non-lucid

This is what I get for staying up too late...that always gives me weird dreams from a lack of clarity

1) The dream began fairly normally. I was Skype chatting with a friend whom I hadn't heard from in a while and she was just telling me about how they had a chemical leak and had to evacuate the house when suddenly people started peering over my shoulder and refused to go away. Well that was awkward, so I moved to a different computer and tried to keep talking. Before long I was interrupted by another person (who just randomly was there all of a sudden) who told me that the guy that wrote "Old MacDonald Had a Farm" wrote a new song back in 2008 and it was a big hit that I should look up. He wouldn't stop pestering me about it so I gave in and interrupted the chat to look the thing up on YouTube. Couldn't find it anywhere, and the guy had left after a while, so I went back to Skype...only to be interrupted by someone telling me I had to come with them to some gathering at a farmhouse. I didn't want to go, but before I knew it I was right there at the party...and not happy with this DC at all for bringing me there. So then my captors tried to make me feel better by attempting to set me up with one of the girls there. They were nice but I wasn't interested...I just wanted to catch up with my friend on Skype! I ran away to some little office room that had WiFi and opened up Skype on my iPod...and my friend was gone. Frustrated, I went back outside and just hung around until the party was over.

Dream Signs: unusual events, being pulled away from a task, frustration with something, being at a new place

Big goes here.

I had to be at a work meeting rather late last night, so my sleep schedule was thrown off and not surprisingly, I didn't go lucid in spite of my MILD. When I slept, I just slept hard

1) I was looking to get a new desk chair (which I did IRL recently--probably had something to do with this dream) and I found one that struck me as odd: it was advertised as 'the leg-less desk chair'. Basically, it was said to contain some kind of highly magnetic device that would consistently keep the chair hovering a few feet off the floor. Sounded interesting, so I got two of them, and immediately discovered that by tilting one of the chairs while sitting in it, I could cause it to move around at pretty good speeds. Suddenly I was on a trip to Israel and still in my hovering desk chair. I propelled all over the place at something like 45 mph, all the time having more and more false memories explaining the backstory of the dream that I hadn't seen...making it harder and harder to become lucid all the time. I was just about to have to leave Israel when one of my friends who was there with me turned evil and started some scheme I was going to have to stop...

Dream Signs: Being somewhere without remembering getting there, dream-like environments, highly unusual events

2) I was surprised to find that someone had stuck my old PC's hard drive in my new PC, but since it was there I decided to have fun with it. I booted up into Windows Vista and as expected, it ran poorly for an OS but much faster on the newer computer. I intended to upgrade it to Windows 8 (yes, 8) but just as I popped the disk in someone started Skype chatting with me and I never got around to it

Dream Signs: highly unusual events

...even though the memories weren't 'precious' in this case. That song just seemed like a creative title for this one

1) (and 2?) Last night my dreams were made up of scattered memories, with only a very few fictional, but lifelike, locales in between. The dream's plot was likewise fictional, but not unusual. Basically, everything I saw was either from straight from real life or mimicked real life pretty well, and so I never caught on that I was dreaming.

Dream Signs: being around groups of people, switching between places without actually traveling there

Sooo...I know I kinda got behind on the dream journaling and MILDing over the weekend, but hopefully I can get things back on track here...

1) I went into work, fairly normal day, but far busier than usual. Eventually amid all the craziness, one guy came in and started to mildly cause trouble. He wasn't doing anything so obnoxious we could put him out of the store, but he was bothersome. I went into the back room to do my job in there, and came back out a bit later to see that guy still there, and talking to people in a very strange way...he was brainwashing them. I spoke to some other people he had already brainwashed--people I knew before--and they were completely different. In a daze, unable to hear me, repeating bizarre phrases, and quickly turning to displaying aberrant moods and behavior. Before long, these people had turned into zombies, and all my coworkers with them. Since I had been in the back, only I didn't get the brainwash treatment. I ran back to the stock room and locked the door. My boss was in there, too. "What are we going to do? Have you seen what's going on out there!?" I asked in a panic. "Yes...I...I don't know." I'd never heard him sound so discouraged before. We looked all over for a place to hide before the zombies broke through the door, but there was nowhere safe enough for us to plan on surviving for more than 30 seconds. Eventually my boss gave up. "I'm sorry." He said, just before a bullet went into my head. It didn't kill me, but after I turned and saw my boss holding the gun, I fell to the floor like I was dead anyway, to keep him from shooting again. As I lay there, I heard another gunshot go off, and this time my boss fell to the floor. I guess he would have rather died by his own hand than by the zombies. After a minute, I recovered from the wound and picked up my boss's gun (which strangely turned from a pistol to a shotgun when I picked it up). The zombies were close to breaking through. I quickly went out the back door and locked it, but it did little good. All around me outside things had turned into a wasteland covered with zombies. I had little hope of survival, but I didn't give up so easily. I went everywhere looking for a safe place, taking out zombies with my shotgun all the way. I woke up before finding anywhere.

