Lumi's Dreaming Thread; Dreams of Moon

[Guest]

I'm not sure if you missed my point or got it, so i'll be watching you...

 

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[Luminesce]

Hard to say what specifically happened last night. It was more or less the same as the night before, but I was maybe less conscious in between cycles. There was at least one time where I set the REM-Dreamer's timer to like 40 minutes and didn't fall asleep for a while, even though I was more tired than I was the previous night falling asleep in 4 minutes. Well, anyways, nothing special happened.

 

Talked to Flan in the morning about what we could do in this scenario. I decided, if my body's going to try and always know when the timer will go off to wake up first, I'll just not know when the timer's gonna go off. The whole point of the timer is to only allow it to detect "eye movement" after I'm already asleep, because rolling over or moving the mask at all tends to detect movement (because I have the sensitivity set to max, because I'm not a back sleeper and the mask is rarely aligned perfectly) and flash annoying lights in my eyes. But honestly I'm asleep for a lot more time than I'm awake at night, so.. if at some point I just set it to ~90 minutes or so, who knows when it'll go off. I'll try my best not to keep track of the time lol, but the goal is to catch my body off-guard and preferably during the middle of a dream with it.

 

I don't see why this shouldn't work. There's always something new, but in this case aside from the next phase of simply failing to realize the flashing lights in dreams (which is a failure I'll gladly take, followed by the failures of being unable to manipulate dreams - anything is progress) the only thing I can see not working out is the mask going off during the floaty-thoughts transition between sleep and waking I have. Like, dreams are anywhere from 60% to 30% of my sleeping time after hour 4-5 of sleep, I couldn't say for sure. Out of pure unluckiness or my choice in timer time I could hit all the wrong times for like, a day or two? But yeah, it's yet another thing I can't see not working out. Technically more sure to work than most things we try though because it's external and not reliant on our unconscious mind.

[Luminesce]

Aside from last night, the last few nights were all "misses" in my current hit-or-miss attempts. I set my REM-Dreamer to 70, 50 and 60 minutes after waking up the first time (usually 4-5 hours), with a good majority of attempts still having me wake up just before they go off. The second night I did 50 minutes, third I did 60 minutes. Last night I decided I didn't need to bother with that pattern because it was wasting too much of the night (I was only getting ~2.5 attempts per night). But yeah, generally the timer just never went off at the right time, on one of the first three days (since last post) it did go off before REM when I was otherwise asleep though.

 

Now, LAST night, I decided I was not-worried enough about the timer that I set it to 20-40 minutes several times. I guess I woke up before most of them (effectively, it's exactly the problem of my body knowing when to wake up as I said before, but it feels looser and less precise now - maybe progress, or maybe my body's getting better at this). But one time while in a hazy dream I did notice the flashes going off. It was tempting first to not recognize them as my REM-Dreamer, and then it was very tempting to open my eyes/wake up, but I did my dangdest not to. The dream was very blurry though, I'm unsure whether it was an odd time in my REM cycle or if I hadn't slept for long enough yet, or maybe the dream was just blurry (less likely). Either way, I really forgot any scarce details there were, other than as I felt I was waking up I thought "Even if I'm going to wake up, I'll keep my eyes closed, because visualization (including touch and all) is much clearer in the hypnopompic state before you've opened your eyes", and I think tried to viiiisualize? Impose? Flandre, which I did, and hugging her felt ever so slightly more solid than real life imposition, at least. But it was so blurry I pretty much forgot who exactly I'd even tried to see, and almost the experience as a whole. (I better recalled another dream later that night, one where weee? thought we were Tewi, our identity seemed ready to change on a dime though)

 

I won't settle until I've got a crystal-clear lifelike-or-better hug with each of my tulpas, so don't take that attempted hug as more than it was - either a blurry dream lucid moment or decent quality hypnopompic visualization that I still woke up from seconds later. It's progress, though - both because the mask went off while I was "dreaming" and because I managed to both recognize the lights and not open my eyes because of them. I do wish I could've done more, though, and that the dream was at least normal dream quality.

