here's a snippet from december of last year, a post I had made in another thread about a LD I had.

I actively practice lucid dreaming, and one of the things I try to do during my dreams is stabilize the dream sufficiently that I can actually start to pass reality tests. I haven't quite gotten to this point, but in the course of trying, I had an interesting experience in my mind's attempts to confabulate and make sense of its own reality:

I was doing the "read text -- look away -- read again" test. I looked at a piece of paper on a table and it said "May" -- the current month. This by itself was a semi-interesting connection to reality. I looked back and it had changed to "April." Not quite the same, but pretty close. Not bad. Then it changed into a stack of birthday cards, one for each month, as if to make sense of the failed reality test.

I've recently had some long and vivid lucid dreams that maybe I will recount later (as I'm sure many of you have noticed, the night after taking DMT tends to lead to high levels of vividity/lucidity), but this particular instance stood out as giving a special bit of insight into the workings of the mind.

Interesting test. I've done similar tests with looking into something twice and notice how it has changed. Reading I've attempted several times but never as you described it. Nice idea.

Something I have been attempting is to organize my mind, like to have knowledge ready in the dream.

Like be watchful of the sky, try to locate the moon or possibly planets, in order to set course for them. I'm very intrigued what will happen if you attempt to fly to the moon for example.

Another is to enable 360 degree vision. It seems very interesting and people report it's possible.

There is some kind of balance. You can't have the information when waking present, only bits and pieces. To remember the useful one's can help to find gateways through the spheres so to say.

Last night I fell asleep on the couch and had a super interactive flight dream - really rare in my case.
It started as a typical chase dream where I was being pursued high up in a snow-capped mountain range. Not sure what was chasing me but felt the strong urge to elude it. The ground was grassy with patches of permafrost on this particular downsloped flat field, that lead to a substantial drop off at the edge.
I remembered to glide this time.
So often the high drops lead to death and restart but this time I was feeling froggy.
My legs became water and I glided for what felt like kilometres until landing on the next peak, completely free of the feeling of being chased - But replaced with a deep desire to become the pursuer. Not knowing what to chase I decided to chase the big jumps. Previous jumping dreams usually are limited to tree line height <100m following a nice parabola. But this one I could steer in the air, not like 90 degree turns but it felt like banking and rolling around the mountain peaks. I also had control over the dive and climb, feeling no energy loss from gravity on the climb. But I could feel the G force of the motion within my body.
This went on for however long until I got lost in it and found myself in some wooden lodge with a bunch of people I dont know.
Needless to say today was a good day Walking on clouds all day.

In flying dreams I've on occasion attempted to venture as high as I could. I found it to get daunting, especially the time I got beyond the moon's orbit, realising the further I went, the harder it would be to find the way back.

The one extraterrestrial planetary visit I recall was rather interesting. On this rocky, somewhat desolate planet was a smooth, dome-shaped building. It was a place of learning, open to all. They were toys or puzzles there and, on a podium, there was a book of knowledge. The writing was strange. I remember being able to read it in the dream but after waking up I could only recall that it was a bunch of shapes but not what they meant. Curiously, some years later somebody gave me some symbols they'd written down, saying they were angelic language. These were exactly like the writing in that dream!

My dreams, lucid or not, are mostly about the past - me walking on halls of a primary school (during class), sometimes getting lost, discovering the bathrooms are a vast complex of different rooms with toilets, some made of metal, rusty - I knew these were from 1911. Others made of porcelain, heavily stained, from 50s ... and so on.

I don't know why I dream so much about the past. But all these dreams are heavily emotional.

I dont know if we have any drunk benzo addicts in the crowd but that combo mixed with an immediat ability to not find a benzo or a whiskey sextuple is where you get your Inception like dream within a dream phenomenon. You actually wake up from a dream, start doing what you do and then something strange happens and you think...this isnt, real. That cant be happening.

And then you startle awake, and you're in the o.k. zone and crack an egg on the skillet thinking about your last dream where hornets were stinging your feet and just all kinds of things were after you and a gargoyle like batman comes over your peripheral like AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! And you snap back to "real life" and sweating bullets, half dead..

3 deep is the farthest I can remember. Much past that I cant remember, I think that once you get that deep you arent meant to bring back the frilly details of like what the curtains looked like and what sort of china was on the table.

Once you get there it's, you're going into your bones so to speak. I caught a "boxer's fracture" this one time and the "inside the bone pain" was deeper than my thin hand could offer in reality. Bone pain goes deep..and it is very thin. Apply that depth to your brain...

