blonde girl wearing a white top on the very right side of the table nervously smiles and says, "Hi, I'm... Serenity-- you can call me Serenity if you want-- my middle name is Hannah?" Everyone at the table laughs. "Nobody calls me Serenity," she finishes. The girl to her right (one space to our left, with shoulder length brunette hair, and a burgundy top) begins to speak too, but in the middle of her speaking I woke up, and couldn't tell you anymore for the life of me what she had started to say. She started with her name too but it's now lost to the aether.

I thought the idea of drawing repetitive art while reading was pretty good too when I was asleep, but now that I'm awake I'm not so sure, lol, in theory it sounds nice but in practice it seems like a pain in the butt and like it would just make it way harder to focus. Maybe if it was an audio-book.

Awake/explanation
Normal dream
Lucid dream

I went to bed around 11:30 PM, and forgot to set my alarms. I woke up around 3 AM from a dream and didn't voice memo it, so I only remember a sliver:

I was in a store with a friend of mine (Brooks, who shows up in a lot of dreams apparently) and we were looking around, when I spotted a rack of video-games. Curious, I stopped to thumb through them (this also happens a lot in dreams, lol, I guess in real life too in thrift stores). There were games there of various generations but no prices really lept out at me as good enough to pull the trigger on.

That's pretty much it for that fragment, then I remember lying down to WILD. I forced myself to get up and use the restroom (I was about to fall back asleep straight out) and when I got back I laid down and closed my eyes. It went very quickly, and suddenly I was startled back into waking mind by the sensation that my whole body was vibrating and there was a loud, train like sound in my ears. I knew these were just sleep vibrations, and as they passed, I laid still and listened. I kept my eyes shut and felt my heart beating fast from the start that I was given.

At this point I don't remember what happened. I think that after the noises passed, I may have actually been asleep and didn't realize it. It's also possible the noises passed, left me startled in bed, and I quickly fell asleep normally. I probably should have sat up and reality checked after the noises passed, because it may have been a totally successful WILD if I had.

At any rate, when I woke up this morning it was from another fragment:

I was in my car driving up a high-way ramp when for some reason I pulled over onto the side of the ramp and waited for a gap in cars (something made me do this but I can't remember what). Eventually, a gap came and I pulled out into the road, then pulled into the left lane because there was nobody there behind me and I figured I'd have time to get up to speed. As I did this and turned forwards, I realized another car was coming down the ramp the wrong way, and I quickly yanked my car into the right lane again. There were two guys riding on one motorcycle in-front of me, and I put on the brakes to not run into them. They put on their brakes at the same time, and as I wasn't braking hard enough, I pulled my wheel to the right to go off the ramp again. However, they pulled to the right too, and my car gently pushed their motorcycle off the embankment down the hill, while they both jumped off.

I quickly jumped out of my car and, for some reason, immediately ran down the hill to catch the motorcycle. When I got there, I picked it up and realized it wasn't much of a motorcycle at all-- it was like a little tiny motorcycle for children. I picked it up and hauled it back up the hill and set it on the pavement. The guy who was driving was the older brother of two siblings, and he apologized to me first, saying that he had slammed on the brakes because he was afraid there was a car coming, and if he had just kept going it would have been fine. I told him it was okay, I also could have just gone around them I guess, but anyway no harm done. Then he tried to start his bike and it wouldn't work.

I told him, which I knew from earlier in the dream somehow, that there was a mechanic up the ramp and across the street on the other side, as I walked with him and his brother up the ramp. I pointed it out to him, and he went inside a nearby building for some reason (I think it was a fast food joint). I started walking across the street (for some reason abandoning my car), and that's the last thing I remember before waking up.

Awake/explanation
Normal dream
Lucid dream

Gonna start giving my dreams names, because it's more interesting than "WILD Attempt 13."

But, last night I was so worn out from going out in the morning, doing a bunch of homework afterwards, and then acting in improv for a couple hours that I headed to bed about to pass out at 11 PM. I set alarms for 2, 4, and 6 AM, but I slept completely through the 2 AM alarm, woke up at 4, and just turned the 6 AM alarm off (it's already sunny outside by like 5:15 anyway, I need to get a sleeping mask).

This dream also is not well remembered because I didn't voice memo it as soon as I woke up-- I actually fell asleep again for a couple hours and am typing it from memory.

Anyway:

11:30 PM - 4:00 AM

Knocked out. Hard sleep, don't remember any dreams, lol.

~4:15 AM - 9:00 AM

I wake up, turn my alarm off, and lie in bed for about 5 minutes staring at the ceiling lost in thought and drifting. I eventually force myself to get up (I really don't want to), use the bathroom, and then lie back down and try to WILD. I effectively just fall asleep instantly.

At some point however, I'm dreaming about being in my front yard again. I just can't really remember, but I think I may have WILDed into my bed, but not caught the false awakening, and as usual began walking out of my house, but not lucid. I'm not sure, but at some point I just had the thought, "this seems like a dream."

With this realization, I reached up and plugged my nose and blew a breath of air and was, like yesterday, kinda surprised that air went through. I turned to my right and looked over the fence to see there was a huge Pidgeotto (the Pokemon) and reached into air expecting to find a Pokeball. I did indeed come up with one, and lobbed it at him. It hit him, barely, and wobbled once as I was walking up, and he instantly popped back out. I didn't have another and he began charging me, and I took off running into my field-- starting to regret my attempt a little.

I heard a familiar "Pika" noise, and turned and noticed that a Pikachu was also running up the field, and there were further Pokeballs scattered along the field, I bent and scooped some up as I was running trying to avoid the Pidgeotto, and hit the Pikachu with one, caught it, and then sent it back out yelling at it to "Thundershock, or do something, please! Quick attack!?" (lol)

I think the quick attack command was the one that worked, and we defeated the Pidgeotto, which I then threw another Pokeball at and caught, sticking it in my pocket when it became tiny again. I found myself walking down the driveway holding the Pikachu in a bucket next, and I said something to it, and it started talking back like in Detective Pikachu. I can't remember what it said either, I just remember it presented me with a bow, and two quivers of arrows (which I somehow knew had 50 a piece inside them).

I fastened a quiver to my back, ignoring the ominous words of Pikachu, which I can't remember still, and headed into the street holding my bow. I didn't really know what to do now, and I recalled the mention from DVers that you could ask your dream characters things and sometimes get surprising answers. So I looked around me and found a friendly looking blonde man walking down the street (he was wearing khaki pants and brown shoes, had a blue-ish button-up shirt, and green-blue eyes), and ran up to him, saying, "Can you tell me where I can use this bow for something?" He kind of waved his hand and acted like he was apologetically dodging the question, and I said again, "No really, any idea at all, where can I use this bow?"

He mentioned there was a place down the road, but didn't say anything further, so I looked around again and found an Indian woman (as in, actual Indian, not Native American) walking on the other side of the street the opposite direction (she had a long multi-colored dress down to her ankles and black top, and black hair, with brown eyes). I walked across the street to her now and said, "That man said something was down the street where I could use this bow, do you know what he meant?"

She more quickly answered, "There's a war camp down the road about a mile where a bunch of warriors are stationed."

I thanked her and jogged down the road (the mile went by in probably 5 seconds, so I must be a record speed jogger), and found a dirt road offshoot of the main road and headed inside. The fact that I was brandishing my bow quickly set everyone to arms, I guess thinking I meant them harm. I shouted out that I didn't, but they didn't listen and began encroaching on me en masse, probably 40 people, and I started backing away and nocked an arrow in the bow.

In retrospect, almost as soon as this fight began I was drawn into the dream and lost my lucidity. I began quickly nocking arrows and shooting people around their various shields, in the legs, neck, whatever, but never fatally (not that I wasn't trying, I just wasn't very good with the bow). I eventually dropped the bow entirely and picked up a wooden shield, which elicited a laugh from someone nearby that I had picked up a shield being worked on instead of a finished one. A couple people laughed in response and I felt more threatened.

