The day before, we had a bunch of family friends over for a party, including one of my best friends (who lives quite far away, unfortunately). Anyway, I went to sleep at about 12:30 am. I entered a dream where I “woke up” in my dark bedroom, with me in my bed, and a whole bunch of people quietly standing around. I realized they were the guests we had over recently, and I just asked my mom what time it was (she said “one o’clock”) before falling asleep. I felt that this was completely normal, nothing out of the ordinary. I woke up again and bright sunlight was streaming through the window. Looking at the clock, it said 1:00, and I thought, “Oh, she meant PM.” I got out of bed and realized that my floor was a nicely mown lawn, and that there was nothing else in my room besides my bed (maybe a nightstand, I forget). As I was walking towards my door, something clicked in my mind, and I found that I gained control of my actions. I immediately thought “Lucid dream!” even though I only browsed this website and forum for a few hours several weeks ago and briefly discussed it with a friend. I got excited and wondered what I should do…I thought of flying and visiting a friend. I walked back toward my bed when I realized that the dream was sort of fading from the outside fringes of my vision (hard to explain, it became black and fuzzy). I remembered something about spinning, and I spun halfheartedly a few times before the dream ended and I woke up with my heart pounding. The time was 12:56 am. For a while, I tried to figure out if it were a lucid dream or not. I thought that it may have been a super vivid imagination, but then I realized that that was dumb. Right after I woke up, I could remember my dream extremely vividly, but when I felt it start to trickle from my memory, I got up and wrote down what I remembered.
Oh, I was reading a strange surreal book before going to sleep. Anyway, just my story.
All that happened in only half an hour? According to scientists, the first REM dream period only appears some 90 minutes after you fall asleep, and unless you are extremely tired (or unless you’re a master in WILD), there’s little chance that you can enter a full dream in the first half hour of sleep. So it might have been truly vivid hypnagogic imagery, which naturally occurs during the onset of sleep. These images are usually very fleeting and fragile, and any reasonable attempt to interact with them usually causes you to wake up. Whenever I had these HI, I too have this dark, fading peripheral vision. It’s possible to become lucid during HI (I also usually experience this); it’s called protolucidity. But lucidity during HI often destabilizes the images, unless you can keep the balance between observer and participant.
So anyway, it MIGHT have been a real dream, but I highly doubt it.
Well Mystic generally spoken you might be right, but there’s people doing WILD from going to bed in the evening, and they report quite good dreams once they hit sleep. So I dont think it needs to be purely HI’s, also because the border between HI’s and non-REM dreams is very fleething anyway! To me this looks most certainly like a LD. So congrats on that, djwang88!
I was surprised as well that I only slept for half an hour. But I’m quite sure it wasn’t HI…they weren’t static images. As in, people were talking and moving. Plus, I remember that I interacted with a computer that appeared on my bed when I turned around (after I got out of bed, I walked towards the door and found myself in control). I’m pretty sure I hit the keyboard and could feel myself touching it. I’ve never tried LD techniques, and I very much doubt that I can WILD on instinct. Perhaps I went to sleep at 11:30 pm and just forgot when I fell asleep. That would fit the 90 minutes thing almost perfectly. But regardless, when I woke up, I felt like barely any time had passed.
Also, you know in the mornings when you wake up, fall asleep a few minutes later, have a dream, then wake up and see that only maybe 5-10 minutes have passed? Why can you dream so quickly then?
Also, you know in the mornings when you wake up, fall
asleep a few minutes later, have a dream, then wake up
and see that only maybe 5-10 minutes have passed? Why
can you dream so quickly then?
It is easier to restart the REM cycle after having slept a few hours, hence why techniques like WILD are often combined with WBTB.
Being able to hit REM fast is actually not the reason you “dream quickly”. The same happens if you hit non-REM fast. REM seems to influence the dreams though (often reported as more vivid), and provides a means to have better recall (it enhances memory). I think a better explanation lies in the fact that your entire brain is still in “dreaming mode”, so to speak, when you wake up. And this isn’t the same as REM (something dream researchers recently figured out).
