Lucid Heart

Lucid Dream with Juliette Lewis

Prologue : I had recorded something in my dream journal for 30 days straight prior to having three lucid dreams in a row a few days ago, and two lucid dream on this night (3-Jan-2010 12:45am). This is the first of two lucid dreams.

The Dream : I was in a Casino like mall, and somehow I ended up on an airplane by accident. I was at a terminal/gate bragging to the stewards about a large vacation I was planning where I’d be earning enough free miles for even more travel time. Yes, there were airplanes at this mall. The stewards were so impressed that they let me on the plane to look around. Before I knew what happened the plane had taken off and was already getting ready to land again. I was trying to find a seat to buckle up in, but it happened so fast I didn’t have time. I was able to watch the plane land as if I was in the cockpit, and the plane landed extremely fast and impossibly between two tall building. It went nearly straight down and just bounced into the gate as if that’s the way it was supposed to land.

When I got off the plane, I was struggling to figure out a way to tell someone I needed to be taken back to where I was, and that this was a big mistake. As I walked around the terminal I noticed some features that were identical to where I had gotten on the plan in the first place. This is when I realized the impossibility of the situation and determined that I was in fact dreaming.

I took a second to orient myself and to ponder my next actions. I quickly thought of the recent lucid dreams from a couple nights ago and immediately decided on two things. I would not immediatly try to travel anywhere from this place, and that I would simply focus on reminding myself that I was dreaming. I wanted to try and prolong the lucidity as long as possible.

I was thinking to myself how real this dream seemed, and that I still needed to do an actual dream check to verify for sure. I reached out and touched a marble ledge on the wall to the right of me and ran my hands along the wall to see how it felt to the touch. I said out loud “wow, this feels so real!” as I watched fish in a fish tank briefly turn to rock shapes before returning to the fish shapes they were. This was my dream check and proved that I was dreaming for sure.

As I walked around a corner to the left, there were a few topless body builder men standing there talking and laughing. Walking a little further I noticed even more body building men doing excersices on the floor. I was apparently walking through a body building convention and it was getting a little crowded with this topless scary looking men. I reminded myself that I was dreaming at this point as I had to jump over some of these men. Sorry ladies for not including a picture of this part of the dream. The pictures on google are a little frightening to me. 🙂 I also briefly thought of Experiment B, but decided I wanted to try prolonging the lucidity before trying the experiment again.

After jumping over a cluster of these men, I asked myself, “Where are all the pretty women?”. I turned around another left hand corner, and as if answering my question, there were some women walking around. Not so pretty at first (in my opinion), but eventually some pretty ones came into view. I started to flirt with one of the women, and she responded by saying “whoa!” and let me know that she was not interested. I reminded myself again that I was dreaming, and I had the power to do anything I wanted in this world, yet, I was not interested in doing anything to cause negativity or trouble even in this dream world.

As I moved on, another pretty woman appeared in front of me, and I casually placed my hands on her waist as she walked on. She turned and smiled at me and said “Can I help you?”. And I responded “I think so.”. She smiled even more at this point, and her voice went up in pitch as she invitingly said “You think so?!”. I recognized that voice for sure. It was the voice and face of actress Juliette Lewis.

She grabbed my hand and led me around the next corner where there were less people around and embraced me gently. Both my hands were now on her waist while she was facing me and looking at me with welcoming eyes and posture. I took this opportunity to remind myself one again that I was dreaming.

Now, not because I’m a pervert or anything mind you, I decided that I wanted to see how real things felt in this dream world. I watched as my hands slowly moved from her waist on up to cup her breasts. And just to complete the test, purely scientific I assure you, I massaged them just a little. Without a doubt, it felt as real as it would have in the waking world. I focused on how real they felt through her black dress, and on the fact that I was dreaming and lucid.

Soon I was pressed hard against her body, and kissing her deeply. My heart was beating fast and my breathing was deeper.

I’m not certain what caused it, but suddenly everything stopped. I was still aware of what had just taken place, but I was no longer in the dream, and I wasn’t exactly awake yet. After a second or two I felt the strong precense of my physical body. I could hear that my breathing was labored and heavy. I could also hear my heart beating extra fast, not to mention noticing a few other physical characteristics caused by the dream.

I decided it was time to wake and write it all down in the dream journal. My opened and I noticed that I had a huge smile on my face.

Epilogue : A few things I determined from this dream. I believe that a few things I do while in a lucid dream are causing my lucidity to end prematurely. 1) I believe that closing my eyes causes my lucidity to reset. Whether I’m meditating, or just concentrating of being somewhere else, this causes the dream to stop, or reset, or wake me up. In this case I kissed someone, and I always close my eyes when I kiss. Either no kissing allowed, or I keep my eyes open during the kiss. 2) Increasing my heart rate is a sure fire way to wake me from the dream. 3) Reminding myself that I’m dreaming on at regular intervals is a very good thing. In past lucid dreams I would quickly forget I was dreaming and fall back into letting the dream control my actions, rather than my actions influencing the dream.