At some point, a person came up to me and swung a short sword at me, which I bashed away with my shield. It fell out of their hand, and I threw my shield down and set to work punching them in the face through their helmet, repeatedly, until they were backed up against the wall and I punched them a couple more times, brutally. I gave them a pretty bloody nose, and they slumped to the ground, but they weren't dead either.

This display of aggression seemed to set everyone into fear, and when I turned to face the rest of them, they backed away. Soon, people were lowering their weapons and simply eyeing me warily, as if they no longer wanted to fight. Amazed that this had happened, I set out to find the chieftain of the camp and ask him how I could participate, which is why I had come here in the first place.

When I found him, there was someone already speaking to him, and I guess charged with the anger and aggression of the previous moment and now lost in the dream (and my perception of myself as a gruff warrior following those events), I just pushed him out of the way by the shoulder.

I woke up almost instantly afterwards though. I went back to sleep for a little bit without recording the dream (oops), and then

Finally a WILD success to report! WILD 12 did the trick, and was followed by a DEILD of its own! Let's get into it:

Awake/explanation
Normal dream
Semi-lucid dream
Lucid dream

12:00 AM - 3:00 AM

I fell asleep so late last night I decided to abandon my first 2 hour alarm at 1:30 AM, because I knew if I slept only 1h30m, I wouldn't have had any dreams. When my alarm woke me at 3:00 AM however (approx. 3 hours of sleep), I remembered a dream!

I was trying to go into some kind of swimming pool/resort place, but I realized my phone was losing charge and I wouldn't be able to listen to any music/books, so I decided not to stay after all. I was in my car driving home, when I crossed through the parking lot of some place called Cafe... something. I can't remember the name, but as I was looking at it, I thought-- that sounds pretty nice. I could go for some coffee. And it also was the end of my work-day and I was driving home anyway, so I pull over into the parking lot.

There was a lady in a phonebooth nearby who was arguing so loudly I could hear her screaming, but I couldn't understand what she was saying specifically. I locked my door and started to walk away from my car, and as I got about halfway there, two people came out of the store, a guy and a girl, and I suddenly remembered I left my wallet sitting in the passenger seat of my car. So I went back, unlocked the door, pulled it out, and headed in-- while still listening to phonebooth woman yelling at someone over the phone.

I go into the store and notice it's much larger than I expected, with a full first floor, and also an escalator that goes up to a second floor. I'm a little overwhelmed because I really don't know much about coffee, though I like it alright, so I just start walking around in a counterclockwise circle looking at the walls. As I pass the escalator I see a group of 4-5 children with a woman watching over them, who seem to be getting something for themselves, like decaffeinated coffee, and they're all picking various flavors and creamers while she watches. I walk past them and notice I'm in a "kids' section" of coffee, and just sort of glance over things there and keep walking.

As I'm walking near the back aisles of the store, I hear a woman say, "everything alright?" and I just ignore her for some reason, thinking she's not talking to me I guess. She says again, "Can I help you with anything?" and I turn and look at her a little startled and say, "Oh, no, I'm just enjoying looking around," with a little laugh, and then say, "all this coffee is making me almost want to buy something." She laughs too and says, "Imagine how I feel working here." I notice she's an older lady, probably in her 50s, a little chubby and wrinkly and she seems nice. I tell her, "I just was on my way home and saw the store and decided to come have a look," and she says, "Oh, you're on your way home, did you stop downtown?" I tell her no, and she says, "There's an film festival happening there, you should have went and looked around!"

Someone had mentioned this to me earlier in the dream I remember, but I can't remember when, but as I was telling her, "yeah, someone mentioned that to me earlier," I woke up.

When I woke up, I decided to do my WILD, and as usual I fell asleep without transitioning.

3:00 AM - 4:30 AM

I woke up again before my next alarm which was set at 5 AM, and I think because my alarm has been set at 4:30 I didn't comprehend this, because I got up as usual, peed, and laid back down. Here I began thinking about King Yoshi's WILD Guide which I have mentioned before. In it, he mentions that a technique for stopping dry-spells is to pretend that you are an expert at what you're doing, and very confident you'll have the lucid dream.

Taking this a step further in my groggy state, I first start saying to myself, "Oh, yes, I know exactly what I'm doing," in my head, and, "I'll definitely succeed at this WILD, I do it all the time, it's very natural to me, like breathing." I'm kinda amused by this and suddenly while adjusting myself I'm just playing along with the idea and find myself talking to a fake audience, saying, "Ladies and gentlemen, you're about to see a lucid dream performed live on stage for your entertainment-- I'll be lying here and for the next two hours you'll be utterly entertained by the world of fantasy unfolding on the screen above your heads, whereon you can see everything I can see..."

I continue running with this mind-voice, promising them that it will be fantastic, as I comfy myself, then saying, "Now, I need absolute silence from the audience as I enter into one of the most difficult parts, wherein I must fall asleep comfortably," and I chuckle at this and get comfortable on my side and begin trying to count down in my head with each breath in and out.

4:30 AM - 5 AM

Suddenly, I'm awoken by my actual alarm going off, and I roll over and shut it off and lie back down, mentally saying to my fake audience, "That was a close call, ladies and gentlemen, what you saw was almost me failing for the entire night, but fear not! The alarm has caught me and now I will roll over and begin anew, and once more I need total silence please." I laid down on my right side now, and began counting down again, and quickly, I found myself lying in my bed in the morning with the sun shining through the window and the smell of breakfast from the other room.

I sat up, thinking, darnit, I messed up again! But then I reach up and plug my nose and find that I can breathe. I'm baffled by this, because I feel 100% awake and as if this is the realest, most regular awakening ever. Everything looks normal, sounds normal, feels normal. I plug my nose and try again and can still breathe. I'm so confused I think something is wrong with my nose, I can't understand how I can breathe.

But, I think, I have to be dreaming! There's nothing else that it could mean! So I basically leap out of bed and look at my hands, which look normal, and I start rubbing them together to increase the stability of the dream. I walk through the kitchen where my dad's making breakfast, and tell him I'm going outside. He seems puzzled by this but I open the door without waiting for his response and walk down the sidewalk and into the front yard. I'm still telling myself, "I'm dreaming, I'm dreaming!" because everything is so real I'm afraid I could lose it at any time.

As I'm walking into the front yard I remember my goal of "splitting a mountain with my aura" for the lucid dream tasks of July. So, wondering how to even do that, I begin screaming at the top of my lungs trying to somehow "charge up" like in DragonBall Z or something. Nothing really happens and I feel my voice becoming raspy, and have a faint moment of hoping I'm not actually awake and screaming in my front yard at the top of my lungs, lol.

But, to quell my fears, I immediately run an acre or two into the yard as fast as possible, and I'm able to run so quickly I know that it can't be real life. I stop again, and begin yelling again, trying to do... something, and my next idea is to stomp on the ground so hard it sends my aura out and splits the mountains. So I stomp on the ground, and nothing happens. Next, I bend down and punch the ground as hard as I can, then stand up and look around. Suddenly, I notice something falling and look up, only to see the moon has turned dull grey and is falling through the atmosphere breaking into pieces and falling to Earth, lol. So, I think, I can destroy the moon-- surely I can destroy a mountain. (Also I don't know why the moon was directly overhead during the day, don't ask questions.)

Again I punch the ground as hard as I can, then look up once more, and in the distance I see a mountain breaking into pieces and crumbling into dust, and I feel self-satisfied that I achieved my goal. When I woke up I feared I had failed, thinking the goal was to "split the mountain," but it turns out the goal was simply to "break a mountain," so I think I passed after all!