...yeah,

Could that be a sort of restraint, the thought of not able to get back? I found that exit is immediate and be done anytime.

For a while I tried to get as far as possible. Waste no time, try to get on the move asap and continue till the end. Lately it occurred to me that working on the 'technique' is as rewarding. With that I mean stay on the spot. Do stuff like trying to scrutinize the room/ situation you're in. Try to find out what's real. For example, if I get to the LD from a 'rollout' out of the body, then carefully scan the room. Try to see if it's real enough. For instance, I can see myself lying in bed in the opposite direction or I am lying in another room. The curtains are open while closed in real time. Being able to sift through the fantasies and real is thus helpful.

Another one is to go to the bathroom. Looking in the mirror and seeing what the mirror image does. Does it look at me like a 'real' mirror image? I have learned to get the mirror image look at me, at first it was not looking at me at all. It was looking away or wasn't there at all.

How much fingers do you have? Try to count them.

Let's have a paragraph about hands. Some sort of nostalgia prompted me to seek out Castaneda again. There I found the instructions on looking at the hands in LD. Wow! He elaborates on how it helps to bring the world into focus. So the technique here is to look at your hands and then something in the scenery and back to the hands again. Not getting into how real Castaneda is or isn't. This technique is very helpful! Bringing the world into focus through alternating between hands and objects. You can also use it to check for consistency, like has this changed while I looked away?

Another thing are the senses. First I could not get beyond seeing and hearing. Though feeling was always a part of it. Going outside in the rain proved interesting. The sensation of wet rain coming down is pretty amazing. So I intently go for these kinds of sensation. Likewise taste and smell. Smell is tricky, but I've already tasted whiskey and it was pretty nice.

Body is a kind of image. You don't need a solid body. Remember what Morpheus tells Neo in the Matrix about it? I found that the sensation of fright while falling has to do with a kind of identification with the body. Falling can't hurt you, nor does your strength rely on muscle force in this realm. So I do backflips, frontflips, can do splits and other yogic postures. This is ongoing, not sure if getting bodyless is the goal here. But there is room for change, maybe shapeshifting?

There is much more you can do on the spot. Having to go for the edge of the universe is nice, but if LD becomes reliable (occurs frequently) working 'on the spot' for technique is as rewarding. There are false lucidities. Where I think being lucid, but in retrospect wasn't. Like dreaming having a lucid dream.

One last thing. My house used to be full of boobytraps. Like the vacuum cleaner becomes a snake trying to snare me. There are cops standing before my house. Gas and water are leaking. These are subconscious things. I haven't seen them lately, but want to look into that as well. I suppose already told the cops to go away. They look very peculiar btw. Archetype is correct word. I found much more of them around as well. Somehow this can be useful. For instance you can talk to them if something is not right, like mother, father, brother, sister etc. But this is also for the coming LD's.

Allright get on with the LD's. I'll be coming back.

Funny how I never seem to get out of the atmosphere when trying to fly as high as possible in a LD. Either I start falling back down or I suddenly appear in a completely different place. I have never attempted to LD through a practice though, so maybe the continuity would help with control.



So glad you mentioned this, neurohack! I opened the nexus to describe the experience I had this morning, to then see this lucid dream thread and your latest post mentioning the phenomenon.

It took me a bit by surprise. I suddenly realised I was dreaming and started attempting to fly, but as soon as I got quite high above the town I was in, everything started to fade into white. I then woke up in another dream thinking I was awake... but woke up for real a short time later.

I would love to start inducing them instead of having them happen at random. The control you seem to have is incredible.

I'm not for certain I lucid dream, but I think it is.
I'll give this a try and hope I don't embarrass myself.

I'm old. So that's one parameter.

For a long time, and this is so stupid, every once in awhile I dream I'm hanging out with a celebrity. Like, musicians. Just hanging out with them. Singer-songwriter types. Maybe we're driving down a road, going somewhere. One time, a very famous guy, is 'busking', I think is the word, playing songs in front of a drugstore with a can for tips. And we're arguing about what he should play. Sometimes I matter to these people, others I'm just there.

Anyway.

Last week, I'm consciously dreaming I'm hanging out with President Obama. First in his office, he's busting my chops, I'm busting his, laughing and carrying on. There were other details, but then this one gets me laughing so hard, then and now. He starts singing Simon and Garfunkel. "The Boxer". And then we're both singing it and laughing it and really belting out the "Lai-Lai-Lai" part. Laughing so hard my wife touches me, wakes me, asking what's so funny.

