Dreamland

Lucid Dreaming

Last week a reviewer of this journal asked if I had heard of Lucid Dreaming: The act of becoming aware you are dreaming while you are dreaming, and taking control of your dream, "steering" it wherever you wanted to go. I had read of this a while back, bt never successfully pursued it.

The other day, while online killing time during lunch break, I decided to look into it further. I found a site, www.dreamviews.com , that went into quite a bit of detail on how to induce lucid dreams, and techniques to prevent you from waking up immediately once you achieve lucidity (one of the biggest obstacles lucid dreamers face). Interesting info, but they said you needed to keep a daily dream journal and get to a point where you could remember 2 or 3 dreams a night before you should expect to be successful at lucid dreaming. I haven't been keeping up with my dream journal very well, and many of my dreams have been kinda dreary lately, so I figured I wouldn't do anything with this info right now.

Much to my surprise, I achieved lucidiy (albeit for a brief time only) in a dream last night! I'll chronicle the series of events here, since sleep and wake intervals are said to be significant in achieving this state. This dream is odd, and not necessarily as interesting as the ones I typically record here, but since it is my first lucid one, I wanted to include it.

I fell asleep on my recliner while reading at about 9:30 PM (somewhat typical for me) and woke about 11:30. I got up and went to bed, but had difficulty falling asleep again. Looking over at my alarm clock, I saw that it was almost 12:30, I had been lying there an hour. I remembered reading on the lucid dreaming site how one of the ways some people induced lucid dreams was to wake up after sleeping a few hours, then stay awake for an hour before going back to sleep. I thought as I finally drifted off "It'd be funny if I had a lucid dream now."

Dream sequence: I'm in a large grey dusty warehouse, buying a tv antenna in a large cardboard box, from a guy I worked with a few years ago...

The dream shifts and I'm at my uncle's Garage. I learned to work on cars there as a teenager, years ago (it was my first job). I see my uncle talking to one of the mechanics: "It's too bad about my nephew. He complained about having indigestion just before going out to the truck to go on a road call. I wasn't paying attention, didn't see that the truck never left the lot. I went outside an hour later and saw the truck still parked. He was sittin' behind the wheel, dead as a doornail. Heart attack got him, poor kid..."

I walk up to my uncle and shout: "That wasn't me, it was you! You died of a heart attack in that truck! And that was years ago!" (This is true in real life.)

My uncle doesn't answer, he can't hear me, and neither can anyone else in the Garage. They continue to talk as if I weren't there. I realize I'm a ghost to them, maybe I'm in an alternate reality where I really was the one who died. I grab a key off the wall and start up a blue tractor that's in the Garage. I back it out of the bay, and the mechanics start freaking out! They can't see me driving it because I'm a ghost, they think the tractor is possessed...

The dream shifts and I'm back in the warehouse. I'm gliding along the floor down a long grey dusty aisle. It's as if I'm sitting on a sled, but there's nothing under me. I'm holding onto a thin rope, like a clothesline, that's pulling me along. But there's nothing on the front of the rope to pull me, it just fades into nothing.

My cellphone rings. I look at the number to see who it is before I answer. The numbers are all scrambled, some are letters, some look like Japanese characters. I remember reading on the lucid dreaming site about looking for signs to make you aware when you're in a dream. One sign is how numbers on clocks and things get scrambled. Another sign is seeing people that you know are dead in real life. I immediately realize: "Hey, funny numbers, dead uncle, I must be dreaming!" and I decide to see if I can control the dream.

The first thing I think about is conjuring up a harem of sexy ladies. But I can't make them materialize, and the effort of attempting this is causing the dream to fade. (I realize then that I should have started with something easier as a first attempt at control) I remember reading one technique to use to remain in the dreamstate is to "spin". But I realize that the dream will be gone before I can stop gliding and stand up. So instead I decide to try to change something simple in the dream before it fades, just to see if I can do it. I concentrate on adding some color to the drab grey warehouse I'm in. Immediately, a pile of pastel colored veils appears next to me on he floor of the warehouse, the clothes the harem girls would have been wearing if I had been able to conjure them up! The dream starts to "break up", looking pixellated like bad satellite TV reception, and then it's gone and I'm awake.

I look over at the alarm clock, it's 1:40 AM.