side notes

Notable day substances: No caffeine, Decaf, phosphatidyl choline, 5mg Benedryl 7:30pm
WBTB substances: 6mg Galantamine ~4:00AM

I wanted to have my first lucid this time around since my last break to be without Galantamine, but I'm impatient so I threw it into the mix tonight.



WBTB with Galantamine and WILD

I woke up at 3:45 am after 4 and a half hours of sleep. I read some Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming until I felt like my mind was awake, which took 10 minutes. Then I took 6mg of Galantamine and went back to bed.

I normally try to fall asleep as fast as possible after taking Galantamine because it works pretty fast and it’s difficult to sleep after it starts working. After about half an hour with no luck of going back to sleep on my right side, and attempts of laying very still for WILD - I turn over to my left side to try to WILD there.

Over 10 mins I made less and less movements until I was very comfortable and still. After a while I couldn’t really feel my body and that’s when the transition from waking into sleeping consciously began.

I had no visuals but I felt like I was sitting on a rollercoaster. I could feel when I was traveling up the tracks and the momentum and speed when I was going downward, I could feel myself lifting out of my seat. This went on for a while and was really fun, it felt very realistic. I also started to get some slight visuals of the track which was going around a ski-lift over and over again.


Then the visuals started. A colorful background appeared and there was some nonsense text in the middle that looked AI generated. The text made no sense but when I pretended to ‘read it’ it would transform into a new gibberish text. The text was only ever between 1 to 4 words long. Each time I ‘read’ one of these it felt like I was doing something right and getting deeper into something and the visuals got brighter.*

Now a ‘loading screen’ appeared, it was 16-bit SNES graphics scrolling from right to left of a brick wall. It was very stable and I would pick a piece of grouting and watch it go from one side of my vision to the other - the clarity and detail in lucid dreams always amazes me.

After maybe 10 seconds of this the loading is finished and I’m playing a SNES-style beat em’ up genre game**. It looked like Super Double-Dragon - the very basic track ‘Train Ride’ from this game was playing as well, which I haven’t heard in probably over 10 years.


So now I’m playing this game, the graphics are very bright and vivid - enemies are coming at my character which I’m controlling. But I don’t have a real body, it’s like I’m looking at a screen with blackness all around it and that’s it.

I told myself before going to bed that if I had a lucid I was going to go with whatever the dream was, for stability and practice sake. But I didn’t want the dream to be about playing some SNES game, I at least wanted it to be based in a reality-like setting.

So I test out transforming one of the enemies I’m looking at, which begins to work but the contrast and brightness of the dream begins to dim. I figure I’ve only been in here for less than a minute so I should slow down, so I stop doing that and the contrast and brightness return.

I still don’t want to be having this experience so I close my eyes and now I feel my body in bed. I decide to do a reality check and reach over and plug my nose - I can still breathe just fine! Also I’m seemingly on my back, but I know I’m on my left side in reality. So I decide to try to get out of bed to get out of this gaming situation.

But as I start to move I feel like my left arm is still not totally asleep and that if I move it I will wake up, it feels really heavy compared to the rest of my body. So I close my eyes and enter the video game again, just to see a enemy hit my character and die. The game over screen says ‘YOU FAILED!’ with a big fat purple weasel laughing with a high pitched voice as the dream collapses and I return to feeling my actual body in bed laying on my left side, awake. (5:08am)

I think I just tried too much too fast and needed to let the dream develop more and become more involved. I’ve had plenty of close call WILD’s but normally I get to a point where my body feels like it’s humming with electricity as the visuals begin and the dreams collapse very early. I’ll count this as my first successful WILD! Even though I used Galantamine and ruined it pretty fast.



Dream 2

I’m on the phone with JohnF, a guy I only met very briefly maybe 10 years ago. He’s severely depressed and I’m trying to make him feel better but it wasn’t working. I suddenly had the random thought that he hired a hitman to kill someone. I asked him if he had done something irreversible. He said ‘yeah…’

I don’t know what he actually did but I said he should try to forgive himself and maybe do something that feels like he’s giving back to the world in some way.

I heard super Mario RPG music coming through the phone and asked him if he was playing it. He lit up a bit and said he was, the remastered version. And that he had plans to swap if for another game when he was done.

Then an unknown friend of mine comes by the room I'm in (PA house, bedroom at the end of the hall on the left). He says he got a purple coat and a mustache and he's really excited about it. He doesn't want to show me though because he doesn't know the guy I'm talking to, who is now in the room with me.

JohnF and I both say we wanna see it so he shows us. 'It's not purple at all!' I say upon seeing it, it’s a deep mustard yellow. He says 'oh yeah? Well look at THIS!' He opens it up to reveal a mustache on the hanging loop/tag on the jacket. He takes it off and clips it to his nose, it's a really convincing mustache. We both applaud him.


This dream started out serious and dark and ended feeling funny and relaxed.



Dream 3

I’m deep underground in some sort of mine. To demonstrate how extremely deep a hole is, a man/woman pair toss a raccoon down into it. Immediately it sounds like it hit pipes or something and there are lots of scrambling sounds. The man then throws a basketball down which hits something, and then it's silent.

The woman explains that the raccoon was so relaxed when it fell with its limbs stretched out, that when it made contact with the only pipe exposed it quickly grabbed on. Then the basketball was thrown to hit the raccoon and send it all the way down..

We spoke about something but I forget what. I vomited up a strange pufferfish looking like creature into a nearby basin with water in it, which freaked the lady out and she ran off.

This dream just had all around gross vibes.



