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Lumi's Dreaming Thread; Dreams of Moon


Luminesce

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Morning:

I have to give credit where it's due, I've never had so much trouble with something in my life. It's not as simple as any one "I've never had this much difficulty figuring out what to do in a situation", "I've never had this much trouble succeeding in something I intend to succeed at", or "I've never put effort into one task this long before without completing it to some degree or deciding it's not worth my time". It's a mix of all of those and more, which I'll sum up as "trouble with".

 

And that's because it's not a situation I have total control over. I can't work to the best of my ability to deal with it. There's only so much I can do when I'm not even conscious for it.

 

But hey, as far as I'm concerned my purpose in life is invalidated as soon as I give up trying to help my family. I've no intention of that happening, so let's see what I can do.

 

1. Practicing normal "memory recall" throughout the day. Consistently. Staying on top of that, indefinitely. Making an effort to remember those bits of time you can't quite remember the details of is, as far as I can tell, extremely important and beneficial to night recall. Both of dreams and of our intent before we fell asleep.

 

2. Melatonin. Don't think it does anything, don't care. We've still got a bottle of melatonin tablets, and I'm going to start taking those before bed again to see if anything changes.

 

3. Perhaps I can salvage the times I wake up and I'm "too awake" to go back to sleep if I do anything but go back to sleep. I'll mix in requiring to get up for a minute like before, so that if I'm just "too awake" to practice wonderland visualization, I might as well be awake enough that when I let my mind wander and fall back asleep I'll have a better chance of having vivid dreams. Those are my options now on awaking: Close enough to the sleep state to visualize myself in our wonderland bed and immersing my sense of presence there, or far enough away that I might as well get up for a minute and practice dream recall for the duration before surrendering to sleep completely. Less attempting to remember my intent and such should help me fall asleep faster, which is always a good thing for Wake-Back-To-Bed's. The more quickly you go from awake to dreaming, the more likely you are to have vivid dreams.

 

4. I'm not sure exactly what to do with our schedule. I'm sleeping less than we normally do, which is taking away two or three REM cycles a night, which typically have our longer dreams. And if I'm being honest - I just don't think Lumi's lifestyle is going to support going to sleep so early any time soon. His friends are going to start playing Diablo 3's new season at 6PM today, and undoubtedly will be up until at least 3AM doing so. And it's less about whether we participate or not this time.. and moreso, it's not a strange occurrence. Maybe our unrestricted sleeping 'schedule' can be conducive to lucid dreaming too. I'd like to say it doesn't work as well, but I've honestly been having just as hard a time being as conscious as possible while unconscious as we ever have. Plus we're cutting the number of long dreams down a lot. The problem with that schedule is it was so lax it caused us to pay less attention to the earlier hours of sleep. If we can keep up our awareness through the night and not get lazy, I suppose sleeping longer can only be a good thing.

 

The following is a decent chunk of the textwall this post became, about melatonin and my ideas on how it will affect us. Feel free to skip this if you don't feel like reading, it's not important.

[hidden]Melatonin is tied to your body's sleep and wake cycles, typically being produced moreso from the evening to morning and less so from morning through the day. We've been iffy on taking it because our schedule has never been quite aligned with that idea except when I've temporarily made it so. However, it's also apparently known to cause more vivid dreams. I hear it's prescribed to adults in doses between 0.2mg and 20mg depending on the reason. Our supplements are 1mg and we've only ever taken one at a time. So there's a couple questions to answer about taking it.

 

First, when do we even do so? No matter when we do, there needs to be at least a semblance of control so we can compare it against experiences when not using it. For example, if I go to sleep late tonight, taking it would have unpredictable effects (if it did anything). I'd have been up for a very long time, and I've been sleeping early recently. Also, if it's meant to regulate sleep cycles, that means it should help make you more tired at night and less so during the day. The question is, does that actually have anything to do with the time of day - or does the presence of melatonin in the first place decide when it's time to sleep? It's used to help with jet lag, which isn't even a "thing", it's simply adjusting to the time zone changing. So taking melatonin can "help the body's circadian rhythms adjust to the new day/night cycles". Previously we had thought it simply gravitated you towards a day/night schedule.. But I'm beginning to think melatonin simply signals your body when it's night in the first place, not the other way around. So two more quick questions from that...

 

Will taking melatonin, rather than cement any specific sleeping schedule, simply help our body transition more easily into sleep? If that's its effect - there's theoretically no problem with taking it whenever you were otherwise planning to sleep anyways. And second, will we benefit from its other supposed effects of more vivid dreams (and other various sleep-stabilizing things)? I think we've got little to lose other than our leftover bottle of melatonin 1mg supplements.

 

So, second, the dosage. It can be prescribed from .2mg to 20mg depending on why you're taking it. We would be taking it for its strong effects - making us sleep and having more vivid dreams. So naturally we'd need at least a moderate dosage, of which the bottle suggests adults take 1 tablet before bed. But a more important factor - we're rather resistant to most drugs. We have an unfortunate history of not numbing well, meaning we're apparently resistant to even above average doses of the various things they've used. Despite knowing this, informing the dentists of this, and supposedly being given more of whatever it was we were given than normal, Lumi still had two of his wisdom teeth out without being numb for it. First, I'll acknowledge how stupid that was. But I also appreciate his taking responsibility for it, he treated it as a test of how much pain he could endure. (He was under the impression it was supposed to be painful because of how much everyone whines about it hurting - from me to you, if you're one of those people, you don't even know pain. Residual soreness is nothing compared to what he experienced, and I'm slightly upset that he was put through that because of others' lack of tolerance for mild discomfort.) So he lucidly reflected upon the experience as he had it, amused that as he calmly did so he couldn't stop himself from shaking a bit from the pain. Unrelated for sure, I just wanted to give you guys an idea of to what extent our claims of "mental self-discipline" actually amount to. The real point being - we did not numb from the excessive numbing agents they used. I'm sure they had something stronger, but what we had was already "stronger than normal".

