Welcome class members! This conversation is a place to post the lucid dreams you have during (and after) your time in this class. Also, as Stephen said, those "near misses", dreams with clues that you want to recognize as a dream next time.

There's a third kind of dream that I think would also be fun to see here, even when it's an NLD (non-lucid dream). A lot of us will experience dreams over the next several weeks which incorporate class members, or messages from the class or from our reading. Two examples that have really happened in dreams: An annoying, persistent class member shows up with a big flashing sign saying "Do a reality test now!" The dreamer understands that yes it is important to do reality tests often, but she wants him to leave her alone right now--she's trying to listen to what Stephen is saying!

Right after hearing Stephen say in class that "we can't control light levels in dreams" (I'm not saying he said it that definitely, but that's how I heard it), being the naturally contrary person that I am, I went home and had a dream where I was manipulating a complicated series of switches that turned various lights on and off.So let's hear them, folks. What's going on in your dream world?

[Guidelines: Feel free to do a certain amount of discussion of each other's dreams, especially asking questions and sharing "me-too" experiences. But please be respectful and refrain from "interpreting" each other's dreams. (Later in class Stephen will probably discuss the limited value of even self-interpretation of dreams, much less interpretation-by-others.) Discussion on other topics should still go under the "Welcome, let's get started" conversation.]

Alright, here's one to kick things off with. I've never really had a completely lucid dream before, but this is the one that's come the closest. It happened a few days after our first class.

The setting is a New York street, set in the Stanford foothills. I'm riding down the street on a large, blue fish that's "swimming" through the air a few feet off the ground. I'm following a co-worker, who's ahead of me on some sort of dolphin-SUV thing. I'm starting to lag behind because my fish is thrashing his tail so much I can barely hold on. Now, I don't know what triggers this next bit, because I don't consciously think "I am dreaming now." But somehow I realize "hey, I can change how this all works. I can choose to just float along gently with none of this thrashing business." So I choose to do that and find that my fish could swim/fly beautifully without moving his tail at all. I catch up with my co-worker and we arrive safely at our destination.

The weird bit is what I think I remember from once we arrived at wherever it was we were going. It's sort of fuzzy, but I have a feeling that I knew I could become lucid at that point, but I was worried that I might wake up and lose it entirely. So I think I deliberately stayed in (or went back to) regular dream mode for the rest of the night.

So my questions from this: Does becoming lucid in a dream feel like waking up? Or does it just feel like becoming more aware of your surroundings, like the exercise in class yesterday? Is waking up something you have to be careful not to do when you become lucid, or is it not likely to happen because you're really in deep sleep? Are there tricks for avoiding it?

-Graham

This isn't quite a near miss, but a question.

My dreams are rarely such that I am actually present within them and experiencing the dream world with a perspective as if I were having a particular experience in reality. Usually, it's more like I'm watching a play or a TV program/film, or browsing the Internet, and I'm a character in it, if I appear at all. My few lucid dreams are mostly like this in the last few years too. I'm wondering if this is so for other people? Is this a help or a hinderance to having lucid dreams? Also, I'm wondering if this type of dream might result because, in fact, I spend maybe 80% of my life watching a screen of some sort, namely at work using a computer, so, in fact, the dream world is mirroring what my waking life is like?

jak

Hey Jak,

I know those TV-like experiences of dreams, some even resemble computer-games with several levels. I dream of the x-files-characters quite frequently and I can never tell if what I dreamt happened on a tv-show or if i "really" was part of it. I think this is neither a help nor a hinderance for your lucid dreaming. I also think you already gave yourself the answer why you're having those dreams, for in my experience, dreaming puts you very often in every day situations. It could be a good idea to use your capability of lucid dreaming to change this perspective.

Christina

dream reports: 04/16/04 near miss: I am on the Canary islands, Gran Canaria, to be more specific (1999 I lived there for half a year just as I am living here for half a year now) and I don't know why I'm there. My boyfriend is with me and he also hasn't any explanation but when I ask him if our flight back to Germany is still from San Francisco, he says, it is. I am worried about the money, I am sad, that we already left the bay area and I don't understand why we are there (I tried to remind myself before going to bed, to make a reality check, every time I am back in Germany or any other place than California). I hear a noise from the next room. I step into that room and see a door in the ground. I open it and find a hand, coming out of a pile of old stuff, mainly furniture. I ask the hand: "Who are you, what are you doing in our flat?". He answers: "Oh, don't worry 'bout me, I'm gonna leave soon, I'm expected at a party". I stare at the hand, not knowing what to do with it. "First I have to see you. This is my flat", I'm saying, trying to pull it out. It doesn't come out, so I start to dig out the old stuff, to get a more complete picture of him. I work my way down to the arm. It is quite an effort and I feel pretty uncomfortable as that arm is grabbing me, so I finally let it be and stop digging deeper. If that wasn't a near miss I don't know what would be ;-) 04/19/04 class dream piece: I am in the classroom in Stanford and I try to write down on the blackboard that I need a ride. Somehow it doesn't work out. Mister LaBerge comes in and tells me to sit down. He says: "You come here by train and I drive you back. We will have time to talk some more than". I am pretty stunned and not sure if this is ok, because I guess that he is for sure not living any place near Piedmont. :-)

