Lingering between two worlds

This is not a dream entry, but a short post about something I experienced last night.

I awoke from a disturbing dream, where my family was in trouble, my friends had neglected me and my body had been covered with stress-related hives. I charted down the dream in my orange notebook next to my pillow so I wouldn't forget it the next morning.

After writing down the dream I tried going back to sleep again, using the counting technique I described in the previous post. After a while I start having a battle with myself. I am counting, but behind the counting lies other thoughts - or at first I think they're just thoughts, but eventually a part of me starts viewing it as a reality or a dream - as if I'm physically experiencing the thoughts. Kind of like I am hallucinating.

On one side I have an "awake" part of myself struggling to keep counting to get myself to fall asleep, and on the other side I have a "dreaming" part of myself walking around in a mall doing some christmas shopping, but my awake part is still keeping me informed that I am just lying in my own bed trying to fall asleep.

I'm being pulled back and forth between these two state of minds and after a while I start to get tired and a little sea-sickish, so I stop counting, open my eyes and just stare at my bedroom wall. I try resuming the counting but the tug of war returns. Frustrated I open my eyes again, take a short break and try to stop the room from spinning. I decide to stop the counting and just try to go to sleep the normal way.

Eventually I do.

Count your way to sleep

When sitting down to read a book or an article my mind has a tendency to wander off into other thoughts while still reading the words, but not "taking it in" at all - lately, when this attention span breakdown happens, I've been doing a 10 second countdown where I stop reading and try not to think about, or visualizing, anything else but the number 10 counting down in my head, and I've been amazed at the effect that this has had on my concentration when my mind gets distracted. So what has this to do with dream(b)log?

Lately I've been impatient about falling asleep, because I have so many dream adventures I want to try out. I thought about different ways one can do to help yourself fall asleep faster - listen to calm music, binaural sounds, breathing exercises... then I thought about "counting sheeps". I remember trying to do that when I was younger and it didn't help, so these last couple of nights I've been doing a different version.

Closing my eyes in bed, I visualize the number 1. It's colored in bright white on a black background. I notice other thoughts in a transparent manner behind the number 1, but I try to focus hard on the "1". Then I start counting: "One... two... three... four..." always visualizing the number I am counting out loud in my head. I have no goal. No number "destination". I just count. At different times - sometimes at 150, sometimes around 300 - my mind starts to "flicker". I fall off the wagon and start thinking about something else, but I try to recuperate as fast as I can and resume the counting. (I've noticed this flickering occurs when I'm getting close to falling asleep, since I feel it is a product of my will giving up its control and surrendering to the sleep session ahead.)

Eventually I fall asleep, and when I wake up the next morning I can't remember which number I stopped at.

Healing hands?

Category: Spiritual / Experimental
Hours of sleep: 9
Lucid: Yes

I was running down a road to catch a bus. Something struck me as odd and I became lucid.
"This is a dream."

Just to make sure, I started running faster and tried to do a jump - and sure enough - I leaped several feet in the air, lingered for a bit in mid-air, before floating down again. Wondering what to do with this lucid moment - I remembered reading, in Waggoner's book, about people who had used their lucid dream to provoke self-healing.

I have been struggling with pneumonia for a couple of weeks and still coughing like an old man on his death bed. Remembering what I had read, I tried to put "healing thoughts" into my hands. Waggoner reported that many people experience white light in their hands when they go into "healing-mode".
Greatly expecting my hands to burst into white light, I was pretty disappointed when nothing happened, but as I looked closer at my hands I noticed that they were sparkling - like small patches of glitter here and there on my fingers and my palms.

With my new-founded "sparkling healing hands" I started to rub my chest, my throat and my head always thinking about how I am healing myself... then I got interrupted by a woman asking what I was doing.
"Trying to get rid of my pneumonia!"
"Oh... I see... well... good luck with that..."
Then she lit a cigarette, took a deep breath and blew smoke in my face.

Then I woke up.
I guess time will show if I managed to speed up my healing process.

I suppose the scientific way to look at this "healing process" is that you trigger your mind to send more "healing process" to the area of your body that is damaged. Kind of like when you cut your finger, and it starts to throb immediately and blood starts rushing to the area for protection and to start the regeneration process.

Assassin?

Category: Nightmare
Hours of sleep: 9
Lucid: No

I went to the movies and watched Tron:Legacy. There is a scene where duelists have to fight to the death.

The following night I had a dream about dueling against an asian girl. She had a knife in her hand and was trying to strike me down. It was a fight to the death - who would win? Me or her?