Content with this, I remember I had wanted to explore the mountain after it split. It kind of just crumpled into dust, but I figured it still might be worth seeing what was there. So I head over that way and find some small lumps of tiny mountain still standing next to a house. What's more, they seem to be lightly glowing, so I begin kicking at them and trying to see what's underneath. Eventually I take my hands and slash the air in their direction, as if cutting X's into them, and soon one begins to erupt, as if it were a tiny volcano. Without thinking I reach out with my hand and catch a piece of lava, and find out it is unbearably hot and drop it on the ground (not sure what I was expecting). I pull my hood up over my head (suddenly wearing a hoodie I guess) and pick up a piece of rock that has some lava sitting on it, and throw it at the nearby house, just to see if I can catch it on fire (I guess I'm kind of destructive, huh?).

It doesn't, so I head over to the house; I somehow teleport inside the house and don't know how. This confuses me and makes me worry I'm losing control, so I begin rubbing my hands together again to reassert control and stability in the dream, and then I decide to exit the house by holding onto a banister and kicking my way through a window. I do so and slide out onto the ground awkwardly, but get out nonetheless, lol.

I walk away from the houses and notice that I'm on a hill, overlooking a golf-course, and there's another hill above me-- and people are hitting golf-balls off the hill into the course as if it's a driving range. I head up on the hill and at this time, a friend of mine, Brooks, comes and begins talking but I don't listen well, and soon after a girl he used to date comes up and begins complaining that someone has broken the window out of her house. She questions him, and then me, and remembering that I don't have to stay here for this and have better things to do, I smile at her and then turn and jump off the hill and begin gliding down into the golf course with my arms out like wings.

However, I'm not satisfied to glide, and think about how I always have trouble truly flying. I remember how on the forums here at Dreamviews, someone said that the key to dream control was to simply know that it would work. As a symbolic gesture, I simply drop my arms by my side and begin saying to myself, "I don't need to worry, I'll simply lift into the air and float. This is my mind; I control everything here."

Surely enough, I begin rising into the air, fairly rapidly, up above the trees, until suddenly I see a cliff overhang I hadn't noticed before. I float along underneath it and land on a small platform and notice there is a nametag on it, and a ragtag house. The nametag says "William" something or other, and I turn around to see a little anthropomorphic mole (standing on his hind legs) looking up at me. When turning around, I accidentally bump him and he falls off the platform, like 10 stories, and hits the ground. I look down after him trying to ascertain that he's okay, and when I see him get up and brush himself off I decide he is.

I start walking into his little house (uninvited, lol) and soon encounter another little mole person who is pointing a shovel at me warily, and I tell him, "Sorry, sorry, I don't mean to intrude!" and he threatens me with the tiny shovel again, and I say, "Your friend is okay, he's coming, look!" and I point down at him coming up in a little elevator. The one pointing the shovel at me continues holding it out but looks down at him.

And suddenly, just like that, the lights go out. I have no idea what time it is, but I realize I've woken up, and I hold my eyes firmly shut and just lie there. I feel like I'm struggling to fall asleep again. Eventually, I open my eyes and I'm in my room, but now it's dark. Once more I think, "Darn, the DEILD attempt didn't work," and start to get up, thinking it's the middle of the night still. Then I stop, and plug my nose again as I'm getting out of bed. And I find I can breathe! Once again I'm baffled by how real the false awakening feels, and how quickly I dismissed it as being real life, and am glad I did another reality check before taking it for granted. I stand up and go over to my door in the dark, and think, "When I open this door, I'll be overlooking the rings of Saturn," which is the first thing that comes to mind. I open the door, and instead I'm looking at my hallway, and my dog is at my feet wagging her tail. I close the door in her face (lol), and think, "When I open this door, I'll be somewhere fantastic!" and I open the door again. Once again, I'm in the hallway and my dog is at my feet wagging her tail.

I say, "alright, fine," and walk through the door with my dog following me. It's now light as I exit the hallway, and my dad is in the kitchen making breakfast, and I say, "Good lord, how long have you been making breakfast?" and he says, "About an hour," (LOL) and I walk past him and go out the door into the yard again. This time I stop and bend down to pet my dog, and I notice her eyes are shut and her face is even more greyed than in real life, and I sympathetically say, "Oh no, you're getting all old girl!" and as I say it I realize I've made a mistake. She starts bending down and coughing up phlegm and stuff and I think, "Oh no, I set the expectation that my dog is old and sickly and now she's gonna die in front of me," so I start backing away from her and saying, "No, just kidding, you're young and spritely! You're even younger than real life! I've never seen you so energetic!" but I'm also backing away from her because I don't want to get distracted with this and want to go do more lucid dreaming stuff.

As I'm heading into the driveway, I look back and see my dog is indeed young and healthy again like when she was a puppy, and she comes bounding down after me into the driveway. I start jumping in the air repeatedly, thinking to fly again, and then I stop and think, "Oh yeah, there was that other dream task of milking something!"

No sooner did I think this than I suddenly found myself trapped in some strange, half-awake state, unable to move. It was like one of my eyes was seeing my bed in real life, and the other eye was seeing the dream, and the dream was suddenly "locked up." I was just stuck there floating in space, and I closed my real life eye (this was purely an illusion/dream, not reality I think) and still I was stuck in the dream, but now I was back in the mole house sitting on a sofa, unable to move. There was a man there talking to me about lucid dreaming in theory, and I told him, "Actually, I'm lucid dreaming right now, I just can't move!"

He went bug-eyed at this and then began scoffing at the idea, and I said, "No, no! I really am, I'm just stuck!" and while ignoring his scoffing I somehow accidentally found myself awake for real.

I did another reality check JUST TO BE SURE, and then laid down again in my bed and patted myself on the back. Finally, at least one decent LD after a week of work!

Edit: listening to my audio logs I also discovered I reported a dream fragment I had forgotten, but I don't know when it happened:

I had a dream I was playing Runescape (lol) and came across these two guys swarming around this emerald lying on the ground as if they were protecting it. I walked up to them and watched them for a bit and then just ran up and took it off the ground. They both ran after me telling me they were trying to protect it and I needed to drop it, and I just said, "No, that's okay," and logged out and changed to another world (lol). Once I got there I used a spell to go home and then walked away still holding the emerald, but I accidentally wandered into a dangerous area and got the crap kicked out of me and died, dropping all my stuff.

Panicking a little, I ran back there again and picked it all back up and tried to run back to the home town, but again got killed and dropped everything again, but a little closer back to home.

But I woke up shortly thereafter.

Again I won't describe my WILD process other than what has changed. As before I set three alarms, but as you'll see below only two of them were used.

I attempted both the "counting down (and up)" WILD anchor, as well as once trying the "FILD." All three were failures, though I obviously don't blame the anchors. I'm not sure what is going wrong, I just seem to be unable to keep my consciousness, there hits a point and suddenly I'm out like a light-switch.

That being said, I had a few strange experiences last night that I can't remember the timing of.

-----

Awake/explanation
Normal dream
Semi-lucid dream
Lucid dream

I went to be at 11:30 AM.

11:30 PM - 1:30 AM

I woke up and found I remembered no dreams (as yesterday, it seems 2 hours is not enough for me to get REM cycles going. I'll try 2h30m next time. I got up, peed, went back to bed and attempted a WILD. Almost no sooner than I laid down and closed my eyes, I realized it was 3:00 AM!

1:30 AM - 3 AM

I still don't know what happened here. Part of me thinks I may have succeeded in my WILD and had a false awakening, but I only remember turning off my 3 AM alarm once, so it seems like it had to be real. I should have reality checked, or maybe I did, I can't even remember. I just remember I laid my head down, closed my eyes, and without any dreams or even a feeling of passage of time, it was 3 AM and I was awake again!

