Nightmare up in smoke

Category: Nightmare
Lucid: Yes

I was in a pitch black room. I could hear voices and someone breathing down my neck. Desperately I fumbled around in the dark, looking for a door handle as my fear elevated with every second.

I recognized the touch of the room as the locker room at my school, so I managed to calm myself down and reason to where the door handle might be. Eventually I found it, yanked the door open, welcoming the bright light from the hallway outside, and started dashing down the hallway away from my pursuers.

This light seemed to give me a moment of clarity to realize I was dreaming. So I became lucid.

I stopped dead in my tracks and did a one-eighty. I noticed two monsters scrambling towards me. I started to sing a tune consisting only of the words "la la la". They stopped and tilted their heads to the side, like a dog discovering something unknown. I kept on singing while skipping towards them.

When I came face to face to them I smiled and said 'Hello'.
They evaporated into smoke, and I was alone in the bright hallway.

Pee worry

Category: Bizarre
Hours of sleep: 7
Lucid: Yes

I woke up in my bed (WPR - waking physical reality) and I felt the need to go pee, but I was too tired to even bother getting up - so I fell asleep again.

In the dream that followed I instantly became lucid ("I am dreaming") because the urge to go to the bathroom had followed me into my dream world and was now haunting my dream emotions.

I walked over to a sink in the dream and started to "relieve my pressure" and while doing this I started to worry: "So I had to pee when I woke up in my bed early? Now in the dream world I am peeing in a sink. Could there be a risk that I am wetting my own bed as we speak? Or maybe I've been doing some sleep walking and I'm standing in my own bathroom peeing in the sink in synchronization with this dream? I have to wake up!"

I focused all my thoughts on waking up - and when I did - I was relieved to see my bed was still dry and the feeling of having to pee was still there. Not wanting to repeat my mistake, I got up and went to the bathroom.

Reach for the sky

4:19 AM - Time of dream recording

Category: Superpowers
Hours of sleep: 5
Lucid: Yes

I was in a camper, and somehow I found this odd and became lucid. "I am dreaming!"

Not remembering any of the special projects I wanted to try out the next time I had a lucid dream I just ran out in the streets (in the dream) and started skipping around while humming a tune of my own.

Then I remembered reading about Robert Waggoner's attempt to fly as high as possible in his dream, like if he was trying to visit a god in "heaven".

So I gave it a go - to see how far up I was able to fly. Usually I just fly across lakes, and over rooftops - never straight up. I saw a bright light behind some clouds, which I figured was the sun, and started flying towards it while spinning around to gain a deeper lucidity. The flight started off pretty well, but suddenly the updrift stopped and I was caught mid-air before dropping down again. Like a jetpack that ran out of fuel. This probably happened because I was doubting my own abilities for this to be a successful attempt.

Luckily I landed on a roof. There I decided to fly up to the higher rooftops one by one until I got to the top one and give another attempt at flying up and through the clouds, but once I landed on one roof there was always a taller building somewhere else. So I went to rooftop to rooftop until my dream eventually collapsed without warning.

Testing the spinning technique

Category: Experiment
Hours of sleep: 1.5
Lucid: Yes

I was sitting down on a couch having coffee with unknown people. The couch was sitting right outside the walls of the church my parents got married in. I found this fairly odd - so I become lucid. "This is a dream!"

It had been a while since my lucid dream and I had just got done reading Waggoner's book about lucid dreaming so I had a million things I wanted to try out.

The first thing that came to mind was trying to make my lucid dream more stable by spinning around (a technique first mentioned by Dr. Stephen LaBerge to prevent a lucid dream from collapsing).
So I started to spin. The scenery started to get all blurry, like it does if you spin really fast in waking physical reality, and I started to fear that I might actually be waking myself up doing this. So I stopped spinning, but the spinning blur didn't stop at first, it just kept on going to the left like if someone was smearing out the paint on a canvas. A blur came in from the opposite side and the two blurs collided, making a huge sonic-sci-fi-white-noise that is impossible to describe further as a lightning bolt flashed down in the middle and merged the two blurs together.

To my surprise I was still in the same dream, outside the church, with the same people. Only this time all details of the scenery was more vivid, and the dream characters sentences made a lot more sense - previously it was more gibberish.

Super-excited I yelled to the dream characters:
"Hey guys! I'm dreaming. This is a lucid dream!"
They just looked at me oddly.
"I can prove it!" So I started doing incredibly high jumps in front of them, and one of them, a woman yelled out:
"Oh wow! It's true! *turning to her male partner* Honey it's true! Now all your problems are fixed."
Her male partner looks at me with evil jealous eyes... probably pissed off because I impressed his girlfriend.

My own excitement of being this lucid and jumping around like an idiot blinds me to the fact that my dream is collapsing - and bam - I'm awake in bed.

Hopefully I'll be more calm next time - and now - while I'm awake, I'll make a better plan of what to do next time.

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.