Lumi's Dreaming Thread; Dreams of Moon

[Tewi]

Oh no. I missed a chance to be lucid for half of a whole vivid dream because our reality check failed. Our "This scenario sucks, hopefully I'm dreaming" sense triggered and I reality checked by pinching my nose and trying to breathe through it, but it felt plugged and I just went on with the dream for a fair amount of time from there. Immediately after waking up, my nose wasn't hard to breathe through or anything, so that was very strange.

 

I practiced imagining reality checking (basically simulates what should happen in a dream) and can only really think I just didn't do it hard enough. A halfhearted ~sniff or whatever you call that might not cut it apparently, but really trying to breathe through your fingers should be a very recognizable feeling. So, in the future we need to put extra in/exhale strength in any reality checks that were prompted by likelihood of dreaming, if not casual random reality checks because we thought of dreams or something.

 

Not much else to say, our focus has been almost entirely on learning 3D modeling/Blender and that's not about to change. My focus has been on fixing our motivation issues, but I've only been fronting for a few days - hadn't fronted in 3 months before that, because Lumi was dedicated to trying to do things without help. Considering how much ~progress (in understanding) I made in one sort-of-meditation yesterday though, I'm not sure he's going to make any progress at all the way he tends to go about things. Maybe if he starts thinking more critically like me, but for now, I'm taking setting the groundwork into my own hands. But we can talk about this if it turns into anything later, in our PR.

[SheShe]

Sorry to hear about that Tewi, but we're wishing you luck in the future.

[Lucilyn]

sheeesh, just had our longest (non-Claridream pill) lucid dream ever I think, though I'll say off the bat not enough different things happened in it for me to remember it all in detail

soo

Fell asleep: Around 9PM
Woke up: A little after 3:30 AM, to go to the bathroom (drinking water literally right before bed just guarantees this lol)

Went back to sleep, probably fell asleep before 4AM

Lucid dreamed at the end (I woke up from the dream into already looking at our alarm clock lol) waking up at 6AM, apparently

 

so like, I've been fronting for over a week, but the dream was still 100% 200% completely obviously Lumi fronting, like straight down to his thoughts sounding like him and having his priorities lol

when I woke up, the thing I saw in the first second was our alarm clock, then by second 3 before even thinking anything yet I already knew I was me and that the dream had just been from Lumi's perspective seconds ago

so that's really weird huh? you'd think when we have switching down so perfectly that we know who we are in the worst possible scenario - 3 seconds after waking up directly from a lucid dream where someone else was fronting, before having a single conscious thought yet - that we would at least lucid dream from the perspective of who's been fronting for over a week, but nope!

 

So, the lucid dream started (obviously after a whole REM/dream period had occurred since it was like ~100 minutes after falling asleep) with Lumi feeling like he'd just woken up into the exact same scenario he'd just been in IRL, but we're super smart with dreams and because the dream was so vivid he was just kinda automatically lucid, and while he still thought for the whole dream that he was actually asleep IRL at his computer, he wasn't fooled at all by "waking up" where the "IRL"(dream) had left off and was ready to do lucid stuff

 

he didn't think of/follow any lucid protocols at all (ugh, when will we remember), but he kept focus REALLY well throughout the dream, like the best we ever have without the Claridream pills, probably 50% because of our training and 50% because the dream was so dang vivid and his thoughts were so clear

so he stood up in our room and walked to the middle, and was trying to make Reisen appear by visualizing->imposing her like we do IRL, but it was totally not working at all and as he kept trying the dream started doing weird stuff like turning to static to dramatically match his attempts to focus on her and stuff, but magic clear-thinking vivid dream kicks in some more and he realized that the dream is getting way too unstable and he's liable to lose focus, so he focuses back on the room around him and walks a bit while keeping his awareness on the area to stay lucid

 

I really can't remember the details super well (don't worry, there weren't many) because he kept almost falling out of lucidity but then somehow remembering to start focusing again to some extent (re: 50% training 50% the dream was just so vivid it was easy to think), so I know that he walked down our hallway into a room that should be a storage room but was a bedroom, was kinda lost in dream stuff looking at details, but remembered he was supposed to be lucid and focused just a bit and walked back to our room, then he walked to the middle and tried to visualize Reisen again but still couldn't and then he felt he was probably about to wake up and sure enough we did - our vision literally went from seeing our room into eyes opening into looking at the alarm clock, and then as I said I immediately knew I was fronting even though the dream had just been 1000% him lol

