"Into the WILD" - 05/29/2013 (Lucid + Chain)

(Happy to say that this was the first WILD experience I have had in years!! I'm going to add the dream fragments that surrounded the main dream as well, so this entry is more of a 3-in-1 post.

I'd awoken in the middle of the night, after 'dreamless' sleep, used the bathroom and decided to try a WBTB. Using a lucid dream induction audio, I lay back down and tried to put my attention on becoming aware of when I was dreaming. At first, I couldn't get to sleep and wondered if I was going to be able to at all. Soon, though, I had already drifted off to sleep and had a short, first dream: )

05/29/2013

Dream Fragment #1

(False Awakening)
(Lucid)

I 'woke up' to the sound of my daughter's voice, having come into my room to let me know that I was sleeping late and had to hurry up to take her to school. It struck me as strange, at first, because it was still dark in my room, but she doesn't go to school until sun-up. All I could see was her silhouette standing in the cracked doorway. I wondered how she got in my room in the first place, seeing as how the door was locked when I went to bed. Quickly, I realized that I had to be dreaming. However, before I was able to even think about having some fun with my lucidity, I began to wonder whether or not I actually was oversleeping. Thinking it was better to be safe than sorry, I woke myself up.

(After looking around my room - which was now empty, with the door still shut - I prepared to go back to sleep, resetting the induction audio.)

"Into the WILD"
Dream #2

(Lucid)

The hypnagogic imagery came on pretty quickly, this time. I started to see dull, abstract figures moving around in the darkness behind my eyelids, while the audio still lulled in my ears. Focusing more on these images, they began to expand into a more detailed scene of large, armor-clad beings trudging back and forth in an enormous cave. It seemed that they were shipping or mining something through these tunnels. Everything was still rather hazy and dark, though, and I really didn't like being in this cave scene. I wanted to be outside. I wanted to do some flying.

With little more effort than just the desire to do so, I found myself falling through gray skies, high above a mountain range with an enormous stone temple set into one of the cliffsides (Which I believe might have been representing the caves/tunnels I was just in). I wasn't falling at freefall speed, exactly, but I simply couldn't get much control of myself, in order to fly. The entire dream scene was still hazy and unstable, as if the dream could have fallen apart at any moment. It didn't help that the sky was overcast and extremely foggy, and I could still faintly hear the audio track. Below me, I could see an enormous green canopy of trees. I was falling toward a forest and tried to pull up so that I could fly over the tops of them. Gathering some forward momentum, I started to skim across the treetops, which were so dense that they looked more like a solid surface than millions of separate leaves and branches. It reminded me of a vast green ocean and, even though I was now flying forward, I was still descending toward it. My feet touched the top of the trees...but they didn't feel like trees. It felt like mud. The mere thought of an ocean/liquid was causing the treetops to turn into a green sludge. I felt that I would soon be consumed in a sea of this muck, if I kept sinking, and I just wanted to abort the whole situation. Again, I thought about being somewhere else. Anywhere else.

Next thing I knew, I was inside a building. It seemed that I was backstage and a band was about to go on. (The sound from the induction track was now gone.) There were a few people my age milling about, but I don't remember interacting with them much. Now that I had a moment to collect my thoughts, the first thing I thought of was stabilizing the (still visually hazy) dream. I looked at my hands, which were wavy and out of focus, while repeating to myself "I'm dreaming, I'm dreaming, etc." to keep myself from losing lucidity. Slowly, my hands came into focus. I turned to the wall nearest me, which had some yellow 'safety' lines painted on the concrete surface, and I rubbed my hands along the wall, really getting a feel for the surface and bringing the dream even more into focus.

Once grounded, I thought of what to do with the rest of my time. I remembered the game I'd made up for artistic inspiration (where I would turn over cards in a dream and use whatever showed on them to make some graphic art in waking life). Walking over to a dresser, I stuck my hand in one of the drawers and 'willed' some cards into my fingers. When I pulled my hand out, I was holding about 3 cards. The first one I turned over was a 4 of hearts, but the hearts were all drawn dripping with blood. I then remembered that I was supposed to use Magic: the Gathering type cards, with actual characters and scenery on them. I tossed the cards back into the open drawer and blindly reached my hand in again. This time, I pulled out a whole deck of regular playing cards. Rather than keep trying to get a 'Magic' deck, I simply held up one of the playing cards with the back facing me and 'willed' it to be some sort of fantasy genre image on the other side. When I turned the card over, there was a picture of the Grim Reaper, looking rather menacing while holding his scythe. Noting that one in my mind, I pulled up another card and did the same. This one had a picture of what looked like a female angel who was composed of either water, ice, glass, crystal or something of the sort. It was a pretty cool image. 

With those 3 images in mind (including the bloody hearts, which I will incorporate somehow, if I decide to do a piece based on these cards), I went around to find something else to do. I levitated and started floating around the room. The thought crossed my mind, to fly up through the ceiling, but didn't want to get stuck (which I often do). Instead, I floated over to a nearby window. I could see my old neighborhood outside, and decided to try phasing through the glass. I put my hands up to the glass and pushed forward. My hands sank through, up to the elbows, and then got stuck as if the glass just solidified around them. Frustrated, I pulled on them for a little bit but couldn't get them back out, so instead, I just focused on getting through the glass, pushed forward and phased all the way through.

Instead of ending up in my old neighborhood, though, I was outside my present house, in the backyard. It seems that the scenery had changed in that small (always awkward) moment that I stepped through the glass. Still levitating, I moved around toward the front of the house and began having trouble with flight again. I was only a few feet off the ground, but my hovering felt really sluggish, and I couldn't move as freely as I wanted. There is a huge hill on the side of my house, and as I started to round the front corner of the building, I started 'sliding' down the hill backward, as if I was getting sucked out toward the street by gravity, instead of down toward the ground. I kept trying to fly faster to escape the pull, but I couldn't. The more I tried, the steeper and higher the top of the hill seemed to stretch away from me. So, thinking of Iron Man, I put my hands behind me and imagined them and my feet as being thrusters. This worked, and I began flying back up over the hill with ease. (There was no actual propulsion/jet, though. Just imagining that there was made flying seem easier, I think.) When I got to my garage, it was already open. My old dirt bike was inside, covered with a tarp. Without a second thought, I jumped on the bike, started it up with no problems, and tore off down the street, riding on one wheel with no fear of falling (which I wasn't very good at, in waking life. Lol).

While riding down my street, I saw some kid getting beat up on by 3 or 4 punks. I turned the bike around and approached them. Once off the bike, I don't remember much of the conversation, but I remember picking the entire group of bullies up as if they were one being, and slinging them away into the woods nearby, causing them to break through the trees like a collective wrecking ball and disappear among the debris. It was actually rather cartoonish...but satisfying. Lol.

Around this point, I thought it best to go back over the events of the dream, so that I could recall them when I woke up. I stood still and recounted all of the events that I could remember, until I got to the present. Then, when I figured I had enough remembered, I attempted to wake myself.

Dream Fragment Three:

(False Awakening)

I 'woke up' in my bed, and all seemed normal. Sitting up, I turned to face my laptop (which is near my bed). Attempting to type up my dream notes immediately, I found out that my laptop was covered in a jungle of wires. The more I tried to unravel it, the more wires seemed to be entangling it. Before too long, I realized that this was completely unusual, but before I realized it was another dream, I woke up for real.