Lumi's Dreaming Thread; Dreams of Moon

[Guest]

I saw something possibly different. I was on a lucid dream thread and someone said they enter lucid after they wake up by "rolling in visualization and visualizing where they want to be."

[Breloomancer]

that sounds like WILD to me

[Reisen]

I saw something possibly different. I was on a lucid dream thread and someone said they enter lucid after they wake up by "rolling in visualization and visualizing where they want to be."

 

I believe that's just a method of performing WILD, where you rely on being just awake enough to be conscious while still tired enough to fall back asleep, retaining your lucidity. It's the most sought-after lucid dreaming technique, but it seems to not work for a lot of people. In our case, the slightest thread of consciousness appears to keep us awake, as our body/brain is incredibly proficient at only being awake or asleep at any given time. Most easily seen by the fact that we've never once encountered sleep paralysis, contrasted with (but also) the fact that we wake up very, very quickly and precisely, usually between every single REM cycle. We're able to think often the moment a dream ends and also move if we so choose (and while it feels at the time that we're fully awake, retrospectively our thoughts seem only mostly conscious, so there's still chance for hypnopompia). And yet, unthinkably, practically going from dream to waking ~totally conscious, our dream recall is still awful. Do we forget our dreams in the haze of waking like everyone else? Nope! We experience them being instantly deleted from our memory in the span of a few seconds! We can be fully aware we've just woken from a dream seconds ago but all details but vague feelings quickly flit away.

 

 

But speaking of the seeming slight potential even WILD has along with other techniques we've ruled out in the past - I guess I should write an update for this thread about why we're not really posting in it. After all, Lumi said he would never give up trying (and at the time of creating the thread, that we'd post every single day, and we did.. until it started to get old quite a ways in). And we haven't! Actually, we're doing something Tewi decided and orchestrated herself, having pegged it down as the biggest (actionable) roadblock to our success in lucid dreaming. (But actually, it's something that applies to our entire life, and so it's done for the benefit of both!)

 

We've tried most lucid dream induction techniques, a lot of them many different times, and with a whole lot of determination as was the case when Lumi lay in bed for hours attempting WILDs, yeeaars ago. But you know what the one thing we've not done, that is occasionally stated as one of the big things with learning lucid dreaming? Kept at something when it wasn't working. Because we can't, actually. Our life-wide motivation issues severely impact our ability to keep anything up for, in the most important of situations: about two weeks. Most important being school, college, and the one job we've had (luckily it's been a recurring, two-week job! Like.. only twice! Made some good money, though). In pretty much any scenario, along with our "toomucheffortDonotdo" semi-conscious automatic thought response to a lot of things in the short term, our overall motivation for something also wanes very quickly no matter how much we initially cared/dedicated ourselves to it from the outset. And whether learning piano or using our REM-Dreamer mask, I can't really think of a time we've spent more than two weeks working on something before giving up. Even if we do come back to it later as our motivation "recharges" (not the case for piano, RIP), that single long stretch may be the key (well, our very specific key to our very specific situation's lock) to finding success in lucid dreaming.

 

With that said.. Whoops, I've tragically steered this post into an iceberg... See, what we're working on is actually the short-term motivation, purposely challenging the automatic "toomucheffortDonotdo" thought (not actually in words mind you, it's a strong resistant feeling that accompanies most tasks/actions that will require "effort") when it arises. And uh, interesting results so far! While Tewi's original plan was to isolate that feeling and purposely stress it whenever it came up while using her willpower to do whatever it was anyways - in hopes of desensitizing us to said resistant feeling/thought, at the very least in the specific activities she chose - we've instead found... The thought/feeling kind of dissipates when we focus on it. It's like trying to grab something slippery only to have it slip out of your hands when applying pressure. Just today when thinking of a game to play, the idea to "play" Kana Warrior (a nice, old flash game we used to learn hiragana and katakana a long time ago) to study as we're starting to become rusty (and this was one activity Tewi specifically designated - studying Japanese), I was of course hit with the "toomucheffortDonotdo" feeling.