Dream Signs: highly unusual events, being at work, zombies

My sleep schedule the past few nights has been weird and so my recall hasn't been all that great as a result. Last night I finally remembered a dream again in spite of a lack of a normal amount of sleep.

1) The dream began fairly realistically with life as normal. But then suddenly I watched as my brain generated pages and pages of text spontaneously. I wasn't fully lucid, but I understood that I was asleep well enough to be impressed. I didn't take the time to read through everything, but what I did read made sense. A DC told me that I was reading my next dream at its base level, but that I had two other choices besides this first, basic option. It and one other DC created a variation on the first dream, leaving me with three slightly different dreams to choose from. I tried out both of the DC's variations, but found them to be very dark and creepy; as soon as things proved they weren't turning for the better, I left those dreams and went to the normal one. It was the best of the three.

Dream Signs: highly unusual events, being around people

Kinda weird if you ask me. It's like my brain was telling me the best dream is the unaltered dream...almost as if it was kicking against full lucidity. Hmm....

While I still may not have had any lucids from MILD yet, my brain is definitely starting to incorporate the visualization part directly into my dreams. The other night I visualized beginning the dream on an airplane because I could either skydive and land wherever I wanted to, or just make the plane land wherever I wanted it to. Easy transition either way. I didn't go lucid, but the dream did begin on an airplane. Last night, I visualized being back in Israel because that's where my previous dream was. And again, while I didn't go lucid, the dream did begin there. I think I'm getting on to something here...

1) As I just said, the dream began in Israel, although it quickly left that behind and turned into something big. Huge. So much detail I can't even begin to recall it all; there was an entirely unique world all around me with a deep story of its own to tell. Keeping things simple, there was a giant corporation that was getting too much power; it acted as the government, but due to its business nature, it was more corrupt than even the average government. I, along with a small team of others, sat down and planned how we could get inside and blow up the entire facility that was at the heart of the whole problem...realizing we would likely die in the process. (Yes I know, IRL that would be an act of terrorism, but this was a dream, ok? ) Our plan was highly detailed, but proved effective. We had unexpected complications along the way of course, but we improvised and still barely made it to our objective after hours of constant work. We had silently (for the most part) taken out all the guards going about the place, and all that was left was the CEO himself. We set up the bombs and then dove out the windows as our only shot at survival. Surprisingly the fall didn't hurt at all. However, once outside, a giant tree burst up out of the ground and revealed itself to be a tree-machine AI who was very angry at our work. We started to fight, but soon the machine recognized us as friends and stopped before he did any real damage.

Dream Signs: being somewhere without remembering getting there, highly unusual events,

Wow, I really need to go to bed less distracted if this MILD thing is ever going to work for me. My mind was working on too many things to stay concentrated on the visualization or mantra, so my dreams ended up being a direct manifestation of what I had been thinking over...and not about the mantra

1) I was in Israel for a friend's wedding. Never actually saw the ceremony; I was dropped into the dream right after it ended. As I was walking away, somehow I ended up talking to a Jewish girl and we hit it off pretty well. After we'd talked a little while I told her I had to go, and then turned and woke up...

Dream Signs: being somewhere without remembering getting there, being around people (particularly groups of people)

2) ...into a false awakening. I got up and was just about to walk out the door when I saw a big spider laying curled up on the ground. "Oh, I didn't think I'd actually killed that one last night. Guess it didn't get away after all." I was just walking past it when suddenly the spider sprung back into life and shot up into the air, simultaneously growing several times its original size. I tried to escape it, but it came down on my head and startled me awake, for real this time.