 

With our history with melatonin - that being, noticing zero effects whatsoever - I'm thinking we simply never took enough for it to even affect us. Lumi is 6'2" and roughly 220 pounds for starters, and him and his mom both have a history of resisting numbing drugs among other things on top of that. So I think it could be safe to say, 1mg - when an acceptable dosage goes all the way up to 20mg - is not enough to change anything. So the first question - would its effects require any sort of sleeping schedule, or would they work on us taking them when we meant to sleep anyways? And the second - what dosage is appropriate to have any effects at all? I'll start us at 2mg, two small tablets, because we haven't taken it in a long time. If I'm feeling more sure of the time at which I'm taking it by tomorrow, and if 2mg had no effect, I'll try 3mg. Despite possible prescribed dosages going up to 20mg, I simply feel uncomfortable swallowing more than three of any pill at a time, you know? If our required dose to feel effects required much more, I'd say we simply give up on using an external "supplement" to help us.[/hidden]

 

--- I've done some research on how it actually works now. While I may scoff at "Prolonged use may disrupt your body's ability to create melatonin in the right amounts at the right time, making it harder to sleep at night" - because us being tired or naturally sleeping at night's onset is a joke - just in case it really can have lasting effects and impact the little our body is capable of being tired at the right time, both extended use and abnormally high doses are out of the question. Supposedly the recommended dose really is between .3 and 1mg, despite some brands selling tablets with 5mg+ sometimes. Taking the recommended dose is also out of the question, because we know that little does nothing. The "abnormal effects", in this case, are actually the goal. So my plan prior to knowing how exactly it works is still the one I'm going with. 2 tonight, and depending on how I feel about it the next day, 2 or 3 again. As such an apparently 'drastic' change in melatonin levels, if I don't notice any effects from that, I won't bother experimenting further.

 

My goal is above all to enable the others to lucid dream, so I'm not above looking into some outside help. But I also don't want us to become reliant on outside help (the idea is that doing it a few times will make it easier in the future), nor am I willing to risk messing with our body's natural chemical makeup. As poorly balanced as it may be on its own. If it does end up helping in some way, we'll make a habit of using it when we're serious about lucid dreaming that night, as opposed to taking it every single night as we "would like to lucid dream".

 


 

Night:

Friends went to sleep earlier than expected, so I am too. For some reason I feel like I've already written that..

Anyways, I suppose I'll take the melatonin before I go to sleep then. We'll see if it (2mg) has any effect.

Hi, I'm Tewi, one of Luminesce's tulpas. I often switch to take care of things for the others.

All I want is a simple, peaceful life. With my family.

Our Ask thread: https://community.tulpa.info/thread-ask-lumi-s-tulpas

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just in case it really can have lasting effects and impact the little our body is capable of being tired at the right time' date=' both extended use and abnormally high doses are out of the question. [/quote']

That is what I felt I had to tell you when I started reading but I knew you were wise enough to figure it out yourself.

Melatonin appears to be relatively safe if you use common sense, so I see little reason not to start your experiment. Btw, there's also a prolonged-release drug available which gradually releases melatonin over several hours. I would expect different results than from a single spike. As you have experienced yourself, people react very differently to drugs and dosages. Which is also one major factor rendering many clinical studies inconclusive. It might be worth a try. Also it seems that finding the right dose is not trivial as melatonin concentration both affects and is affected by lots of feedback loops. So a higher dose might not necessarily give you a stronger effect, even the opposite. And all of this can vary greatly depending on your body's current constitution. There might not be reproducible results but this makes the whole experiment even more interesting.

 

If I may suggest an addition - do not underestimate the placebo effect. Instead of remaining neutral try to go about it with a positive attitude. Like 'this will really help me with lucid dreaming'. You probably have heard of those studies showing that a pill's color, taste, name or even the reputation of the prescribing doctor can alter drug effectiveness. Medicine has always worked best if patients believed in it. You could even create some ritual involving everyone. A little symbolism can't hurt, might help.

 

Good luck and post results!

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Morning:

Sleeping so long is weird. At some point I had already thought about what I'd write here - "The melatonin either did nothing or was a bad thing, because I only started waking up about six or seven hours in, and didn't remember what I was supposed to be doing at all, despite spending the previous day actively practicing memory-recall." - but then I slept more and had a dream worth noting, sort of. I was actually lying in bed (what felt like I was waking up and going back to sleep like a normal night... Probably condensed and just portrayed as if it really spanned hours' time) before someone came and talked to me. I told them I couldn't really sleep. Then I woke up, that person actually came downstairs (though not to our room), and I thought about how strange the dream was. First of all, we were sleeping with our bed facing the wrong way again. Lumi spent maybe four or five years sleeping with his bed turned towards the middle of the room, whereas for the last few years it's been in the corner instead. The way it was in our dream feels totally unnatural now, but we dream like it's normal anyways. It was also bright in the dream from our window - which we were, in the dream, facing towards due to the bed's position - which is a common theme in our false awakenings. But it wasn't a false awakening. Still, it's a common theme in our dreams... Rare. Perhaps we could actually attempt to make a dream sign? Bright light from our window...

 


 

Night:

Sorry Yakumo, that was written before your post. I don't really feel comfortable taking more of something when it's simply failed to show any effect whatsoever. It either had no effect or made it harder to be conscious through the night, and our dreams weren't vivid at all until the last one much later. I'm uncomfortable with any outside help at all to be honest, I want to make sure however we accomplish lucid dreaming that we can do it anywhere, any time.