The Battle for Lucidity ~ Ending 2010 with three Lucid Dreams in one night

Lucid dream above LA River at night — Photo taken by gsgeorge. Click picture to see his flickr page.

Prologue : Last nights lucid dreams were confusing for sure. It seems as if some of these dreams looped back onto themselves in terms of how I remember them. It is confusing to know where one lucid section ended and another lucid section began. So please bare with me if parts seem a little disconnected. The most prominent thing is that there were three lucid dreams in the course of just a few hours of dreaming. This is by far a record setting event for me.

The Dream(s) : I remember very little of the first lucid dream. I know that I was walking on a sidewalk. Possibly in a city or a suburb of a city. I remember thinking to myself that I had been Lucid for an aweful long time. By contrast, my past lucid dream experiences only lasted about 20 seconds. I managed to maintain lucidity for at least several minutes simply by focusing all of my energy on doing so. It felt like I had been lucid for more than 10 entire minutes, but I can’t recall anything that happened in those 10 minutes. And then I remember nothing else of this lucid section.

Next, I was sitting on the floor near a bed in a room that I did not immediately recognize. I was thinking to myself that I was pretty certain I was dreaming. I remember nothing prior to this tought that I was dreaming, and I wanted to perform a dream check. I recall that my previous dream check a few nights ago of trying to levitate failed, so I thought I would try something else. Something I saw from the movie Inception. Magically there were a couple of quarters in front of me, and I was thinking I would spin them on edge and see if they would just spin without end, or if they would fall over. I was having a tremendous amount of difficulty in even getting the quarters to spin at all. At least 3 times, the quarters fell over onto their side as they would in the waking/physical world. But I was still quite convinced I was dreaming. Somehow my own mind was stopping me from making those quarters spin on edge forever. But I was determined that I would prove to myself I was dreaming, one way or another.

I stood up from the quarters and looked over to the bed behind me. I saw myself lying on the bed and waking from a dream/sleep. The bed wasn’t a normal bed. It was like a sleep chamber of some sort. Some kind of mechanism to study, interpret, or control dreams. Somehow I made the connection that I was still dreaming, probably because I was looking at myself in a detached state instead of from within myself. For some reason I felt like I was trapped in this dream, and I felt like I wanted to wake up. So I sent a message (telepathically I suppose) to myself lying on the bed to wake up. As I watched, my body on the bed turned pale blue and started to strip layers of its skin away, like several layers of old paint from a wall in an old house.

As I turned away from myself, I noticed on a security monitor that there were three bodies/shapes standing outside the front door of the house. These were not normal people either. They were cyber robots with super powers, and they were looking for me. They wanted to capture me. No longer lucid at this point I was focused on escaping these cyber robots. I ran upstairs and found my way out a window on the second floor and started to run from the house.

This is one section where the dream seems to loop back onto itseelf. I have two distinct memories of leaving that house. Once (this time) on foot and not lucid, and another time in a truck with two other people, and completely lucid.

Skipping to the lucid dream section (loop), I was driving a truck with two other people in the truck with me. We were either trying to escape pursuers, or we were on a mission to get somewhere faster than the truck or traffic would allow us. I knew I was dreaming at this point, and told the two other people that we didn’t need to drive at all. I said “Watch this!”. And I levitated the truck and all three of us into the air and started us flying high up into the sky.

It was dark out, and we were well above the city lights. I was moving fairly fast over these lights when I realized that I was being aimless with my lucidity. I was allowing myself to be caught up in the excitement of flying and being lucid. I immediately focused myself on Experiment B. I told my passengers to hold on while I set out to land the truck in a quiet place below. Looking down, I saw a patch of area with no lights at all. It was like a river (the LA River to be specific) cut through all the city lights, and there were trees and parks all along it.

As I guided the truck down toward the dark area, it didn’t seem to work as expected. While the ground did get closer, once I stopped it seemed that I was right back where I had started in terms of altitude. I had done nothing significant.

Then I remembered that I should not need to fly, drive, or walk to get anywhere. All I had to do was imagine myself where I wanted to be and I would be there. So I closed my eyes in mid flight and began to focus on the destination. But alas, I was confused about my destination. My initial thought was that I wanted to get to the dark areas and to the trees so that I could truly relax and meditate. But also, the thought occurred to me that I could simply imagine myself into my sons bedroom with the deck of cards (See Experiment B). I believe that imagining two seperate destinations at the same time may have caused some problems with my focus and the results of my action. After closing my eyes and concentrating, this dream section came to end. Though I’m wondering if I ended up in the dream chamber as the body that was lying in the bed above. I’m a bit confused in trying to remember the time-line of these dream events.