The next thing that happened was pretty psychotic.
I managed to disarm the girl and get the knife in my own hands. Then I went mad crazy on her and stabbed her over 20 times all over her body until she lay flat on the floor.

In shock of what I had done I dropped the knife and started walking away. I heard her scream behind me and when I turned around - the knife was being thrown after me, but I managed to dodge it.

Then I woke up.

Suiciding my way out of a nightmare

Category: Nightmare
Hours of sleep: 6
Lucid: Yes

I am a crime scene investigator... CSI baby! Me and my crew are investigating a murder at a fancy mansion on top of a cliff. Suddenly all the doors slams shut and one of my colleagues starts laughing manically.

"I am the killer! And now I'm going to kill you too!"

In fear I take off running up a couple of stairs that leads to the roof of the mansion. When I'm on the roof and realize I have nowhere to go, I wait for the assailant to come up...

We stare at each other, and all of a sudden my fears disappear. I realize I am dreaming.
Normally I would try to befriend my nightmare by confronting him in a cool matter and ask what was wrong and why he wanted to kill me, a technique I learned and wrote about here.

But not this time... I decided to take a fast and easy way out. I would suicide myself out of it.
Knowing I was on top of a mansion sitting on the edge of a cliff, I smiled to the assailant and took off dashing across the roof and jumped off, threw my arms out and let myself fall down the side of the cliff into the pitch black void at the bottom...

But instead of waking up like I thought I would - I materialized outside some bakery in Greece. Scratched my head in wonder of what had just happened. And then I woke up.

Supernatural river rafting on Pandora (Avatar)

Category: Superpowers
Hours of sleep: 6
Lucid: Yes

I am clinging on to two handles in the middle of a giant rubber raft floating down a calm river.
A mountain is coming up ahead and at the base there's a hole that creates a giant waterfall leading down to somewhere unknown. Somehow I just know that I am dreaming, so I'm not feeling any fear for the fall that is about to come.

I'm drawing closer to the drop point, and just before I get to the edge I grab the raft and perform a giant leap straight up in the air with the raft, angle it diagonally downwards and take off flying in diving mode into the hole where the waterfall starts.

I feel the wind around my head and my adrenaline is pumping. When I get to the other side (underneath the mountain) I am struck with awe over the amazing view. I have reached another world. All the colors. A warm evening sun in my face. Weirdly shaped trees. "Avatar" I tell myself in the dream.

Another "rafter" shows up next to me. I challenge her to a race down the, now wild, river. The speed is supernatural and I keep performing the jump and dive move from earlier to gain more speed and momentum and we are swooshing back and forth and underneath each other. My adrenaline level is spiking at this point and I end up waking myself up from all the excitement.

Date with Superman (me)

Category: Superpowers
Hours of sleep: 7.5
Lucid: Yes

I was on a date that was going quite well. We were just walking around my home town, and we decided to head down to the harbor. When we went around the corner we were suddenly in a forest with a river right in front of us. Luckily I was aware enough to note this rapid scenery change as quite unrealistic. "This is a dream!"

I looked at my date and with a great grin on my face I asked: "You want to fly?"
The reply was: "No."
But I didn't care - I grabbed my date's hand and took off flying around the forest.

If someone did that to me on our first date I would be quite impressed.
So I felt pretty awesome doing this for my date.

When we landed we ran into two hippie guys crouched in front of a formation of gray rocks and one distinct blue one. One of the hippie guys asked me:
"Hey dude. We know you know you are dreaming. Do you think you can remember this stone sequence and show us when you wake up?

Here it is: (roughly sketched on Photoshop)

Fail to impress

Category: Superpowers
Hours of sleep: 8
Lucid: Yes

I was standing outside a mall waiting for some friends. When the third one arrives, she's on a motorcycle and almost ends up wrecking the whole thing by almost crashing into some parked cars. Then she jumps off and acts like nothing is wrong. This makes me kind of suspicious, and I start to question the whole setting. "Where am I? Why are they here?" And I become lucid.

Excited I run over to my three friends: "Hey guys! Guess what? This is a dream! And I can prove it to you! I'm gonna run vertically up that wall all the way to the roof."
My friends don't say anything, they just smile back at me.

I run towards the mall determined to run up its wall, but realize there is a small wall, like a fence, in front of the main wall, and I start to question if I'll be able to run upwards on the small wall, shift gravity, then jump "downwards" to the other wall behind/underneath it, and then run up to the top.
I have shifted gravity in the dream world before, but it was not my intent when I did it then, it just happened.


