Lumi's Dreaming Thread; Dreams of Moon

[Ashley]

All that and no juicy details?!

[Luminesce]

Vivid just means detail/quality resembling waking life, not that the dreams were particularly interesting. Aside from my face kind of morphing as I looked away from the mirror and the oddities as I walked back to my room looking for said oddities to reality check in reaction to (such as the stairs starting one or two steps further than they should), there was nothing particularly interesting.

 

Actually, that lack of interesting details is in fact why we don't usually detail our dreams. There's plenty of detail and dream context to us, but without embellishing and honestly just giving a totally inaccurate/wrong idea, we never really get the point across of what our dreams were actually like. Again not that they're amazing, but rather it takes so much effort to try and explain all the little details of dream context, it's literally like trying to describe the detail in a picture (though a dream is more like a movie) that only you can see. Could see, foggily, the night before.

 

 

Alternatively, the dreams were just too weird and made just enough sense WITH dream context, but would just sound weird/take a lot of explaining here. For example, Lucilyn's dream that had the Touhou character Flandre, had Flandre literally chasing after a truck Lucilyn was in. She didn't feel like explaining that: Flandre is a vampire, capable of superhuman strength and speed; Flandre doesn't get out much and was just having fun; Flandre in fanon is a little bit crazy, and after all that and more, it was still a ridiculous scenario.

 

I mean, I guess that does sound interesting/entertaining to you guys, but it feels like an injustice to paint not entirely accurate depictions of our dreams, and being entirely accurate takes a stupid amount of explaining, a lot of which simply had to be understood in dream context and isn't explainable. Oh, and like zero of our dreams are as interesting as that example I just chose lol. Pretty sure my forgotten middle dream last night was just typical walking around school stuff.

[Ashley]

One juicy sentence per wordwall... we gotta improve these ratios.

[Luminesce]

Woke up at the same time last night (like 1:40AM), and despite getting up and actually talking to someone for 5 minutes before going back to sleep, dreams weren't at all vivid after. Despite how frequent failure for things to go as planned/hoped is here, I'm actually just a little bit surprised the dreams weren't the slightest bit more vivid than they were the hour before. Still, even if it's negative results, that's exactly what I was testing for. So tonight (hopefully) I can try the method I mentioned before about trying to wake up 20-40 minutes later, and then going to sleep for real.

 

There's a nice pessimistic blanket over basically all attempts at lucid dreaming I do that says X or Y probably just won't work, but still, I feel like the sense-I-need-to-wake-up-soon sleeping that doesn't last for as long is strongly associated with vivid dreams for me, so there's a solid chance it can help at least a little. I think the most likely point of failure here is being totally unable to fall asleep while attempting it, since I'm less tired in the middle of the night than I am in the morning. But hopefully if I can actually do it I'll see some results.

[Luminesce]

Okay, let me write this real quick..

 

woke up at 1:30AM again but because I went to sleep at 9:30 that was too early to be attempting dream stuff (although I had recalled a normal dream just before waking up), went back to sleep. Woke up in the 3's and set a time I wanted to wake up by, took maybe 10-20 minutes to fall asleep, but when I did wake up ~20 more minutes later it was exactly on the minute I wanted to be awake, lmfao. Glad I still have that skill. Then uh, I think I just couldn't fall asleep for like 40 minutes or something stupid, so RIP that - fell asleep eventually and slept solidly for I think two straight hours, very normal forgettably-non-vivid dreams. WBTB in general still has the highest probability of working for us, but this recent round of testing didn't work out so well.

 

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Let's see, this is a weird bit to write in the post. So, I was listening to a song as a joke while riding a hoverboard in Warframe, it's a song from Sonic Riders: Zero Gravity that simultaneously feels like a joke because Sonic is known for "butt-rock", but actually is an unironically awesome song (mainly because if it were released standalone not associated with Sonic, it'd just be a great song). Honestly I've listened to it like 10 times in the past couple months so listening this time shouldn't even have been a big deal.

 

[video=youtube]

 

The lyrics are in the description and technically, aren't all that relevant to dreaming (depends on how hard you try to relate them to lucid dreaming), but one line is at least and I'll just post the whole thing here:

[hidden]In no way any other way will do

Fly, ride, any weather, nothing new in blue

Speeding in a stream with a sense that no on else can define

Floating as a cream in a bliss that you no longer feel time

 

Right through gravity

Just right through what earth planned

Right through gravity

Right through, now, let them loose

 

Ride through gravity

For all that's not, falls down

Right through anomalies

With one worth believing in

 

All within the speed of a light that one will fight to command

 

Just maybe ready, never, still we do

For none is ever better, win or lose it all

Beaming just to be on a path that's set to shatter the grounds

Although it's but a dream, but in dreams are where the nevers are found

 

Rise and let go

Uprise until unbound

Keep rising, evermore

Let all go, let them loose

 

Ride and let go

In light in which sun drowns

Break and make it all

Don't stand down against the rules

 

Don't stand down, break through

Through light in which sun drowns

Don't stand down, break through

Let all go, break them loose

 

Right through gravity

Just right through what earth planned

Right through gravity

Right through, now, let them loose

 