Dream Signs: FA (should have made me RC...but I didn't ), highly unusual events

3) When I fell back asleep, I was back in Israel picking up roughly where the last dream had left off. I had only one more day before leaving from my visit to see the wedding, so I was going around with a couple members of my family who were there with me and we just enjoyed ourselves (and I kept looking for a restroom in the dream because IRL I had to pee ). Somehow I ran across that same girl and her family, and we got to talking again briefly. Before I knew it, we were talking on the phone as I was heading to the airport to leave. It seemed like things might actually work out with this girl, so of course I didn't want to leave, but I was literally getting dragged away by my family, so I just had to say goodbye and wake up.

Dream Signs: being somewhere without remembering getting there, romance

Last night I came close to a lucid dream multiple times. I didn't get to MILD quite as heavily as I would have liked, but last night I caught myself as I began to fall unconscious and bring myself back long enough to use a mantra for a few minutes before falling completely asleep. All night long it was like my mind wanted to be lucid, but it just never actively grasped that it was in a dream even though it passively acknowledged that fact multiple times.

1) Fragment of walking somewhere in third person. People were talking about dreams as I passed by them.

Dream Signs: being in third person, being somewhere without remembering getting there, people talking about dreams, being around people

2) Short dream where I suddenly appeared in my class room, and this time I knew I had suddenly appeared there, because I was standing up front by the teacher instead of sitting at a desk. I half-panicked as I hurried to take my seat, as if my only explanation was that I had gone insane for a moment and walked up to the front without realizing it. But somewhere deep down something was trying to tell me it was a dream. The dream ended before that could sink in.

Dream Signs: being somewhere without remembering getting there, being around people

3) I was looking to buy a car, and I found that one guy had a special deal going on for light cycles (like the ones in Tron: Legacy). Of course I took the opportunity right away, and as soon as I got on the light cycle, the entire world turned Tron-esque with dark structures set off by glowing outlines and everyone wearing those slick suits. It was great fun to ride around the city, but unfortunately I got a little too adventurous and pulled off a rather dangerous move to take a shortcut down the wrong side of the road, and as luck would have it, the cops saw me do it. However, without ever really being lucid, I thought to myself, "I can just go back in time because this is a dream...right?" And sure enough, I was able to pull back to right before I made the illegal action and take the safe path this time.

Dream Signs: being somewhere without remembering getting there, highly unusual events

Grrr...I really need to get to bed on time. I made it farther into the MILD process last night, reaching a very decent point of visualization, but I only went over the mantra two or three times before I fell asleep

1) The dream began with a title: "Dream 06 - Israel". If that title is to be trusted, that means there's five other dreams I had last night but cannot remember After that, I found myself in the middle of a hotel shower. I got out and made my way into the world outside, and found myself in Israel. I spoke to some locals in Hebrew and they all told me about a horrible person that was coming into town that would do me great harm if he found I was there. They advised I remain hidden in my hotel room until he came and went. Well I thought that was unnecessary, so I didn't listen. Eventually I wound up in the same building as this horrible person when he arrived, and to save my neck I sneaked around, avoiding detection. I stealthily took out a couple guards, but I still got noticed by the man himself before I could escape. Turned out he was actually a pretty nice guy, though...

Dream Signs: being somewhere with no memory of getting there, being around people, highly unusual circumstances

Not such great recall last night...I was up later than I had planned on, and so when I finally got to bed, I didn't stay awake long enough to properly go through a MILD setup, and I never woke up naturally during the night for another opportunity to try, either.

1) I was running around with the characters from Inception, but I don't think we were doing any extracting business. Can't remember what we were doing, though. At the end of the dream, Eames leaned up against a rail and looked as if he was about to faint or something. I woke up as everyone went over to see if he was alright.

Dream Signs: being around people, interacting with fictional characters, being somewhere without memory of getting there

Had a monster toothache last night and didn't really have a mind to work too hard on anything, even lucid dreaming...just wanted a good night's rest

Even so, I did have decent recall, given the circumstances.

1) It was Christmas, and I was being woken up early. Strangely, even in the dream, I felt very tired at getting up so early. So tired in fact that I shortly fell back asleep into dreamless sleep.

Dream Signs: Being around people, significant time lapse

2) I was working at a large factory, and several of my friends were there as well, investigating what they perceived as some conspiracy. They convinced me of its reality and I agreed to help, but I had to keep up my job as well so nobody would notice me. It was both a scary and thrilling experience to sneak around like that.

Dream Signs: Being around people, being somewhere with no memory of getting there, highly unusual circumstances

I'm going to keep trying!