 

so there may have been just a few moments I don't remember clearly because he was falling a bit out of lucidity and into dream stuff, though none of it lasted very long and he kept re-remembering to be lucid because the dream was so vivid/clear-thinking (though for comparison, it was just like our other best lucid dreams but somehow the clear-thinking vividness stuck around the whole time, but NOWHERE NEAR the Claridream experience of just lifelike vividness and thinking for a whole series of dreams), and I know the dream didn't sound long but I'm pretty sure this is the longest total amount of lucidity/focus we've ever had in a dream overall

 

it's definitely the longest we've gone without totally falling back into dreaming or waking up, with second place being that dream where Lumi was at some kinda building where people were gonna go to jail but he realized he was lucid and like, angrily told them he was leaving, walked outside and down some very lucid stairs, into a super cool ivy-covered garden trestle, then walked and sat on a bench nearby and then woke up

 

 

 

So! What'd we learn! In order of least to greatest importance:

1. We can know who's fronting 100% clearly a second after we wake up even though someone else was just very consciously fronting for the dream, which is making me wonder if we should start accrediting dreams to who it felt like was fronting in them instead of who was fronting before/after sleeping....... nah, only dreams where it was really obvious someone was fronting

 

2. Lumi was CONVINCED that he had fallen asleep at his computer and started dreaming in the same place (and was even worried he might damage his keyboard/headphones IRL), and he used that as a sort of anchor to stay lucid, but in reality what helped him stay lucid was focusing on anything so consciously, even if it was totally fake dream stuff

 

3. WBTB! I literally just got up to go to the bathroom after 6 hours of sleep, went back to sleep over maybe 15-20 minutes (probably easier than normal because I went to sleep so early that it was perfectly dark/quiet going back to sleep at 3AM), and while strangely the next set of dreams we presumably had I did not remember at all, still the dreams we had before waking up @ 9 hours were so hecking vivid they were our longest lucid dream yet, so dang Wake Back To Bed is potent and we should ABSOLUTELY keep trying to do them even though we're otherwise focused on motivation & Blender these days

 

like really, we stopped trying because we thought dedicating 0% attention to lucid dreaming during waking life would make becoming lucid super hard, but apparently all it takes is one well-timed WBTB and we can just have a long lucid dream outta nowhere, sooo - lucid dreaming is back on the table! just a handful more of dreams like those over a couple months and I'm sure we'd be able to up our dream control game a ton, so here's hoping lol

 

realistically we still need to do it when we're falling asleep between 5PM and 10PM so that it's quiet and dark when we try to go back to sleep, and our schedule still drifts to sleeping at every time of the day/night over time (but sticking around at going to sleep between 1am and 5am the longest unfortunately, and our sleeping mask just isn't good enough to make falling back asleep easy whenever), but at the very least we should now be aware that every single time we're gonna wake up in the dark is an opportunity to WBTB and lucid dream!

Edited August 26, 2021 by Lucilyn

[Yakumo]

Congrats!
For me WBTB shortly before the time I'd naturally wake up is the most potent way to induce vivid dreams, but sadly not lucid ones. And not being able to summon tupper sucks. Had that multiple times. But generally I have little control over lucid dreams.

 

It's fascinating how you woke up as "you" though Lumi was dreaming. Some years ago I would have dismissed something like that as absolute nonsense and it's still the most intriguing aspect of tulpamancy for me. But I can confirm it's possible.

[Guest]

Nice.

 

As you know WBTB is what I do with biphasic sleep about 3 days a week. This morning I was standing in the back yard of my childhood home and I heard a noise. I went to investigate and it was a miniature pink pig in a miner's outfit and yellow lit helmet carrying a pickaxe. I started yelling for my mom to see this but he soon shapeshifted into a normal unclothed miniature pink pig like a pet.

 

"Oh I'm dreaming... Misha?" Then I called for Misha and woke up immediately to Ashley saying, "why didn't you call for me?"

 

Ashley stabilizes dreams, Misha destabilizes dreams, so yeah. Went straight back to sleep and had other inconsequential dreams not worth remembering about not wanting to live in a house with 10 people.

 

Do you think one headmate has more of a stabilizing/destabilizing affect than others?

