First off, thanks in advance to anyone who decides to read this. I realize it’s quite long but I could really use some advice.

Last night marked my second night of my deciding to consciously be aware of my dreams in hopes of one day learning to become lucid on demand. My objective for the night was to recall as many dreams as possible and perhaps be lucky and get lucid in one of them. It didn’t go quite as planned.

As I went to bed, I suddenly became very anxious about what was going to happen. Was I going to freak out if I LD’d? Would I be able to remember anything? Would I have an out-of-body experience? So I started counting my breaths to relax and after a few minutes (not sure how many as I intentionally refrained from looking at the clock) I felt I was at last calm enough to sleep.

I started repeating “I will remember my dreams” in my mind each time I exhaled and, soon enough, I was seeing a void, dark and empty for a Louis XIV red armchair occupied by a black man dressed as an old-school pimp, illuminated by a spotlight. He was holding a drink and was blabbing out merrily and having some good laughs, although he wasn’t talking to anyone in particular and I couldn’t actually hear the sounds he was making. This went on until the pimp accidentally spilled his drink onto his lap, which half-woke me, enough that I could write a note about the pimp in my DJ before being swept away again into sleep.

This pattern went on throughout the entire night. I would drift off to sleep, have a very brief hallucination/dream and I would be awakened. A few times I felt trapped in some sort of limbo between awake and asleep. This was not a pleasant feeling. I found myself constantly attempting the nose-plug RC, failing every time. At one point, I suspected I was experiencing a false awakening and wanted to do the nose-plug RC, only to find myself quite incapable of moving my arm and hand. Upon waking up, I would sometimes take a second to jot down a small note in my DJ about what I was seeing/thinking/feeling before waking up. My DJ in the morning was full of odd stuff, including a note reading “looking for lost dog, but the dog is just an idea” and even some incomprehensible scribbles. The last entry of the night reads “I’m too tired to do this, I’m letting go”. I then remembered I did decide to give up sometime around 5:00 a.m. because I was feeling constantly troubled and anxious and I felt like I wasn’t getting any rest.

The highlight of all this came when I was dreaming of a red car (which I may or may not have been driving). The car then crashed into another red car. But, instead of a normal crash, the cars acted like they were made of rubber, bouncing back after the collision and remaining unharmed. I immediately realized that could not be real, but as soon as that realization dawned on me, the dream started dissolving. I quickly remembered I should rub my hands, but suddenly I was aware of my physical body while still half in the dream and I couldn’t figure out which set of hands I was supposed to be rubbing, the real or dream ones. I finally concluded that I had to rub my dream hands, but by that time all I could do was imagine my dream-self rubbing its hands. I did no longer possess my dream-self, although I could still faintly see him in my mind. I quickly did a RC, only to find out I was already awake.

All in all, these small bits I’ve shared with you are all I could recall in the morning. This, compared to the night before, in which I went to bed extremely drunk and only got about 5 hours of sleep, but still managed to recall 7 dreams and had a semi-lucid dream (see here). As you can imagine, I am a bit frustrated and I wonder if I did anything wrong. What should I be doing differently or avoiding? Any other advice?

One last thing. I’ve noticed I keep dreaming red stuff. Does this mean anything?