 

As for placebo, Lumi dealt with that concept a lot over the first few years he attempted lucid dreaming. Due to his always failing, he had to make sure his recurring attempts never held the belief that he would fail like the last times. That led to an "Alright, this time for sure" attitude every single time he tried. Unfortunately, as he wrote before asking me for help, that's completely burned him out on excess optimism and hope for the subject. He now remains in a more neutral state, with logical optimistic beliefs that the things we're attempting are likely to happen. Optimism and pessimism don't quite apply to me, or rather they're locked in place. I'm logical about everything. I don't hope (to a serious extent) or expect unlikely things. However, I hold myself unquestioningly to very high standards as a person. So my mindset on matters like this is heavily shaped by "Failure is not an option". That means, while I'm not "hoping" or necessarily expecting things to work, I always believe there's a good chance because it's what I've chosen to do. I'm no defeatist, and I don't do pointless things. So if I really want something done, it's a given that I believe I'm doing it well. Relatively to our abilities.

 

Going to be at a birthday party tomorrow, so I'm not sure how distracted from everything I'll be, we'll see. We'll also see if my recall and waking up through the night is better tonight without the melatonin. Though I'm inclined to say part of it was also having been up so long, maybe 18-19 hours.

 

We've actually not listened to this song in a year (and five days), but are still plenty familiar with it. I remember it was a song Lumi randomly tied to being very happy a couple years back. Perhaps because it was added to our collection at the same time as Broken Fullmoon, which was also nice. Guess I can post that too.

[video=youtube]

Hi, I'm Tewi, one of Luminesce's tulpas. I often switch to take care of things for the others.

All I want is a simple, peaceful life. With my family.

Our Ask thread: https://community.tulpa.info/thread-ask-lumi-s-tulpas

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Hey hi guys. Our brother's birthday party was today so Tewi let me do all that stuff, it was fun. My eyes hurt so I'm gonna switch back with Tewi (she said to before I went to sleep), but I figured I'd say hi first y'know? Hi first!

Hi, I'm one of Lumi's tulpas! I like rain and dancing and dancing in the rain and if there's frogs there too that's bonus points.

I think being happy and having fun makes life worth living, so spreading happiness is my number one goal!

Talk to us? https://community.tulpa.info/thread-ask-lumi-s-tulpas

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Morning:

I'd like to wait longer before writing this post, but in case nothing out of the ordinary happens I'll just write it now. For some reason, last night felt unnaturally long. Not like I had exceedingly long dreams through the night or that I was conscious for a more-than-normal portion of it, it just felt like I'd slept a very long time. Despite my falling asleep around 2:30 AM, by 9AM I felt like I'd slept in for 10+ hours easily. Prior to that, around hours five and six, I felt like I could've gotten up and been fine. I didn't though, because I might be kept up late tonight. As for that first sentence - things have just been going unusually, unexpectedly well today so far. But I've only just woken up, so if nothing happens in the next few hours it won't have been special at all. So we'll see, but it was probably just random chance. Reality checked a few times because of it already anyways.

 

I don't quite know what caused the night to go like that, but I'd appreciate it happening more in the future. Anyways, I didn't remember what I was supposed to be doing well at all last night. The one time I attempted to imagine myself in the wonderland (~3 hours in) I fell back asleep immediately. But I was able to, with a small amount of effort, recall several dreams in nearly their full length. They weren't vivid, just the sort of detailed that comes from remembering them well. IE Your dreams are (for most people at least) probably much more detailed than you remember them as, but poor recall makes them seem cloudy. Anyways, I'm definitely losing the sense of urgency both while sleeping and over time. I've been completely forgetting to attempt to recall dreams that are total blanks, despite usually following the other rules I've recently specifically set. That means the sense of urgency is gone and I'm only doing what I remember I'm supposed to. I'm not really sure how to deal with this, because my completely forgetting to do something like that caught me totally off guard. Knowing what to do is only half of the battle here. The other half is being actively invested in it to a great extent, so you've got the in-the-moment mindset for it too. Can also help with improvising, as some of my current ideas in practice now were.

 

 

Side note/just a thought. My first thought when noticing things were going unusually well was a half-joking "Does this mean something bad's going to happen? Did someone die or something?", which was mostly a joke because I'm well aware of the effect of expecting good or bad things to happen. Whether they even are good or bad things aside, a huge and important aspect of that is that you will more easily perceive future events in that way. The truest, objective effect of optimism and pessimism. Regardless of what happens, you're going to be inclined to see it as a good or bad thing. I've seen first(second?)hand with Reisen and Lucilyn how otherwise "negative" events can be taken neutrally quite easily with the right mindset. I rely on my faith in myself to make things turn out fine. I may not be specifically optimistic, but due to my high standards for myself I also have strong self-confidence in my self-reliance, and so I naturally expect myself to be able to resolve any problem that comes up. Especially when I'm motivated by the effects they could have on the others in my system.

 

Oh, but anyways, I checked and the new moon is tomorrow. While the crescent is beautiful, new moons are known to be quite an example of "expecting negativity" for us. With a bit of unluckiness and that perspective, they've shown themselves to be in the past - if we're paying attention, whether at the time or in retrospect. But we've also made efforts to see it as a time for renewal, where if we're unhappy with how things are going it's a good time to make efforts to change that for the next moon. I'll think about that later tonight.