Christina

continuing dream reports, 2 very short lucid dreams, 04/19/04, around 9AM (I must have been very hungry ;-)): I walk into a bakery in Germany. There's an old man behind the counter. I am looking at the prices of the chocolate easter bunnies. I realize, they are all made of chocolate in a red covering and two of them shall cost 12 Euros (about 14$). I decide not to buy anything and I turn to go. the old man starts speaking to me. He talks of professions today, of the choices, young people have to take and of consciousnes. Suddenly we are sitting in a car. I am the driver and he's in the backseat. I tell him, not all professions are boring and alike, as he claimed them to be. I start talking about lucid dreaming and of how much I want to work in this field after finishing my studies. While I'm speaking I look at the car-clock. I can't really read the time it shows. I try again and another time and my vision is still unclear. So I'm dreaming right now! I turn around to the old man, tell him, that we are in a dream state right now and that he should keep talking to me, otherwise it could easily happen that he disappears while I'm driving. My intention is, to ask him about himself. To find out, if he's aware of being a dream character, if he possibly claims he isn't. I think I wake up but I experience several false and true, but very short awakenings. Each time I feel myself in bed, I fall back into sleep within seconds. I don't move. I am in bed with my boyfriend, just after waking up. We want to have sex but he gets up and goes to the bathroom. I put on two cds, the first one I don't remember but the second one is by stuart Davis. The first one is over and I'm still waiting in bed. When the second one doesn't start, I get up and walk around. The room is unfamiliar but I don't recognize it. I find something to eat, something sweet. I'm really hungry and I grab a pack of... what's that name? I can't read it at first glance and when I look a second time, there is just nothing in my hand. I see nothing anymore (reoccurring: not even my hand) but I feel the pack in my hand. So I'm dreaming, right? I try not to get confused by the strange double optic I suddenly see clearly, caused by the fact that I'm sleeping with my eyes open and that the visual input from the outside finds its way into my dreams. This is one of the points that can easily kick me out of my lds, when they occur in the morning, being aware of my body, lying in bed, sleeping with open eyes. I hold on to the pack of sweets and I just grab a handful of...? and put it in my mouth. I chew on it, still not having a clue of what it is and it tastes wonderful and real. It tastes so good that I eat the whole pack at once. Then I wake up... or didn't I?

Christina

Unfortunately I had no lucid dreams this week, but have had some very vivid nightmares that leave me a bit frightened. I recently started a new job so I have had many dreams about work recently, mostly about new people I am meeting. But honestly,the majority of the nights I have been so exhausted I have not been able to really concentrate on dreaming or remembering them...hopefully more progress next week!

I remember going through about three different dream sequences last night, all of which contained plenty of clues that I was dreaming, of course, though I didn't catch any of them until the end of the last one. I was walking home at the end of the dream, across a large field. I don't know what tipped me off -- all the people in Renn Faire outfits, or the giant green statue pulling the bell in a clock tower, or what -- but somehow I realized I must be dreaming. As soon as I thought that I looked around myself in excitement, but moved so fast that I woke myself up.

My alarm went off about then so I got up, but then decided to put it on snooze and lay back down. As I was dozing off again, my bed started shaking. Not like an earthquake, but more like one of those vibrating alarm clocks, only big enough to shake my entire bed. That seemed pretty strange, plus it occurred to me that I never use the snooze button on weekdays, so I think the combination of those two things clued me in to the fact that I had just had a false awakening. I moved a pillow aside to check my alarm clock and the time was 7:50, about right for having hit the snooze button a few minutes ago. So I covered it up briefly and then looked again, now it was four-something, plus I realized that the clock was on the right side of my bed instead of the left. So I did it once more, deliberately choosing to see it as 1:51, and that's what it changed to.

So now I know I'm dreaming. I go back to the field that I left in the last dream, and it's filled with random dream characters there to welcome me, though they're all sort of cartoon-style. Everything's a little blurry too, and I'm having trouble figuring out how to focus my eyes. I can see things with my eyes closed or half-closed, but not very well, and I feel like opening my eyes will wake me up. Unfortunately, I'm also somehow taking a bird's eye view of the scene, rather than being directly in it, so I'm getting more distanced from the dream, which doesn't help. I didn't think fast enough to try to do the spinning trick, so everything faded out and I woke up (for real this time). It turned out to still be 15 minutes before my alarm would go off, so I just stayed awake and jotted down some notes on the dream.

So that was a lot better than last time, but it looks like I still have issues to work out with waking-up worries. (I know, I know -- get over it!) Cool, though.

-Graham

Hey Graham,

very cool though, I mean this is a huge success already, don't you think so? By the way: i can't be the only one who fails in the task we are to carry out until next week or am I? Yesterday I remembered to touch maybe a third of the doors I've been walking through and today, at least until now I have only touched two doorframes, though I tried hard, made myself some notes and even wrote "door" on my hand yesterday! What is your experience so far? As it comes to lucid dreaming, I can report some near misses: I've been swimming with dolphins yesterday night, one of my greatest wishes since I was a teenager, not fulfilled yet but I'm working on it and hope I will be able to carry it out in Maui next week. Anyway, I made dolphins one of my dream signs, talking to myself in the way like "If you see dolphins you should check if you're dreaming". Unfortunately I didn't check. Last night I saw a video of myself, driving to a place with the intention of swimming with dolphins. I was wearing a diving mask and I dived down. I watched the video, not knowing how it would turn out for I couldn't remember having actually experienced any of the stuff I saw (Sounds a bit like the "Total Recall" bits, Stephen was talking about). Suddenly I felt like being in the water and experiencing the scene right there. No dolphins around but I couldn't breathe and I feared to die when a voice spoke to me. It felt kind of blurry as far a a voice can be but I heard her words anyway and I wasn't sure if she was speaking to me or if it was only in my head. She told me, she was the goddess and I was her child and she would let me go and give me power if I would worship her. I think that was a pretty strong dream sign for until now god (goddess) never actually SPOKE to me ;-) Then there were a couple of other things yesterday night like an oceanside (looked very much like the Bretagne, France), that looked beautiful and peaceful and suddenly there was something like a fist made of stormwind, hitting the landscape in several places. I stood there watching it. When I glanced at the ocean I saw that the tide was out and there wasn't much water left. The water turned into blood and I started thinking about the biblical background of it all (or was it again because I watched too much of the X-files?) and if it was meant to be an indicator for the apocalypse. I wasn't frightened though. Ok, I think these near misses (beside being back in Germany) were sufficient. Oh Laura, could you please post our homework for this week? I remember rereading chapter 3 of "Lucid dreaming" and chapter 4 of "Exploring the world...", is that correct? I'm really sorry that I had to leave in such a hurry but the other option would have been to wait 1.5 more hours in order to catch the very last train and the train ride itself already takes me 2 hours. Still I'm glad I figured out how to get to Stanford!

see you all next week!