 

At any other time in our life, this is highly influential and hard to make ourselves want to overcome or ignore. Tewi's always specialized in using the fact that it's beneficial she do something as motivation to overcome them. So when I felt it, of course it made "me" want to play something else more fun. But having some direction/intent (and the required introspective abilities to recognize and work with these thoughts, which thanks to Lumi's years of effort we ALL specialize in as a system!) to apply lets us directly oppose it. No idea how long that would last, seeing as Tewi's original plan for this was set to be one to two weeks long depending on how strenuous it was (it's not), and her plan was not to expend effort for a couple of weeks for a temporary fix, but to put a dent in the feeling itself to help us in the long run.

 

But as she was starting to suspect, when I targeted that feeling and thought "Okay, what if I play it right now though", trying to summon the feeling back/stronger, to then oppose it.. I really just couldn't. So I opened a new tab... went to the URL... went to the Freeplay and needless to say, the feeling hadn't come back yet. So our plan may change from here.. The initial plan to directly hold the thought/feeling in focus while doing things anyways seems not applicable. Best we've thought of from there is that we'll simply need to hone our ability to recognize that feeling when it occurs (I mean, it's been an ever-present thing in Lumi's life since he was at least 12, so almost half his entire life now! ... as in it's natural and blends in), and reassure ourselves with the fact that it disappears when opposed to continue doing whatever it was we deemed a positive thing to do.

 

That.. still doesn't bring us to an answer for the "overall motivation" problem. I suppose sooner or later we can try and look into that too, and we must do something about it, but.. Neither Tewi nor I see a particular way to deal with it, no plan of attack as she came up with for this one. In fact, I'm sad to say Tewi hadn't thought about that once this whole time, up until I realized the problem I was about to talk about wasn't even something we were working on or knew how to.

 

Well! We're working on making progress in a part of our lives! And in the meantime, we are of course still trying to work on dream recall and such, but it's sort of the same-thing-every-day/week/month non-content that we decided to stop posting in this thread a while ago now. Mainly because it's non-committal fluff that hasn't worked in the last 8 or so years.

 

Still, I guess I can leave you all with the slightest bit of positivity? This "short-term anti-motivation" problem we've been working on as far as we can tell is also what stops us from just throwing on the REM-Dreamer every night instead of only saving it for when we try to commit for a week or so. The loosening-band aside, we've never tried foregoing the Two Way Communication/Timer feature and just using it in its default mode (meh, so many annoying false REM detections that flash light in our eyes while we try to sleep) or, as was a different method we've considered (and of course tried just a few times in a single week period once), setting the timer not 20-40 minutes to activate during our next REM cycle, but to 4-6 hours so that we can hopefully avoid thinking about the timer, which keeps us awake, which has been the biggest reason it's not worked for us yet.

 

Sooo, yeah, updated! I was going to wait and let Tewi write this post, but then Bear posted, so here it is written by me.

[Luminesce]

I had a lucid dream, though I'd consider my post in our PR more important than this one.

 

Song title not relevant despite sounding like it might be, but it's what I decided to listen to while writing the post so I'm putting it here.

[video=youtube]

 

There's.. very little to say, really (edit: I wrote plenty, rather I just didn't want to recount all the fine details of the dream itself I remembered, and I didn't). I woke up after 6 hours around 7AM, was somewhat awake for 5-15 minutes before falling back asleep (lying in bed, considering whether I should get up to fix my sleep schedule or go back to sleep because bed cozy), and when I next woke up around 9AM I had just woken up out of a lucid dream. Whoops, I forgot to reality check after waking up, that's a sin..

 

I really can't be bothered to try and recite the whole dream because there's so much context it just "had" to make it make sense. I was supposedly robbing my "grandfather's" (never seen this person in my life) house, and he came home and caught me. Got taken by police to some legal place where, lol, I met a couple of old troublemakers I knew throughout high school. I asked one if this was extreme coincidence or if he was just here often, and he just looked away, which was a good answer. Anyways, I was supposed to be giving my uh, I guess official statement of what I did (I don't exactly have experience being a criminal), and while doing so I realized I didn't remember walking to the place nor "buying this hoodie" (dream context: it was a hoodie I had bought earlier. See what I mean about context being annoying? I've left out tons of details), which I knew is an obvious sign I may be dreaming, so I reality checked and yep.