Ok, so I'm going to try to get back into regularly lucid dreaming again, and so that means I need to write in my DJ again. However, the reason I stopped writing in it is because I didn't have the time to write 10-page entries...so I'm going to change my style dramatically and give only a summary and list some possible dream signs to watch out for. I will maintain my color scheme for lucid/non-lucid dreams.

As a starting-out night, last night was a good one. I recalled three dreams and one of them was lucid (though only momentarily).

1) Summary: Overall this dream was unclear; I was doing a bunch of random things in unfamiliar places and somehow ended up on Facebook...and when I tried to read the nonsense text I became lucid, but I only stood up and began walking off when I began to wake up.

Dream Signs: Nonsense text (though usually text looks fine in my dreams), being someplace I don't remember getting to


2) Summary: This was a weird one; I should have gone lucid immediately. I went into the garage to find my car missing, and my boss was in there working on a tank. A Nintendo DS arrived in the mail and my boss took it and wired it into the tank so I could control it by the DS controls. I tried driving the tank to work, but it was too big and powerful to drive properly on regular streets, and I was sure I would get arrested...

Dream Signs: Highly Unusual Events, being around people (HUGE dream sign--when I go to sleep I'm always alone), video game elements


3) Summary: I was looking for something (not sure what), and my search ran me into Ashley Cowie as he looked for the Holy Grail. For some reason I thought an ancient tomb/cave place was where I would find my thing, and that's where Ashley Cowie wanted to look for the Holy Grail as well. We found a pillar with something on top, but we couldn't get high enough to look at it at first, and then when we did a glass box covered the top. Ashley distressed over how we could get in there while I broke open the glass. Nothing was inside.

Dream Signs: Being around people, highly unusual events, video game elements, looking for an unknown something

Wow, it feels like forever since I last got on these forums! Hopefully I'm back to stay awhile...

So in recent months I haven't really even tried to lucid dream. If I did try it would fail every time; maybe things just got too routine to be meaningful enough to cause my brain to go lucid. I honestly don't know. But I think now that I have spent a decent amount of time away from lucid dreaming, as long as I have a goal in mind I can get back into it.

That goal came to me last night as I watched Inception for the second time. Of course I realized how much of it isn't true to real life, but a lot of things from the movie could work, with some slight modifications. So I decided that in the coming weeks I'm going to try to take as many concepts from Inception as possible and turn them into a real life, working form. At the same time I will simply be keeping a normal journal of my dreams to aid in recall. For the sake of those that dislike people using Inception for real-life lucid dreaming, I'll be including small sections that explain the reasoning behind each part, to prove I'm not mindlessly following a hollywood story.

Last night, being the first of this quest, I had to start small and simple, with something that could work without a few days' practice beforehand. That narrowed things down to none other than the kick. I went with Non je ne Regrette Rien, the song used in Inception, set to an alarm on my netbook (using Easy MP3 Alarm) so that it would deliver the kick right about 4:00am.

I don't recall a lot about the dream I was having, but I do remember that suddenly everything went black, and I heard the sound of a trumpet as if it had been recorded and then exponentially slowed down. It faded in and out, the blasts increasing in pitch and frequency as time went on. After a few seconds, the trumpet was normal speed, and I could hear Edith Piaf's voice in addition to the trumpets. I was successfully awakened by the song.

Why it works: This is up for debate, but I believe the reason this song in particular is effective at waking people up is because the trumpets function similarly to a beat in an isochronic tone. Because the trumpets sound off at a relatively high frequency, your brain's natural reaction is to adjust to match that frequency, which is too high for sleeping, thus waking you up.

After that, I got up, shut down the netbook so I'd stop wasting electricity (I'm no environmentalist, but that stuff isn't cheap! ), and then got back in bed, hoping I'd remain conscious enough to reach lucidity.

Next time my eyes opened, I was laying on a mattress without sheets, looking up at a roof of blue-tinted steel, and a very bright light. I sat up and walked out of my chamber, finding the whole building to be made of the same blue-ish metal. The architecture was odd--not based on squares and rectangles like normal buildings, but rather everything was based on a hexagonal shape. The hallways were also lined with screens that were embedded into the walls. They were displaying games and programs currently in testing. As I continued walking down the hallway, I passed a room where I could see the people who were actually doing the testing. I got the feeling that I was in the headquarters some software development company, or something of that nature.

When I got outside, I saw a group of my friends, but before I could even say anything to them, they had grabbed me and pulled me behind some weird structure, telling me that I had to be careful not to be seen by the police. Apparently I had accidentally committed some crime in regards to the software company, and false memory caused me to believe it. I also wasn't alone; one dream character had done the same thing as me, and had to hide as well.