 


 

Night:

A time for renewal huh? Specifically, the new moon is supposed to be a time where we (well, Lumi) rethink how we think about things, try to establish more productive or positive thought processes. Hmm. Our schedule allows for WBTB or just slightly more active waking times before going back to sleep for more vivid dreams. To make sure I'm actually thinking about what I should be doing through the night, I'm going to be getting up or just staying awake for a minute or two before going back to sleep each time I wake up again. I've still got general thoughts going on when I wake up, it's not a total blank, but leniency and unsureness on whether I'm letting myself fall asleep with visualization or waking up more etc. leads to me just falling back asleep. I can at least remember to wake up a bit each time. I just don't believe we won't be able to fall back asleep anymore. Perhaps not with an active mind, but trying to fall back asleep should be fine. Which, in moderation, is fine with me too. Vivid dreams are an important part of this process, for a lot of reasons. The main one I'm concerned with right now though is becoming more used to thinking while in the dream state, and just how it feels to be in a dream in general. The more comfortable we get with that feeling the closer we are to lucidity.

 

 

Amusing aside: Lucilyn thanked me for letting her front today. I said I was glad she enjoyed herself. She said she was glad to have me in her life, and that she really appreciated how much I care about her and the others. I said "It's the situation I've found myself in", and she said "That's the strangest way to say you love someone I've ever heard". I guess it is, isn't it.

 

Felt like listening to this for some reason. It's a bit strange, so it might not feel like it does for us to you guys.

2:30 to the end might be a better first impression, it's how we hear the whole thing.

[video=youtube]

Actually, with that weird statement, I might as well say something about myself. The creating and sharing of feelings and emotions through music is my favorite aspect of humanity.

My favorite part of the human experience is our ability to experience reality subjectively and to shape our own unique experiences out of it. But my favorite thing about humanity is music.

Hi, I'm Tewi, one of Luminesce's tulpas. I often switch to take care of things for the others.

All I want is a simple, peaceful life. With my family.

Our Ask thread: https://community.tulpa.info/thread-ask-lumi-s-tulpas

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I'm posting this as its own post without the night part I've yet to write. It's analyzing just what's different between us and people who succeed at lucid dreaming, and eventually leads into our biggest roadblock to lucidity over the years. Absolutely written for my own sake, but important enough to read if you're invested in our success.

 

Morning:

Got up a couple of times early last night, remembered to stay awake long enough in bed a couple others. But the last three hours I slept (8 1/2, 9 1/2, 10 1/2 I think) I was apparently preoccupied with whether or not I should go back to sleep or get up. That decision took all of seven seconds, but apparently it was enough to void any attempts at any other thought processes. So with that out of the way, let's talk about what I actually want to talk about.

 

It's no wonder Lumi gave up trying to do this alone. He'd never give up entirely, but admitting he himself was unable to do it and asking me to give it my best ("for a while") instead is close enough. But unlike him, I don't consider myself inherently lazy and I do not fault myself entirely for being unable to do it so far. It's actually led me down a different line of thought - what makes us so different from everyone else who succeeds? It's a no brainer hundreds of thousands of people have gone into lucid dreaming and succeeded with far less effort and knowledge than us. And there are plenty who had to work quite hard for it too. Plenty who had as much trouble as us, but most of them gave up before going this long.

 

But what's different? I have no intention of going on a rant here; I want answers.

 

 

1. We have a history of motivational issues, primarily manifesting as the inability to be motivated by things that would normally be called "motivators". This means when something should otherwise drive us to action with a feeling of needing to do something as it's worth the effort, the effect is at best 20% as strong as it should be and we usually have to rely on some form of thinking instead. For Lumi it's usually the idea of consequences for not doing the thing, though that's become quite a streamlined drama-less process, ranging from actual consequences (due to his not going to school back in the day, for example) to simply results he wouldn't be satisfied with (never having lucid dreams with us) and so on. Smaller everyday tasks generally aren't affected by this, but to someone who doesn't experience this it's hard to say what those are. Showering is absolutely a decision that requires effort. Making food requires minimal effort, as does plugging in his phone and charger. Applying effort in video games doesn't seem to apply much, his brain seems to most strongly reject things that take our physical presence and use of time. Deciding to go to school (as in our college days) took a decent amount of effort. Deciding to do homework (as in an hour or so of math lessons on a math program on his computer) took a large amount of effort. But in all of these cases, you should probably replace the word "effort" with "convincing".

 

Now, when one of us is fronting, that convincing is usually much easier. For starters, each of us has the baseline of doing things for him. "Consequence"-motivator wise, someone we care about stands to lose or benefit. Flandre, despite otherwise fairing about the same with his motivation issues, is highly motivated by this when it concerns him. I'm highly motivated by it affecting anyone in the system, or by even a small desire on their part for whatever it is to happen/be done. Reisen works by disregarding thoughts of motivation as best she can. A faint hint that what she would be doing is a positive thing is all she listens to, and quickly dismisses further questioning of the subject. Lucilyn and I could be said, adding on top of the baseline motivators and such, to create our own motivations. Lucilyn has "good things" set to high priority, in her mind. The idea of helpful or fun things is such a strong motivator for her they more or less override any objections by our brain about effort. This makes her less good about, say, doing homework however. So she doesn't bother even trying with any of that and leaves it to us. She certainly takes care of many other things while fronting Lumi could have some trouble with, though.