I learned for one: I need to start doing reality checks the SECOND I wake up. I keep telling myself to do this and forgetting, sometimes remembering as I'm headed towards the bathroom or etc. I need to do them as soon as I wake up. I also think I will get in the habit of recording a voice memo just saying, "I woke up at 3 AM, and don't remember any dreams" so I can be sure in the morning if I had false awakenings. Anyway...

When I did this WILD, I can't remember if it was during the WILD or during a dream, but I have this weird memory of seeing a very white woman's face and upper body (I don't mean caucasian, I mean whited out, like a piece of paper, and featureless), against a light blue background. And just really trying to get my way inside what felt like a dream. It was as if I was looking through a telescope, and if I tried, I could get closer, but then I would slide back out again and the black circle around the image would close.

3 AM - 4:30 AM

I dreamed I was at my middle-school, but it was actually a college. Somehow, just like last night, I managed to lose my shoes at school, and ended up wearing a pair of white sneakers-- I was looking down at them walking through the hallways. I ended up walking outside onto the sidewalk where our busses used to line up (I've had many a dream about this particular sidewalk and missing the bus for some reason, then having to walk home-- perhaps a dream trigger).

As I walked outside I noticed there was a hubbub regarding a giant trailer carrying multiple huge missiles sitting in the parking lot. Almost before anyone could do anything about it, the school principal (who was actually my high-school principal) jumped in a nearby bus, hooked it to the trailer, and backed it out of the parking lot into the adjoining parking lot-- so quickly that he ran the truck up onto the curb (causing us all to go, "ohhhh!"). The trailer smacked against the front of the bus after the collision, and put a huge dent in the back of it. Nobody seemed to know why this thing was here, but the principal took it upon himself to get the dent out. He took a giant wet sponge on a stick and just started beating the crap out of the back of the dent, shouting, "no problem! It'll be out in no time!" and similar.

Now here was a time skip. I may have woken up temporarily, as evidenced by this next bit:

I was now at my home, which was an incredibly ratty rusty shack built up on a hill in the middle of what looked like a literal dump. There was a ravine running near our house which essentially served as our driveway. For some reason, I was lying in my ratty bed in my room that was missing two walls (simply looking out onto the night-sky and this dump), and next to me was this giant missile launcher from school. I had somehow ended up with this thing in my house, though it wasn't on a trailer anymore, it was simple a computer console attached to a couple missiles.

Now for some reason, I thought it seemed like an incredibly grand idea to set the timer on these missiles, which made a beeping noise, as my anchor in attempting to do a WILD... in my dream. So I set the beeping timer, and I realized I set it wrongly. I wanted it to go longer, because I obviously didn't want the missile to launch, I just wanted the timer to run so I could listen to it as an anchor. So I tried to clear the timer. And clear it I did, because the missile immediately launched into the air, changed direction and shot off. I quickly looked at the console to try and see where it was headed and noticed the coordinates were a few miles south-east from here. I got up from the bed and looked out over the demolished wall of my room and saw the missile land with tremendous impact, creating a giant mushroom cloud, and causing the entire city nearby to light up. All the nearby animals were barking and car alarms were going off in the middle of the night.

Panicking, I ran back to the missile console unsure of what to do. How did I even end up with this? I couldn't remember. Would I be put in jail for accidentally launching a missile? I'm an adult, not a child, so I'd certainly be tried as a competent adult who did it on purpose. Why else would I steal the missiles? Then I noticed the timer was ticking again. Once more I panicked and tried to turn it off, and once more I immediately launched the missile, which shot off and landed in the same place with a similar explosion. I imagined everything within a mile of it was dead already, so it didn't really matter, but now I worried that somehow they could trace the origin of the missile.

I ran into the other room and grabbed my keys, and snuck through the room where my dad was sleeping on the floor. I felt bad leaving him and like it was my duty to stay with him, but I knew I didn't have time to wake him up or explain. I figured he would be fine since it seemed easily provable I was the one who launched the missiles accidentally. I snuck through the room, and went outside-- but as I looked downhill to where my car was, I saw flashing red and blue lights. They were already rolling up and surrounding where I could exit, so I instantly turned to my left to try to run away, and saw a fence about 5 feet high.

I ran at it and dove over it (and under the barbed wire about a foot off the top), and as I hit the ground on the other side I woke up in my bed, relieved I didn't have to really run from the cops!

I woke up before my alarm set at 5:00! At this point I had quite a bit of dream to record, thought back through it, and instead of describing it all (which has taken upwards of 5 minutes some nights), tried to hit the key points in my voice memo and hoped I could reconstruct it in the morning. I also went ahead and disabled my 5 AM alarm. I tried another WILD, which I felt pretty much like I'd succeed at, but once again, nothing.

4:30 AM - 9 AM

I could only recall a dream fragment at this point. Before I went to bed last night I had been reading "King Henry VI - Part 1" in my Shakespeare's Complete Works book. Lately in my spare-time I've been watching "Taxi" (an 80's sitcom) on Hulu, as well. Both of those things are relevant, because:

At some point before I woke up, I had a dream I was watching "King Henry VI - Part 1" being acted on Youtube, and the recording was from the '80s. But much to my delight, I realized as I turned it on and watched it that it was King Henry VI as acted by several of the main actors from the sitcom, "Taxi." The scene opened in some kind of cellar and inside were Judd Hirsch, Jeff Conaway, Tony Danza, and Marilu Henner acting as the various Dukes and Earls during the scene where Tony and Judd were acting as the Duke of Somerset and Richard Plantagenet arguing and getting people on their sides by having them pluck and wear white/red roses.

Afterwards, they all headed upstairs to the courtroom scene where Richard (Judd in this case) tries to have his family status as Duke of York restored, and who else to play the young King Henry VI, than Danny DeVito! When the camera scrolled up to him he was picking his nose sitting on the throne and the audience gave a huge laugh. They came up and began appealing to him in Shakespearean words, with the correct lines, (you know, 'thee,' 'thou' etc). Danny DeVito simply looked down after a few lines and said, "What do you bums want? Speak regular!" which elicited another huge laugh.

Unfortunately I can't remember almost anything else from this dream, which is a shame because it actually made me laugh when I woke up too. If only this were a real thing I could watch, lol.

Afterwards I got up and went about my morning routine!

Today I won't bother to describe the specifics of my WILD attempts so much, not much has changed other than this:

I read KingYoshi's WILD technique last night and took away a couple things (I'm still following Sageous' class, I just wanted to see what other information was out there that I could mix with his to fit my situation):

• It reinforced my idea that maybe I should just freely move as a way of helping myself fall asleep more quickly, which seems to work for him. I don't know if it's "right," but it seems right for my situation. However I have to find a way to strike a balance between moving whenever I feel like it, and moving when if I waited a little longer I would have made it.
• I can make multiple WILD attempts in a night. This hadn't really occurred to me, so last night I set 3 alarms, woke up, did very quick WBTBs (went and peed if I needed to, went back to bed).
• If I make multiple WILD attempts, not only my chance of success goes up per day, but also I have plenty of chances to improve my dream recall.

-----

Awake/explanation
Normal dream
Semi-lucid dream
Lucid dream

11:30 PM - 1:30 AM

I woke up from my first WBTB. Here I struggled to think but couldn't recall any dreams that had happened. After just 2 hours this wasn't surprising, but I attempted a WILD anyway, and fell asleep unaware.

1:30 AM - 3:30 AM

I woke up for my second WBTB and had some dream which I traced backwards and then recorded in a voice memo!

I was in some kind of store and ran into my friend from high-school (I need to start doing reality checks whenever I see or think about a friend from high-school because they show up a lot and I don't see them much irl...) whom we'll just call Sean. Sean was hooking up and demonstrating some Call of Duty in VR, as if the store were his house. I watched what he was doing, and we may have talked I can't remember (this is at the edges of what I could recall from this dream).