[Lucilyn]

no not really, and I don't think you calling Misha had anything to do with waking up, you woke up 'cus you were going to wake up, we're professional wake-up-right-after-becoming-lucid-ers so we would know

 

you often become lucid towards the end of dreams because of course that's where your brain is the closest to its waking state, and at that point exercising thought in the dream probably just makes you wake up seconds or a minute early compared to dreamily drifting, but I think it's usually inevitable anyways

(unless your REM cycles allow + you are very skilled in Dream Exit Induced Lucid Dreams, and you know how to kinda keep the dreamy state intact long enough to naturally make it back to REM again, but that still won't work for most people if they were about to wake up for the day anyways)

 

oh but anyways, the only two ways headmates can affect dream stability differently is 1. acting differently (being less serious and messing around maybe), and 2. weird brain stuff with associations that I don't think you or most established systems have, but like maybe waaaay back in the day the old Flandre might've been more prone to causing chaos in the dreamstate than say Tewi just because Lumi's brain associated her so much with chaotic thoughts, but that's like..... REALLY reaching, lol, I think there are way more relevant factors (like.. whether they try to keep you lucid, or just do random stuff)

  

3 hours ago, Yakumo said:

It's fascinating how you woke up as "you" though Lumi was dreaming. Some years ago I would have dismissed something like that as absolute nonsense and it's still the most intriguing aspect of tulpamancy for me. But I can confirm it's possible.

 

well yeah, "some years ago" practically nobody even had this much switching experience

we've been switching consistently for 7 years straight now, so our brain switching the right person in subconsciously before we've even had our first waking thought is nothing now

(and no I wasn't exaggerating, the first second or two of waking up were wordless thought about how silly it was to go from seeing the dream room to seeing our alarm clock, and between then and second like three/four we were already correctly switched and my very first conscious thought was "Wow, Lumi was just fronting in the dream seconds ago")

 

we definitely would've just woken up with Lumi fronting in 2014 or 2015, but I'm pretty confident our potential fastest switching time really is 2 or less seconds, we just don't really have any strong conscious triggers to do that on purpose aside from waking up (since probably almost all our dreams are from Lumi's perspective, so our brain must be subconsciously "switching" between sleeping and waking sometimes right?)

Edited August 26, 2021 by Lucilyn

[Tewi]

I just came here to note a dream that was slightly too interesting for LOTPW, but since it's the first of the year I should probably update people on what we're doing too. After the dream part.

 

Not going to make it super long and detailed because I don't care to, but basically: I woke up early in the morning and decided to get up and walk around a bit and WBTB, since starting the year off with a lucid dream sounded nice. Didn't lucid dream though. Instead I had a relatively stressful (but not negative) dream where I had just gotten off a plane at an airport and was tasked with carrying our cat (but a little smaller than normal), and someone's baby.

 

The point in the dream I start to remember what was happening, I was in a big room with lots of chairs that was supposedly an airplane. We were with a couple friends, and were holding their parents' baby for them, since they had changed plans and not taken the plane trip with us last minute. Except when we landed, our friends were like "So heyyy.. Since our parents aren't coming we kind of cancelled the trip and are going to go back. But you can give the baby back to them on your way home, right?" Which was cool enough on its own, but then we saw our cat scared-ly creeping through the aisle and realized we'd have to take it with us too.

 

I somehow carried both in the same arm, and long story short I made the reception kiosk(?) people's lives hell for a while. They had to do a fair bit of paperwork and also give us a couple things because I had (someone else's) baby with me. And the girl next to me helped out a bit when our cat climbed out of my arms (onto my shoulder and then back as I leaned forwards, as she tends to do IRL). I woke up around when I was actually walking out of the airport.

 

This was a relatively long and vivid dream because of the WBTB I did, and while it was stressful most of the way through, I woke up feeling rather accomplished and confident in myself lol. I would like to have more dreams where I handle unexpected scenarios like that.

---

 

Anyways. Yes, it's me, the one who told our system it was pointless trying to lucid dream until we sorted out our motivation issues. We focused mostly on Blender last year, but Lumi has been working almost exclusively on motivation for over a month now. He recently figured out a way to theoretically apply the same thought-pattern-reconditioning he used to overcome depression to our motivation issues, our method that our therapist said resembles cognitive behavioral therapy, but that we'll continue to consider thought pattern conditioning or some variant of that. Wasn't easy by the way, the reason we didn't do that in the past is we could never pin down clear thoughts causing our motivation issues, the feelings were just too slippery. We're a little closer now though, after a lot of introspection and talking to people about how motivation works for them.

 

And as luck would have it, he accidentally came up with a relatively unrelated method of reconditioning our motivation issues right after that breakthrough, and it's what we've been focusing on instead. It's not easy to express well in words since we're simply able to work with our mind more naturally these days (after all the hard work Lumi put in in 2013-2015 or so). But basically, we're attempting to create as we're thinking of it a neural bridge between the thought of deciding to do something, and taking physical action to do it, with no thought in between. So.. We're "being conscious of our deciding what to do", and then "focusing on bridging that decision/thought with the act of starting to do it". It makes sense to us, anyways.