 

So, starting from lucidity - I got up and walked back through the place surprisingly full of people and a little mad my dream had been putting me through this very stressful (and by chance, vivid) scenario, I said something along these lines (I want to bold the text but it's distracting): "You know, I don't remember walking to my grandfather's house, nor buying this hoodie. And I also don't remember being able to breathe with my airways blocked," at which point I covered my face with my hand and breathed through it. As always there's a sense that I'm being scary to these normal people/dream characters who don't understand, so I continued "But I think this is payback enough for putting me through that" as I walked out. Yeah, it made more sense with the dream context. So as I walked down some nice outdoor-but-covered stairs and through a few fancy doors with shapes cut out of them (I want to call them doors you'd see in a garden), which were actually the most vivid part of the dream, I had to walk.. through a school bus (and I mean through, in a non-existent entrance behind the driver's seat and out the actual door) to get to a nice paved path under a line of trees with some benches.

 

And I remembered at this point (I mean it's been what, 15 seconds since I exited the previous scenario and started doing my own thing) that I need to remember to just sit and focus on actually being lucid, instead of wandering/getting caught up in nonsense when I become lucid. So I went to sit on the nearest bench, but despite this supposed clarity I was like "Well actually the next bench down seems nicer", so I went to sit on that one instead lol. Precious 4 seconds. I sat on the bench, but then it was flat on the ground, and I was like screw this, dream, you are not distracting me, and tried to believe-it into raising. It worked just barely, until my focus went elsewhere after which it seemed to have went on working fine. Unfortunately my focus went to my classic waking up not long after becoming lucid. The dream started to fade out, but I really wanted to not wake up yet, so I focused on the book I was apparently holding in front of me and the at-the-time very clear sentence at the top of a page, which actually came into focus, along with the path and trees in my environment again. For roughly 4-5 seconds before I just woke up anyways. Didn't reality check like I should've, but luckily it was a real awakening. Actually no, I'd rather it have been a false awakening than just further proof Dream-Induced-Lucid-Dreams will never be satisfactory in length. Probably not, anyway.

 

 

That was it, though it reminded me I had a ""lucid"" dream in the last week that barely counts. It was far less vivid, and I don't remember the context sleeping-wise, like if I'd been somewhat awake before falling back asleep, but probably not. All I remember is I realized I was dreaming, this much is true, and decided to try and turn the floor into a pool and swim through it. In-dream, it didn't work, and I just pushed myself around on the floor. In reality/retrospect, I was definitely closer to swimming than crawling, it's just that the texture of the floor remained floor-y and not pool-y. And I think I woke up from there. I wouldn't call it a "lucid" dream at all, rather just one where I did realize I was dreaming. Vividness of the dreams seems to have a huge impact on, well, everything. Especially the clarity of my thoughts, though.

 

So as always, if we wanted more lucid experiences (if not entire outright dreams), which is still totally fine and productive, we need to make our dreams more vivid. Honestly we've been supposed to practice visualization with Reisen's method she made specifically for me, and I've just not gotten around to it in the week or so I've been fronting, but - I'm actually not going to do that at this exact moment, instead continuing to do exactly what we've been doing (just imposition (and sometimes visualizing just them) ~daily) along with keeping up our dream recall as best I can, which hopefully remains possible tomorrow morning since I remembered several vivid dreams from this morning in good detail, not just the lucid one. The point being that I don't want to mix up what was a natural increase followed by dip in our dream vividness with any potential benefit that direct visualization practice (which we've barely done at all) may have.

 

I know, sounds lame I don't throw everything we've got at what seems like a chance. But I'm more interested in long-term results, and it's very important to know if direct visualization practice influences the vividness of our dreams or not, so doing it during a natural high point would only muddy the results. We'll see how things go, and we still plan to do the visualization practice soon too.

[Luminesce]

(I remembered roughly zero dreams between then and now, so I guess I can start practicing visualization.. I'm also imposing everyone more frequently than normal, so this too will be good practice, if I remember the possibly-vivid-er dreams at all)

[Lucilyn]

I had a dream that was really fun and interesting (it was pretty dang vivid AND the theme was fun!)