After watching him, I wanted to play it too. So almost out of nowhere I pulled on a VR headset and started up the game and began playing some kind of tutorial section. However, not long into playing the game, another friend of mine (we'll call him Brooks, and we do still talk)'s mother showed up and said something about the game, so I paused it, and she made a comment about how the game had frozen up. I told her I had just paused it, and she just laughed or something and walked away.

After the distraction I decided not to play anymore and took the headset off. At this point, I turned my attention towards this connected room in the store which was a bathroom and a had a shower in it. I had this shower-head attachment that my mother wanted me to install for her, so I attempted to do so. The instructions were kind of complicated and had like a 6-step process for after it was installed, about using it 2-3 times in various conditions, then taking apart and running it again, and etc.

I installed it and then ran it a couple times, and Brooks' dad now (who is a handyman type) shows up and offers to help, kind of criticizing my work jokingly. I hand him the thing and he takes it apart, and he's reading the instructions and starts to tell me to do something, when someone walks up and starts talking to him about some kind of event or something (I couldn't remember what he had been saying, I was looking at the shower head thing, and noticing how it was put together inside).

While this was happening, I heard piano music coming from outside the room behind me. I thought this was Sean in the other room now playing piano at first. But it turned out to be my alarm going off and its piano music, and I eventually woke up!

3:30 AM - 5:30 AM

I was at a convention, standing on the edge of a tall roof of a building inside a ginormous warehouse (HUGE, the size of a city) and I was trying to get art commissioned for a friend, when I ran into ANOTHER person from high-school, Zach (man, they might seriously be a dream trigger after all) who agreed to do an art commission for me. However, he told me he wanted to do it of me, and he wanted to paint me as Spider-Man. Amused, I just said, "yeah okay, sure," and he told me there was something he wanted to show me and asked me to follow him. He suddenly stepped off the building and flew away over a couple more buildings, so I jumped off the building too and followed him-- suddenly, I had Spider-Man's powers, and I was using web to stick to buildings and pull myself up and over. As I went overtop one of the first buildings, I made a parachute out of web like Spider-Man does in the comics and hovered down to ground level where some construction was happening.

Down there, they were working on this enormously tall tower which consisted of just one extremely skinny midsection going up hundreds of stories in the air, culminating in a big wide platform-- basically the most structurally unsound thing possible. So I somehow get up on the tower, I don't know how, and as we're standing on top, the thing predictably starts wobbling. The floor is shimmying side to side, and suddenly, it collapses and the 10 or so people standing on it go down the 100 floors with it, but I remain just hovering in the air for some reason, I guess because I saw myself as a superhero at this point (though not that much of a hero because I didn't even try to help them, lol, though they were all somehow fine anyway).

So there's all this stuff still stuck to the ceilings and walls where they were working on the tower (it was near the roof of the warehouse), so I glide down and ask them if they want any of that stuff. They name a few things so I fly back up with my fists in-front of me like Super-Man, and bring down some bags and drop them off, and then I'm getting ready to leave the convention-- I exit the warehouse, jump in my car, and am driving home through a path I'm not sure I really recognize (in-fact, I'm feeling pretty lost).

For some reason, I suddenly got pulled over by some cops. Also somehow, I realized I was driving from the backseat of the vehicle. At this point, my real life alarm started going off, but in the dream I thought that the alarm was coming from my phone (which it was, in real life lol), and afraid of pissing off the police officer because I had music playing, I took the phone and stuffed it in the glovebox (... on the back of the right back-seat) to try and quiet it down.

The cops then came up to the back door, two of them, a younger and older guy, and I put my hands up on the back-seat to show where my hands were so they didn't see me messing around in my glovebox. The cop started questioning me, and he took my license. Beside me in the cup-holder I had an almost empty Powerade, and he asked if it was alcohol. I said it wasn't, and he reached in the car and took it out and sniffed it and said, "Yeah, it smells like alcohol." I protested that I didn't even drink, but he handed it to his partner who took it and told me they'd be testing it.

Then for some reason he asked for my keys, and I was pretty sure that wasn't allowed of him to ask but I just took them out and handed them to him anyway, and then next thing I knew he was asking for my shoes (lol), so I took those off and handed them to him also. Now him and his partner got in the car with me, still in the backseat, but driving from the front-seat and his older partner riding shotgun. Somehow, suddenly, I was scooted over to the right seat and now also some blonde woman was riding in the back-left seat.

At this point I suspect this is not a normal police stop (lol), and as we're driving along his older partner pulls out his gun and starts waving it in the air and I realize he's extremely drunk. They continue driving to my house, weirdly, and eventually his partner starts getting really wild and starts turning around in his seat pointing the gun at me and yelling. I just put my hands up and try not to agitate him, hoping they'll let me out soon.

He then grabs my left hand and puts the muzzle of the gun up against at point blank, and at this point the woman is panicking too. He tells me he's gonna "shoot my hand off," and I don't know what to do, and he starts counting down, so I just lie there thinking "well this is about to really hurt," and wait. Then he counts down to 0 and pulls the trigger and the gun clicks because it was empty, and he laughs but keeps holding my hand.

Next he puts the gun barrel in-between my fingers and starts shooting real bullets out the back-window of my car through my fingers for some reason, not hitting me, just between the gaps. At this point his partner slams on the brakes and pulls him out of the car, as if this was too far. I try to get up and notice his partner is now pointing HIS gun at me from outside and he's dragging this guy away. As they both walk away, carrying my keys still (!), there's a time skip and I realize I'm on a bus.

The bus stops at my house and I get out, and start walking up the driveway with no shoes on lol. I also now had this giant convention bag, which I didn't know where it came from but I was just carrying it with me. As I was walking, my brother drove into the driveway in his car, rolled down the window and said something to me, and as that was happening I woke up!

When I woke up I realized my alarm had been going off for 10 minutes lol. I guess I need to make it a little louder.

5:30 AM - 9:00 AM or something

I tried one more WILD, was unsuccessful, and this time didn't even remember my dreams really, I thought about it a bit and just eventually got up and ate breakfast. I think I woke up out of REM or something because I couldn't remember anything at all.

First, the WILD (wake induced lucid dream) attempt (because it happened first):

As per usual, went to bed and set an alarm for 4-5 hours out. This time I went to bed around 11 PM and set an alarm for about 4 AM. I probably fell asleep around 11:20.

I woke up, peed, sat on the edge of my bed for my 15 minutes, and thought about my upcoming dream. I decided I would try to go into the spaceship I saw in the hypnagogic imagery (HI) from the night before that woke me out of my WILD attempt. I settled also on a simple mantra: "Enter," meant to mirror the immediacy of Sageous' "dive," while communicating the intention of entering the dream.

I laid down on my back in the bed and began with my mantra. I tried shifting my attention inside my head more than I have the previous days and intentionally shutting out the bodily noise (both the feeling of my body lying there and the small sounds in the room). I probably only laid there about 20 minutes this time and encountered some of the usual problems (swallowing, an itch at one point). I found myself becoming a little frustrated and reflecting on something I had typed yesterday: I have a hard time falling asleep on my back, and it feels as though I could lie there for hours and never quite get there unless I'm very tired.

In response to the frustration and the fact that I couldn't let the thought go, as well as remembering that the WILDs I have succeeded with happened on my side in the past (although I thought, really, that lying on your back makes more sense because it's harder to fall asleep totally as I tend to do quickly), I decided to abandon the position and roll onto my side. After awhile of lying there in such a way, still awake, repeating my mantra, I felt the need to move yet again. At that point I committed to just doing the sloppiest WILD I could to see if it would meet with success, by which I mean, every time I wanted to move, I moved. Every time I wanted to swallow or scratch or whatever, I went ahead and did it and returned to my previous position.

