Lumi's Dreaming Thread; Dreams of Moon

[Tewi]

Good and bad news, the latter mostly nullifying the former as it tends to. Flandre's "trick" to always remember to remember our dreams somehow became a nearly perfect habit within days, I've not once had to rely on looking at our clock to remember dreams. It just sort of happens as I wake up, at least in the later half of the night's sleep. However, the detail and length of the dreams has decreased, along with our perceived dream vividity. I paid no special effort to recalling the dreams I had, somewhat on purpose. I still attempted to recall all of them and attempted to recall increased length on any I deemed too short, but I didn't make a big deal out of it.

 

Because making a big deal out of it is something that cannot last. The goal of this trick was to remove the need to pay special attention to dream recall, as eventually that's where we end up time after time. However, Flandre's initial success was apparently due to the special attention she was paying to dreams. Without going to bed with great intent to be remembering each and every dream, even if we do have this habit of recalling dreams automatically, they won't be as vivid (or at least recalled so). It's still an improvement, but not an answer. So it's up to me again to figure out what to do, hm.

 

 

Doing that isn't easy you know, reader. That was nearly thirty straight minutes of trying to think of what we can do. Although the text continues immediately, or may show up day after day, don't take for granted the effort this sort of stuff takes. A huge problem for us, but a still quieter one for all. The casual half-conscious decisions not to do something with accompanying excuse push your life in a very different (boring and unproductive) direction if you let them. It's good to acknowledge that effort is effort, and that it is necessary to create quality life experiences. And of course, our system seems to be at a lifelong disadvantage due to a lack of positive-initiative impulses in our brain. There are some, relatively slight, but the majority of things we do are negatively enforced, typically by the negative or lack of positive things that not doing something will cause. In case you were wondering how exactly our "motivation issues" manifest. My motivation is not quite either, though it certainly isn't positive. All things I deem I should do are negatively enforced as "Not meeting my own standards", which itself is considered not an option. So my motivation isn't any easier than the others' in our system, but it is consistent and reliable. Just in case any of you had the impression I magically had motivation where the others didn't.

 

This entire thread is driven not by the anticipation of the happiness we'll experience if successful, but by the fear of not experiencing it if we aren't. Such is the nature of our motivation.

 

 

Anyways. Looks like I'll need to be the one fronting for a while longer. "Special effort" is a literal necessity for vivid dream recall, and I'm not sure anyone but me is capable of applying that for an extended period of time. I've no plan for it once I'm not fronting, other than hopefully I can get it to a point where our habit of always recalling at least some of each dream maintains it a bit. Also, our sleep schedule needs to be made regular. The others are capable of this as long as it's set as a rule to wake up by a certain time and not just experimentation or something wishy-washy like that. Since this needs to be truly long-term, I'll set the time as late as 9AM. Our existing rule on wake-up times is not to go back to sleep if we're within ~30 minutes of hitting that time, so we may sleep slightly past it from time to time, but not too much so.

 

I've got a good idea of the level of effort in dream recall that doesn't work now, after practicing it the last week or so. It just needs to be... a lot, forever. Something we aren't good at, for sure. But as Lumi has (unfortunately already) attempted to use as a motivator in the past, we'll need to consider recalling dreams of the utmost importance each and every time, paramount to the success of our lucid dreaming. Each and every time we wake in a night, which is as few as 2 and as many as 6, the last dream we had is the next step on the staircase to lucid dreaming. Choosing not to adequately reach the next step but only to look at it is directly against us ever reaching the top. As this necessity to apply effort occurs at our most vulnerable, most likely point to not apply effort - literally in the middle of our day's rest - it's necessary to give it a personal, negative connotation. Similar to "I need to get up now or I will miss an exam that will make me fail a class", if you're familiar with that feeling. Giving ourselves no choice is our only choice. I hope the others can deal with this, as I'm sort of used to living like that, but it can be stressful.

 

Sleep is a very valuable time. It won't be easy giving up even a small amount of it each night. But that value is exactly the price we need to pay to reach our goal, which has infinite value.

I hope we can do it.

