Hi,
This is my first post. For the past few months I’ve been studying astral projection. Having not yet been able to achieve a projection, when I came across the idea of lucid dreaming it seemed intriguing and it seemed like it be easier than projection. So I started trying for a LD a month and a half ago. I read all the websites, all the forums. I started and kept a dream journal. Soon I was able to remember and record up to 7 or 8 dreams a day. (Waking up numerous times during the night to remember and record.)
I tried to DILD, I tried to MILD, I tried to WILD. Nothing. I looked for hypnogogic imagery, and did have some success there. I saw swirls and flashes and heard sounds, voices. Still no real success.
I bought a RemDreamer and starting using it. At first the light was so disturbing all it did was wake me up. Then later I seemed to get used to the light because it didn’t wake me up, didn’t give me a LD. I should have checked the counter to see how many times it was going off, because I suspected it wasn’t working.
But then I took another step (yes I was determined to make it happen) and bought some galantamine. i bought the pill Galantamind off the internet, and started taking it. I had read that it worked quick so you should take it an hour or so before you hoped to LD. So I took it around 2 or 3 in the morning, sometimes as early as 11 or 12. I had also read that it wouldn’t work if you took it every day, and sure enough, I tried, and I could tell they were right. So I have been taking it every other day.
And lo and behold, last Saturday I had my first LD. I went to sleep around 10, woke up at 12:30 the first time, and already had a dream I remembered. I took the Galantamind and went back to sleep. I woked up at 2:45, looked at the clock. Got up for a minute, went back to bed this time determined not to fall asleep again. It took a while, but soon I started to slip in and out of dreamscapes.I had a short dream and came too. I slipped out again, and found myself viewing another dream. A point came in the dream where I decided to take action, and when I did, I started feeling a tingling starting in my lower body and moving up all the way to the top. At the same time I because lucid. It didn’t hurt at all it felt good. But it was so strong it did startle me. And when I started to move in my dream body I immediately woke up. It didn’t last but a few seconds, but there was no doubt, I had had a lucid dream.
I tried every other night for the past week with nothing eventful to report. But Saturday night I went to sleep around 11, took a Galantamind just before. I woke up first around 12 or 1. Then again around 3 or 3:30. Then again at 4:45, and then I went back to bed, but again this time I was determined not to fall asleep again. And again it took a while, but eventually I saw a dreamscape (when going back to sleep I visualize dreams from earlier in the same night I remember) and again there came a point where I wanted to take action. And again I started to feel the vibrations or tingling all over my body. And again I was lucid. This time though for some reason I didn’t make the body movements I had thought of making, and the scene blanked for a moment, then started up again in another room. As I looked around birght colors emerged throughout the scene. It felt like earlier I was seeing black and white, and now everything was in beautiful vivid colors. There were people in the room, but I remembered that I wanted to test my ability to fly in a LD, so I made an effort to go straight up in the air and fly away. Nothing happened. So then I decided to exit the room I was in and then try again when I was outside. But when I tried to leave the room, a couple of people asked me to turn off some machine for them before I left. So I started turning knobs on machines trying to turn them off. First one. That wasn’t it. Then another. That wasn’t it. Finally I got it turned off, and I walked up some stairs to the door leading out. But, as I walked through the door someone was walking in, I made contact with them physically, and I woke up right away.
So my 2nd lucid dream. This one lasted a couple of minutes or so after I became lucid. It was still disappointing that I wasn’t able to exit the dreamscape I was in, and construct a new one of my own. But it was great to be able to get number 2 under my belt, and know that the first one wasn’t a fluke.
It seems like the G put me over the top. I’m sure it would have happened eventually without it but I believe it helped it come quicker. What convinced me in the end to try it was a recording I got from one of the sites of an employee of the Laberge dream institute being interviewed. He claimed that by giving a drug to their dreamers they were able to substantially increase their success of having lucid dreams. He didn’t say which drug but I know galanatime is one of the drugs known to help produce lucid dreams.
One thing that puzzles me though about my first 2 lucid dreams. The tingling I’m getting when I first become lucid sounds more like exit symptoms of an astral projection than it does lucid dreaming from what I’ve read. I know the 2 are closely related. Both times at exactly the point I’ve become lucid I’ve gotten the vibrations, or exit symptoms. The first time I was startled and I woke up. The second time the scene sort of went blank for a second then I entered a new scene. They both seemed like dream scenes.
In my dream journal I wrote that it seemed like the first dreamscapes were more like experiencing phasing, where I was seeing everything, but wasn’t really participating in the scenes. And then becoming lucid was like going from phasing to stepping into the scape and becoming an active participant.
To go into a dream do you first have to project? It feels like is what happened to me.
Also, I consider these LDs to be Wake Induced Lucid Dreams even though I did both times skate in and out of consciousness for a second.
I’d appreciate any feedback from the experienced lucid dreamers, especially any of you who have had atral projections also.
Thanks
John