LukeSid

To bed at 12.30, woke at 6.00am and WBTB at 7.20am. Lucid at 8.30am. It hit me suddenly. I'm at the edge of a very green field. There were others there. Overwhelmingly green, the grass, the surrounding bushes and (I'm not a biologist) some kind of ground vegetation, like docks, was everywhere. It was so intense, the most vivid dream I've ever experienced.

I thought something like, “hey! I'm lucid..do a reality check.” Doh! So I try to push my thumb through my palm and I can't. While I'm fumbling about the dream slips away. Gone. I try to get back into it and I can't...never have managed that yet. I'm overwhelmingly awake.

With no preparation, and very little in the way of good dream experiences these past few weeks, it came out of the blue...well green actually...so much green.

Anyone who has had a number of LD's surely knows what I mean, when I say I just KNOW when I'm lucid. There's no mistaking it. The vividness, the presence, my thoughts and responses. I know. So the last thing I should be doing is RC'ing so soon after I hit the event. Stand still, look around, and slowly and carefully stabilize the dream.

When I can, I usually touch a wall. Maybe I should have touched vegetation. I need to quickly spin when I sense the dream going. I've done that successfully once before. I need a different approach. I eat the right stuff, my brain get's all the stimulus it should reasonably need. I've taken “little helpers” like melatonin, but I can only hit LD's at the top of the morning. Mystery.

When I say there was no preparation, maybe there was. While I was up, I watched part of David Eagleman's series “The Brain” Part 5 “Who will we be?” When I went back to bed, I pondered for a short while about what it said. Maybe there's nothing special about the biological construct of the brain. The “mind” is not what the brain is, but what the brain does. Hooray for that.

We are advised to think “dream” things when WBTB, so maybe thinking “brain” things had the same effect and provided a stimulus (albeit short). When I WBTB, I'll work my way though The Brain series again, to see if I can trigger another LD from that.

Whenever I start to flag, I always seem to get something to spur me on. Short lucids, or the recent “schemas...” all contributions gratefully received...

PS An Afterthought. Maybe I'm looking at this from the wrong angle. Maybe I'm sleeping a lot deeper now and my (few and far-between and short) LD's happen when I'm rising from deep sleep, up towards awakening, and I reach a plateau when I'm not yet quite awake but I now have enough awareness to trigger a lucid. That might also explain my failure to pass the "thumb through palm" test

It's a thought, and maybe I need to condition myself to sleep lighter (if that's at all possible)