So since I filled myself with doubt, that I should have learned not to do in this previous dream, I only ended up running halfway up the small wall, then doing a back flip off of it, and landing in a hunched position on the ground again. My friends start laughing at my attempt then they walk in to the mall.

FAIL!

Water park adrenaline rush

Category: Adrenaline
Hours of sleep: 8
Lucid:Yes

The setting was a water theme park. I was standing in line on top of a giant water slide, with a tiny rubber raft in my hands. The raft had room for 6 people, so me and a bunch of strangers jumped in when it was our turn. I was in front.

The raft started sliding down, first a tiny drop in the slide... then I saw it: a giant, almost vertical, long drop was coming up ahead. I braced myself on the slide, getting ready for the drop. I wasn't scared, I was more pumped with adrenaline and getting ready for the gut-clenching emotional rush you get when taking different theme park rides.

(On a side note: this dream was based on a personal memory from a family vacation to Cyprus, where we visited a water theme park, WaterWorld Waterpark, and took the exact ride, Drop To Atlantis, that is described and illustrated above.)

The raft went down the big drop, and my belly started to tingle and of course I had to let out a little scream - but midway in the drop I realized that I was strangely lacking the hard-core emotions I usually feel when taking rides like this. BAM - lucidity hits me. "This is a dream."

The raft comes down to a giant lake, and we are forced to paddle with our hands to get to the dock where we could get off the raft. I started paddling with my hands only to realize we weren't moving at all. Luckily I was a quick thinker, and I thought: "I have to work in rhythm with the dream figures behind me." So I listened for their strokes, and eventually I could hear an even paddling rhythm. I joined in - and the raft took off across the water, and we ended up crashing into the dock.

Who knew that much speed could come out of just paddling your hands.
The dream world can be a fun place!

Using objects to fly: The pillow

Category: Superpowers
Hours of sleep: 7
Lucid: No

I was standing on a platform in space with a big pillow in my arms.
Some army-looking guy walks up to me and says: "Okey. We're good to go."
I jump off the platform and start free-falling downwards.  I put the pillow in-between my legs and it takes off flying towards a giant building that looks a lot like the Colosseum in Rome. The pillow climbs over the top of the outer wall and immediately I am hit with loud roars from a cheering crowd.

Apparently I am some flying superstar acrobat guy and all the people are my screaming fans.
I twist, turn and do loops over the stadium and the crowd loves it.
I notice a giant pool at the bottom, so I stand up straight on the flying pillow and do a back flip off of it, before angling my body into a dive down into the water. The crowd cheers even more.

But right before I hit the water, I am struck with a hint of hesitation, and all my confidence evaporates and I hit the water with a big belly splash and I wake up.

Lesson learned: There is no room for hesitation or doubt in the dream world. If you go at things totally fearless and confident - your wish is your command.

Searching for deeper meanings

Category: Superpowers/self-research
Hours of sleep: 6
Lucid: Yes








I was running through gardens and leaping over fences in my mom's neighborhood.
With every leap I gained more altitude in the air. Eventually this nature-defying gravity loss made me realize I was dreaming.

Excited as usual I started flying around Superman-style, happy of being the master of my dream, but then I remember reading (in Waggoner's book) about characters in your dream and how you can ask them questions. Like what they represent in your dream.

I descended down to a group of people on the ground. When I landed I noticed it was my classmates from school. I went over to one of them, a guy, and asked: "Hey dude, what do you represent here?"

Expecting some amazing self-revealing, wake-up-callish, super-philosopical answer from the grand subconcious I eagerly listened to the response, determined to remember it so I could chart it down the second I woke up in bed. He casually turns his head to his right shoulder and says:
"I represent a porn site."

The answer was totally not what I had expected at all, and I couldn't do anything but burst out laughing, which set off my entire class around me giggling as well, and one by one they started revealing their grand "I represent"-secrets. One of the girls said: "I am the farter!" and then she started laughing hysterically. The other replies were somewhat similar, but I had stopped listening.

Shaking my head over the bizarre situation I was in - I woke up in bed.

Sledding

Category: Bizarre
Hours of sleep: 6
Lucid: No

I was walking upwards on a giant car-trafficked bridge talking on the cell phone with my dad who was in his boat in the water down below. I agreed I would meet him when I got to the bottom of the bridge.

As I got over the top of the bridge and over to the side that started to descend I noticed all the snow, and from out of nowhere I pulled out a sled and started sledding down the bridge, swooshing back and forth in-between cars on the four-lane bridge gaining more and more speed the further down I came and without any fear of being hit by all the cars.

