McDreamy

Woke up in the middle of the night, and set my intention to wake up with my eyes closed, motionless after my next dream. It worked! Hearing seemed to become my "primary" sense, if that makes sense. I could hear some gentle noises in the room, then noticed the back of my eyelids, and realized I had not moved. It was a gentle awakening. I tried to imagine the previous dream, but nothing was really happening. I think I decided to focus on breathing next, there was some mild hypnagogia but nothing more happened, and I decided to give up and sleep.

Edit: I wonder if my autosuggestion is not specific enough. Perhaps I am waking myself up too early and am awakening from NREM-dominated sleep. This would presumably make it harder to DEILD. I may check the time after unsuccessful DEILDs, or alternatively I could set additional intentions to wake from dream after each attempt, and eventually I will wake during a REM-dominated period of the night.

Dream

I am on a street at night, trying to get across a section of it without someone seeing me. I think this is like the video game Player Unknown's Battlegrounds. I am walking down the sidewalk now then begin running past someone.

I woke up repeatedly throughout the night but not with eyes shut. Didn't have too much time to set my intention perhaps. After my initial successes, a part of me is also afraid of failure because this is a promising technique that I would like to work for me, and now I'm somehow expecting it as a result. But I will focus on the progress, the successes, and remember that it is about training over time. I will get this. I will try meditating for relaxation immediately prior to my next attempts, and see if this helps. A part of me suspects that confidence in success is a huge part of whether or not it actually works.

After a wake back to bed of 45 mins I try to WILD. I took an attitude of: anything that occurs is an experience happening to me, I don't control it, so I will just let it happen and observe whatever it is, even if that experience is me becoming too excited and things coming to a halt. I tried FILD on my back and became quite relaxed, body numb, and I noticed the swirls and blobs of light becoming more and more frequent. They became more intense than usual probably due to my mindset, and I felt my eyes starting to open automatically, and I struggled to keep them shut, but unfortunately they fluttered open a little bit. Switching to my front, I was on the brink of sleep and was sometimes forgetting what I was trying to do, and would then revert back to the FILD practice. I let myself forget about lucid dreaming, and just let myself sleep, but also remembering the finger practice without consciously thinking about the WILD attempt. Re-interpreting it as something I do to help me sleep normally, so that I wasn't so focused on lucid dreaming, which tends to keep me excited and too alert. I noticed rapidly flashing lights and the sensation that something had just happened to my body, like a heaviness or something. My alarm went off shortly.

Later noon attempt: body became very relaxed and numb, and there were swirls of light, but I was drifting off less often than earlier. The excitement/heart rate was high and I was having trouble mindfully/gently allowing thoughts and metacognition to come and go, returning attention the task. Mindful breathing did help somewhat but improvements and dedicated mindfulness practice may pay dividends.

Edit: Afternoon attempt (3pm): When had some HI and it felt like my view of it was zooming in, my eyes just automatically started to open. How frustrating!!

Dream (from night before waking)

I am in England with my girlfriend (I think), and am driving over what looks like a Scottish countryside road, replete with rolling hills overlooking beautiful small lakes. There are old stone buildings on the hill tops and elsewhere along the road, and the day is a cloud one, but still the scene is picturesque. I am sitting in an airport terminal with some people, KZ included. We discuss driving to Cape Cod (USA) before leaving England, because this is one of my favorite places and I would like to go. I think that KZ leaves today to go back to work, but he says that he is leaving in the morning and can go out on the town tonight.

I am at work now, and there is a toy remote control helicopter similar to the one my girlfriend's brother owns. I play with it and fly it around the office. I almost crash it a number of times but manage to salvage the mini flight. The lights are off in the other end of the office, because I decided to save power and only turn on the ones that I would need. I am completely alone here, nobody else is at work. I am disembodied and flying a helicopter in the third person now, and am hovering above three warehouses below me. There is someone in one of them, communicating with me via radio or walkie talkie when I am hovering about them directly. This is some sort of drug bust, and they are perhaps undercover.

Was planning on just sleeping last night without attempting to DEILD, but I woke up naturally, although without having my eyes closed etc, and decided to try WILD. I was not able to fall asleep. I was trying too hard, I think, and was still a little excited. Eventually I started losing track of my counting which was positive I suppose, in that I was starting to doze off, but nothing happened for too long and I decided to give up. While I was trying to sleep for real, I finally started to notice hypnagogic imagery, the blobs and swirls, and was able to watch it without it disappearing. I think I was passively paying attention, rather than my usual 'trying to be passive'. Trying to be a passive observer is not really being a passive observer, I suppose. I think it is important to experience the hypnagogic imagery through your senses, in this case sight, but not really through the lens of thought. You can tell while awake if you are experiencing the world through your mind or through your senses primarily, the latter just being in the moment, so the same will probably be true of falling asleep. I will experiment again tonight and record what happens.

Dream

I am in my girlfriend's room with a group of others whom I do not really know. They are huddled on the far end of the room by the window. The door opens slightly, so I go over and gently close it. It opens again. I close it again..I think it is the wind, although deep down I know this doesn't make sense, because there is no draft through the apartment and no windows open. The door bursts open, there is a strong gust, and I am thrown into the air towards the others by the window.

I am biking somewhere through an open field, filled with people, near some building. This is a park, perhaps. I leave the bike and start walking. I notice some gangsters walking into the area and they look very sketchy, so I decide to get out of there, but I forget about my bike lying there on the grass. The gangsters are shouting at each other, but I do not remember what they said. I am now in a movie theater/lecture hall, and Tom Hanks is the speaker. He finishes one segment of his lecture and tells us all to get into these reclining chairs equipped with some audio or visual technology to allow us to better experience what he is trying to impart to us. I do so, but others don't seem to use the chairs. Some people in front of my are sitting in their normal chairs and continue talking.