Christina

PS: For those who haven't seen it, I can warmly suggest the movie "Waking life" to all of you. See for yourselves why! PPS: Stephen, this one goes out to you, before I forget it again: Daniel Erlacher sends his greetings to you!

Hey good morning all of you... and what a great morning this is! At around 6 o'clock today I started having lucid dreams and realizing that I had false awakenings, they turned out to be three in a row (although the last one was over within seconds). I really hope I haven't forgotten too much... let me try: I was walking on some obscurely lit street and there weren't many people around me. I don't remember becoming lucid but that must have happened by finding my environment rather strange. I realized I was dreaming and managed to stay calm. I took some deep breaths, looked around again because I wanted to chat with some of my dream characters. Unfortunately there was still no one to be seen so I walked on until I found something like a shopping window that was a flat at the same time, besides the fact that it had glass walls on three sides. I went inside and in order to get there had to walk through the glass because there were no doors (usually that's not an easy task, for I have to put the molecules of the material I wanna walk through into new order... an explanation I have to give myself to make it more plausible that I can walk through walls ;-)). Inside of the room I found the children Anne and Nickolas (right out of the movie "the others", I had just watched the night before). I started to talk with them, told them, that they were dream characters. I lost most of the conversation I had with them but I remember that Anne was trying to kill me all the time and that I had to be careful with her, because I guessed that I'd maybe wake up if she succeeded to kill me. Anyway, after a while I had enough and I got out again, only that by now we were on the third floor of some flat and the balcony I was stepping on to (walking through glass once again), seemed pretty high above the earth. I started to levitate but there was little space and I was scared to fly down to the street because I prefer to be in the air a little bit, to test how fit I am in flying on the night in question, before I just jump right down and fall insted of flying. Hovering up (this tiny little bit that was possible) was no problem but I didn't make it down or did I? For next thing I knew was that I was somewhere else, still dreaming. "I am not in my bed", I thought, "I didn't wake up, although this really feels as if I'm awake but I'm not". I looked around. I found myself in a pretty house with wooden planks on the floor, some nice and cosy oven, huge windows and with a furniture that fit pretty well with my taste. This house was "gemuetlich", a German word that doesn't exist in other languages, meaning very nice, comforting, cosy, snuggly, like home etc. I realized that the dream was fading so I quickly rubbed my hands against each other (in order to get some tactile input) and after it became more stable I started touching things around me. I wanted to put on some music but there was no stereo to be seen so I hummed to myself for a while. I turned on a candle, which took a while (just as when I did it before going to bed that night!) and when it was burning I thought about the experiment, Stephen told us about, in which the pinch didn't hurt as much in the lucid dream as in reality. I decided to try this myself. I took the candle and poured the hot wax over my hand - almost no pain. I was really amazed for I heard about poeple who hurt themselves in lds (Tholey was getting dangerously far in that field) but I hadn't dared to try any of that with myself. I walked on, found a banana and ate it. It tasted like a faded copy of a banana, some of the taste was there but not the full flavour. I went on trying things, some sweets, I remember and the last thing I tried was some chocolate with marzipan, that my boyfriend gave to me. Well, that tasted real as could be! Hmmm... there seems to be more missing, I only remember going over to a mirror and trying to touch my reflection through the glass. I don't remember how it worked out but when I have done this before it felt a bit like touching a fish (not as unpleasant a sensation as it might be to some of you) through a thin layer of cold but pleasant water. Anyway, next thing I knew was that I was lying in bed next to my boyfriend. This was probably a false awakening, right? I didn't have an alarm clock that is readable in the dark so I just pretended to be still dreaming (because I thought I was). I reached out to my boyfriend with the intention to have sex with him but when he turned over to me I finally woke up for real, lying in bed, all excited, trying to tell myself this whole dream as if it were a story, so I could remember it later to write it down.

ok, how was your morning? :-)

Christina

another near miss: had a reoccurring dream about my gerbilles (no idea if this is the correct expression) last night. The mice died about 10 years ago but I still dream that I find their cage, they are in and most of the time they don't look very healthy (probably because I don't expect them to, after such a long period without food and water). This time they looked pretty normal, they even jumped out of the cage, opening their food boxes themselves! I was amazed. And i failed again. I try to consider reoccuring dream symbols (as the gerbilles and as my late grandfather, of whom I dreamt the night before) as dream signs but I never seem to get it.

Christina

Finally success! Of a sort...

So last night I tried the MILD method, setting my mind firmly on the intention to have a lucid dream before going to sleep, returning to this intention when I woke during the night to record a nonlucid dream, which happened twice. Around 3:30, I had a dream in which Renate and I were in Australia on a backpacking expedition with a group run by the Sierra Club or something like that. The group stopped at a resturant for lunch, and when we came out, I noticed that the parking lot was filled with a lot of construction detritus and gear. We then walked along a street that was seperated from another street by a park-like median with trees. There was a strange kind of bus vehicle, red top and down the back with white sides and a kind of glass cupola, that just sort of drove across the park and I remarked to Renate about how crazy the Australians were when they were driving. Then, we turned into a street between two buildings like warehouses but couldn't find the car. Somehow, a river had arisen and washed the street away. We followed the river to a meadow, at which point Renate had disappeared, and I saw the car with the rest of the expedition members parked under a tree. Just then, I began to soar in the air and thought "Oh! I must be dreaming cause I'm flying!".

At that point, the dream started to become very vivid and solidify, but suddenly, I started to lose altitude and there was a sound like "rrrr, rrr, sputter, sputter" of an airplane engine stalling as I tumbled downward. The dream began to break up into colored rectangles, like one sometimes sees in MPEG video that gets interference, and blackness and I moved on to another nonlucid dream.