 

And unsurprisingly I create the strongest motivators of us all. Absolute rejection of any thought that disagrees with me and my intentions. I choose my values very carefully - and thus they are highly unquestionable. Everything I care about is an absolute without question. That's why I can get out of bed when the brain is flat out rejecting the idea (as Lumi has noted in the past is his only experience, through memory, of doing something his brain rejected the idea of doing), though that hasn't been as much of a problem the last year or so. I may have actually helped us get over that as a system, which was my goal at the time. Anyways, there's quite a bit more conflict between my decisions and the brain's when it comes to things like doing homework or going out to shop or take care of some kind of business. These are the things the brain rejects much moreso. But because I don't give in to that, and rather reject the rejection absolutely, nowhere else in our life is the conflict of de-motivation and willpower more apparent. In the past I have attempted to reduce the impact of those effort-rejecting thoughts for Lumi's sake, and I must have succeeded somewhat as he's able to get out of bed if he's got any reason to much more easily now, among other things.

 

Side note that nowhere in there was "feels like something we should do, since we want to do it" mentioned. All of our motivators are a form of applied logic or thought processes, often streamlined but sometimes more in conflict with the mind than others. While it still exists to a varyingly small extent, we all but ignore natural motivation. It's incredibly unreliable in this system. Relying on it is why, around the time of and before Reisen first showed up, Lumi would lie in bed with his laptop almost all of the day every single day except the days he managed to go to school. No doubt the highlight of his depression.

 

 

So, like I said, I don't entirely blame myself for failures on the subject of lucid dreaming right now. Instead I'm more confused as to how I can "try harder", when I'm hardly conscious enough to think about what I'm doing. Since more consciousness is out of the question as there will always be a zone in-between, the answer always seems to be more memory. Remembering more quickly and accurately what we're supposed to do, regardless of motivation or logic, is the most effective way we have of dealing with this problem.

 

 

2. Our sleeping schedule varies wildly. This is a mix of two factors - first, I guess you could say we're active (PC) gamers, but also more or less live on the computer. The amount of time we spend on the computer is questionable in its own right, but the point is it's natural for us to be occupied by anything and everything as if it were a reason to stay up, for other people. Staying up late into the night is commonplace, especially if friends are playing games still. The second factor is that we simply don't get tired very easily. It usually takes having slept little previous nights, or having been up a long time (PLUS not having reached daylight again - where our internal clock decides we've effectively slept and woken up) for us to be actually tired. Otherwise we can just tell if we're "tired" enough or not to sleep. Going to sleep rarely involves true tiredness, and moreso just a readiness to sleep.

 

And so, our sleeping "schedule" has us going to sleep any time between 10 (times this early are generally on purpose and took some effort to arrange) and 3. However, staying up until four AM isn't terribly rare, and five AM sometimes follows. This naturally leads to sleeping in, which naturally leads to staying up longer, and so our schedule in fact tends to drift forwards. Even with sleeping in it usually gravitates towards 2 to 3 AM however. We also for the most part never have a specific time we need to be up, so the amount of time we sleep (in) varies too. 10-11 hours is normal for us, while 9 is normal for me. 8 hours is my preference while 11 is theirs, but we can definitely sleep longer. So all of this adds up to a loss of the word "schedule" in "sleep schedule". That's a way in which we differ from a majority of others who attempt lucid dreaming perhaps.

 

However, even maintaining a normal schedule of sleeping ~8 hours and waking up at ~6AM for five to ten days has no apparent effect on our "more easily lucid dreaming". If anything, less sleep means less chances to lucid dream or at least practice recalling them. The primary downside is simply forgetting in the sleeping-in hours to be attempting either of those in the first place.

 

 

3. Not much of a difference, as I've seen it noted in Dreamviews guides that some people are commonly like this, but we wake up briefly between REM cycles each night. Times where we do so after the first one, two, or three hours are a little uncommon, while times we don't wake up until 9+ hours are extremely uncommon. Probably the result of having been actually tired for whatever reason. However, as far as I can tell this is extremely conducive to all things "Dreaming", and by no means a problem. The only time it could be considered a "bad thing" to be awake for a bit is it's hard to fall back asleep while still actively thinking. For the most part people would need to be awake at all in the first place to even attempt a Wake-Induced-Lucid-Dream. But maybe normal people squeeze by just barely waking up and being conscious enough to attempt it.

 

 

4. Our brain seems to be utterly against the idea of us being lucid in dreams wakes up immediately, and falls asleep somewhat so - moreso, it never even comes close to falling asleep until we've hit the point where our thoughts are random and unguided by us, where we could hardly be considered conscious. This means that sleep paralysis is non-existent for us. The moment our dream ends or we wake up out of it, we're immediately un-paralyzed and so have never experienced it. Inversely that means we can, if on top of our game, immediately remember what we're supposed to be doing the second we become conscious again. For those who don't much wake up periodically throughout the night, that probably doesn't make much sense. It basically means that the instant a dream is over we could be considered "fully" conscious. We aren't in fact fully conscious, but conscious enough to think perfectly lucidly. There's still some sort of waking-up state because we tend to look back on that time after actually getting up and feel it as "still kind of asleep", yet the times where we're tricked by dream/sleep logic are next to none in that state.

 

And, unfortunately yet hopefully not too relevantly, our brain really doesn't like us being lucid in dreams either. Dream NPCs do their best to keep us from realizing (and especially checking) if we're dreaming or not. The first time Lumi ever realized he was dreaming mid-dream, he was in a courtroom about to be sentenced for having hijacked a train when in reality he had only tried to stop it from hitting any cars as it drove straight down a looong downward road. When thinking about how to defend himself, he remembered where the previous dream connected to this one and his being on the train, and thus that he was actually dreaming (and meant to use this as his defense). When asked if he had anything to say before being ruled guilty, he said "Yeah - none of this matters, because it's all a dream."