Non-Dream

Repeated the mantra: "I will wake up with my eyes closed, remaining still," and imagined doing so.

I woke up, but unfortunately did not keep my eyes closed, and did not remain still. Nonetheless, I decided to count myself to sleep, using the phrase "1..I am dreaming...2...I am dreaming..." etc. I was far too excited, and could not relax enough to fall asleep. To relax, I tried a breathing technique that involved inhaling for 4 seconds and exhaling for 6, for a 10 second inhale/exhale cycle, resulting in 6 breaths per minute to slow the heart rate down. I learned about this technique in a sport psychology class, and decided to try it given that apparently there is some empirical data to support its use. My heart rate gradually slowed, and I am pretty sure that I felt my body enter sleep paralysis but am not certain. After the counting approach wasn't working I tried to passively watch the hypnagogic imagery but nothing was happening.

I was fighting with my mind too much, fluctuating between trying to do these exercises, trying not to try too hard, and the like. I decided to give up and go to sleep, which did result in my first lucid in a long time, but through a DILD rather than DEILD.

Dream

I am standing at the end of my driveway, and the entire street is completely flooded. I look to my left and there is a group of golden retrievers jumping onto kayaks for fun from the side of the road. They are accompanied by two other non-golden retrievers, and they are forming a pyramid on the kayaks, like human gymnasts do. I try and take some pictures with my phone for my girlfriend, but realize I have her phone and not mine. I take some pictures and try to record a video, and wonder whether I should drive the phone to her.

With the girlfriend, there are some gangsters that are mad at us in their car while we are walking. They yell at us and I yell back. Then we start threatening each other with tiny guns. Then we start taking shots at eachother, but they are little bb's that just sting a little, and we are not aiming for lethal parts of the body. We don't actually want to kill eachother. Later I am with girlfriend in huge mall, where there is a party, and we notice people are running, and we assume that there is a shooter. A guard informs us that there is no danger, and cites our earlier bb incident as evidence that everything is fine. We go outside onto the road, it is winter, and there is a crowd of people, and a trough of ice along one side of the road. There is a girl from the show WestWorld there, I realize I am dreaming, and rub my hands together to stabilize the dream. I try not to think about waking up, and try to focus only on the world around me instead. I run my hands over the ice, and spin around to try and further stabilize, but I wake up instead.

I go into the basketball court and am the worst player there, and people groan as I attempt to make a shot and miss wildly. They don't want me on the team. I run to the locker room in shame, and another younger player tells me I should quit. I defiantly refuse, but he threatens to accuse me of sexual misconduct if I do not, so I end up quitting.

I have returned to lucid dreaming after a long hiatus, and will be documenting my progress with DEILD. Hopefully this will keep me motivated and will help me to troubleshoot any issues I am experiencing. Although my past five or six attempts have not resulted in a lucid dream, they have been very promising, as I have been able to wake up while remaining still with my eyes closed. The first attempt I felt vibrations but then got excited and the vibrations subsided shortly after they started. In subsequent attempts I have woken up, but have been too alert to fall asleep. In part this has been related to excitement, but also it has been difficult navigating the paradox of trying without trying, and of looking without truly seeing. In other words, my trying too hard after waking up is probably counterproductive, and it is challenging to let images form before your eyes without focusing too intently and causing them to vanish. I am beginning to practice mindfulness during the attempts, which I think will help a great deal.

I am still a little bit confused regarding how to facilitate the transition to a dream. If I hold onto a tiny slice of awareness, will this happen automatically? Or alternatively, do I need to reach some requisite level of relaxation and sleepiness, and then imagine the dream scene, and become enveloped by it? As I understand it, the latter is the recommended approach to DEILD, and this is how I will focus my efforts. I am a little confused by the use of mantras to anchor my thoughts during an attempt, but I could perhaps mindfully use an anchor until I start seeing hypnagogic imagery, and then start to imagine the sights, sounds, and tactile sensations of my previous dream.

I think if I were less alert upon waking, the transition would be quicker to the dream, and there would be less room for error. Not my attempt last night but the one prior, I woke up tired and groggy, and felt like this was a good level of alertness. The mantra I used to set my intention that night was this: "I will wake up with my eyes closed, tired and groggy." Coincidence? I think not. I will try to incorporate this again into my bedtime mantra, but may also include something about remembering the previous dream and re-entering it. Experimentation time!

Last night I was very stressed out before bed and was unable to wake up from a dream with my eyes shut or remaining still. My mantra was "I will wake up with my eyes closed," and I repeated it fewer times than normal, but the attempt was probably doomed to begin with because of how I was feeling. Here was one of my short dreams anyways:

Dream

"I am at a banquet with people from work and my girlfriend is there too. There is music playing, and she wants me to sing but I don't want to. We are sitting at circular tables with white table cloths. Someone at my table is singing a song about a relationship, and tells someone else to pretend that they are a mountain. I think he also had a newspaper cartoon section in front of him. I get up from the table and walk past some tables, and past one of my co-workers, and out the door where there is a piano with microphone outside. To the right of this there is a giant box of chocolates that look very delicious. One of them is spherical like a truffle, and has a long chocolate tail roughly 8 cm long, and has some sort of sparkle or sprinkle to it. That's the one I want."