I was lucid dreaming in Washington DC, doing a tour of the national archives which I thought was real. It was mostly boring, but it did have some details about a 2016-ish internet worm. Despite being lucid, I thought I had been here- but it was an imagined place.
I left, and met my mom in a hall. She was dreaming too. She was carrying a pile of artifacts. We talked about how cool lucid dreaming is, and she asked me to carry one thing into the real world. I took it in my arms - it was large, perhaps a little spiny like a mine.
I used to have lucid dreams almost every night as a teenager, to the point that it almost became distressing, but now i hardly have any. I wish that lucid dreaming didn't have so many bugs: Running is generally impossible, NPCs freeze, stop talking or give unintelligible responses when directly asked questions, places are unstable, text is gibberish, the whole experience is too short... Generally the best lucid dreams i had were deliberately induced by falling consciously asleep and done during the daytime when my mind was more alert. But it took a lot of training and had a high failure rate, with many attempts resulting me wasting an entire Saturday morning and falling fast asleep. I once had an incredibly vivid out of body experience. Other times there was hardly any visuals but a feeling of rapid movement that accompanied a tremendous high. I miss that experience more than actual lucid dreams.
It's fascinating how much of that is very relatable, *used* to be relatable, or is just different from my experience!
I used to be unable to run, even in "normal" nightmares. I think maybe it's still impossible to *flee* from things, but one can be like the wind, weightless, when it comes to moving forward (or even being an action badass, as a fun treat). I dunno - maybe I've gotten jaded to the body-horror monster dreams. Nowadays I feel more able to engage with the underlying psychological terrors my brain is trying to walk me through, which means the skinless horror sits down and starts asking for grandchildren or whatever.
Text being gibberish is a fascinating recurring thing, though weirdly not 100%! I was definitely reading things last night. But last night was weird in a lot of ways - I had a lot of pizza, and my subconscious reacted with a smorgasboard of wild nonsense. It's crazy how reliably cheesy pizza before bed makes me trip balls, and there are similar reports going back centuries. It's very unrestful though, like a fever and with constant interruption.
Places becoming unstable usually seems to happen when I try to force my will on a dream. I don't tend to do that often. The temptation is obvious, but it tends to be disappointing compared to leaving my subconscious in control. The world falls away in my grip, and I risk my subconscious being less "kind" next time around. The longer I put dreams off or interfere, the worse they get... It's better to play along.
Speaking of, I still freakin hate daylight dreams. Probably because they're the result of me failing to sleep, or actively avoiding sleep, because I'm having a particular mental
time and am unready for another dream-lecture. And bam, I have a 30 minute dream that feels like hours and freakin sucks. "Lucid", sure, except that I'm too tired to know what's dream and what's glimpses of my room. So I basically hallucinate, in similar ways to sleep-apnia. Paralyzed in my room as people stand over me, that sort of thing. I learn nothing and it basically sucks in all the worst ways.
I mostly discarded last night's dreams as trash, but they largely involved a new modern-Doom game but with heavy RPG elements? I think because I was playing Dungeon Siege 1 before bed. See? Meaningless.
Also blah blah gender stuff, but it was super confused. It was either happening to a certain webcomic character, or I *was* them, and either way the big reveal was utterly wrong, and there was no coherent message. I was just high on cheese.
And some politics! Though, that involved backrubs and was very pleasant, and I cried but in a good way. I didn't know I could cry like that in a dream, new datapoint I guess. oh also I threw up on a jerk from my past, his reaction was *hilarious* (and was purely imaginary, thankfully)
There's a popular dream-like animation project called ENA. I've only seen this one video from it, and perhaps it's more dreamlike than the rest of the series, but it feels appropriate for this thread. There's a constant unease of riding the wave, trying to remain chill and cooperative so that things don't turn from weird to bad.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juBv2XWnwt8also I like Ena's vocal quirk and, well, otherwise dualistic nature