What Is Real? by HKEY_Current _User
October 19th, 2007 11:24 AMStill though, I feel like I can tell the real world from the dream world, like there's all these tell-tale signs even if I can't quite put my finger on them, and so I've never really questioned my wakefulness. For this task, I've planned to do just that. For a few days before I saw that clip, I already tried a few reality checks. I've pulled my fingers to make sure that they don't stretch, and I've looked at clocks. But I didn't really consider the possibility that I was dreaming. In addition to trying to change my mindset, I've switched reality checks. Starting today, or maybe yesterday, I've started flipping light switches, to see that they still work. So far, so good.
I'll probably have something else to say after tonight.
I had dreams, but I didn't know enough to do the light switch thing. I'm not sure there were any lights. A few times when I woke up, I tried to figure out how I knew it was a dream, and I decided to try spinning. (The article linked in the instructions said that helped prolong dreams.) I don't think it worked, or maybe I wasn't able to try it. I woke up today, and played with some lights, and thought about how I always wake up in the same bed, wondering if that was the problem.
I dreamt of a girl I knew from high school, and a huge assembly of people debating something. Like a town meeting.
This morning, the 20th of October, I had a dream of drinking one final beer that pushed me over the edge and had me vomit about eight stomachs worth of food. I remember seeing a whole loaf of bread in there. I also drove down a very impractical road. There were sharp turns running steeply downhill, and when you got to the bottom, it was a complete U-turn to merge into traffic. And once you got there, it was bumper to bumper. Car theft was a problem, because people would just abandon their cars and sit on the hill as they waited for things to clear up. There were nearly as many crowded on the hills as there were cars.
Anyway, that's at least two days of reality checks.
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Okay, I think I could probably try to draw some of what I remember seeing, but it'll be pretty rough. Alternatively, I think I could photographically demonstrate the process of reality checks.
I'll be interested to know (assuming you keep up the reality checks) which ones you found most effective at getting you into the lucid dreaming state. I haven't yet tried myself, but it certainly sounds interesting.
Well, last night I had a great opportunity to lucid dream, and I didn't even realize it. I was in a library. I had a book, whose text must have changed three times, and the card I was filling out for it probably changed four times. The book was written by Dr. Cox's actor, except with a different name, and the fact that he moonlighted as an actual doctor and a top physicist advancing string theory. This text was meant to guide a person from classical physics to modern physics, and its cover bore a beautiful design: longhand writing scattered at random with little streaks of ink of a cream-colored page, but with a texture that you can kind of scrape with your fingernails to get a sound like scraping teeth over a comb, like I'm doing right now. I found it while I was trying to help this kid with his research project, but now he kept bothering me and distracting me and I didn't care about his stupid problems. The first time I opened this book, there was more longhand writing on the top half of the page, like on the cover, and on the bottom half was the actual text. The second time, the entire book seemed to be in French, which I have never really tried to learn except for basic pronunciation which was hard enough. The third time the page was full of English, with none of the design flourishes. There was an anecdote describing people who first hear an academic term when they're being told to forget it. I do not remember the term, or I would've tried to look it up, but I think it was in French or something, too. It was the name of a document; I know that much. Anyway, this final time that I looked at it, I was standing at the checkout counter, and the man handed me a card to fill out, which was really a stack of sticky notes with carbon paper. This became very confused. I think the first time I looked at it, there was carbon paper on the top, and the second time, it was just an exposed note, with the name of the last person to check out a book written at the top. I was trying to write under the it (the last thing written, not the carbon paper), but I was told to provide the author's name and the ID number. I held the book down low, on my left side, with the card on the right, or maybe I just kept the book on the floor. I'm left-handed. I looked at the book and back at the card several times to copy the name down, rather than just setting them side by side, even though I might have thought about it.
I must have had ten opportunities right there to become lucid. Before this dream, I made a decision not to go somewhere based on the belief that I was awake. I woke up a little later and realized that I could've gone wherever I wanted. I'm pretty sure I had full control, but I wasn't lucid.
I'm pretty sure I had a lucid dream last night. I was walking around wearing sandals, and my toes were getting kind of irritated. I looked down, and I had cut the tips off of my toes, and stuff was scratching the holes and getting stuck. It turns out I had done it so I could wear those shoes, which were just a little too short for me, but that I really wanted to wear. I wished I could go back in time and undo that, but then my toes came back. So I looked down, and willed "toes, no toes, toes..." for a little while, just to play with it. I think I might have tried flying, but my dream was hours ago and I didn't have a chance to write it down.
After that stuff, I tried making myself invisible. I wasn't invisible to myself, just to everyone else. I think I had some code sentence I used to do it, instead of just visualizing, something like "you can't see me." It was something really simple like that. I went into a meeting with someone, and he was talking to me. Everyone thought he had an imaginary friend. I let myself appear to each of them in turn, and you could see the light go on in their faces when they finally saw me.
I planned to do some other things, but there was no time. I forget if I decided on what to do while I was dreaming or in the brief moments when I was awake. I might not have been exactly aware that I was dreaming either, but maybe just kind of aware that I could do anything I wanted.
can you aesthematically represent any of your experiences while (attempting) having lucid dreams?