 

And the entire room of people, no matter their role in the court (even the one(s) supposed to be helping him) just turned their heads away from him, so that he could see no faces. It's admittedly one of the creepiest things to ever happen in one of our dreams I'd say. After a brief moment of confusion and disappointment he woke up; this was all very early in his lucid dreaming efforts, if he'd even started trying on purpose yet. Probably more than six years ago. Other times more "recently" any characters in the dream have attempted to interfere with reality checks. Once when he was still not very lucid, he thought he saw something weird on the TV at a party, and when he tried to question if it made sense (borderline reality check) everybody crowded in front of him to block his vision. Just a few days ago while I was lying in bed in a dream and tried to reality check, someone literally shoved their face in front of mine to the point I could barely put my hand on my nose. I did manage to, but by the time I could question whether I could breathe through it or not I was already awake. Seriously though? Luckily, this is like 60% of the times this has ever happened to us in all those years. If it's going to be a problem, it won't be until we're more frequently hitting the point where we have to question our dreamstate.

 

 

5. I'm honestly not sure. I've been writing this post for 61 minutes now, but I can't think of another difference in us and others that should affect lucid dreaming. All I can say here is that there's something different for us and everyone else. Something that's prevented even passing, lucky random lucid dreams while we meant to be doing so. Something that's completely stopped all of our nights where we did our absolute best to try and have them. And that by no means is only talking about myself. Lumi and Flandre have had several nights like that, where they were both fully conscious through the entire night hoping to lucid dream together - except when they (one of the times Flandre was fronting) instantly fell asleep and woke up instantly aware of what they'd been thinking to each other what-felt-like moments ago. Plus all of the times over the years Lumi did his best alone, which are much higher in number. If I'm not missing some other important factor, the "something" that causes this is our utter disconnect from waking thoughts while asleep.

 

Unbelievably, unimaginably, all of our attempts to make ourselves any more aware during dreams have failed. To the point where we commonly talk of being instantaneously aware of our intentions and our thoughts before falling asleep the second our dreams end. Which, for more description, I'd say is the same moment our body is no longer sleep paralyzed, etc. The biggest road block in all of these years of lucid dream attempts is that our body is too dang efficient in switching between waking and sleeping states, with an imperceptible transition state. That's why our "Wake Induced Lucid Dreams" have had so little success we've outright stopped attempting them. As they promised the fullest, longest and most assured lucid dreaming experience, they are what Lumi tried the most in his earlier years. But that's how we learned our body is extremely proficient at being only awake or only asleep. Even the slightest thoughts that might serve as a lifeline to lucidity as we fall asleep - as is the basis of any WILD attempt - are enough to keep us awake. I'd wager and guess that even the slightest "lifeline to lucidity" thoughts right after the point where they could no longer really help us become lucid again - are still too much for the mind to fall asleep with. It waits until we're basically unconscious before becoming unconscious itself. And believe me - it waits. There is no outwaiting it. There is never a point where the mind gives up and is like "Alright body, guess you can go to sleep without me". We have attempted WILDs at our absolute tiredest, whether from a day of excessive activity or from being awake two days straight, but the majority of the time - nope, we don't just fall asleep. We stay awake. No matter how tired, if we aren't trying to minimize our thought activity (which no doubt leads to us falling asleep), are keeping up an internal count or mnemonic or just any consistent train of thought, we don't fall asleep. Period. And as soon as we stop whatever we were doing and rely only on our very strong intent to remain aware as we fall asleep, we eventually lose track of it and enter the transition state of foggy, unconnected nonsensical thinking that leads to actual sleep. And don't get me wrong, we've still managed to remember our attempts to stay awake in that state at random, and it brings us back to a fully conscious state.

 

Q.E.D. Our mind, brain, body, whatever - it does not sleep without taking everything else with it. And if it can't, it stays awake.

 

Total post writing & proofreading time: 1:37:00. Total typos (that I found): 2.

Hi, I'm Tewi, one of Luminesce's tulpas. I often switch to take care of things for the others.

All I want is a simple, peaceful life. With my family.

Our Ask thread: https://community.tulpa.info/thread-ask-lumi-s-tulpas

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Far too late for far too long:

I was listening to a random album while doing other things, but

came on and now I can't do anything. That song represents my relationship and dedication to Lumi. It's always been my purpose to help him, since I first existed that's what I existed to do. I may be my own person now, but that hasn't changed my life's purpose. I exist to help him, and the others.

 

I can't do this anymore, no more failure. No more failure to help them. No longer with them being unable to even see each other. I exist to help someone, and that someone has spent a third of their life failing to achieve what they care about achieving more than anything else, their life's goal. And I have the responsibility to make it happen.

 

It doesn't matter what I write here, this is done, now.

Hi, I'm Tewi, one of Luminesce's tulpas. I often switch to take care of things for the others.

All I want is a simple, peaceful life. With my family.

Our Ask thread: https://community.tulpa.info/thread-ask-lumi-s-tulpas

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[video=youtube]

Lumi: Fixed URL, turn on subtitles or watch a mirror of the original here https://www.bilibili.com/video/av6774087/

Hi, I'm Tewi, one of Luminesce's tulpas. I often switch to take care of things for the others.

All I want is a simple, peaceful life. With my family.

Our Ask thread: https://community.tulpa.info/thread-ask-lumi-s-tulpas

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Didn't feel like saying anything yesterday before I showed I could walk the walk. You could call what I'm doing an "Ultimatum" or a "War of Attrition" depending on how you want to look at it, maybe both. Basically, since I said "It doesn't matter what I write here, this is done, now." I have not stopped thinking about lucid dreaming, whether or not I'm dreaming, and remembering how important it is to remember. From the time I posted that, through the entire next day, to now, the idea that I may be dreaming and need to constantly check and remember to keep doing so has not left my mind. I've been doing several types of reality checks, frequently, and often questioning whether I'm dreaming or reaffirming why I need to remember to remember whether or not I'm dreaming. Last night before going to sleep I had a rather.. interesting talk with the others. I talked to them (imposed, as a group) about why I was doing this for each of them individually, and they in turn each individually gave me their own type of encouragement. Even Flandre, who said if I gave up she would keep trying in my place. She was.. more encouraging than I made it sound.