 

though it started with like, me and a "class" of people playing hide and seek with one person supposed to find us, and that person was Reimu Hakurei, but she like didn't come to find us and we came out and she had fallen and was injured or something, so I had to carry her as we all collectively started walking towards a hospital or something. except Reimu isn't real so she was a tulpa so I was carrying nothing and said to the people I was with "You're lucky we're good at weight imposition!" even though that's not a thing and we're not l0l

 

anyways, the being-with-a-class motif stuck but the dream basically changed to another dream, we were all in.. well honestly it was a supermarket with a big area where the class was supposed to watch a play. And we did I guess, but then every "one" got doubled so there was a clone of each person except me but also I think... even objects that had something to them (focus from the dream? lol) got doubled too. Anyways ignoring that, suddenly we were told we could wander around the market and everything was free!!! From here it was really vivid and fun, it was like a huge school-wide event (everyone was basically 18 mind you) and people just walked around the store picking up random stuff they liked. It was a huge supermarket, but the stuff on the shelves was pretty varied, and I remember there was a pink fuzzy purse that had been cloned for whatever reason too lol

 

I didn't really wanna take anything until I found donut holes! which I just took a container of and started eating them. Yay for vivid dreams having a strong sense of taste! then as I was walking to a place where it vaguely felt people were starting to gather, a big hulk-y guy (he reminded me of the chef from total drama island, but was just in costume) started following me and I saw him out of the corner of my eye, which was like kinda scary but our passive ability to direct dreams to be not bad kicked in and I kept eating the donut holes, and then tossed one over my head which he caught, and tossed another and then the situation was resolved :V

 

from there he was actually just a teacher in a halloween costume and we were at the gathering for soooomething but I think I woke up after that. Yeah definitely, 'cus I remember waking up and being like "Cool, I still remember the taste of donuts lol"

 

anyways that was fun, the feeling of us and a lot of people (well, a class/school we were with) being free at a big event to just go around and have fun with free stuff was super nice. And it was pretty vivid! (by our standards, vivid means similar to real life but still very wishy-washy with details, as opposed to a normal lucid dream that's usually lifelike)

 

nothin' to report on the progress front, I didn't do anything fancy to cause that xD

it was pretty much just me getting to sleep for 12 hours, the dream before that was similarly vivid but not as long or well vivid, and the before that was kinda clear too but nowhere near as vivid, so the vividity just went up as we slept longer. Though I was waking up between each dream and before the last one I got up and stretched for like 45 seconds, I still attribute it mostly to having slept so long, maybe getting up and stretching helped check the "Vivid dream?" box for our brain but the actual level of vivid/length of dream was because of how long we'd been asleep

[Lucilyn]

https://community.tulpa.info/thread-game-last-one-to-post-wins?pid=272093#pid272093

 

... except after hour 10 when I got up and stretched and then took like 15 minutes to fall back asleep, I had a LONG dream (I think I slept for about 70 minutes) that waaas.. not as vivid as recent dreams, but at a point it was still vivid enough that I was ~lucid again. A weird lucid, even though I was lucid it doesn't feel like I was after the fact. But semi-lucid I was definitely doing things that were good to be doing, I was practicing dream control and one time when it felt like my lucidity was fading I "had to force myself to talk/interact", which actually worked. And as semi-lucid, I did practice dream control in clearing a path straight through a wall and (now in a really dark school hallway as opposed to the normal one I was in) even tried to use my finger as a flashlight, which worked for a moment before the light got stuck on a wall and I couldn't move it lol

 

'n then I woke up, and thought "It was definitely the fact that I got up and stretched and took a while to fall asleep. WBTB is basically causing vivid dreams consistently, and vivid dreams are basically causing lucid dreams consistently! Well, consistently as in more than once in a week and more than twice in the past, since 9 years of no progress gives you a very different perspective on what consistent means" (I was already thinking about writing in this thread, so yes, I really did think that much detail, which is funny because-)

 

surprise, I wasn't even awake, I had a false awakening into more dream even though I'd already been dreaming for a long time up to that point, and then the dream went on for even longer! Like jeez, that was a 3 or 4 part dream, but I'm still satisfied with the length of my semi-lucidity in it so that's fine. After waking up and realizing I fell for a false awakening I was like, man, we need to reality check when we wake up from a lucid dream.