My logic in giving over to this was that when I'm going to sleep, I tend to shift positions 3-4 times until I find the one I like and then I fall asleep rather quickly. I figured if I shifted positions several times while repeating my mantra and maintaining focus, I'd eventually find the position I liked, fall asleep within a few minutes, and manage to keep awake while doing so. Maybe. I didn't really know; I just figured it was worth a shot.

Well, when lying in each of these positions I sometimes got as far as HI happening, but then would end up shifting and moving, and therein saw the flaw: my constant moving kept setting me back in the WILD (perhaps obvious in retrospect). But I figured when I did find the correct position, I'd fall asleep so quickly it would be as though progress wasn't lost.

Ultimately, I probably moved about 3 times, eventually settled into one position, and as expected, I went out like a lamp. Unfortunately my consciousness didn't stay with me, and I had felt it fading already when I had moved into that last position so it's not surprising.

Take-aways:

• Just one main one, I need to experiment with either timing or position because something feels wrong about the 15 minutes up, and then lying on my back. I think both together are too strong of an obstacle for the WILD to culminate in me actually falling asleep, especially when I add in all the thought-work of repeating the mantra and visualizing the dream. My mind is so busy that lying in an uncomfortable position after having so much time to wake myself up pretty much just ends up with me lying there very awake and struggling to become sleepy.
• In the sake of eliminating one of the above, I'll start tonight by shortening my WBTB to as long as it takes to get up, pee, and go back to bed (i.e. 1-2 minutes), but still lying on my back. This is against Sageous' advice, but I just think I should try it because my intuition tells me that it may help.
• If shortening the WBTB does not help (I still have trouble falling asleep), I'll extend it to 15 minutes (or more), and I'll just begin the WILD on my side in the first place, and commit to not shifting positions. This is harder on my back because it's uncomfortable, but on my side I am comfortable and I suspect will fall asleep more quickly. That's why I will almost have to keep the WBTB longer in that position: otherwise I will fall asleep immediately.

Now, the dream fragment:

Awake/explanation
Normal dream
Semi-lucid dream
Lucid dream

5 AM - 8:30 AM or so:

I dreamed I was on some kind of comedy game show, and honestly I don't know how I ended up on stage. I remember being in the audience, but somehow I ended up performing/competing. One of the key elements on this stage was that there was a window which exited into a pool of water about a floor down, off the side. When people left the stage, they would dramatically be shown "diving" from this window (I guess as if it were a building window), and land safely in the deep water below.

Unrelated to this, there was also this girl who did her act in a barrel. It didn't strike me as strange at the time but in retrospect it was very strange: she was always in the barrel even when she was off stage. Which means that she couldn't get back up to the stage without assistance, and lucky for her, the stage had these air tubes she could hop her barrel into, and it would shoot her up to stage level. After I had somehow ended up down where the pool was, I at one point watched her hop her barrel into this tube and be whisked away by air pressure.

At one point, I somehow (sorry, there's skipping which is why this is a fragment, I can't remember everything) ended up back stage where these tubes connected to the stage. There was a room where there were four tubes in the floor, and two tubes which connected horizontally out to the stage. There was another girl in the room with me, and at the same time as this barrel-girl was getting off the stage by entering a tube, the other girl in the room shouted to me that they were sending up a back of bricks through the floor tubes (so they were going to potentially collide).

She and I both began yelling through the tubes not to come through, but barrel-girl, now simply sitting on a pillow for some reason, but still holding the barrel-lid above her head like a hat, was already in the tube and coming. I jumped in-front of the tube and scooped her up as she came sliding out and pulled her away from the tubes while the aforementioned sack of bricks (why were they sending a sack of bricks to the stage...?) came hurtling through the tube she was headed for, going upwards, and was sucked in by the in-take tube towards the stage (powerful air!).

Holding her in my arms (and I have to say, noticing how beautiful barrel-girl was with her wavy brown hair), I gave her a weak smile and said, "which tube am I supposed to drop you in?" and she just said, "the back left." I was already nearly standing over-top of it so with a quick nod, I simply let her go over the tube. I heard some clattering and a small scream and looked over the edge of the tube to see she had spilled from her pillow and dropped her barrel-lid and was sprawled on the floor of the tube. I called down, "are you okay?" and she just said, "yep!" and gathered her pillow and lid and took off. She sounded more embarrassed than hurt, so I minded my own business.

I'm not sure what else happened but somehow I eventually reached the next day, where I waking up on what appeared to be a school campus. I walked down the sidewalk and was greeted by one of the women on the show with me, who performed some kind of gesture with the burrito she was eating as if she were pulling it from her pocket, and laughed. I had no idea what this meant, but thought it must be a reference to something that happened on the show, so I politely laughed and said, "yeah," as though I had any idea what this woman was doing, then I walked past her and entered the door on my right.

It instantly went into a Hardee's (a fast food chain) and I began standing in line. Somehow the line got out of the way rather quickly (perhaps a time skip) and I found myself standing at the counter unsure of what to order. However, they had one biscuit which was piled comically high with various things, and I didn't see why not, so I ordered it-- it was called "Drew Crews' Biscuit". I had no idea who Drew Crews was but figured he must be someone famous. Unfortunately the cashier told me, "oh no, we don't have the stuff to make that right now, you have to order that earlier in the morning, we're almost done serving breakfast right now." So I apologized and said, "just give me a couple of bacon-egg-and-cheese biscuits then."

And then I woke up! Strangely, with "Such Great Heights" stuck in my head out of nowhere.

Awake/explanation
Normal dream
Semi-lucid dream
Lucid dream

Due to the nature of how I slept last night, by which I mean lots of waking up without bothering to voice memo (for shame), I don't remember a lot of my dreams but I do have a few snippets I can log. Maybe I'll remember more later today.

Time unknown

I dreamed that my neighbors had a daughter around my age who wanted my help with something related to her computer. I agreed to come over and help her to install something (I don't recall if it was stated what that something was...). When I showed up at their house, she greeted me at the door and then went inside, and I immediately ran into this sorta deadbeat guy that her mother used to date, sitting in a recliner watching television. He looked very exasperated to see me, sorta sighed, and I quickly explained I was here to help with something computer related.

He told me that her computer was actually her mother's computer, and that he didn't think she wanted to be woken up. I apologized, feeling like he clearly didn't want me there, and said that I would leave if he liked. He didn't say yes, but simply looked back, and around that time the daughter (whom I didn't ever learn the name of, incidentally) came around the corner and told me that her mother was okay with it. Apparently she also was ordering a pizza for all of us since I was there around dinner, and at this, the guy in the chair looked even more exasperated.

The pizza was quickly produced (I have no idea where it came from, it just showed up on the table at the suggestion of it being ordered) and I woke up while I was getting a couple pieces.

Time unknown - 8ish AM

I dreamed I was at my grandparents' house during some kind of family gathering. Most people were outside, but me and my father had come back inside and were sitting down to check out their TV. They had some sort of streaming system which wasn't tied to any specific brand, but was instead provided by their satellite, and simply hosted a recording of the episodes of each show that were new that week. I turned it on and started scrolling, and was very surprised to see "The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy," from when I was a teenager, had a new episode listed. I scrolled over and booted it up, and the show started strangely with some animals in the forest eating grass and such.

I can't remember exactly what happened, but somehow all the animals had eaten some particular berry or something that was growing in the woods, and Billy had just wandered into the forest and eaten one also. He complained that his stomach was hurting, and then immediately ripped a huge fart, which is pretty on-color for the humor in that show (lol). Immediately afterwards, the animals all began farting loudly in sequence, some in unison, with the scene cutting to various animals being surprised by their farts, scaring off attackers with their farts accidentally, etc. I thought it was mildly funny, and I looked at my dad and he looked back at me seemingly embarrassed (in real life he would surely find this side-splittingly hilarious with his childish sense of humor, but he didn't seem to like it in the dream). He suggested maybe we shouldn't watch it around my grandparents, who are known for being somewhat uptight about matters of politeness. I agreed while making a mental note to look up when the show had come back later.