Epilogue : While I feel a little disappointment about having the same problems with getting to my destination, I must celebrate in the fact that there is significant progress. Most significant is having three lucid dream sections in one night. With more lucidity comes more opportunity of course. And the other positive side is that I was quickly able to adapt and focus on the experiment. I believe that in future attempts I will be able to focus on the clear set destination of my sons bedroom, and to block thoughts of all other destinations. I think before closing my eyes in a dream I should first repeat to myself, more than once, “only one single destination”. But I may also need to reenforce the thought of being “lucid” when I arrive at the destination. I have a suspicion that the mere act of meditating toward a destination is resetting my lucidity somehow. I’m suspecting that is how I ended up on the floor next to the bed performing dream checks. I suspect that I ended up on that floor from the sidewalk in the suburb of the earlier lucid section. I was in a bedroom afterall. Just not my sons bedroom.

I think perhaps I should keep my eyes open as well. I think the closing of the eyes may signify some larger shift/change that my memory can’t seem to handle.

Dream Sign ~ Epic Fail ~ Pantless and Shirtless in Kodiak Alaska

I was parked along side the waterfront about 50 yards west of downtown Kodiak Alaska. I had pulled down into a gravel area. I was getting ready to drive back out onto the road when I saw a Lego cat trying to crawl up on top of a small brick wall that separated the road from the gravel area. I gave support to the bottom of Lego cat and help him get on top of the wall with a little push.

Then I was standing next to the wall. My sister was on the other side of the wall, and so was another man I did not know.

When I looked down, I noticed that I was wearing nothing but my underwear. I had no shirt and no pants. I thought to myself “Great, I’m in downtown Kodiak Alaska wearing nothing but my underwear!”. I hugged myself, both from being a little cold and a little embarrased. As my eyes scanned the wall, I saw my shirt and pants sitting there on the way. Relieved, I started to throw my shirt over my head and I started to laugh.

I looked over to my sister and I said, “Ya know, this is one of my strongest dream signs! You know what a dream sign is?” The confused look on her face prompted me to explain. “A dream sign is something that will often happen to your in your dreams that would rarely, or perhaps never happen to you in the waking/physical world. A dream sign can be used to recognize when you’re dreaming and help you to become lucid in your dream.”. Then I pointed to downtown Kodiak, about 50 yeards away and said, “For me, walking in downtown Kodiak with nothing but my underwear on is one of my strongest dream signs.”

Prologue : So, there you have it. I had finished explaining to my sister that I had just had one of my strongest dreams signs, and then…. I failed to perform a dream check, I failed to check my reality, and I failed to become lucid, as I most certainly should have at this point.

I suspect that this deam may have been inspired by at least some events of the prior evening. I was in my kitchen in nothing but my underwear, preparing an evening snack. As I looked out my kitchen window, I wondered if my neighbor, the Pastor of the local methodist church would notice. I wondered if it would offend him, me prancing around my kitchen in nothing but my underwear.

Lucid ~ Flying above beautiful marsh and grasslands

Prologue : Two nights before this dream I had formulated Experiment B. An experiment where I would try to astral project from within a lucid dream. About one month prior to this dream, I had visited my old home town of Kodiak Alaska where I stayed in a Bed and Breakfast that my Sister in-law referred me to. The B&B sat just above a lake and the channel where fishing boats came into the city from trips.

The Dream : I was at the Bed and Breakfast in Kodiak Alaska that I stayed at last month. There are many details prior to this that I could write about here, but I’ll stick to the parts just before becoming lucid and to the point where I lost lucidity. I was apparently trying to evade a group of about 4 or 5 young men that wanted to hurt me. There was a parking lot on the back side of the house, a lot that did not exist in the real world.

As I was heading out to the parking lot, and my car, I realized that I had powers. I knew that these guys couldn’t touch me. This seems to be a normal precursor to lucidity for me. These powers must serve as a dream sign. As I approached my car, I began to hover or glide across the parking lot with increasing speed and grace.

When I got to the drivers side door, I could see that the hood of the car was open. I continued past the door and around the front to find steam coming out from under the hood. I knew that I would not be taking this car anywhere. But it just didn’t matter anymore, because I had the power. I flung myself around the front of the car, almost like a satellite uses a planet for a gravity assist to gain speed. I came out from around the other side of the car and shot up into the air over the heads of my pursuers. As I passed them, they winked out of existence of my dream world. They held no more power or meaning to me.