I think what worked is returning to the intention throughout the night, because I've tried MILD with just setting the intention before going to bed and not had much success with it.

But, not sure how to stablize. I've tried the spinning technique before and it didn't work for me, I end up waking up before I can spin at all (besides which, I get really dizzy when I spin in waking, which is maybe why I don't want to do it in the dream).

One thing I did notice though. The dream had a funny effect on my day. It was sort of unreal in lots of ways, or so it seemed.

jak

I had an unusually long and intense dream last night, much more like an entire story than a lot of my dreams, which are more like individual scenes. In fact, there was a lot more to it than I really feel like typing out right now. But I thought it was interesting how twice during the dream I almost woke up. I could still see the dream, like a movie, but I could feel my body in bed. I think I toyed with the idea of trying to become lucid, but I was so enthralled in the story line of the dream, that I just wanted to return to it and see what happened next. I was very careful not to move, and each time I managed to drift back to sleep and continue the dream where I left off. I thought that was pretty neat, how I was able to prevent the dream from ending.

Something I was wondering about that is if being a light sleeper (like me) is a help or hindrance to lucid dreaming. It seems that being closer to wakefulness helps in recognizing the dream state (since I tend to notice it when I'm close to waking up) but it also seems like it's harder to stay asleep. This is definitely the main issue for me, as you can tell from probably all my postings so far.

Another thing: I think I saw somewhere in the reading that, when a dream starts to fade out, the visual imagery fades before the other senses. But what I was noticing in this dream seemed the opposite. I could still see the dream, though I could clearly feel my body in bed. Maybe that was because I was slightly uncomfortable, and my body wanted to shift positions, so it was a more prominent sensation than vision in a dark room. Whatever it was, I remember thinking about doing the spinning trick at one point and figuring that it wouldn't work. Since the body I was feeling was my actual body rather than my dream body, I didn't know how to spin my dream body and not my real body. I guess that's the time to focus on another sense as intensely as you can in the dream world. I think that may be what I did (using vision) to get back to the dream, but I'm not sure.

-Graham

I had my first lucid dream this morning! It was exciting, but left me with lots of questions. Anyway, first the dream, then the questions.

I was in a hotel room getting dressed. I looked down and saw that my belt was on backwards. Just seeing that, I started wondering if I was dreaming. Anyway, I took my belt off and went to put in on the right way. When I looked down, I saw that I already had a belt on and was about to put on a second belt. That's when I said "I'm dreaming!" I dropped the belt I was holding, and said to myself "I have to do a reality test." I looked around the hotel room and saw a stack of magazines on a table. The title of the one on the top was something like "Alto" or "Alco". I looked away and looked back, and it had changed to some kind of symbol. Then I knew I was dreaming. I told myself to relax, or I would wake myself up. I started thinking about what I should do. I remembered climbing over these huge snow mounds earlier in my dream (or another dream?) and decided to go out and fly to the top instead of climbing.

I went and flew right to the top of one of these huge snow mounds -- which now seemed higher than any I remembered climbing. Unfortunately, I didn't have the sensation of flying. It was more like I just imagined myself to the top (maybe I was starting to wake up?). But then to get down the other side, I decided to slide down. So I sat down and slid all the way down. That I remember vividly, and it was alot of fun. However, I'm not sure if I was lucid and the time. Looking back, I'm not sure it mattered. I probably would have done the same either way.

Later on I "woke up". I was sleeping on a couch in a lounge at the hotel I must have been staying at. My wife came over to me and told me my hair was still a mess. I didn't know what she as talking about, so she brought over a pair of reflective glasses so I could see myself. Then I remembered leaving my hotel room (because I became lucid) before I was finished dressing and must have forgotten to comb my hair. As I was thinking this, I remembered being lucid, but I wasn't lucid at the time I was thinking. The dream goes on a little, but I wasn't lucid anymore.

Here are my questions:

1. Why did having my belt on backwards make me realize I was having a dream? It's never happened in a dream before, and I've had much stranger things happen in my dreams that didn't clue me in.

2. Was I lucid when I slid down the snow mound? I guess the question can be asked, was I aware I was dreaming at the time? I don't really know. In the back of my mind I guess I was aware, but I was too involved in the experience to be thinking about it. Makes me wonder if the line between lucidity and non-lucidity is fuzzy.

3. Why was it that when I "woke up", I remembered being lucid, but that wasn't enough to make me lucid again? This was strange since I accepted the events of the lucid part of my dream as both being a dream and as having actually happened at the same time.

This is only my first experience, but these questions do make me wonder how lucid is lucid. I mean, we know that waking thoughts influence dream thoughts. So even if we become aware that we're dreaming, how do we know that that's not just part of the dream? It's like this: Just because we believe we have free will doesn't necessarily mean we really have it. Our belief in free will could be causally determined. So does believing we are lucid mean we really are?

In any case, it was an exciting experience and I will definitely keep working at it.

Michael

Hi Graham,

How did you know that your feeling in bed was an indication that you were waking up and not that you were actually dreaming that you felt yourself in bed? That is, could it have been a kind of false awakening?

jak

Well, if I were having a false awakening at that point, then that would mean that I was having two dreams at once. Is that possible? Like I said, I was still in my original dream visually, but my body no longer felt like it. Since my bodily sensations were correct for reality (i.e. lying in bed) I assumed they were actual, rather than deal with the more complicated possibility of simultaneous dreams. But I suppose that if "dreaming is perception unconstrained by sensory input" then really anything would be possible, including dreaming of senses that give contradictory input. Interesting.

Also, of course, I also assumed I was waking up because I'm a light sleeper, so it was very likely to be true, even if only from a probability standpoint.