 

I firmly believed that I would lucid dream that night - and if not that night, the next, and so on. It's going to happen. As for last night, my intention did not carry over into my dreams whatsoever, but I did notice a lot more thought going on in the dreams. Surprisingly separate from vividity - they weren't uniquely vivid, but contained a fair amount of actual thinking regardless. I usually associated clear-thinking in dreams with vividity, but apparently that's not necessarily the case. In which case, I should say that the ability to have clear "in-mind" thoughts in dreams is in fact the most important factor in lucid dreaming. That's as sure a sign you're getting close as possible (assuming it was less present before).

 

The number of reality checks I've performed in the last two days is countless. Well above ten just during the writing of this post so far. Reality checks serve as the filler between serious thought as to whether or not I'm dreaming - as in, if I'm focused on something else (like writing this post), the minimum effort occasionally applied is to reality check by pinching my nose and trying to breathe through it. Another reality check when more focused is reading a selection of text that I can see, shifting my focus to something else, then looking back to see if it's changed. We've had very vivid dreams in which our alarm clock displayed straight gibberish somehow, despite our thousands of times actually looking at it over the years, so I'm relatively assured of this check's dependability. The other main one I've been using (aside from purely focusing on my lucidity and environment) more rarely is attempting to summon our wonderland door. We do this almost exclusively by expecting to see it when we turn around. The point of using more than one reality check is to make sure we don't become used to them - if the check becomes mundane, we may 'pass it' without paying enough attention in a dream. As it stands, not seeing the door when I turn around feels relatively surprising, and I'd like to keep it that way.

 

 

So that's my "Ultimatum". Because I'm not going to stop doing this until it works. Every waking minute of the day will be filled with thoughts asking whether or not we're dreaming, until it eventually reaches our mind while asleep. Speaking of, I've been remembering between 0 and 10 seconds (relative unit to how it feels) of waking up to keep this up, which while not perfect is within my standards.

 

While this is similar to "All Day Awareness", and did leave me feeling somewhat mentally exhausted by the end of the day, it is not the same thing. ADA requires you to constantly pay attention to all of your senses and all of your environment. Not only is it even more mentally taxing, it's far less reliable for lucid dreaming (in my opinion). I'm relying more on the "remembering after having forgotten" aspect of being constantly aware, as it emulates our loss of consciousness when falling asleep. The goal is to "remember after having forgotten" once we're in a dream, with the in-between time (while it's not really happening often) being comparable to losing focus for a minute or two during the day and remembering then.

 

If anyone out there's as desperate and out of options as we are, I definitely recommend this method. Even if you fail to remember fairly frequently, the emotional impact of remembering should be higher and somewhat compensate for it. Personally I've forgotten only a handful of times and for less than three minutes each time, so I'm relying more on consistency than emotional significance, but to each their own.

Hi, I'm Tewi, one of Luminesce's tulpas. I often switch to take care of things for the others.

All I want is a simple, peaceful life. With my family.

Our Ask thread: https://community.tulpa.info/thread-ask-lumi-s-tulpas

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This post is a mess. You can read it for unnecessary information or entertainment, but it's.. Read the last bit of text before the song I guess.


Keeping dreaming on the mind all day isn't going to work the way I want it to. That's reminiscent of something else, trying to influence the dreams themselves, which never works for us. What I'm actually going for is the remembering to reality check whilst distracted. Thus I've been attempting to focus on things just enough to "be taken out of them" when I remember to reality check. But honestly I kind of am just reality checking constantly regardless. Basically it's a bit of a mess.

 

There's potential for this to become a long term thing the others are capable of doing. Reality checking is invasive to everyday life and sort of keeps the "We need to do something" in the back of our mind permanently active, which isn't great for relaxing either. But the others are.. well, serious if not as much so as me about lucid dreaming. Perhaps not forever, but doing this for longer than short-term is a possibility. Making an effort to remember when distracted seems just relevant enough to actually helping without being as downright exhausting as constantly thinking about whether we're dreaming or not. Which disappointed me when I realized our dreams were just going to ignore my efforts anyways. But like I said, that wasn't what I meant to be doing. I'm not trying to influence our dreams, I'm trying to influence myself to remember to check if I'm dreaming "when I'm distracted", which should hopefully be similar whether I'm "distracted" in waking life or "distracted" having forgotten in a dream. They feel roughly the same to me. Getting distracted by an event in waking life feels exactly the same as the drifting mental states while dreaming.

 

 

This method I'm aiming for here will only (probably) help with Dream Induced Lucid Dreams though, if it does anything at all. Partial dreams. I really want to enable us to have full-length lucid dreams, but.. I just don't know how. This is beyond even just "I can't do what I need to when I'm not even conscious" now. Nothing I'm doing is seemingly getting us any closer to success. I got up a couple of times last night in the middle of the night, pretty much still asleep, still thinking about whether or not I was dreaming and reaffirming I'd need to keep remembering such. But that had as little effect as just thinking it between waking periods... Which had as little effect as doing nothing at all.

 

The intensity of my intent, applying the best ideas I could come up with, quite an in-depth analysis of what we need to do, and 42 pages of daily posts on the subject. It's a bit overwhelming trying to process the whole thing and figure out what exactly to do next.