On a hill above I noticed a colleague of mine.
I called out her name and she turned around saying:
"YEAH! GO MIKAEL GO!"
I let out a scream of joy and continued down the bridge.
The dream ends.

Animorphing

Category: Superpowers
Hours of sleep: 4
Lucid: Yes

Me and a friend walked into this huge, under construction, house that was being built right next to a steep mountain. We went to the top floor of the house to see if we could get closer to the mountain top.

The top of the house was all covered in glass, but with some wooden beams here and there.
Outside one of of the windows we could see an old scaffolding which lead to a narrow run-down wooden bridge that seemed to lead to the top of the mountain.
And for some reason lucidity hit me. "I'm dreaming!"

"How the heck are we going to get up there?" my friend asked.
With my brand new lucid confidence, I tell him: "Watch this!"


I rip a big chunk of wood out of one of the heavy beams carrying the roof. I start dashing towards the window. I throw the heavy piece of wood at the window, making it shatter into a thousand pieces, and as I jump through the window I morph myself into a black panther and start dashing across the wooden scaffolding and on to the narrow wooden bridge.

The bridge starts to shake, crack and give in to my weight and I start to feel that I won't make it to the top in time. I focus more and more on my fear of the bridge collapsing and the cracking sound gets louder and louder.

Yet again, I remember something from Waggoners book (mentioned in the previous post) about focusing on reaching your intended destination when traveling in the dream space, and not the struggles you may encounter on your way there, because that will only fuel that concern to make it even worse.

So I lift my panther head towards the top of the mountain where the bridge ends and I notice my paws are increasing in pace and I'm gaining an enormous amount of speed. I can sense that the bridge is starting to collapse behind me, but I am totally confident that I will make it in time.

And finally, I am at the top, feeling pretty good about how I managed to trick my dream with my own mind set, and how I managed to turn myself into a beast.

Here's a video from the online role-playing game World of Warcraft, that shows the transformation I made when I jumped through the window.



FAST FORWARD TO 1 M & 15 S.

Back in the womb?

Category: Bizarre
Hours of sleep: 2
Lucid: YES

Before I start telling about the dream I want to share something quick:
I started reading Robert Waggoner's book 'Lucid Dreaming - Gateway to the Inner Self' yesterday before I went to bed.

In the first chapter he tells about his first lucid dream experiences, and I pick up another trick for checking if you are dreaming.
Before you go to bed you study your hands, and do a little mantra for yourself about how you will check your hands the next time you (i. e.) open your eyes. You say this mantra over and over again until you are too tired to do it anymore, then you lay down and go to sleep.

I'm on this giant old pirate-looking ship and huge waves are starting to come over the side of the boat.
One of the waves knock me off my feet and I slip'n'slide down the deck of the boat and fall down a hatch to the storage room inside the boat. Water keeps pouring in and I am bashed down into a corner.

I try to fight my way up to the upper deck again but the force of the incoming waves are keeping me pinned to a wall until I'm totally submerged in water. It gets dark and the waves are twirling my body in all directions until I eventually lose my orientation of what is up and what is down. Just as my fear of drowning starts to kick in - I have a slight tick in my thought process that says: "Look at your hands!"

So I do and I am amazed at what happens next.

The noise from the waves cease to drown my hearing. The water starts to feel warm, and the darkness turns into a dark red/pink atmosphere. I no longer need to hold my breath. It feels like I'm floating and I feel incredibly safe.

I look at my hands...
They are tiny. Tiny and pink. I study them for a while as I start to wonder about my whereabouts.

Someone grabs my arm and yanks me out of the liquid space, and suddenly I am flying across a dance studio at school and one of my teachers are saying: "You can fly! You can fly!"
And my classmates are applauding my supernatural abilities. I am still aware that I am dreaming, so I keep flying around in the room until I eventually wake up.

Awake in my bed, with my notebook next to me, I eagerly start to chart down what I had just experienced. As I write down my description of the "liquid space", I realize it's closely familiar to a fetus's environment during a woman's pregnancy...

Then I start to wonder if it had been a product of my imagination... or my memory.

A quick Google search tells me that memory doesn't start to develop until you are born... but how awesome would it be if that fact is false?

The evil bird

Category: Bizarre
Hours of sleep: 8
Lucid: No

I'm on a forest path. Everything seems peaceful and quiet until a bird comes swooping down and starts pecking away at me. I grab it with one arm and I am surprised at how incredibly strong this bird is.