-Graham

Hallo everybody,

hope you had good dreams (of course there es realy no such thing as a bad dream if you take a closer look). Graham: I'm a light sleeper too. I think this makes it easier to become lucid but harder to obtain lucitidy, which you can train. had a lucid dream this morning. one or two... depends on how you see it. I dreamt that I was talking on the phone with my formerly best female friend Nadine, whose friendship I have lost just recently. She pops up at least three nights a week. This time I only talked to her on the phone. I told her that I miss her and that I wish we could find a way to be still friends. She was always answering, only on one point she was silent, that was when I said I had the feeling that I had always cared for her more than she had cared for me. I won't go any deeper in this, it was a long talk, about 45 minutes, so it seemed to me. I had Counting Crows on my stereo and the cd was almost over when we finally said goodbye. We had agreed on a meeting on friday or saturday for those were the only days I was free (of work and university) before leaving Germany to go to California (! so there was a shift of time again). After I hung up, I started thinking. When was the last time that I had spoken to Nadine? How did I know where to reach her or had she called me? I suddenly remembered that in the evening, before I went to bed I have tried to prime her image in my dreams as a reminder that i was dreaming (clever that it was only her voice this time!). I made a reality check. Even while I was reading them, all the letters kept changing and jumping. So it was a dream. I looked around me. The room was empty. I had wanted to speak to my dream characters (after reading a thesis about lucid dreaming by Cora Schlag-Giess yesterday in which she explained several ideas of Tholey about the consciousness of dream characters). I was alone so I had to go find them. I jumped into the air and flew up, right through the ceiling, which wasn't a good idea for as soon as it became dark around me, I felt the dream fading. I was in a state between waking and sleeping but closer to waking - I could feel my paralysed body in bed. I wasn't to give up now. It took all my effort to start spinning, saying to myself "I'm dreaming, I'm dreaming". At first the body - though a dream body - didn't obey me but after a while I got into it and I closed my eyes while doing it. When I opened them again, I was in a room again, maybe even in the same room as before. I was still lucid , still nobody there. I took a look around and found a cd, which was about the size of a record. I put it on and listened to it for a while. The music was different from what I usually like but it was smooth and nice and I enjoyed it very much. I thought about the instruments they were using and came to the conclusion that it were strings, though different from violins. While I was listening, I took a closer look at the album cover. I saw several details that kept changing as I tried to keep them in my mind. I even spoke them out aloud but the only images I have kept was something like childrens drawings of 4 pyramids that started dancing around. Then there was a little picture of a womans head. It fell out from between the pages. I looked at it, trying to memorize her features and her face changed three times while I was still looking. The only thing that remained the same was her dark, middle long hair with bangs. I don't remember how I woke up...

Christina

Michael, what exciting news! Welcome to the world of lucid dreaming! Did Stephen answer your questions in class? And did that in turn generate more questions?

Just to add my personal experience, I would guesstimate that in less than 20% of my false awakenings (from lucid dreams) do I ever realize I'm still dreaming. And I bet the percentage was near 0% before I started trying to notice false awakenings.

I look forward to finding out what else I missed. See you tomorrow! Well, today, since it's 1:15 am here. Which reminds me, someone mentioned the time appearing incorrect. The forum has users from all over the world, so the time is shown in Greenwich Mean Time (yes, I know I'm supposed to call it Universal Time, but that seems so arrogant. The entire universe is supposed to use our planet's time?)

Hi everyone! Unfortunately I don't think I am going to make it to class tonight because I have come down with the flu. This has, however, given me some very strange dream experiences and improved my recall since I have woken up so many times in the middle of dreams throughout the night. I still have not had any lucid dreams, but I have become much better at noticing the signs.

Last week we talked in class about my frequent nightmares and that I repeatedly dream about drowning and wake up in the mornings very scared and anxious. I have gone to bed every night thinking about the techniques we discussed in class but I have not had one nightmare this week! Which is so strange. I will work on that again this week.

Liisa

Sorry about the flu, Liisa; we missed you last night!

As for your 'frequent' nightmares, I suspect that it is exactly BECAUSE you have been focussing on the nightmare transformation techniques we discussed last week that you haven't had a single nightmare recently.

A good sign I'd say! Remember, if you have sufficiently faced your fear while re-dreaming the nightmare, you have effectively solved the problem of "predestined doom". This is the feeling we get from recurrent nightmares that we are unwilling to face "because whatever has happened on past nights MUST happen on future nights". By conceiving an alternative response if a similar dream scene occurs in the future, you are freeing yourself from the Repetition Compulsion.

Looks like you're moving in the right direction. So keep up the good work!

See you next week. May 19th just happens to be the night we are going to devote to transformation of nightmares and LUCID DREAM WORK.

Stephen

okay, here we go: good morning class. There's three lucid dreams to report, at least partly. First one was on wednesday morning, when I had just taken a day off for myself, telling me: "no lucid TASK this morning, just DREAM". It was quite an adventure (Freud would have been happywith that one), I was at a family meeting of my boyfriend, with strange fat family members. I was shooting pictures of them and they were posing in three rows. After I took several pics, they wanted me to be in the picture, so I got on a chair that immediately started to levitate away. I wasn't recognizing that it was a dream. The chair was floating above the ocean, three other chairs with my boyfriend and two others in them followed me. I saw an island with a huge volcano that looked a bit like any mechanism in a science fiction movie, that would slide apart at touching it. We landed on the volcano and got out. I feared the volcano would break out and so it did (expectation). We jumped out of its way and ducked into a cave. Someone said, that was just like in the prophecy he heard as a child (...some part got lost here...) I was in a very pleasant place with mosaic patterns of naked people (mainly women) in the ground. I knew I was dreaming and i knew I could have dream sex with anyone I picked. I took a look around. There were good looking men who seemed kind of "flat" to me. I wasn't going for them. One guy appeared. He was blond (I prefer dark haired), unshaved and not handsome at all (also not ugly) and he seemed to be different from the others. He was walking away from me and I followed him. I had the feeling I could make anything happen that I wanted to happen but he was an expectation. He wasn't that much at my command. I asked for his name and I even remembered it after waking up, something with two syllables, like "Bewa(re?)". I repeated his name several times to keep it in mind. Then I wanted to have sex (I don't go into detail here but flying was involved in the sex, so i found it very interesting what Stephen said in class, that according to Freud flying is associated with sex) and right after we started, I woke up. Let that be part one, part two (about this morning) is about to follow...