 

 

 

And if you look closely, you can see me working all this out as I went, because earlier parts of this post sure don't point to me knowing what I was about to write lol. Post took about 70 minutes to write by the way. A lot of my posts take about that long.

[Tewi]

Annoyingly, another random reality check failed, and I believe that makes two now. Randomly did a passive reality check out of habit in a dream with no thought put into it and, apparently, didn't notice anything strange. So we've two kinds of reality checks, the kind where we're intent on doing them and the habitual kind. The habitual kind is prone to failure when not occurring alongside thoughts of suspicion about a scenario.

 

That's such an us thing. Add it to the stupidly long list of things that are harder for us than for others. After eight years when reality checks finally start showing up randomly in our dreams, they don't even work.

 

Have definitely confirmed that dreams can start very quickly after falling asleep and be in full quality, "full" length before us waking up, in a matter of 20 minutes or less. I fell asleep somewhere between 8:30 and 8:40 AM, and woke up at 8:59 AM due to my intent to not sleep past 9, and recalled a moderate length dream since I was last awake. I can't say whether all dreams occur this way or if that scenario is special as I was more awake and obviously intent on not sleeping for long.

 

And yes, I suppose I can do that. We generally despise alarm clocks, and/but can also wake up on time for basically anything. We tend to have trouble falling back asleep if we know we need to get up in the next 80 minutes I'd say. First noticed this when Lumi was a child and would wake up on Christmas morning, but it also applied in other circumstances, and it works even for "I don't want to sleep past X:00" apparently. I'd trade it for the ability to nap, as that'd actually serve any purpose in lucid dreaming.

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I keep pulling up Ruxia's "C.C. -cosmological constant-" album just to skip directly to the second song and it only. I should probably just add it to our itunes.

[Tewi]

Wooow. Woke up already relatively upset and stressed out and had to just stop thinking because thoughts were annoying me. Checked when the next full moon was before going to bed just now - it was a new moon when I woke up. A very unlikely amount of "bad days" happen on new moons when we've no idea what the current phase is, I'm almost starting to think there's really something to it.

 

Anyways. Was doing the schedule thing and failing to improve dream recall, when one morning when I needed to get up and the body just disagreed, I thought "Fine. I'll lay on my back, and either we won't fall asleep, or we'll have slept on our back."

 

Well. I fell asleep within 20 minutes and slept fine. I basically dropped everything else I was trying and focused on that - if we could sleep on our back on demand, we could wear the REM-Dreamer without its sensor getting moved over, and we could induce lucid dreams at will. This is the surest method to succeed in all our years of lucid dreaming.

 

Unfortunately I was nowhere near tired enough the next few days to fall back asleep on my back at the 7-8 hour mark (longest/most vivid dreams). So I stayed up all day and night to guarantee I'd be tired. To be honest, this has a tendency to screw with our sleep and make us wake up after like 6-7 hours of sleep, unable to go back to sleep. Which really sucks when you've just been up for over 24 hours. So, I might not be "tired enough" to sleep on my back tonight. But the body will want to make up that sleep the next night and will be much more tired, in our experience. So I'm counting on that.

 

Don't get your hopes up, I didn't. We generally expect no results from anything no matter how promising at this point, because we've got 7 years' history of nothing ever working. But still, this is the closest we've ever been to lucid dreaming, especially on demand. That much I'm sure of. But if this trails off over a week or two to being decidedly futile/useless again, I won't be surprised. The positivity is high.

[Lucilyn]

EEEEEEEE I HAD A LUCID DREAM!!!! YES! LET ME JUST HIT CAPS LOCK REAL QUICK

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That back sleeping thing ain't workin! We're like never tired enough! Even after sleeping for 16 hours twice in a row after being up over 24 hours twice in a row we weren't tired enough because tired=/=tired! Anyways! Okay I put a song up there! It's super duper special! Lumi's favorite song remixed by one of our favorite music-ers! ALL EXCLAMATION POINTS THIS POST!!!