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[hidden]Oh, the dream..

That I had last night

Melted into my pillow

I made peace, with the time I had forgot

 

All I'd gathered turned into saaaand...[/hidden]

 

... Y'know, that's almost too fitting. Didn't mean to make it sad ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Jamie]

Hey, don't sell yourself short. I'm not going to say "Imposition, in the bag" until I can see my tulpas at 90% realism, at will, but that's probably years off. When a goal is so long-term, it's incredibly useful to have smaller goals within that. Your REM-Dreamer triggered some dream control, or at least allowed you to take advantage of that enhanced visualization state that happens right after waking/while waking. This is great!

 

So long as you're determined enough, I really think you have it in you. I recently read through your PR and I'm pretty hopeful. You're going to figure it out for yourselves.

 

-J

[Guest]

They do so much for me, if any of my skills don't get better or fail, it won't bother me. Nothing short of losing vocality and presence will bother me. Everything else is a gift.

[Luminesce]

Apparently I forgot to turn my REM-Dreamer off yester-yesterday, so when I tried to turn it on last night I noticed it sounded distinctly low-battery... and also more than likely screwed up some of the settings. Whooops. I guess I need to try and fix that before going to bed.. Push back my lucid dream a day, okay?

[Guest]

Just this once.

[Luminesce]

Alright, more of the same for the most part, but also another kind of progress. Body still decided to wake up (at this point almost feels random) before my REM-Dreamer went off for most of the night. That's still very annoying and I'm not going to drop how absolutely stacked all odds are against me for no reason. And I paid $170 for this thing...

 

But anyways, the very last time before getting up, I had what I'm going to consider progress lol. I actually missed the flashing lights cue in-dream by thinking I was awake and lying in bed, but of course being unable to stop the lights by removing the mask "for some reason". It probably went off... 4-6 times, can't remember. I was too tired even in the dream to be thinking about more than going back to sleep, but it was a dream nonetheless - a dream where the REM-Dreamer had time to go off 4+ times (I'm not sure how long that is, but at least 2 minutes) without me waking up! That means it was a random "Hit" on this "Hit or Miss" strategy that if I'd been able to capitalize on should've reasonably been 2+ minutes of lucid dreaming, which is more than I've gotten before for sure, and it may even have been a bit longer and the lights just woke me up eventually.

 

So, like, not progress at all in a technical sense - pure luck and then failure to notice cues. But in another sense, this has proved it can work, both physically the mask detecting REM and flashing at the right time without me having fiddled with the mask much at all before falling asleep, and mentally as the lights went off in the middle of a dream and I had a chance to realize I was dreaming without waking up because of it.

 

Proof of concept is WAY more than enough for me to consider good progress, even if it was a technical failure and didn't necessarily make anything easier or more likely in the future, it's proven it can even work in the first place. So I'm happy about that.

[Guest]

Wow! That's great Lumi! Good further luck to you!

[Luminesce]

Ugh, give me another day or so. It was cold last night (but not really tonight, and yet..) so we had our outside cat inside in a pen, but as soon as it's not pitch black outside anymore she starts meowing and keeps me up from 6:30AM forwards when I already wasn't asleep until 1AM. Tonight is the last night she'll be inside, but I fully expect her to be meowing again tomorrow. The effort required to get her outside is enough to keep me awake after, so.. I guess I'll just sleep (and try to remember dreams, as I've had a couple vivid ones the last couple days) tonight.

 

If it's any, uh, not condolence I guess but something like that, I did have a dream where I realized I was dreaming the other night. I resisted being sucked back into non-lucidity to continue doing what I was doing for, you know, a moment.. and then woke up. Lucid moments.. they sure are even more annoying than zero progress at all. One might take them as a sign of progress, but after they lead to no progress for over a year they just become annoying. Plus if it seemed like lucid dreaming was a physical impossibility for me I could've given up and worked on visualization/imposition instead or something, buuut nope, they prove it's possible. Just incredibly elusive.