continuing: that's what I dreamt this morning; I was someplace (Hawaii?) in a supermarket. I was carrying my backpack and suddenly I felt someone close behind me: two boys (at first they looked like young men to me, maybe like freshmen at university). One (again the blond one) had opened my backpack and taken out stuff from there. When i asked him what he was doing he blushed and said that he wanted to find out more about me, my address for instance. He actually held my addressbook in his hand. I asked him to give me everything back. He did, shyly, boyish and he asked me if he could give me his address so that i COULD write to him if I wanted. I said, that was ok with me but to be honest, I didn't think I was gonna write to him. He wrote down his address and I read it or I tried to. I thought it was because of his spelling that I couldn't even read his name. I only saw that it had either 4 or 5 times the letter "A" in it and I thought to myself: what a strange name. Then I saw the city where he came from and I realized it as being close to where I live in Germany. The postal code kept changing but yes, I could guess the 66 at the beginning ;-) So I said: "Hey, you're from Saarland!". We started having a conversation and my sister was suddenly there with me. She said to them: "Which class are you in?" and one of the boys, suddenly really boys answered: "we're in the seventh grade" (in the German school system that means that they were about 12 years old!). My sister said to me "I would have guessed ninth grade". We parted saying "Aloha" and shaking hands in a certain way that I always had difficulties following and which is considered cool. Sarah and I were walking on, laughing about young boys trying their luck with elder women. (...) We were sitting around a table at a party. Suddenly my former spanish teacher Birgit came toward us. She was dressed in violet, wearing violet eyeshadow aswell and she seemed to be so beautiful to me. I loved her very much, she was a teacher and a friend at the same time but we lost contact about 5 years ago. She came closer, smiling at Torsten, who was also in my spanish class. Then she saw me. Her face brightened even more and just as we were about to hug, I took her hand and told her to hold on for a second. I already assumed it was a dream because I hadn't seen her in such a long time and as I tried to think of how we could meet with me being in the USA and her being in Gran Canaria as far as I know, I was doing the reading test with a coke bottle on the table. The words were not in a straight line, they appeared to be waves and they changed. I tried to look up again but I couldn't. the dream faded forcefully and suddenly. I asked her: "Who am I?" and rubbed my hands... and I awoke (no false awakening this time, I checked) really rubbing my hands, asking "Who am I?" all over again... I went back to sleep consciously. First I couldn't sleep but then I tried to make up a dream and imagine it. The imagination became a real dream but it didn't feel as real as lucid dreams usually do. I was in some house, sliding down a firepole which I had made to appear. Somehow I almost woke up again and I let myself fall backwards into darkness. I was sitting in a street now, rubbing it with my hand, feeling its roughness... or was I? It just didn't feel the way it would usually feel. I made water appear. As I touched it, it felt warm and too soft for water. I tried again and managed to make it feel like cold splashing water. I was playing with the water like a child in a bathtub. There was a mirror. I looked into it and tried to keep my face from changing. It didn't obey me. I could hold parts of it in place but other parts would appear either demon- or angel-like. I have tried it before but it is still scary. In the next fragment I was in a car with my boyfriend and his cousins wife, whom we had visited in Maui. She said she wanted to show us something beautiful. I wanted to see it, so I stopped changing the dream. We drove along the sea which didn't look particulary nice, the color being more greyish-green than blue. I said: "How beautiful the water is", hoping to make it change its color by saying this but it remained its quality, looking like a not very well developed picture. Then we saw the whales, humpback whales I think. They were everywhere. She said, they were attracted to some noise, that's why they came so close. I should have been overwhelmed but I wasn't because it didn't have the right feeling about it. I managed to stay lucid for quite a long time but I woke up tired and not satisfied. Somehow the light and the beauty were missing... I had more dreams tonight in which i should have recognized I was dreaming, one about a dolphin in a overpopulated fishing pond, that just appeared as I wanted to drive to the airport to pick up my best friend there. It seems as if awareness wakes up in the early morning - until now I can harldy find it at nighttime. Hope I wasn't boring you with this novel...

Christina

It's way too silent here... are you all asleep?