 

 

So I woke up after like 8 hours of sleep, went to the bathroom and was going back to sleep but heard our little sister asking our brother a question about something on Minecraft not working so I got up when I was almost asleep and talked to her for about a minute and then went back to bed again and then "I woke up and got on the computer, tried to look at something on our desk, tried to turn on our light and it didn't work. Which means I'm dreaming!" I reality checked and air went cleanly through my fingers when I was pinching my nose!

 

So I panicked as heck and rubbed my hands together for ten seconds while thinking of what to do to stabilize the dream next, decided to grab a water bottle 'n that was a good texture and weight for sensory immersion, put it back down and touched the desk and walls, then I stood up and tried to walk towards our door and fell the hek over because my leg was like cramped, so I propped it up on our bed and kind of shook it but not a lot because I didn't want to lose the lucidity and knew it was an illusion anyways, so then I walked to our door- holy crap I just typed so fast I got a full word ahead of myself and thought I skipped a word when I didn't lol that has NEVER happened before- held our door knob and held the intent to see anything but our hallway tbh (our wonderland hallway though), and honestly I don't remember what exactly my environment looked like for the rest of the dream because I ignored the things that weren't how they were supposed to be while trying to make'em look right (practicing dream control). So it was either our normal hallway or a stupid wrong version of our wonderland hallway with too much light and space and wrong materials. Either way I walked back out a couple'a times closing the door and trying to make it look right when I opened it again. Our mom walked up behind us and I was like NO, go away and she was like wellokaythen and then after I opened the door again at some point she said "I'm still sending your brother though" and I walked down the hallway and walked up the quick spiral staircase to the right to Reisen and Lumi's room to try'n make the stairs look right but walked back down instead of focusing on their room 'cus it was too big and different from what I was already focusing on, noticed the walls were the wrong color (not wood) and focused on changing them and they slowly faded to be more or less the right color (great practice), then I walked out the hallway and failed to make the couches be there so no one was there, walked to the end of the living room that was still all wrong and opened to like a beach scenario, turned around to try and make the couches appear and I forget if they did cus then our brother walked in and I pointed back at the door and said "LEAVE!" and he just turned and ran out (I thanked him after I woke up for being so respectful of my wishes), and then I guess I woke up while trying to make the others appear or make the wonderland look more like our house I forget, just opened my eyes and bam awake.

 

I wasn't me in the dream I was basically just Lumi, but I'm not giving him credit lol. next time as part of the dream stabilizing process I'll make me me! apparently (I guess we knew this though) the reaffirmation of who's switching only happens as we wake up, 'cus I immediately was like "that was Lumi even though I'm me, huh". And uh, I know it seems like I was being silly just focusing on the wonderland/environment the whole time, but makin' the others appear was only secondary, mostly I was practicing dream control. Practice, gotten! Expectation is super important! Super duper! Needa learn to trick ourselves into thinking things will really be a certain way! Not sure why the hallway was such wrong details though, that might actually be because our visualization is so bad? either way our wonderland isn't functioning as a perfectly 100% familiar place to be in a lucid dream because the whole living room (and somehow the hallway too lol, had light coming in from the sides) felt open, but it's way better than our actual house. ummm. Maybe we can make it be more accurate with time and then it'll be way way good. but for now it just served as basically a blank slate area to like teleport to with a door, and I'm not sure the couches thing will work. Honestly I'm really surprised all those years ago that despite Lumi being in such a huge hurry and waking up and bad quality dream that the hallway was mostly right and he actually saw Reisen and Tewi on the couch! he must'a accidentally had really good dream control because his expectations were purely subconsciously expecting the wonderland because he didn't even think about it, whereas I was focusing really hard to try and make details right.

 

Anyways! Trying to make the others appear is hard! It'd help if the environment were a little more SOLID, but mostly it was just hard to expect them to be there. I think I know a better place though! Our grandma's house appears in our dreams more than anywhere else ever because Lumi really loved it as a kid, and we went there recently when working for our older brother at his fair stands, and we spent every night when Lumi got back in a lil room we usually don't sleep in and he imposed all of us together and it felt super cozy and nice, the room was technically small and cold and dark but how WE saw it was all of us together, Lumi and Flan on one twin bed and me and Reisen on another and Tewi sitting on a cushioned bench against the wall and our bed lookin' out the window at the full moon that was there at the time, and it's just the SWEETEST memories ever so if I can get to our grandma's house in a dream (heck they're already occurring there by default half the time) and make sure it's night and not day (this is hit or miss for now) then I bet I could see'em all when I got in there! 'Cus Lumi spent like NO time in there when he wasn't imposing us, and we all sorta had our own spots y'know? I wanna do it!