I try to hit it with my free hand, but I seem to have no strength in that arm.
I run over to a giant flat rock right off the path and I start bashing the bird against the rock until it's flat like a pancake. When I release the grip and start to back away from the now, presumably, dead bird, I can see it starts to puff itself up again as it starts to flicker with its wings.

I run deep into the forest and hide underneath a bush...
... and that's where the dream of the evil bird ends.

Controlling nature

Category: Nightmare turns good
Hours of sleep: 7.5
Lucid: Yes!

I walk into a house, and apparently this is where I live, and it' nighttime. I notice that a balcony door is open, and I get struck with a feeling that there is a burglar in the house. I try walking over to an alarm box mounted on the wall to try and call for help, but it's not working. Scared I close my eyes and crouch down in a corner... then somehow I realize I am just dreaming. When I open my eyes I see a dark shadowy figure standing above me.

Instead of freaking out and making this nightmare worse, I pretend to have a romantic connection to this burglar (befriending your nightmare will release all your fears, and the nightmare will turn itself into something pleasant. Read about it here).
The burglar smiles, takes my hand and leads me out into the garden of the house... while walking in the garden I see a giant moon-lit bird up in the sky. I take it as an omen as of what my next move should be.

I turn to the burglar, I tell him goodbye, then I leap from the ground and take off flying through and over the woods.

It is still night-time when I approach this massive snowy mountain valley with a huge frozen lake in the middle. The sight is so grey and cold... and quite depressive.
I call out to the part of my brain that is creating this visual world: "Give me sunshine!"
... It's quiet for a couple of seconds while I'm hovering mid-air... and then the amazing thing happens.



A sun starts to rise in the east. I see rays of light start to dance over the landscape as daylight breaks through the gloom more and more.
As the sun gets higher, the lake starts to melt into vivid bluegreen water, the mountainside blossoms at an enormous pace, and the sky turns bright blue without a single sky on it. It is a magnificent sight - and the colors are amazingly strong.

I fly over the lake, high on joy, high on life, and impressed at what my mind has created.

"Give me sunshine!" In all aspects. :)

Stable lucidity

Category: Ordinary
Hours of sleep: 8
Lucid: YES!

So I was walking through something that seemed like a student campus.
I felt a bit lost, because I didn't recognize any of the buildings - so I looked around for a sign somewhere and I saw a street sign.
Unfortunately it didn't help to clear up my situation, so I got a little suspicious.
I turned my head away from the street sign and then back again - and sure enough - the street sign had changed and was now flagging a different street name. I had performed a dream check* - and it worked out perfectly - I became lucid.

Instead of going into a hysteric/happy/excited mode that I usually go into when I feel the sensation of becoming lucid - I decide to take it slow, just relax and enjoy a little stroll around in my dream world with a clear conscious lucid mind.

I walk into a mall where I see some people and a bunch of different stores. While walking past all the stores I am amazed at how long I am able to stay lucid and instead of just enjoying it more I decide to see how much I can push the stability of this lucid dream.

I start doing something I've never done before; I actually start moving my gaze in extreme directions - I look up as hard as I can - down as hard as I can - and so on and so forth. Usually, in the dream world, I just move my head around to look around.

I of course end up waking myself up from the strain of the eye movement in the dream world, so I guess it was a failed experiment and I won't do it again!

Can't wait for the next lucid dream - wonder what I'll do then? ...

*dream check: a dream check is a way to check if you're in the "stable real life" or in a dream world. In this instance I read some letters on a street sign twice, and they didn't match the second time. In the dream world, nothing is stable. As soon as you turn your back on something it will be different when you look at it again. You can also do this by checking the time on a clock or a watch for example. Or looking at a person twice.

Déjà vu

Category: Ordinary
Hours of sleep: 8

Lucid: No

I was standing in front of a house - just observing it because it was pretty nice house I tell yah!

Suddenly I get hit by a sense of déjà vu:
"I've seen this house before!"
I say to the mysterious person who just materialized next to me out of nowhere.
"Oh really?"
"Yeah... it's pretty!"

Then I wake up in my bed and chart down the experience, pleased with noticing that you can have a sense of déjà vu in the dream world as well.

The stunning view from a creative mind

Category: Visually breathtaking
Hours of sleep: 8
Lucid: No

I was standing on the river bank as my vision was coming to.
A bright red light nearly blinded my eyes and I had to cover them with my hands.
It was the sun coming up from across the field - the bright red light of dawn.