 

 

 

oh wait that means I need to reality check now *pinches nose and tries to breathe through it, can't* okay lol, just making sure

 

so yeah, dreaming me already said what I wanted to! Wake-Back-To-Bed (and so Dream-Induced-Lucid-Dreams) is definitely our best bet since, like honestly to give ourselves some credit, we're trained really well to become lucid if we can actually think in the dream considering like 75% of our vivid dreams have a point where we're lucid by now. And I still remember why we weren't really doing WBTB despite it giving some results - because it's really hard to fall back asleep a lot of the time. Dunno why it's worked so well recently! Still, even if it only works 25% of the time (and the other 75% we just sit there unable to fall asleep and end up getting up... or worse, take 45+ minutes to fall asleep which seems to negate the WBTB), it's still lookin' like the best shot we've got for now.

 

Can't forget that getting practice being lucid and recalling dreams from WBTB, which Tewi and Lumi have said definitely is not their end goal because they're shorter (because you become lucid halfway+ through) and not consistent, will still make it way easier to induce lucid dreams with other methods!

[Misha]

Sounds good right?

[Lucilyn]

I had a random dream that I won't try and explain because it just makes no sense and sounds too silly really lol, but all that matters is it had Touhou's Flandre (not ours) in it, and it was interesting to think about after I woke up because she seemed much younger and had a kind of chaotic-ness and fun-seeking to her that is nothing like our Flan at all, so.. basically it was just interesting to literally see a Flandre in person that was just the Touhou character and not our Flan, it made me realize how much older our Flandre is than the Touhou character

 

also, it made me wonder if we should really be replacing the characters we're based on in our Dream Gensokyo, 'cus like.. I kinda liked that Flan.. and it always felt like it'd feel a little empty for Flandre to be missing in that world (she's supposed to live exclusively in the Scarlet Devil Mansion), so like

 

I wonder if we should let the "duplicates" just exist as the original characters? I mean, they're mostly different enough from us, but.. Suwako is just like me, and would I be the Moriya Shrine's god still? well, I definitely think me and her would get along, and she could keep the purple dress while mine stays blue, but I dunno, wouldn't it be weird to interact with those characters who know there's another version of us already around? maybe Flandre will never go near the scarlet devil mansion but surely Reisen would hang out around Eientei... maybe like, whoever's switched in and controlling the dream could be the only one without their duplicate around, but I feel like even lucid dreams are a little too chaotic to control like that

 

I really can't imagine any easy ways for Reisen or Tewi to interact with themselves/people who know there's two of them, maybe we can just make an exception for Flandre (after all, our Flan doesn't even consider herself a vampire anymore, and she considers Tewi her sister, not Remilia)

 

that just leaves the question, can one world really handle two of me? I mean I'm not exactly like Suwako, we'd definitely be different, but I gotta decide whether I wanna be that Gensokyo's god of the Moriya Shrine or not.... I guess not really? if I can figure out a way to still interact with Kanako and Sanae that makes any sense? we'd still be really good friends, right? aaaaaa okay I think I'm still going to replace Suwako in our dream Gensokyo, I just can't make any sense of her still being around. so just Flandre is an exception, which is fine because she has no interest in the SDM or interacting with anyone the character Flandre is close to, unlike the rest of us and ours

[Luminesce]

[video=youtube]

 

I'll get right to the point for once: I just had the most vivid dreams I've ever experienced last night, apparently all in one REM cycle even though there were three distinct dreams.

 

5 hours into sleep: prior dreams were normal levels of vivid and quickly forgotten upon waking. I got up to go to the bathroom, went back to bed. Didn't quite fall back asleep for maybe 20 minutes, at which point I didn't-quite-sleep for 40 minutes, weirdly having teetered on the edge of sleep with no thoughts or dreams, something akin to what happens when I fall asleep with strong intent to not actually sleep for too long (ie when I'm awake at 7:20AM and need to get up at 8AM) - I sort of dip into and out of a sleep cycle without going through the whole thing, although this can absolutely contain full dreams somehow. Actually, there's almost always sleepy thoughts, so definitely I was at a weird point in my sleep cycles to have ~not slept but without thoughts for 40 minutes.