 

The things we're practicing this on are any given productive activity that we can manage to do at that time. It does require having some motivation to do those things in the first place, of course, and we do for the sake of improving, but it's rather small steps for now. Showering, brushing our teeth, and looking up and following Blender tutorials were the first three main candidate activities, but theoretically it can be applied to any activity that starts as a decision and is followed by an action.

 

We will talk about all of this in much more detail, if and only if we start to see some tangible long-term improvements from it. This is already more than we intended to be saying (clearly, or we would've a week or two ago) as we do not like to get people's hopes up on subjects like this (I mean, look at the page number we're on to see why). But I figured the first of the year was a good time to, so people who follow us or this thread understood that we hadn't simply given up or fallen into total inaction.

 

Oh, and Lumi's about to turn 26 by the way.

[Lucilyn]

7 hours ago, Miri said:

Btw, what happened to your guys' lucid dreaming progress? haven't heard about that in a long time

  

like Tewi said here a long time ago now, she decided lucid dreaming was impractical for us to try to seriously do until our motivation issues are dealt with, since she pinpointed the best thing we could do as really committing to it every day for multiple weeks or even months straight, which we're unable to do because we stop being motivated to care about literally anything after 1-2 weeks of trying to keep it up, no matter how much we care

 

in the last post here she talked about a brain-change-y thing that sounds really hard to actually make work but I'm surprised our real thing hasn't even been mentioned here because it's been so long, maybe we put it in our PR or something?
around I think April we thought of a new way to help tackle our motivation issues on the "initiative/bad-feeling-in-response-to-thinking-about-doing-things" front, which is basically to practice creating positive associations in advance for activities we want to do but have that negative feeling about, ie brushing teeth/showering/working on Blender/etc.etc.

kinda similar to what Tewi said, it uses the same skill of apparently cognitive behavioral therapy? that we learned on our own and Lumi used to overcome depression, which is a way of installing new thought patterns/reactions to things by focusing on them and trying to think a new preferable thing instead, consistently over time until your brain just kinda picks up the new one

 

and we actually tried this for a week or so and saw REAL results! not crazy ones but we did notice opening Blender to work on stuff got easier

 

buuuut... that's just the initiative part of our motivation issues, which is like 1/3 of them overall, another 1/3 is our long-term burnout where we stop caring about things that we still care about after 1-2 weeks of trying to stay dedicated to them, and the last 1/3 (which we don't personally consider as big of a deal as the first two) that we have motivation-depressive episodes every so often (a few days once a month, vaguely? sometimes more/longer) where literally nothing sounds good, not even food or games, and we tend to just sit there doing nothing

 

so, we talked to our friend about this like 6 months ago who is very smart because he researches and reads complex studies and stuff as a hobby, and he did a lot of research on treatment/medications for our problems (mainly anhedonia) and eventually linked us like 7 studies on how lithium is a very often successful medication for relieving depression/anhedonia symptoms in people who haven't responded to traditional SSRIs and such (which is us)

 

it took forever to get an appointment scheduled with a psychiatrist since we waited to get a recommendation from our therapist first, and then he recommended since lithium is known to have more potential side effects than tried-earlier antidepressants that we try prozac first - 

 

so, we had actually taken effexor, lexipro, and celexa, AND wellbutrin back in 2012 apparently (we didn't even know we tried wellbutrin back then and tried it again at double the dosage in like 2018 because it works for our family), all of which did not affect us at all, but because it had been about 10 years since we'd tried an SSRI and we were new to this psychiatrist, we agreed to try prozac for a bit just for the data y'know

 

so we were just on that for a month, but because we spent a lot of our time with Splatoon 3 which we've been waiting over a year for we weren't sure that not experiencing the depressive episode in that month was really convincing since having stuff we're excited for (not to mention, not actually working on anything effortful/productive during them), we told the psychiatrist at our monthly appointment that we'd like to go 1 more month to be sure before saying it doesn't work

 

 

And that brings us to two weeks later! And sure enough, since Splatoon 3 playing has died down a bit and we've started trying to commit to opening Blender (or Unity or another productive program) to work on for at least a few minutes every day, I have actually been in a motivation-depressive episode for the last like 4 days lol, where halfway through the day I'm just slumped in our chair trying to think of anything to do but doing nothing and just wanting to go to bed

 

so, we've confirmed now that prozac did not help our motivation-depressive episodes, which means it's also safe to say it won't be helping with our other motivation-depressive symptoms either (our friend said a medication that helps alleviate the episodes should also have an effect on the rest of our problems too), so in 11 days we'll have our next psychiatrist appointment and we'll tell him prozac didn't work and probably start lithium, though we'll need to get a blood test a couple times over time to make sure the dosage is correct for our body

 

 

so that's where we're at, sorry for the silence in this thread! but wait, there's more!