As my eyes adjusted to the new light I noticed something even more incredible.
Instead of seeing the tiny moon, like we are used to, up in the sky - there was another huuuuge planet floating in the air, and it looked quite similar like earth, except it had a lot more oceans to it and more small patches of earth.  Since the planet was so close to Earth, I could see all the details - from mountain ranges, jungles, and deserts. The sight was so spectacular that I just had to stand there and smile in total awe.

The greatness of the planet, the level of details and the hot red sun that filled the setting with warm light made me realize how amazing your imagination can be in your dreams.

Escaping villains

Category: Superpowers
Hours of sleep: 8
Lucid: Half-way

So there I was - Batman himself - battling against Poison Ivy.
Eventually she became too powerful for me to handle so I started running.
"Where are you running to Joker?"
Baffled I looked at myself and realized that I had just turned into The Joker.

I saw some green vines and lianas crawling towards me so I picked up the running again until I reached a waterfall by a river, I start dashing harder and take a leap of faith down the waterfall and just before I'm about to hit the water I spread out my arms and I start floating along the water instead before re-adjusting my course upwards and start flying over the trees. Filled with a victorious feeling I hear the return of "Bohemian Rhapsody" (Bohemian Flying - apparently I have a thing about flying to this song) and I celebrate my escape from Poison Ivy.

As I land on the river bank I get a feeling of waking up - so I close my eyes and let the feeling of awaking consume me - when I open my eyes again my vision is all blurry, and I think to myself that it is only an effect from being asleep for so long, but without realizing it then I have awoken into a new dream...

The paralyzing deep sleep

Category: Bizarre
Lucid: No

I did a little experiment before I went to bed the other day.
I tried mashing together all available relaxation options I had at home.

- I lighted some candles, one of them scented
- I put my nail mat on my bed and lied down on my back
- I put my feet up on two huge pillows at the end of my bed
- I put on my headphones and turned on an app on my iPhone which sends binaural beats into your ears to affect your state of mind. (Read more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binaural_beats )

The result?

I fell fast asleep... a really really deep one.
I started dreaming about meeting one of my teachers at school, and suddenly the whole dream world went pitch dark and I could only hear the voice of my teacher telling us we had to stick together to be able to get out of this darkness.
My legs felt weak and I had problems walking, my head felt like it had tripled in weight and I started having trouble breathing... while stumbling over a rocky landscape, gasping for air and feeling blind I suddenly woke up in my bed again.

I was still wearing my headphones, still lying on the nail mat and there was still a candle left that hadn't burned out. I took the headphones off, removed the nail mat, blew out the final candle, and went back to bed.

I returned to the same dream almost - still having the physical sensations that I had earlier.
It started to get harder and harder to breathe, until I eventually started choking and woke up in my bed again. My pillow was covered in drool and I was breathing heavily.

Apparently I had been relaxing to deep when falling asleep and it had paralyzed my entire physical system somehow.

Eyes in the sky

Category: Bizarre
Hours of sleep: 7
Lucid: No

I had a bird's eye view of a huge battlefield.
(Kind of like the Command & Conquer series illustrated below.)

I was one of the soldiers on the ground.
I was moving around like normal, thinking like normal, and talking to others like normal - but still observing everything from a bird's eye view in the sky.

When I woke up in real life - I realized the strangeness of what had just happened.
Observing and controlling your body like normal, but from a distance.

Like I plucked my eyes out and stuck them to a cloud in the sky.

Comic (dream) relief!

Category: Ordinary

Hours of sleep: 7

Lucid: Yes

I was at a friends house back in my home town. Apparently I was "aware enough" during this dream so I realized I was dreaming and became lucid.

While figuring out what to do about this dream freedom that was just delivered to me, there's a heavy knocking on the front door of the house I was in. I tried ignoring it, but someone on the other side kept knocking. Annoyed I walked over to the door and yanked it open.

On the other side was a bunch of drunk football fans cheering: "HEEEEY! Time for an after party!"
Annoyed I snarled at them and slammed the door shut
- just before it closed the whole drunk gang, sighed heavily:
"Aaaaaaaw :( :( :( " and bowed down their heads like a bunch of little boys that didn't get what they want.

Alone on the other side of the, now closed, door, I started laughing at the comical sight of grown-up men sobbing.

Feels good when dreams can make you giggle!

So easily fooled (A dream within a dream)

Category: Ordinary
Hours of sleep: 7
Lucid: No

I was on a train - a train which insides looked like a house.
There was a living room, a bathroom, and a kitchen in it.

I walked into the kitchen because I was hungry - and I noticed a pancake frying in a pan, but no one else around - my dreamy self guessed that it was my dad making pancakes.