The dream fragment ended however while I was looking to see what else was there: I recall my dad pointing something out to me, looking for it only to find he was misreading the name (his eyesight is not so good), and someone else coming in and telling me what he was actually looking at. I scrolled over to it and quickly woke up.

If you're here for dreams, that's it, but what I also want to log is last night's attempt at a WILD (wake-induced lucid dream):

WILD attempt:

I set my alarm for 4:30 AM, went to sleep, and ended up waking up around 3:00 AM having to pee anyway, and quickly got up and peed and decided that I would scrap the alarm and use this awakening for my attempt at a WILD (I had been sleeping around 3-and-a-half hours). I had hastily decided on a mantra the night before which I felt was unique to me, had some power when I said it somehow, and reminded me of my goal (staying awake while I fell asleep, and staying focused): "keep it tight." Which I know sounds silly; it made me chuckle when I thought of it, but the fact that it gave me a reaction is why I picked it.

I stayed up for about 15 minutes sitting on the side of my bed thinking about what I was going to do and steeling my resolve to do it. I told myself I'd succeed tonight and tried to get rid of any negativity or doubts. In retrospect, I'm not sure that sitting up for so long was good and may shorten it, because I think it woke me up too much.

After around 15 minutes I laid down at 3:20 and began my attempt. I folded my hands over my stomach, relaxed on my back, and began breathing in through my nose and out while thinking my mantra, "keep it tight." Towards the beginning I took some time to meditate on who I was also, and what divides me from the world around me, but also what parts of it relate to me as cause and effect. I quickly abandoned this though and just focused on my mantra. I'm purely guessing (I know how long everything together took but not individual parts), but I would say I laid there for about 15 minutes until I started to experience a sensation of heaviness/numbness. Part of this was that my hands being clasped over my stomach had my elbows bent, and the pinch in my elbows was causing my arms + pinky and ring finger to go completely numb, lol. I decided to ignore this and carry on, focusing on my mantra. I occasionally felt the need to swallow, and tried to not focus on it, but three or four times, it happened even though I tried to ignore it.

Around 30 minutes in I started occasionally experiencing some light hypnagogic imagery (HI) that disappeared whenever I noticed it was happening, as it generally does. None of it had any real substance but it was mostly visual. I resolved to try to ignore it and focus on my mantra. At one point I quickly saw a large, blue... thing come flying right at my face which caused me to jump slightly and had my heart racing, but I returned to lying still and repeated "keep it tight," which calmed me down, reminding me not to get worked up.

At around 45 minutes, my finger started to really hurt. They had gone completely numb, but because of the way they were sitting on-top of one another, the fingers on my right hand were starting to feel pinched and there was a dull-ache. This eventually got so bad I could no longer ignore it, and decided to move my hands, which basically ended my WILD attempt, because once I moved them down by my sides, all the blood began rushing back into them creating an insane tingling sensation and warmth that was even harder to ignore. I laid there for what I imagine was the last 15 minutes or so, repeating my mantra, but at that point was so disturbed I felt it was a lost cause in my heart of hearts.

Eventually I looked at my phone clock and saw it had been an hour, and even though I know not to do this, I decided to roll on my side to see if I would become tired more quickly. I rolled onto my right side (I normally sleep on my left) and laid there once more, repeating my mantra. I'm not sure what happened; I seem to have quickly faded in and out of sleep several times, because I had several moments where I "came back to" unsure of what had just happened-- and eventually I looked at my clock again and discovered that 25 minutes had passed!

At this point, once again, I decided I had been at this for an hour and a half (it was now almost 5 AM) so I rolled over on my left side figuring I'd continue repeating my mantra, but fully expecting to fall asleep. I faded in and out like before a couple times, and there were several times when I faded back in suddenly unable to even remember what my mantra was in the first place and having to grasp at a few before remembering. Eventually, probably after not 10 minutes of this, I fell asleep for good.

Take-aways:

• I should not claspe my hands over my belly-button to avoid the painful numbing sensation; I should let them rest by my sides.
• The mantra "keep it tight," worked fairly well but could probably be better.
• I should probably shorten my WBTB (wake back to bed) time from 15 minutes to something less. It feels like sitting up so long woke me up too much.
• It's tempting to try to look at HI, but it disappears when you try and seems to wake you up when it does.
• Rolling on your side, even your bad side, is still just a bad idea.

Awake/explanation
Normal dream
Semi-lucid dream
Lucid dream

This is a collection of 3 dreams. This is the first attempt I've made to become lucid in several years, and it was successful! But not through the method I was trying.

Sometime before 2:30 AM
I dreamed that I was an official content censor for some kind of fascist regime, but even as an editor of content was victim to extreme regulations. I worked in an open office surrounded by other workers and was encouraged not to move from my post or stop working. I remember trying to move unsuccessfully a few times but only small bits of this dream stayed with me.

2:30-4:45 AM
I dreamed that my school had a 'software hit-list' of things they wanted coded for them (I'm a CS major) and one of these was a more secure meeting method. Someone had coded this and randomly instated me as a moderator because I was a CS major, and I realized that all CS majors were given such honors for reasons unclear (we are not generally known for our people skills, lol). Anyway, I hopped on a bus, the physical representation of this new forum for students of my university. I also decided that if I was a moderator, I'd try to be a good moderator, and make sure nobody was doing anything wrong. So I scoped out the area around me.

Next to me a guy was sitting in a trench coat and sunglasses, and I tried to look past him to see what was on his other side without bothering him. There was just a window, and in the end he did see me trying to look around him and gave me a funny look, so I apologized and looked forwards again. I sorta realized in that moment that I was being stupid trying to moderate just because it was written on my name, and started behaving normally riding the bus again.

It gets a bit fuzzy here, but I recall a friend from high-school being on the bus, and lying in the floor. I woke up again later.

4:45 AM-7:30 AM
And here's the meat, the lucid dream. I woke up, used the restroom (I had drunk a glass of water so that I would wake up in the middle of the night), laid down again, meditated for a few minutes while counting my breaths. When I lost count I rolled on my side and began counting my breaths again, trying to fall asleep. And then I did fall asleep! But not lucid.

I can't remember this dream back all the way, but the first thing I remember was playing baseball with a bunch of kids. I guess I was a kid too, I'm not really sure. At one point, we were playing on an abandoned lot, and the pitcher's mound was in the middle of a partially constructed scaffolding (inconvenient), and I was pitching. Batting was a girl who I went to high-school with who was well known for throwing hissy fits when things didn't go her way (no offense to her, I'm sure she's more adult now, but we were all probably 12 or 13 in this dream...). She was indeed throwing such a hissy fit because I was pitching too fast at her. So I lobbed one slowly to let her have her way.

She immediately smacked it and sent it flying into the scaffolding I was standing in, and I picked it up and tried to turn to look to throw it to first base, but I couldn't see first base. I then turned and saw second base was also obstructed, so I turned some more and threw it to someone who was running up from near third base. Of course, when I threw it to him, he missed it, I felt silly for throwing it too hard, and he turned and ran after it. Within those precious moments, two opposing runners had run up to my scaffolding and were standing at the edge yelling at me. I turned to look at them and hear what they were saying, which was that they were complaining that 1st base was a pit, so they had run to the pitcher's mound instead, and that should count as a home-run.

I'm not sure why I was allowed to decide but I shook my head yes and agreed, and the game was over (I guess they were already ahead). Soon, everyone congregated around the pitcher's mound/scaffolding and we started discussing that playing baseball here sucked (gee whiz). I suggested, from nowhere, that nearby was a series of under-construction houses where nobody lived, that was sure to have some open air nobody was using that we could play. It occurred to me we might accidentally break some windows or something, but I secretly figured we could probably get the heck out of there without getting caught if so (sorry construction workers, I was a kid in this dream, I swear!).