Somehow I became lucid at this point. The way in which I’ve become lucid the past two times has been far less blunt than in the past. It’s almost as if I am transitioning into lucidity slow and fluid like. It is like I knew I was dreaming from the very beginning, so there is no shock or surprise in becoming lucid anymore. It just is. Don’t me wrong though. The excitement and slightly euphoric feeling involved in becoming lucid is still there.

I remember thinking in my last lucid dream that I had a goal to get somewhere. That would be Experiment A. And I remember that I could not fly fast enough to get where I wanted to go. This is why I came up with Experiment B.

As I contemplated Experiment B, I thought about flying down to a tree and beginning the experiment. But I realized that I was flying super duper fast, and thought to myself that perhaps I could get somewhere just by flying there. I think that I came to the idea that I would fly to the old childhood home that I grew up in.

I was flying incredibly fast over these green and yellow grassy fields. These fields were in the area of the Kodiak College where I used to pick salmon berries growing up. Though there was no college, and there were no homes over the span of several miles as I flew. There was only beautiful grass lands and marsh.

There were hundreds of trees that I could have stopped at, at any given moment to begin the experiment. But alas, I was having so much fun speeding over the top of the grass and trees that I neglected to concern myself with the experiment. Also what I failed to realize was that I was flying from a location closer to the supermarket in Kodiak, rather than away from the B&B I had started the lucid dream at. I was actually heading full circle back to the B&B where I started the lucid dream in the first place. Lucidity did not enable me to make this connection and change course.

As I approached the lake below the B&B, I mentally lost track of the original destination of my childhood home and focused on the lake and the B&B. I swooped down to the side door where I knew there was a garden and springs of fresh water running through. At this point, parts of the pre-lucid part of my dream started creaping back into my dream, and the lucid part of the dream began to fade away.

I knew that I was looking for something at this point, and I knew that I could find what I was looking for in this tranquil garden at the B&B. I think that possibly the thing I was looking for was the place to meditate, but in the dream I no longer knew what it was I was looking for.

After looking around the garden for about 30 seconds or so, my lucidity completely left me. I was once again a participant in a dream. The people who lived there invited me into their home and we started talking about their garden and what it is that they do. The people at the B&B were about 10 years younger than the people at the B&B before the lucid section of the dream. I was no longer in the same time at the B&B as I was before lucidity.

Epilogue : Clearly I need to stay more focused in the lucid dream if I have any hope of performing an effective experiement.

In my conversation with my dreamer friend a few days ago, he mentioned that he has far more luck in staying lucid in his dreams when he is calm and meditative. He mentioned that flying around and being excited is a quick way to lose your lucidity. I obviously did not take his advice to heart in this lucid dream as I ignored my intention to meditate. Instead, I continued to fly around really fast and revel in the excitement of being lucid.

Experiment B (Meditate and Exit)

This is an experiment that I suspected I may try based on my own experience and readings. I had a conversation with a fellow dreamer just a few nights ago where he gave me some tips based on his success with this very same thing.

Basically, at the point you become lucid within your dream, find a place to sit and meditate. For me, I picture finding a tree to sit under. Concentrate on a place in the real world that you wish to visit outside of your body. Then focus on pulling your astral body outside of your physical body and appear in the place you wish to visit. It is my thought that you are closer to the astral plane in your dreams, and entering the astral plane from a dream is far easier than to try doing so from an awake or meditative state. This thought was backed up by the dreamer friend of mine who claims to have had significant success doing it this way. At the time of this writing (12-Dec-2010), I have not actually tried it yet. At least not with intent to project/exit.

On your first attempts, the place you choose to visit is preferably a place that you are very familiar with and can visualize with a decent amount of detail. Also, some place where you can verify something you have seen on your astral travel by follow-up in the real/physical world.

For me, since my 5 year old son likes the light on at night, I have chose his bedroom as the first place to visit. I have read that when you are astral traveling or projecting on the lower (as opposed to higher, more abstract) astral planes that lighting may be in-line with lighting in the physical world. So, if you go to a dark place (like my bedroom) where the lights are off, you may not see as much as in a lighted place.

Each night before I go to bed, I am shuffling a deck of playing cards. I am randomly picking a card out of the deck to place face up just under my son’s night light. Of course I am not looking at this card. It is to be kept secret from me in the physical world. I read about this experiment from the book Astral Dynamics by Robert Bruce. Though I have altered the experiment to perform it starting from a lucid dream.

The experiement to perform is that the moment you are able to see and remember the card, say the card out loud. Bring yourself to wake up, if you can, and immediately repeat the name of the card out loud. Then go to the card to verify whether or not what you saw in the astral plane is true in the phsyical world.

According to Robert Bruce, he can do this with some regularity.