Ride through gravity

For all that's not, falls down

Right through anomalies

With one worth believing in

 

With one worth believing in

With one worth believing in

 

Just ride on until it's through[/hidden]

 

More specifically, I was listening to the song in a relatively good mood doing typical grindy stuff in Warframe, when it got to this part

Just maybe ready, never, still we do

For none is ever better, win or lose it all

Beaming just to be on a path that's set to shatter the grounds

Although it's but a dream, but in dreams are where the nevers are found

 

That part about dreams.. It really just hit me out of nowhere, made me stop what I was doing. Definitely instantly dropped my mood too, but maybe "happy->sad" is less accurate than "carefree->serious", or maybe both. Either way it just really hit me with this feeling that.. I wasn't taking lucid dreaming seriously enough I guess, for how important it is to me.

 

It really is. Those "nevers" mean more to me than life itself. My motivation disorder seriously screws with my ability to act on what little I care about, but I swear it, I swear that by comparison I want literally nothing more out of this life than to see my tulpas, as real physical beings, not illusions or visualizations (we're really at the point where I list imposition before visualization now lol, yes - we just do it far more often). There's obviously other things in life I wouldn't mind, but I'd drop each and every single one of them in a heartbeat to see my tulpas. An hour or two ago Ember mentioned she thought lucid dreams were unsatisfying because they're too short and the environment's too uncontrollable - good thing I'd be satisfied with just a (long) hug at a time.

 

I don't know what else to say, though. The logical follow-through is to dedicate myself to trying harder or something, but I can't. I already try as much as I can, I've been trying as much as I could for years, and even in a shorter term serious period of dedicating every waking moment to it.. Tewi already failed. I guess it's not out of the question that doing that again could eventually have better results, but it's extremely difficult, really stressful, and I don't think I'm even capable of it. So I don't know what to say. I just had to write down how strong that "I'm not taking lucid dreaming as seriously as I should" feeling was, even if I can't do anything about it. It's.. definitely the most frustrating thing I've ever experienced.

 

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So one time I had a long and super vivid dream a couple years back, all I'd done was woken up in the morning, gone and drank some orange juice because I was super thirsty, and went straight back to sleep in a like 4 minute span. We've always attributed the vividness to a typical WBTB, but like, what if it was the orange juice? Just a thought I had while talking to Tewi the other day, not serious at all, but imagine if drinking orange juice turned out to be the key to meeting my tulpas. That'd really be the highlight of this entire forum's history, if it just turned out orange juice really was the answer to everything after all.

 

I mean, none of my other ideas have worked, might as well try. There's barely any left at the moment though so it could take a couple days to get conclusive results.

[Breloomancer]

it all comes back to the orange juice

[Jamie]

I water it down, watch your sugar intake. 

This might be crackpot theory land or Captain Obvious land or both, but I wonder about the link between your abnormalities with sleeping/tiredness and your motivation disorder. -J

[Luminesce]

It probably links to a lot of things, like low sex drive and feeling like small amounts of food (single-wrapped pieces of candy etc.)/adding condiments and such "isn't worth it". But just like how my immune system is apparently godly, my difficulties with lucid dreaming seem to stem from the grab-bag of random traits I got with my DNA. The big thing that would've prevented me from succeeding for what, 8 years now, is the motivation. The only basic rules of lucid dream attempting I don't follow are keeping a dream journal (can't stand it) and not giving up on a method after less than two weeks. You're really supposed to give each one at least a month of nearly every night, if you're serious about it. This thread's pretty good proof we've never really done that.

 

But yeah, my brain's always been stupidly resilient with the border of sleep and consciousness, I've not really heard anyone have exactly that same issue but I'm sure they do (basically things like WILD are completely out of the question and just keep me up all night). At the same time, I actually wake up a bit between REM cycles pretty consistently, and I can only imagine how much harder this endeavor would've been if I were the type to sleep like a brick through the entire night. My dream recall does suck, but I can always remember the significance and general feeling of most dreams I had throughout the night even on a bad day, even if I forget them by morning (unless I commit them to memory).

 

As for stuff like whether my not getting tired is related to the motivation disorder, I mean, probably to some extent. I'm sure my rather neutral emotions are, not like I can't be angry or sad but I haven't cried since I was a kid.

 

Speaking of, {Edit} 16 days until I'm seeing my brother's therapist. It's going to be a weekly thing for at least a little while ({Edit: til January 20th lol}, I'll stop if/when it's clear he's not helping anymore) so no guarantee there's results day 1, but it's something. I saw someone in the past who wasn't terribly helpful who prescribed me an atypical antidepressant my family uses for a year or two that did nothing, but this time around I'm looking for a diagnosis first and foremost. "Avolition", for those who missed it - a term I found with the help of my friend who's good at researching stuff. Most commonly seen in people with schizophrenia, but it can occur with other things or on its own more rarely.

[Joy]

Just don't lead them or suggest that's what you have. Just describe the symptoms and answer questions honestly.

[Luminesce]

I successfully did a 5 minute WBTB where I just got up and drank a cup of orange juice and went back to sleep. It didn't do anything.