Gotta do it!

 

I'm SO happy I had a lucid dream that actually was productive and sorta long, idk if it was "full length" compared to a WILD but it definitely felt long enough that if we could do what we wanted right from the start it'd be totally satisfying enough. And I think if I'd remembered to be stabilizing the dream more (sensory, not just focusing and shaping it) I might not'a woken up quite yet, idk! We'll see!

 

NEW perma-strat is to get up after 7 or 8 hours and be awake and then go back to bed and then BEFORE FALLING ASLEEP get up AGAIN for another minute or two and THEN go back to sleep AGAIN and go for a Dream Induced Lucid Dream! Our dream-noticing skills are on-point every single vivid dream we have so I believe we can do it pretty consistently! Dream world heckin sucks at being like reality even if it's vivid, and all our reality checks we've done on purpose (not out of habit) have worked perfectly, so it'll work! It will! I'm gonna lucid dream again tomorrow!!!

 

 

 

.... Finally!

[Breloomancer]

That is amazing! I hope you are able to do this consistently

[Lucilyn]

thinking about a whole reality where I can control everything to make anything real and it's REAL and I can feel it and see it makes me feel a jumble of feelings that aren't expressible in words but could probably be harnessed by an advanced alien society as a source of energy

[Guest anonymous2]

That is a very adorable post. I am glad to see that you are progressing. I do hope that you or one of your siblings will experience another lucid dream very soon.

 

I am keeping a dream journal myself and, while I am indubitably inexperienced in reality checks and the various methods of “inducing” lucid dreams, I certainly expect that the steadily improving dream recall will improve matters over time. As recently as two days ago, I have written a journal entry over the span of 1:30 hours that amounts to 2147 words. That level of detail may have negligible returns, but it is still an enjoyable activity in itself.

 

I do wish to read the entirety of this thread one day. There is enough content to fill a book.

[Lucilyn]

It's a whole lotta failures one after another for 500 posts! would recommend

 

wait no, wouldn't, ya don't need all that information on lucid dreaming. 1/10 the effort should be enough for anyone else to accomplish lucid dreaming, so unless you've been tryin' for years and nothin's worked for you, you probably won't gain that much from reading this whole thread, other than maybe getting to know us better

 

anyways schedule's a little bit topsy-turvy so I couldn't really fall back asleep after 8 hours of sleep.. at 8pm, with people bein loud upstairs. Kinda like, managed to not fall asleep but be almost asleep for 45 minutes once though? So that was probably kinda cool, even though the hour before that I did fall asleep, anyways nothing happened RIP next time, schedule will be fixed today

[Srn347]

I don't know what you're talking about, I've gained so much from reading this thread. Then again, I've been trying for years without anything working and I take an interest in knowing you guys better.

[Lucilyn]

too tired, not tired enough! always something! I woke up after 5 hours and checked Discord on our phone real quick and went back to bed but then I was thinkin about stuff and I literally didn't fall asleep for more than 45 minutes 'cus I was too awake lol, sure is tricky bizniss

 

well that's all I got, I'm just trying again 'n again..

 

have the song I'm listening to

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it's Mamizou's theme! she's a tanuki, and she'll be one'a the only ones in our dream Gensokyo to know she's in a dream, did'ya know? 'Cus she's tricky and stuff, knows a lot about everything, even knows how to get outside of Gensokyo in the canon somehow. So naturally we'd never be able to trick her into not knowing she was in our dream!

 

Maybe she'll say (to say) hi to you guys some day! or just as weird, you could say (to say) hi to her? aaaaa I can't wait to interact with all those other people in lucid dreams, they're like a buncha friends who've just been asleep and dreaming without me! That's definitely not an ironic metaphor either, unless it is