Dream 4

A gust of wind blows the front door open slightly, Mogmi makes a run for it! He gets outside and I chase after him. He goes right across the street into the backyard of the neighbors (which is unlike IWL).

A man with a large beard is smoking a cigarette on his phone and there is another guy standing there with him.

Mogmi is hopping up like a dog trying to smell the cigarette. I grab him and apologize, then take him back to the house.



*I suspect this was REM starting, reading these short sentences were making my eyes dart back and forth a lot.

**At this point I became aware of NPT (nocturnal erection), which happens during REM.

Dream 1

I find a shortcut to some sort of ultimate last boss in a WoW like game, Tami is grouped with me.

The shortcut takes us behind the boss where a large treasure chest is. Normally a raid would only gain access to this spot after defeating this boss, who is still alive and in fairly close proximity to the treasure. The boss is some sort of giant undead lich with possessed chains encircling it - it's giving some strong spellcaster vibes and has a purple aura about it.


When I get close to the treasure it gets the attention of the lich, which howls towards us and I get a curse debuff applied to me along with multiple other extremely harmful spells. The ground crumbles and gives way and we fall into the ocean. We die shortly after and respawn in a Stormwind-like city.

I notice I still have one of the curses applied to me. It has a bunch of negative effects but it also reduces all of my spell casting times to instant and removes the global cool down.

To test this out I cast a powerful healing spell that should take 10 seconds to pull off usually. It casts instantly and my character raises his arms to deliver it. I try spamming the ability and since it wasn't meant to be done so quickly he repeats the completion animation over and over and his arms reach into the sky more and more until they're comically stretched about 10 feet into the air.




Dream 2

I'm in the PA house 'suite' area*, when I look out the window through the driveway is from the VI house.

I see a tractor trailer in the driveway, the back is open as a man is taking a large package out. He's heading towards the main doors.

Meanwhile a woman he's working with is holding a clipboard, and is near my door. She's waiting for him to put down the package before she knocks and gets me to sign, but he keeps going back for more large packages.

She calls out to him "How many more packages are we delivering?" He calls back "Nine in total!”. She responds with something along the lines of she wishes they were all for her.

Now the delivery guy is coming in and out of the room I'm in and I attempt to pay little attention to the situation but I'm on high alert. I notice the desk I'm at now has tools all over it like screwdrivers and wrenches and that underneath the desk has many drawers also full of tools.

Something is tugging on the lower right side of my shirt, I look down to see a girl that's maybe six years old or so. She's asking me random kid-like questions.

I look to find her parents and run into the delivery guy, I ask him if she's his child. He says " Oh yeah sorry about that! It's just something work is making us do, bring our kids to work today ya know?"

Behind him is his wife who I didn't see till now, who has their second daughter with her. I 'know' that this isn't her job and she's not normally in this situation. She has a 'very stressed, but making it work' kind of look on her face, her blonde hair is very messy. I feel upset that they're in this situation.


After dropping the girl off with them I want to figure out what's going on with this delivery etc, so I find the woman with the clipboard and ask her if these packages are for me.

She answers saying it's a country wide package lottery event that everyone was drawn into and that I won. She may have mentioned they were appliances.

*I really focused yesterday on the fact that I have so many PA house dreams. So I mentally went through the house when I was awake and reminded myself that if I see any of these places that I am certainly dreaming. Of course this dream was in one of the only places I forgot about, and one of the last changes to the house before I moved from there.

I didn’t feel all that great yesterday, so I gave myself a break and didn’t sleep with any strong dream recall intentions.



Dream 1

I'm in the PA house*, hall bedroom on the right. I'm laying in the bed and I notice there's all of these dead looking plants hanging in transparent green 3D printed plant pots** on the wall. There's about five of them in a row.


They look like they really need water and they're leaves are all hanging down. The leaves are bowl shaped and they're holding some water in them.

Sunlight begins to hit the wall as the sun rises and it hits the first plant. The leaves respond by slowly lifting up to their full height, causing the water to stream down from the leaves into the soil. I think to myself "So that's why its leaves are shaped like that.. A plant that waters itself!"***

The sun spreads across the wall as it dances through the blinds and various trees from outside. Each plant responds to the sunlight the same.



Dream 2 (probably a continuation from the first dream)

I'm in the PA house, living room. There's music playing from the speakers. There's some sort of family gathering and everyone is doing art, I only remember specifically seeing Katie's face. I'm not too interested in what's going on here.

I go upstairs to the bedroom at the end of the hallway. In here there's also speakers in sync playing the same song which was “Savage Garden - I Want You”****. I turn the volume up to the max and lean my forehead against the system and close my eyes. The bass is rippling through me and it feels like I'm getting a full body massage. It’s so strong I feel like my heart is skipping beats. I say 'woah' but it comes out all choppy from the music.



Dream 3

I'm some sort of superhero and I'm writing a letter to a little girl. I'm trying to break it to her that I'm losing my superpowers.

I draw an image of me flying with a cape, holding a car over my head.


Then I draw an image of me walking, explaining that I can't fly anymore.


There were a few more images and notes that I forget. I finish the letter writing that I'm still working on making the world a better place but now I'll have to do it like normal people.

I say something about how we have the same abilities now and that she can be a superhero too.


* I should focus more that this place is a dream sign.
** The same plant holders I printed a few years ago for fun.
*** Another often dream sign seems to be these ‘aha!’ moments where I’m trying to understand something.
**** This is most likely because I checked out the DV Discord recently and listened to a song Lang shared that made me think ‘This sounds so much like savage garden’