Then I woke up at my grandmother's house and walked out to her kitchen and my dad was making pancakes here as well, and he asked me if I had slept well, and I tell him about my "pancakes on a train" dream.

Then I wake up AGAIN - but this time in real life.
I give myself a little mental slap in the face for not noticing, first of all, that I was on a very weird train in the first dream, and second of all, that I managed to fool myself thinking I had awoken into real life when it was in fact a dream that I could have potentially gained lucidity in.

Oh well - next time!

The limitless dreamworld

Category: Ordinary
Hours of sleep: 8
Lucid: No

I was back in my old hometown - and my whole class and two of my teachers at my school were there, and they demanded that their students were in good shape - so - we were ordered to go for a run.

I started dashing hard down the street, amazingly fast, trying to outrun everyone else. And the longer I ran the more I was surprised that I didn't feel fatigue at all. I was still pumped with energy, my pulse remained steady and my breathing was the same as if I was lying down on my couch.

That's what's so great about the dream world - it's totally stripped of the laws of nature and the boundaries of the physical body that we are used to in the real world. And when you become lucid you know you can take complete advantage of this "defect" - you can be your own superhero... or even better... be your own god!

Feeling in the dream world - feeling in the real world

Category: Ordinary
Hours of sleep: 8
Lucid: No

I was at a wedding reception and I was dancing with some other people out on the dance floor.
The newlyweds walked up to me and said they wanted to give me something - they gave me a ring and a bracelet. They said that they had worn these on their first date a few years back - and they wanted me to have them - as good luck charms for finding my own future spouse. I was so touched by this I started crying... or more sobbing... and then I woke up with a bittersweet feeling - one of sadness because I had just been crying - but also a good one because they had been so nice to me.

Anyways...
It's an interesting thing to experience - when your emotions in the dream world is carried with you into real life just as you awake - only to slowly evaporate as the seconds in wake life pass.

This is just another example about how active your body and mind is even tho' your body and mind is "sleeping" in the real world. If you get pain, or somebody hits you, in your shoulder your nerve system will respond in the real life - as if the brain can't distinguish the difference between "dream feel" and "real feel", but of course it can... or else everyone would be sleepwalking and doing exactly what they were doing in their dreams...

Examples:
- Let's say you are drowning. When you finally wake up from that nightmare - you will usually gasp for air the moment you wake up.

- Or you'll have a dream about having a killer on your heels and you will wake up with a slightly faster heart pace than you usually would.

- Or like when I have my lucid dreams - I sometimes get so excited - that I get over-filled with the famous "butterflies in my stomach"feeling so I wake myself up - still with the butterflies in my stomach.

The giant wolf

Category: Thriller

Hours of sleep: 8

Lucid: No

I was standing on the front lawn of a house. A girl was standing next to me and we were just talking. Suddenly her face turned white and she said we had to get into the house. She was staring at something behind me so I turned around.

Aabout a block away, a huge wolf was sitting on the sidewalk, just staring at us.

We started running towards the house - and so did the wolf - we got in just in time and the wolf started pacing impatiently in front of the door.

Grabbing a huge plate of left-over food we threw it out through the door, closed it, and then ran through the house and out the back door.

Teleporting and defying gravity (LUCID dream!)

Category: Superpowers
Hours of sleep: 8
Lucid: YES!

I was standing on a city beach - and I guess something about this scene made me realize I was in a dream.

When you become lucid in the dream world, you have two choices:
1) Take complete control of your dream completely and change everything about it
2) Go where the dream takes you, but knowing you have the ability to control it when needed/wanted.

So this time I decided to go with number 2 - just tag along with my imagination.

So I was standing on this beach - overlooking a Manhattanish city. I locked my eyes on the rooftop of a skyscraper far far away. I decided to try something I never had before. Usually I would just try to fly to the top of the building - today was a time to try something new.

I closed my eyes and imagined myself on top of the building - when I opened them again I was standing on the rooftop looking down at the beach far far away. I had teleported.

There was this crazy rich dude who apparently owned this rooftop or something and he was yelling at me to get the hell off his roof. He had some friends with him who were awkwardly by-standing this whole situation.
With a grin on my face I walked over to the ledge off the roof and said:
"Ok. I'll get off."

I made a giant leap for it and jumped off the rooftop, turned around in mid-air, and froze in the air, lingering for a moment in silence to feel the experience of being weightless.

"Hey, dude!" I said to the rich asshole, and made him turn around.
I gave him the finger and all of his friends started laughing - then I closed my eyes, tilted my head back and let myself fall down the side of the building until I crash-landed in a pool at street level.