"Baby, it's a long story...". "Try me", she says.

Like I say, I hope I didn't embarrass myself.

i Hi all...... .I had a wopper of a long dream it was [ultra vivid].. and long duration!


The dream began with me in a second hand store looking around at stuff and i seemed to know the shop owners then i noticed a toy city made plastic lego

blocks on the floor already asembeled with buildings skyscrapers little cars and lego people everywhere!

The asembeled lego city in a 4 ft by 4ft circle and looked cool and i asked what the price was?

They said 70 dollars... and i thought about it and told them it had some missing peices could they lower the price?

Thye then said ok its yours for 10 bucks!.. so i was very happy with the price and paid them then they helped me box up the large toy city in many boxes..

They also helped me carry the boxes out to my car i thanked them and drove away through a vast city with buildings everywhere ..i remember everything was so vivid sharp and collorfull there!..

After driving a while i noticed a large yellow school bus for sale and i stoped to look it over then asked the owner if i could give it a test drive/?..

I then started driving the huge long bus all over the city and it ran ok but going down some hills i noticed the breaks did not slow it very well and i was concerned that it was not safe to drive any farther so i parked it on the side of the street in a part of town that i was unfamillar with and started walking back to my car..

After walking a while i realized i was lost and couldent get my bearings as to where my car was?

I just kept walking for what seemed hours looking at huge buildings everywhere i still was lost in this giant dream city [without lucid awareness] but the dream vividness was very close to a wake initiated lucid dream in visual and 3D quality!

I was getting a little tired of walking to far and tryed to take a short cut in between some buildings as i entered it was dark and i saw some homeless ..[Dream carectors].. sitting there eating something ...so i cautiously kept walking through the dark passage and saw light ahead but there was another dark figure laying there blocking my exit!

So i sudenly rushed toward the exit and leaped forward and flew safley over the person then did a compleate sumersault and landed squarely on my feet in a 3 foot fall to a sidewalk below!..
I managed to avoid posible danger and kept walking trying to find my way back..

I passed a large crowd of youths i could see on higher ground and kept walking..then i sudenly woke in bed with a welded memory of this dream!

The morning before.. i vaporized some CBD oil galantamine combo mixed in the oil.. and could not sleep or dream for the rest of that morning..

I suspect that i caused loss of[[ REM sleep]] that morning ...and the result this morning was this awesomely vivid dream because of a huge REM dream rebound!!

This can happen with sleep deprovation...

This REM sleep thing is very interesting must study farther...Cheers.. ..

Last night I dreamt I was back in my home town, jogging on the streets and talking to old class mates who would pop out of nowhere. Pretty strange, but the weirdest was walking past a news stand and reading on the front page of a news paper PRESIDENT SOON TO LEGALIZE DMT. LOL! Right about then I realized I was dreaming, but could not make the switch into full awarness/lucid dreaming. Anywho, thought it was funny to share

I had a dream Yesterday where a sudden realization hit me that I'm my own clone / son, with all my memories transplanted... I was with a woman I loved, and I realized that actually now she's my mother. I kinda panicked, thinking that that means my 'original' whose memories I have must be old and alone, even possibly dead, and it felt really unfair to be young and fresh with all these memories.

Last night/early this morning I dreamed I was at a Billy Joel concert. He was playing in a casino lounge, which I thought was odd, because he usually sells out stadiums (first clue I was dreaming). I was also very disappointed because he sucked (second clue I was dreaming, because Billy is amazing).

So I go to the bathroom and start taking a piss. But no matter how long I pissed, the feeling of needing to piss never went away. Then all of a sudden I was like, "Okay, this happened recently and when I kept peeing anyway, I ended up pissing my bed."

So I suddenly realized that I could very well be dreaming. But the only way to know for sure was to keep peeing. So I did. And when I started feeling warm and wet in my groin I knew that I was in fact asleep. And BOOM! I was in my first ever completely lucid dream.

It scared me shitless because my first thought was, "Wow. This seems so real. What if I can't wake myself up? What if there's something wrong with my body?". And so I decided that my first act as a lucid dreamer was to try and wake myself up so I wouldn't die or be stuck in unreality forever. And boom! I woke up in my bed soaked in a puddle of piss, pissed off that I had just wasted a lucid dream because I was afraid of the lucidity!

FML