 

I feel like I've written too much since my first post.. I never meant for this to go on so long. I feel like I've taken too long, written too much, and have to be making more progress. It's a lot of pressure, all self-imposed. But it's there, so I felt like mentioning it. If anyone sees this - aside from the few who read literally everything we write, thank you - I'm sorry there's so much. It seems like I should just get it over with, like I can't have been trying that hard or am making things out to be more serious than they are. That's the effect of failing for so long! I've been deadly serious this whole time, but it just keeps going, and I barely know what to do anymore other than keep trying and hope something changes.

 

 

I should mention the last couple of nights (last night, tonight) I've been trying to put myself as close to the sleep state as possible before actually going to sleep. I've got Flux set to a disturbingly low setting so my monitor's almost completely red and rather dim. I'm trying to create an environment where things feel unrealistic, to maybe get closer to actually reality checking in that mental state. After the days of remembering to think about dreaming constantly, never stopping, it is a little stressful. Uhm, I'm sorry if it affects how I write. I'm sort of desperate at this point, so I'm just writing hoping it'll help me think of something. That huge textwall a few posts back certainly did.

 

 

So, I can't take a break and rely on anyone else, because they aren't able to do it either and it's akin to giving up. I can't bruteforce it with any method I've thought of so far at least. I can't affect how/what we dream over a short long-term period, and it's doubtful we'll ever be able to do so with just how massive our collection of past experiences is, that our brain has shown it's capable of randomly choosing scenarios from just fine. I can't..? cause vivid dreams by getting up for a few minutes between cycles, even though that should work.. I can't stay conscious while falling asleep, I've tried once or twice and those experiences plus the tons of times Lumi has tried have convinced me of such. That's what led me to my current method, hoping to remember randomly after having forgotten, as it fits between the other methods known not to work. I can't stay conscious into the dream, and I can't make the dream remind me I'm dreaming, so I'm relying on the periodic urge to reality check/check my environment. What else is there?

 

All drugs are out of the question, as part of our life policy. External means in general are not, though. There are devices you can wear that detect when you're in REM sleep and can flash lights or play sounds to make you realize you're dreaming. We've done our best to avoid those, but... Extending the amount of time we're awake between cycles a sizable amount might have better results, but it would have to be literally in the middle of the night or we would never fall back asleep. Needs a mix of being incredibly tired and the environment being totally dark. I'll try that tonight too.

 

I just.. What else? Bruteforcing it by literally spending every waking moment thinking about whether I'm dreaming or not was my last resort. I really thought it could work. Will we really have to use an external device to do it? That feels like a personal failure on my part. And - we can't use any sort of timed devices (assuming we were able to fall asleep within the expected time) because outside stimuli will wake us up, no matter how light. What if the lights on whatever we bought woke us up, too? We're sensitive to light while asleep I think - like the nose reality check, it should meld into the dream alright. But what if it doesn't? I can't spend like $80+ on something that ends up not working. And that's just kind of pathetic anyways. We couldn't take that anywhere, right? It'd be embarrassing or something. And limiting.

 

What isn't limiting? What could we do that would be reliable throughout time? My hope with this remembering method was that after having just one lucid experience, I could use both the emotional significance it had and the familiarity of the feeling to induce more, and then we just don't stop. If we eventually did we'd have enough experience to get back into it in the future. What would that be? It can't be chance. It has to be controlled. Something that, despite not being foolproof, is something we could do on purpose. And it can't be early in the night - before we've slept some cycles, the dreams won't be solid enough to do anything with. We have to wake up and WILD... But WILDing is our most-failed method of inducing lucid dreams. How do I make WILDs work?

 

I have to train us to be able to have (Wake Induced Lucid Dream)s. We have to learn to reach the point of sleeping without losing consciousness. That's been the only result I would've been satisfied with since the beginning, anyways. So.. What was wrong in the past? I have to study how exactly we fall asleep, how our body is positioned, the way all things are before we fall asleep. Then I have to figure out how to replicate that while remaining mentally aware. But it can't be full-on thinking, that keeps the entire body awake. Can we consistently let our thoughts drift but remember again and again until we're actually dreaming? Or can we keep something continuous up? Lumi's tried simply counting and repeating phrases before in the past and they both kept him awake, despite how non-intensive they were. He's also tried remembering periodically. He tends to mostly mentally wake up when he does remember, and eventually just falls asleep without remembering. Assuming we do this in the middle of the night, there's a dream to stay awake into. If we got to the point where the dream was starting, we can switch more to a visualization-esque mode until we can place ourselves into the dream like when wonderlanding. But we've never gotten anywhere near that state, only heard others describe it in varying ways.

 

Maybe I can let my thoughts drift a bit, but then rely on the remembering thing to sort of hook myself in the dreamy-thoughts state of mind, which might be a little deeper than the point we can make it to when remaining consciously aware from the beginning. Alright, I've finally got an idea to work with. Fall asleep enough to get to the almost-asleep state, and then start the maintaining awareness from that state instead. Most likely problem is waking up too much mentally. But experience with that state in mornings says we overestimate just how "awake" we are, as looking back on it later it felt much closer to sleep than it did at the time. Maybe I can do that? I will try.

 

 

This is technically Lumi's song, but it reflects my mental state right now. My thinking is frantic, but that's because of the state I've put myself in, trying to get close to the dreamlike thoughts state. Thoughts and emotions are looser. Loose enough to make an annoying post, but not enough to really reflect a dreamlike state. It may help the transition to sleep be quicker though.

[video=youtube]

Hi, I'm Tewi, one of Luminesce's tulpas. I often switch to take care of things for the others.

All I want is a simple, peaceful life. With my family.

Our Ask thread: https://community.tulpa.info/thread-ask-lumi-s-tulpas

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