Here, my school peers where throwing a party for me, and they asked me to tell the story about the girl who stole something from me.

Not knowing what they were talking about, I decided to use this situation to test my retorical skills in a dream. So I made up a story as I went along about how a girl stole my vagina and that's why I was a boy today. They laughed, we toasted and then I woke up.

Dream reruns!

Category: Supernatural
Hours of sleep: 8
Lucid: No

Yet again I had a dream like this one:
http://dream-b-log.blogspot.com/2010/08/disappointing-flexibility.html

When I was a kid they used to say: "If you dream the same dream twice - it will happen in real life!"
So I guess I'll just keep on stretching!

Where did my halo go?

Category: Action
Hours of sleep: 8
Lucid: No

Lately I've been having lots of dream about fighting against people... physically! And I've always been the goody-two-shoes kid, and I have never hit anyone in my life.

Last night I ran into the maid from Will and Grace, Rosario, and we started taking swings at each other. At one point she kicked me in the stomach and broke a couple of ribs - I replied by kicking her in the chest so she flew backwards. Enraged she ran towards me. I grabbed her wrist and broke it right off her arm. She started crying and ran away. Poor Rosie!

In another dream, the same night, I was on a huge cruise ship that was being invaded by NAVY Seal-looking guys armed with machine guns. I was armed with nothing but my hands - and in pure Matrix style I beat the crap out of the entire force.

Where is all this aggression coming from?

Altering physics (LUCID dream!)

Category: Superpowers
Hours of sleep: 6
Lucid: YES!

I was in the house where I grew up. Something made me suspicious about the whole thing being real life - primarily because the house I grew up in is not in family possession anymore.

A TV was on nearby and I did a dream check - I looked at the picture on the screen - turned away - and when I looked back it was completely different - I did this again - and the picture had changed totally. (The images had no connection to each other at all.)

In the amazement of realizing I was dreaming I started dashing out to the 2nd floor balcony of the house, grabbed the railing on the balcony and flipped myself over so I was hanging on the top of the railing, and pressing off with my feet on the lower part...  at this moment I made gravity shift... it was like the world flipped over from a vertical angle to a horizontal one and I lost connection with my feet to the railing and my lower body came down so I was just haning on to the railing with my hands - below me was only clear blue sky - I let go - and as I was falling gravity shifted back to normal and I landed on the lawn.

At this moment I started dashing at a super-high speed - and my amazement of being lucid did something to the lighting of the dream world - you know how dreams often are a bit dark and blurry?

But now, being in a lucid state, it was like someone turned on the lights and everything got brighter, and I could see clear colours, the texture of the grass, the birds in the sky - the feeling is so hard to describe - this was my world - my world created in my mind - with my rules - and I could do whatever I wanted to. It made me super excited! Like lucid dreams usually does!

I just kept on running and jumping at super speed and super height until the excitement woke me up at 4:30 in the morning in my boring dark bedroom in my real, not so boring, life.

Jack Frost ITH!

Category: Bizarre
Hours of sleep: 8

Lucid: No

I was in a house with some friends, when all of a sudden bullets started crashing through the window and we all had to take cover on the floor. Through the window came a bunch of snowmen with rifles in their hands - ready to kill!

An instinct in me told me to fight these snowmen off - so I started "kung fu'ing" with one of the snowmen and I managed to grab the rifle from him and started firing off at all of the intruders. As I hit them in the head they exploded into yellow water - maybe it was urine - it was gross either way.

A little girl came in and told us that the source of the evil snowmen was located in her backyard - so we all went there to try and shut the whole thing down - but when we got there the dream went in another direction that I can't make out clearly - something about cuddling with a bulldog, and having an argument with someone about something - it's a bit fussy!

Dawn of the naked

Category: Bizarre
Hours of sleep: 5
Lucid: No

Me and a friend entered a dark gloomy house. In the room next door there was a spiral staircase leading down to the basement. I went down first, and she followed me, I stopped at the bottom of the staircase and peered out into the basement. I said I didn't want to go further - she sighed and pushed me aside and started walking into the dark hallway.

A shimmer of light appeared at the end of the hallway - and I gasped at what I saw:
"COME BACK! NAKED OLD GUYS!"
A parade of chubby naked men were running towards us, and scared to death I started dashing up the staircase again, with my friend in my heels - the staircase seem to go on and on and we never got to the top - eventually, in the realization of what we were running from, we both started laughing while climbing the stairscase - then I woke up at 3 A.M. in the morning.