I didn't have a lucid dream (actually I had one but I can't recall it) but I started doing the experiment in which you have to write down on which side you were sleeping, which nostril was more open and what was your dream content. I've only been doing it for one night now and already found out something interesting: I always awake in the position I fell asleep in! I've been suspecting it for quite a time now and after re-reading last nights results I'm thinking that could be the reason why I wake up so often during the night - to change position. I've changed it five times last night, writing down four, for I had no dream content memory one time. Maybe that's another reason why I'm a frequent lucid dreamer. Another thing is interesting: Since I learned in class last week, that the doorframe task isn't over yet and I started touching doorframes again and writing down the results every night, it really has become easier for me to carry it out (at least in the house I live in - in another environment it's harder to remember). Unfortunately I tend to lose track of the actual score. If I do, I guess a number probably smaller than the actual number, in order not to cheat. My highest score was around eighty-something doorframes on one day and the mean value must lie around seventy a day. But to my surprise I can't remember touching doorframes in my dreams! Did any of you? Tonight/this morning I had two interesting dreams: In one I was in Stephens home which had some of a buddhist touch (unfortunately there's no details I recall) and we were going through tasks I was to carry out. In the other one I stayed in the house of my hero buddhist punkmonk rockstar Stuart Davis, while I was in Boulder for the huge punkmonks gathering (I will go there by the end of June). I was sitting in his bathroom, looking around me and hardly able to believe that I was really there. Oh, there was one more, a scary one: I was in a house with my boyfriend Yasar and a guy I didn't like at all. This guy was calling up Yasars Cousin Alex, the one we stayed with in Maui and told him to come over immediately. He wanted to party. It seemed as if Alex replied something like "It's not ok with my wife when I leave now" and I felt compassion for her because they hardly have time together. The guy went on, calling Alex a chicken (or words like that) and he became very sexist, showing that for him women had no value at all, besides the sexual satisfaction. I exploded. I was yelling at the man who did he think he was. I felt hurt and very very angry. I had the strong feeling I didn't wanna party with him at all. Yasar wasn't interfering, so I just ran out of the room, still seeing red. I went up a staircase and saw two puppets that I had made myself when I was a teenager. One is a vampire and the other one was a ballet dancer in real life but it was something else in the dream. Next to those puppets there were two new puppets, looking pretty much like the ones I made and I knew that my sister Sarah had made them. Then Sarah was with me. I was sitting on a toilet in a room full of people and I felt embarassed about it (reocurring). It was something like a childs toilet. I told Sarah to call Yasar. I told her that I needed to talk to him. She went and I heard them talking and him saying: "No, this time I won't let her win". It was not his voice, it was the voice of my ex-boyfriend, Achim. He came in and we went on talking/fighting as if we still were together. I asked how he could just watch somebody being so rude and respectless to me and not be on my side. He just kept on talking about not letting me win and not making the same mistakes, being the stronger one this time. Suddenly there was an old friend next to me, her name is Christine. Achim said, we were to come with him but we were not to see where we'd go. He tied our hands together and put something into our eyes that looked a bit like a mask with two nails standing out to poke into the eyes. We were terribly frightened. I had the impression he took us to a secret society meeting. When we got out of the car I could smell hamburger. I took of my mask, looked around and saw a barbecue on the street. Someone was preparing hamburger buns without meat (though i had smelled the meat). I felt easy and free suddenly and I felt as if I was Jadzia Dax from Star Trek DS9 (without transforming myself, I just felt like her)...

that's enough for today. See you all on wednesday!

Christina

After last week's class, I had a very successful night of lucid dreaming, with three dreams, but I've not been able to get anything since. I don't wake up very often (must be tired) and so I don't end up recording, even though I try to re-enforce my intention. I've also been having problems with allergies and taking some antihistimine nasal spray before bed, which I think tends to make me even more sleepy.

One thing I noticed with the lucid dreams I had was that after I had become lucid, it only seemed "real" for a couple seconds, after which my memory of the dream became fragmentary and vague. It doesn't break up, but it becomes more dreamlike. One lucid dream (the strongest I can remember), I was lying in a bed in a room that was not my bedroom and I saw a guy with a beard at the foot of the bed. I thought: "That's strange, I wonder what this guy is doing in my bedroom. Must be a dream. Time for a reality check." So I looked at my clock radio but it had disappeared and become a can of vegetables or something. Then I knew: "Ha! Must have been a dream." When I turned back to the guy, he had turned into 4 light green peppers. I decided to leave the room, so I flew out the window which was closed, at first wondering if I could, but then just moving through the window and wall. At that point, I sort of lost lucidity and the dream became vague.

The last lucid dream of the night I was only lucid for about a second or so after realizing I was dreaming. When I woke from it, it occured to me that maybe I had only dreamed I had done a reality check and realized that I was dreaming, which sounds a little hard to parse, but the effect is that the experience lacks the kind of immediacy and vividness that a really good lucid dream has, and that of course everyday life experience in reality has.

jak

The night before last I had a very obvious (in retrospect) example of the "tacit lucidity" we talked about in class last week. I dreamt that I was reading an email from a friend I had talked to on the phone earlier that day. I remember thinking that I should really remember what the email said so that when I woke up I could check to see if I got an actual email from her, and then compare the two. Sadly, my lucidity didn't go anywhere beyond this, and I also forgot what the email said (though there wasn't a real one to compare it to in the morning, anyway). Bummer. Seems like a pretty good dream-sign, though, to catch yourself thinking "when I wake up I'll...."

-Graham

So this morning I had one of those times when I woke at 4 and tried to get back to sleep but it didn't work. Or did it? It was kind of the reverse of REM: I was conscious of lying in bed on my side but these unstructured images were running through my head. The visual quality of the images was not very strong. I tried to return my attention to the intention to have a lucid dream, but it only occasionally worked, then the image flow would return. Eventually, I lost consciousness, then dreamed that I was near a seashore, and had just finished running some horses (dreamsign, I never have anything to do with horses). The horses were in a trailer hitched to a pickup. I walked over to an outdoor resturant, and the waiter offered to provide me with a pavilion tent where I could graze the horses, but I said we were taking them back to the barn. But when I turned, the truck had disappeared (a dreamsign). I ran up the street and ended up at a house like my old fraternity house from college with outdoor furniture outside where people were sitting around, among them two guys I knew from high school (another dreamsign, I haven't seen these guys in years). I woke shortly after that. It was a little disappointing, as I was trying MILD all night, but never managed to get lucid.

Tonight I'm going to try the Tibetan exercise. This time, if I see horses, old high school friends, or things disappear when they shouldn't, I'll know something's fishy and remember I'm dreaming.

jak

Hi James, so good to hear from you! I'm sorry you feel disappointed not to have gotten lucid last night, but I'm very glad that you had those dreams - after all, they prove that you did get back to sleep! Since I heard you express concern that you wouldn't succeed in falling back asleep after a morning awakening, the fact that you just succeeded should be great mental preparation for tonight's exercise!

And I'm glad you're doing the exercise now, so you can let us know what clarifications might be needed. If you run up against any difficulties understanding or following the instructions tonight, please post them over in the "Homework" discussion so we can answer them for everyone!

Good luck!

Amazing. My first lucid dream. I was watching a percussion player doing all these moves with his hands including playing various instruments such as bells, sticks, drums and my job was to anticipate his moves so that I moved synchronously with him. As I watched him I felt myself able to move almost simultaneously with him, almost with foreknowledge of what he'd do next. I thought to myself: this is impossible, I'm dreaming, and that woke me up.