 

we actually stopped trying that cognitive behavioral therapy thing (that's what we were told our practice resembles, but we really made it up ourselves so idk) we call "positive association creation" because our friend convinced us to try medication again and we didn't want the bad science of doing them both at once ('cus if the positive association creation actually made the difference, we might end up still taking an antidepressant for no reason)

 

so we're still going to try lithium first (yes it's usually for bipolar disorder, but it is also known to help people with depression who didn't respond to other antidepressants, especially when taken along with a normal SSRI), and IF it doesn't work or has bad side effects, then we still have the plan to start doing meditation sessions where we go over various "effortful" activities and create positive associations with doing them and then focus on those new associations while trying to ignore the negative feelings when we do them

 

It's hopeful! But it will still take a while longer, sorry for all the wait for those who are invested in our success, TYVM btw!

 

on the bright side, if we're successful here, our entire LIFE will improve immensely, not just our attempts to lucid dream! so there would be a TON to celebrate, and even relevant to you guys it wouldn't just be lucid dreaming, but if we make a good amount of progress in Blender we plan to do some probably free commissions of making people's tulpas as 3D models (at least to take some pictures of them) for people here!

 

that'd still be a ways off, but if either of these plans really help our motivation issues then that will be a cool thing to look forward to! (and for the record we already have a very nice looking character basemesh, so it's not a pipe dream, but to learn to create custom clothing and other details we still need to learn a lot more)

Edited October 13, 2022 by Lucilyn

[TB]

Fingers crossed it all works out!

[Luminesce]

How come we only just had a dream from Lucilyn's perspective, her form and all, the day after she switched back with me lol?

Nothing too fancy, just had a dream that Lucilyn was playing (but directly in the game, as is usually the case for our dreams) TF2, though I definitely remember seeing her form and not just the TF2 class she was playing at the time.

She was essentially playing Scout and just chasing people focused on the Capture The Flag objective meleeing them with the Scout's melee weapons, that do less damage but attack faster than normal melees. Specifically, she had a weird primary weapon that could launch and light a flame projectile to set enemies on fire, and then could be swung like a quick melee weapon for low damage mini-crits on on-fire enemies.

 

She was a little mean (by Lucilyn standards) lol, I guess the immersion of directly fighting opponents but still in the context of a game meant she didn't mind taunting people, when she would never do that in real life since she values everyone having fun, not just herself (same for me).

 

This actually comes after like four separate vivid and really interesting scenario dreams that night, and a VERY long (maybe it was two back to back??) dream Lucilyn had the previous day. I have no idea why we just started having interesting, vivid, and relatively recallable dreams all of a sudden lol. There's a chance it's simply because that one dream Luci had (which was not prompted by any kind of WBTB-like activity or anything) was rather intense and so she remembered it very easily, and her going over that dream after waking up just improved the heck out of our dream recall?

Surely it can't be that easy, that fast, lol. But that's all I can think of, because I made no special efforts to increase our dream vividness or focus on dreams at all for all those interesting dreams last night. So maybe I'll try to keep up the streak by just putting some effort into recalling back through whatever dreams I remember for however long I can keep that up.

 

 

No idea really what to say on ETA's for lucid dreaming. No antidepressants helped us at all, so all that's left is our own working-with-our-thought-patterns we've been doing this year to try and fix our effort issues (we realized calling them motivation issues was misleading/incorrect). But that's quite a process to tackle in general, so I can't at all say when we'll be applying it to lucid dreaming. Trying to fix our brain's thought processes for "effort/reward" has taken all of our focus the last year or so now, since it's important to ever actually accomplishing anything in our life, or say, making any money lol. Lucid dreaming should come along with success in that though, even if it's not our direct focus.

 

 

 

Honestly, we should've just bought more of those Claridream pills a long time ago. There's no real reason not to have, aside from the minor cost and I guess light distraction from productive waking life stuff it might be. But not so much as to be worth not pursuing anyways. I'll consider that again after the next couple weeks or so, since I'm just now starting a trial of trying to spend most of my time on working/productive stuff (3D modeling, coding (Unity), and now texturing) as a default go-to instead of entertainment, to see if I can either get in the swing of continuing that just on momentum (which would be awesome), or second-best, to see if it helps make an impact on our thought patterns related to effort, to know if doing this kind of thing repeatedly might help long term. Or at worst, it's still terrible and unsustainable and I just end up with a couple weeks of bonus progress on things.

Edited June 3, 2023 by Luminesce