So off we set into this nearby construction area, and me and one other fairly small kid who couldn't have been more than 8 ended up going into a nearby house, and walking around inside, because nobody was there to stop us. As we were walking around looking I suddenly made a joking comment that the house was so empty, it almost seemed like a dream...

And the saying of such a thing is one of my well-known triggers (anytime something seems like a dream in real life, I tend to reality check reflexively just as a habit because I have said it in dreams many times and woke up frustrated I didn't become lucid). I reached up and plugged my nose and blew air through, and found I could breathe. Ta-da! My first night back at lucid dreaming a success, I felt pretty proud of myself and thought back to posting on Dreamviews the night before. I remembered reading an article about lucid dreaming to hype myself up and them talking about how realistic your hands are, so I looked down at them.

Then I set out after my small friend who was with me, and told him I was having a lucid dream! He looked at me like there was a giant spider on my head and began fast-walking away, so I walked after him saying, "No, really, look!" and tried to summon a baseball from thin air to show him. I tried several times, but my dream control has always been a bit wonky, and I couldn't get it to happen. I tried looking away from my hands and looking back. I tried closing my eyes and thinking "BASEBALL" (lol) and opening them and looking back, and nothing. Soon me and the kid were outside of the house standing in the grass, and I still didn't have a baseball. He looked pretty skeptical, and I suddenly feared me losing my lucidity to this goal of getting a baseball, so I said, "aw nevermind," and walked away from him.

Still marveling at all the weird wrinkly detail of my palms, I walked off towards the nearby woods. As I was walking along, the whole group of children I had been playing baseball with came to where we were and began asking if I had found a place to play baseball. I told them I wasn't looking anymore, really, but they could probably play somewhere near here if they still wanted to. They set off into the woods also (for some reason) so I followed them nearby, but quickly got distracted by a humongous ravine going down hundreds of feet, and instantly was taken with doing what I always do in lucid dreams: jumping off stuff and trying to fly.

I jumped off the edge into this enormous canyon and hovered my way down with my arms out, but as I stuck my arms out I was suddenly bothered by the feeling of my sheet on my bed (lol) and the feeling that it was like a wall blocking me from sticking my arm out all the way. This bothered me and also again, worried me I was waking up, so I pulled my arms in-front of me in more of a Superman position instead. I alighted down on a giant metal tower, crawling with futuristic soldiers.

My lucidity started to degrade a little here. I was no longer doing anything I wanted but getting sucked into the current of the dream, while aware I was dreaming somewhat.

These soldiers all began shooting at me, and, aware that I was dreaming, I stood my ground to see what they were shooting. As if in slow-motion, the shots came as a multitude of lasers, followed by a few canisters that looked like grenades. I started smacking these canisters back, and hitting various things on top of the tower and destroying them, eventually succeeding in knocking the soldiers off the tower I was on. Then a large docking bay door opened on the side of the canyon and I was being shot at once again. I once again tried hitting or grabbing and throwing the canisters, but they were far too far away (easily 100 meters). I settled on another plan, which was to forcefully punch parts of the tower towards that loading bay (ambitious).

And of course, as with my dream control, I punched them so lightly they simply limply fell off the tower. I tried harder, and harder, and soon was greeted with a (phony) percentage number indicating my percentage of full power that I was using (which I took for a real measurement, hence why I marked this lowered lucidity). I could only get this number to around 20%, which launched the things I was hitting a decent ways but not quite there. I heard someone call me a fool, and looked to my left to find, who else: Darth Vader, sitting in a chair.

I don't even really like Star Wars which makes this stranger, but anyway, he told me that I would never summon my full control in such a way. Suddenly finding myself curious at what he had to say, I think my lucidity started to come back up here.

I figured, who worse to steer me wrong than Darth Vader in a dream. But at the same time, maybe he would say something useful, so I urged him to continue and sat down next to him. He spoke cliches, telling me that I should 'let my emotions rule me,' and 'use my anger to summon my full power'. I nodded amicably and then noticed that I was now sitting beside him in a flying vehicle. In an act of defiance towards Mr. Vader but also in the interest of trying what he said, I screamed at the top of my lungs (haha) while grabbing the side of the car and pushing, and surely enough, I ripped off the entire right side of the car and part of the roof, and dropped it as we flew along. He didn't really say anything-- he didn't seem threatened but rather like I was acting like a child, and I felt mildly embarrassed (again, haha).

We soon rolled up at a small garage that I felt I recognized from another dream, and I simultaneously felt the dream was coming to an end. It was as if this was a final destination for me, and I could tell this by looking at it. I don't recall what the sign said fully, but I do recall it used a nickname of mine people have given me ("Loaf" a missaying of Life), and I looked around and at Darth Vader again. He didn't have much else to say, so I thanked him for his advice and said maybe I'd use it again later. Then I hopped out of the car and walked up to the shack, and as I was in the process of doing so...

My eyes opened and I hopped out of bed to get my coffee and write up this journal!

Lucidity <0-1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10>
Horrid Nightmare <10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1-0-1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10> Lovely Sweet Dream

[[Double brackets means that a part of the dream is cloudy, and I cannot remember it well.]]

This morning when I woke up, I remembered my wish to have a lucid dream. I rolled over and decided to attempt a WBTB method that I had read last night. It involved imagining yourself running from your back-yard to your front, in your mind, of course, and just running until you eventually ended up falling asleep and dreaming about standing where you had run to.

I imagined myself running; I hopped my neighbor's fence, and ran down his driveway. Eventually, I was placed in a dream, as I ran down his graveled drive-way. It wasn't, however, his driveway. It was a long, twisty driveway, and I was watching a 20 or so year old woman ride a bicycle. She contacted me through a cell phone and said, "Mr. Ayers, this town is just lovely."

I spoke back through the cell phone, replying, "Yes, I imagined it would be."

She rode along beside the river and made a right turn to drive farther into the city, and I continued watching her... I wasn't quite asleep as my eyes were still opening just a little bit in real life...

Eventually, she said, "I think I'll grab some of those flowers you wanted, now."

I didn't say anything, and she said loudly once more, "Mr. Ayers?"

I didn't speak.

She said once more, "Jordan?"

And I said, groggily, in my dream, "I can't... talk... I'm... dreaming."

And suddenly, I was watching a scene very similar to a Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (1) scene. (I played through the campaign of the game recently to get some achievements, I think that's the reason.)

The scene was very small, as if it were not stretched all the way out on my screen. I was looking at my guy, standing in a building, holding an AK74u, and he was simply pointing it at a stack of lumber inside. I was aware that I was dreaming now. I began to listen to my com chatter in the dream. There was a man in the building with me. We were pinned down, and he was leaning against a wall on my left, shots being fired through the window.

I was trying to stretch the window out, make it seem real. I was trying to 'enter' the dream, as I've heard people say. I started getting closer and closer to the window. As soon as it reached full capacity and had taken up my entire sights.

The sound and sight swept over me like an earthquake. The vision became my own, and as real as any day. The sound blurred out and then back in, louder than ever before. It was an amazing feeling.

I moved my gun to the left, aiming over my own guy, out the window. I pulled the trigger and shot, but the resounding BOOM, BOOM, from my gun was so loud that my eyes shot open in real life. I was extremely happy with this progress, however.

I thought this scene would be perfect while I was dreaming it, because I'm so comfortable in this game-like scenario. Over the years I have played so many first person shooters that I thought I would feel extremely comfortable being placed in one. Sadly, the noise from my gun was just a little too much. I also think that adjusting my covers a little bit would have helped, as I was slightly uncomfortable after I rolled back over in real life.