 

6 hours after falling asleep, right after having "woken up" from that 40 minute not-sleep and falling asleep very quickly after for exactly one hour: I had three back-to-back dreams that were all the most vivid dreams I'd ever experienced. First dream was normal dream stuff, except with nearly lifelike detail and conscious awareness. I don't remember the second dream anymore (whoops), though I know it was just as detailed and I was practically awake levels of aware. The third - I woke up out of the second dream, got up to go to the bathroom I guess and looked in the mirror, and just kind of had the color green around my eyes. Any other dream would've tricked me with that false awakening, but since it really felt like I was actually awake, I easily decided to reality check at that oddity and yep, dreaming.

 

With no real time to process how crazily aware I was, I opted to practice noticing oddities in dreams and reality checking over and over. Walked back to my room and around every corner sort of expected something to be off, and each time it was so incredibly obvious things were off I must've been accidentally controlling the dream. Still, I think it was good practice, I did like 4 reality checks in the ~minute or so I was lucid before waking up for real. Reality checked upon waking that time (REALLY trying to establish that habit upon waking up out of a dream) and was awake. And wow, those dreams were so incredibly lifelike, I had to tell Tewi about them and go over the entire night with her to dissect what could've caused them.

 

Since I always assume the least helpful likely explanation, I'm pretty sure some level of influence was simply that our sleeping schedule was pretty weird and I'd gone to sleep at 8PM (yes, that's weird), having gone to sleep at like 7 and 5 the previous two days. More practically, my having woken up 5 hours into sleep and gotten up very briefly (which rarely does anything), but then not actually "falling asleep" for 20 minutes, and then only entering light sleep before "waking up" ~40 minutes later, and THEN quickly falling asleep - is basically guaranteed to have had a hand in how vivid the dreams were. I mean, that's why they were vivid, I'm just attributing the EXTREME vividness as most likely because my sleep schedule was changing so drastically each day for the last week.

 

Still, we're absolutely going to learn from and work with this. With that level of vividity, I confirmed that there's a solid like 33% chance that we simply automatically become lucid thanks to all our practice with reality checking at strange occurrences - all that's required is inducing vivid dreams. My first thought after waking up was "Alright, vivid dreams and Dream-Induced-Lucid-Dreams are probably our future. That probably removes the need to use the REM-Dreamer at all too, huh"

 

I don't know what my exact plan is tonight, since I always like to ride out crazy developments a day or two to not conflate methodology with simply being uh... I can't think of the words, but like "We just had extremely vivid dreams, but rather than try out what we did to make them happen again tonight, I'm going to just sleep normally and see if they happen regardless". It's something you've seen us do before, for sure. Generally, they've not ever happened again except for earlier in the thread where Lucilyn tended to have more vivid dreams simply because she was the one fronting. For the record, while that's not really a thing anymore, she still seems to have more fun/satisfying dreams than me, while the rest of ours tend to be normal drab stuff.

 

Oh, anyways - I don't know what my exact plan is tonight. Probably won't do anything special, but if I wake up after 5-6 hours I might be tempted to try WBTB anyways for vivid dream induction. As for the next night: As I said, that 40 minute not-quite-sleep/light-sleep state I mentioned is very similar to what happens when we wake up less than an hour before we have to get up, and so try not to fall into deep sleep. Though in those cases we often sleep for ~20 minutes (but it can be literally as short as 4 minutes in my experience) and do dream, oddly enough, and in this case there were no dreams. Still - and it relies on the ever-elusive "I need to wake up 5-7 hours into sleep and be actually tired enough to fall back asleep" state, but - if I can happen upon that state, I'd like to try purposely going back to sleep with the intent not to sleep for too long, waking up 20-45 minutes later, and then going straight to sleep.

 

I'm just saying, it'd be really great if that just worked with no hassle and became a consistent way of inducing vivid dreams. I'm juuust saying. Super cool.