Great news, Maureen! And yes, waking up immediately is very common in the beginning. After all, discovering you're dreaming is a pretty startling thing when you've been assuming you were awake. P. 32 of LDCG (the hardback) points out the first thing to practice: remaining calm!Quote:

Becoming lucid is exciting, but expressing the excitement too soon can awaken you. It is possible to enjoy the thrill that accompanies the dawning of lucidity without allowing the activation to overwhelm you. Be like a poker player with an ideal hand. Relax and engage with the dream rather than withdrawing into your inner joy of accomplishment.Then, pages 138-145 of EWLD (the paperback) describe methods that help extend the lucid dream for longer periods of time.

May your next lucid dream continue for as long as you please!

Hi! I didn't have the intention to write while my friend is here but that needed to be done: I awoke this morning when my boyfriend started meditating at six am. I set my mind to having a lucid dream because I had the strong feeling, a friend of mine needed my help and I can't reach her right now. I was only awake for 5 minutes but it worked out. I was in a dream in which I was to get married to a man I didn't like. Crazy guy too because he was rich and a comic fan and he wanted us both to look like elephants (he had the money to get the operation done). I was argueing with his mother about my reasons why I didn't want her son when suddenly there was a way for me to escape, which I did. Outside i started flying away and I knew I was dreaming. i also knew I was getting away from something I should have solved but I wanted to help my friend in the first place. I landed in the crown of a tree and touched its branches and leafs in order to stabilize the dream. The thought came to me that the guy was a giant and that he had fairy tale 7-miles-boots and would reach me instantly but another part of myself reminded me that he hadn't been a giant before, so why now? I had other concerns to concentrate at - I was close to waking up. My surroundings became blurry and brighter, just like someone pushing a light-switch, which worked in stages, not all at once. I remembered that Stephen asked us to pay attention to the way the dream would behave while fading and I was doing it for I while, without the intention of waking up in the end. I realized that my body was in bed with my "bad" eye open (= the blurry sight), the "good" eye was pressed into the pillow so it was closed. I started spinning around, thinking: "When my arm hits the bed it's gonna be a dream arm". It never hit the bed but I was fooled either way. While turning around and around I could feel my hands on my tighs (they were above my head in reality) and I felt my legs moving, as if I was jumping. That - of course - was my dream body too! Anyway, I was waiting for a new scene to appear but at first I was without success, I just felt myself in the state between waking and dreaming, no pictures, darkness (for I had closed the distracting eye). I tried to leave my body and I imagined all my energy floating towards and out of my head. It didn't work (it had never worked that way) but I found myself in a new scene, grass around me and something like huge daisies that looked pretty unnatural. I was walking towards a hut in which i imagined my friend. as i opened the door she was there but she didn't look like her, more like a mix-person between her and somebody else I know. I didn't mind, I imagined her as herself and as I stepped closer I saw writings and symbols on her forehead which I couldn't read, no matter how hard I tried. I was kneeling in front of her, taking her hand (she was sitting, as if on a throne) and looking at her. There was no talking, I just tried to give her strengh and love. I hope it worked in a way.

Christina

Has anyone tried the Tibetian exercise yet? I did 2 nights with 30 min. before I left for Japan last week and the effects were pretty spectacular. On both nights, I drifted back to sleep (on the first night, it took about 45 min.) and had one lucid dream after another. Toward the end, just before I woke up, the periods of lucidity shortened. I'd recognize it was a dream, then I would quickly lose lucidity and the dream would once again become vague.

I'm going to try the 60 min. when I get back from Japan (I'm in Yokohama at the moment). One thing I've been having trouble with is getting a real solid dream body. Most of the time, I'm just a point of view, and if I need to touch something, this hand appears. If I need to walk, there's feet, etc. Maybe I'm just not noticing, but I don't seem to have a very well defined dream body most of the time. I've been having this problem for a while, I think I just need to practice more. Having the Tibetian technique is good as a surefire way to induce lucid dreaming, so I can get more practice.

jak

I did my napping experiments last weekend and this weekend, but unfortunately didn't have much luck with them. The hour-long wake periods were too long for me (I didn't even get back to sleep at all after the first one) but the half-hour ones seemed okay. Sleeping on a particular side was difficult because I tend to move around a lot in bed. So staying in one position was a little uncomfortable and distracting. I need to try the experiment sometime on my own without that part of it.

The night before last I had a brief flash of lucidity during the nap period. I dreamt that I was lying in bed and that my grandmother was standing next to me. She was saying something that didn't make a lot of sense (I was sure I would remember it later, but I didn't). That may have been what tipped me off that it was a dream, so I told her "You aren't real." It was an interesting sensation -- saying that felt very real, but also a bit odd since I knew I was actually asleep. So I said it again. I think I focused too much on that, though, and the rest of the dream went away. I don't really remember the ending. I was very tired that night, so with my dream self in bed already, I probably just went back to sleep.

Then last night I had a near miss that really shouldn't have been. I was in an airplane, and the first weird thing I noticed was that there was no aisle (though everyone had still somehow gotten to their seats). Then, we were taxiing along something kind of like the BART tracks. Out the window we could see the window displays along a whole line of stores. Enough dream signs here yet? I tried to do a reality check while looking out the window, but we were passing things too quickly to read anything twice. Then I started noticing clocks in the store windows, so I checked each one as we went by. They were all within a minute or two of each other, which certainly seemed realistic enough, so my brain accepted that and totally missed a great shot at lucidity. I realize later that all the clocks were analog, so maybe it was easier to match a general shape, or hand position, between each one, than to get all the digits on a digital clock to match.

-Graham

Hey you all,

I am totally sorry but I won't make it to our last class! I wanna say goodbye to all of you and wish you the best dreams! My boyfriend and I have been invited to LA and we're taking the offer. Enjoy the last class...

bye bye

Christina