After a while of just sneaking around trying to find our way home, I heard loud machine noises coming from behind me and turned to see a train driving along an elevated track. The track was horribly damaged and out of repair, and swayed back and forth as the train sped along, trying to cross the weak section before it gave way. It didn't happen; the tracks began to fall apart shortly ahead of the train, and within a moment the train had driven off the end and landed in a (very realistic) explosion.

Something about that explosion and its realism drew me very strongly into the dream, and everything took on a greater depth and clarity. I really felt like I was there, and perhaps I even had a sense of being in a dream, but it didn't register enough for me to truly be lucid.

At any rate, with the train drawing all the attention of the police, the DC and I no longer had to worry about sneaking around. In fact, we were primary witnesses of what happened, so the police and news reporters all wanted to ask us questions instead of turn us in.

I walked around and talked to some people after that, but the dream was pretty much over from that point; nothing very interesting happened thereafter. What I do find interesting is how my mind translated my desire to really be in the dream--as in, a dream that I'm in deeply enough for it to be clear and have the depth of consciousness to it--in the form of an explosion. Usually I would have thought such a thing would cause me to wake up, but it seems that something surprising and highly realistic does the exact opposite. I'll have to remember that...maybe it could come in handy if I'm ever lucid and the dream is fading! Just make something explode

Well, I'm going to work on a totem today and see if I can apply that principle to reality checking. Wish me luck!

NOTES/NON-LUCID/LUCID

Alright, so I consider this 'Day 1' of my attempt to have a lucid dream within the next week, since I am off work and can devote time to lucid dreams.

No lucid dream last night, but at least I have some recall. Hopefully that will improve throughout the week as well.

I was someplace far away from home with a group of friends, and it was time to go home. We loaded up in the car and drove off, but in only a couple hours (which passed like seconds, but the car clock said it had been hours) it was getting close to time to eat, so we started looking for restaurants to stop at. We attempted to stop at several, but something or another would cause us to leave. Sometimes they were closed, sometimes the service was deplorable, and sometimes we'd just plain decide we wanted something different. This went on for several more hours until finally we found someplace where we could actually stay and eat. The day was already ending at that point. I commented that we had not made much progress, and everyone kind of just nodded and kept eating . When we were done, and back in the car, we drove down the street the restaurant was on, rounded a corner...and then, to my shock, I recognized the road we were on. Somehow we'd made it back home while we were searching for restaurants!

The dream faded out then, and I soon woke up. I tried to DEILD or WILD, but no luck. Eventually I did fall asleep for another hour, but it was dreamless.

NOTES/NON-LUCID/LUCID

In recent months life has just plain been too busy to focus on lucid dreaming enough to keep a DJ. I'm going to try from now on to be less specific with my entries so that I can keep up a DJ even on days when I have little time, but regardless, I finally have almost a full week without work or a lot of other things, so I can spend as long as I need to on lucid dreaming right now.

Last night immediately before going to bed I listened to Stephen LaBerge's guided awareness exercise on MP3, and I kept it in mind while falling asleep. This resulted in the following dream:

I was at work, kind of out of it, doing my normal stuff absent mindedly, when a co-worker came up and told me something that had been going on and asked me a few questions about it to see what she should do. For some reason I did not directly answer her questions, but instead got up and found another co-worker and asked her about the same thing. She replied with a totally different version of the same story. I smiled, then, suspecting that I was dreaming. One by one I pointed out all of the flaws in logic with her story, and how it didn't match up with what I'd previously heard--which was now not sounding too logical, either. I determined that if I would hear a third version of the same story, I would know I was dreaming, so I found yet another co-worker and asked him for his take. It was, as expected, totally different, and logically flawed.

Unfortunately, that was the extent of it. I didn't really become lucid, I just laughed at all the logical flaws and stood there pointing them out to everyone, all the while knowing that it all meant I was dreaming, but without truly comprehending it.

I need to do much better than that, but I'm on the right track already, at least. With proper mental preparation, I already am able to identify logical flaws in my dream environment. That's step 1. Now I've got to move beyond mere recognition and into comprehension. If I can get that far, I'll almost certainly really truly become lucid again, as long as I can keep the dream stable. I'm good with dream control, though, so hopefully that issue won't raise its ugly head

I'll be heading to bed here fairly soon; will report back sometime tomorrow with whatever dreams I recall!