Hello, lucid dreamers!
I’ve been a lurker for a while, so I decided to post something for the first time. I wrote this back in June 2020.
My lucid dreaming background
As a kid I remember having a lot of regular dreams, and some semi-lucid dreams as well. Most of these lucid dreams would happen while dreaming about flying (which was constant during childhood) and the absurdity of the situation eventually triggering some kind of weak lucidity. It wasn’t until 2012 that I learned about the concept of lucid dreaming.
I was living abroad at the time (I’m brazilian and was living in Ireland) and had a dream about being at my grandma’s house. During the dream, out of nowhere I though: “wait, I don’t remember taking a plane back to Brazil. That’s odd, it can only be a dream”. I also remembered I’d read somewhere that your hand looks weird in your dreams. I proceeded to look at my hands and the palms were moving in a swirl fashion way and the fingers were all distorted. I yelled: “HOLY ■■■■ I’M DREAMING!” while observing my surroundings in awe. My heart started to race, and as I began to walk to explore I woke up.
That morning I mentioned the dream to my flatmate and he told me about lucid dreaming, citing the film Waking life. I watched the film and got really into the subject, downloading and reading every book on the topic I could find online. It didn’t take long for me to have another lucid, although very short dream.
By the next year I was having an average of 1 lucid dream per month, but they were all occasional, short, and triggered by some absurdity in the dream. I wasn’t dream journaling and would very sporadically do a reality check during the day. I always enjoyed when it happened but was never serious about it or taking any action towards improvement.
On June 2017 I had a really long and vivid regular dream where I went on multiple adventures for what it felt more than 2 hours. I raided castles, fought battles against dragons, drove a fast sport car on an empty highway, among other cool stuff. Upon awakening I was feeling bad for not becoming lucid. It was the most stable and long dream I’ve ever had, the perfect opportunity to lucidly explore my mind, and I missed it. This dream made me start a dream journal and regularly do reality checks throughout the day. I downloaded the Awoken app for it.
From June 2017 to June 2018 I’ve logged 131 entries and 22 lucid dreams onto my dream journal. I noticed a slightly improvement on stabilization, duration and awareness of my lucid dreams, althought it would vary a lot and none of those took more than 10 minutes.
Last year I started to write down only vivid/long regular dreams and lucid dreams, but the average stayed pretty much the same until last month.
Quarantine improvement
I’ve been furloughed since March this year due to the pandemic and it completely changed my daily routine. With so much free time and stuck at home, I decided to change some diet habits, exercise, and take a break from booze and weed. Now, I first did it because I though about losing some extra weight and as a health “experiment” and didn’t have lucid dreaming in mind to begin with, but it definetely affected sleeping and dreaming in general.
The first couple of weeks my sleeping schedule got weird. I was having a hard time falling asleep and the first 5 hours were very unstable and I coudn’t get any deep sleep. But the next 2 or 3 hours were basically all filled with long vivid dreams. I managed to become lucid in a handfull of these. The interesting part was that I was having long dreams in short periods of time every night. As I was experiencing light sleep, I would wake up, check the time, back to a “2 hours” dream, wake up again to see only 20 minutes had passed.
I believe this was happening mostly because of the cannabis withdraw, since I was using it almost daily for the last 6 years (enven though a joint would last 2 or maybe 3 days and I rarely used it before bed).
Since I was having little to none deep sleep, after two weeks I decided to take 5mg of melatonin every night, and that’s when things really improved.
For the last 40 days, I’ve had 22 lucid dreams. That’s the same it took me a year to have before quarantine, and now the lucid dreams are way more stable and somehow easier to control. I’m also experiencing a lot of false awakenings and some hyperreal dreams.
Also, for the first time I managed to wake and go back to bed straight into a lucid dream. Before, all my lucid dreams had been dream induced. The most vivid and hyperreal lucid dreams I’ve been having are coming from WILD.
I’ve been experiencing the so called “vibrations” almost every night, and it feels way more easier to enter a dream lucidly.
Thanks for reading 
