Well, I wasn’t just floating. I was several meters above our house haha. I would love to do some experiments on how to explain it to them. I just tried once (I guess in one of my first LDs ever) and in the end I made myself wake up because the person didn’t want to get it.
The mask still did not have any positive effect. I don’t want to say that the effect is negative, but I sometimes feel like while wearing the mask at night I can’t tell you when I’m actually sleeping and when I’m awake, which is a bit exhausting because in the morning, I feel like I have slept less although I don’t really think that I did and also my sleep cycle app says I slept the normal amount of hours. The mask does not detect REM sleep unfortunately. You have to program it on the website and you can tell it when (after how many hours) it should start emitting light. My settings is 4 1/2 hours so after 4 1/2 hours, there will be three different patterns of blinking light which will be repeated after 18 minutes. I will then set my WBTB to 3-3,5 hours after falling asleep, will stay awake for half an hour and the try to fall back asleep before the lights turn on. So actually I adapt my whole sleep cycle to that mask. Not sure if it is just getting used to. We will see.
I have started another experiment because I read that many lucid dreamers can’t smell in their LDs and when I thought about it… I also never did. So now I try to smell other people’s perfume in the upcoming LDs. I asked ChatGPT if there is any neurological reason why it could be impossible but it seems like it is possible but since for us feeling and seeing is more important to keep the dream stable, we just don’t focus on smelling. Mission accepted I’d say!
What a pity that the person was not able to tell you if you were in their dream. Would be very interesting. There are so many things to discover and research.
Hope you can sleep better tonight! But if you can’t just take some rest. We need to keep in mind that what we are doing to our brain is just not really natural (purposefully interrupting sleep cycles and teaching parts of our brain not to fall asleep) so that we sometimes just need to rest.
Quick update on the remee mask: last night I recognized the lights in my sleep for the first time. I still woke up right after seeing them. Anyways I set brightness to 60%.
Oh I see how the mask works now. You should just try it out when you feel like it and I bet it will work eventually and would be neat to see what that looks like from within the dream. I don’t recall a lot of smells in my dreams, that experiment is worth knocking out. I have taken your advice to take a rest. I have had a few dreams that were social and at parties but I either have to go to school or work the next day so there is always a tension. I seem to have these a lot, and a few dreams where I was playing different video games. Nothing lucid or to where I got up to journal.
It’s disappointing because I know it’s possible to really be dedicated to this stuff and not get tired or frustrated from it, but actually find more energy and balance in life from it. I think part of how I ruin it for myself is the expectations. It’s a double edged sword. It’s good to incubate dreams and prepare for sleep in a way that facilitates good dream journaling. It’s good to be confident about it. But too much energy or excitement can ruin it? It doesn’t seem like it, maybe misplaced energy is the problem.
But I had a few days where I did everything right and was excited to go to sleep, then had very little results. Real life doesn’t always help lol but I can’t really blame it for my lack of dreams or lucid dreams lately. I think I will take a step back and go back to the basics, simply trying to dream journal at least once a day. It is a tricky thing trying to get rid of the expectations or unlearning what I’ve learned. But if I do have an interesting dream I’ll post it in my journal!
I had an LD last night! (see below)
Unfortunately the mask didn’t have any further effects apart from that one time I saw the light in my sleep. I have to admit that two nights ago in the second half of the night, I forgot to pull it back down on my eyes after journaling lol.
Happy to hear that you took a break and that you know yourself well enough to know when you need one! I don’t think that it will worsen dream recall or so if we don’t write down our dreams for one or two nights.
About the expectation, I find it difficult to examine what really causes negative effects and what doesn’t. Expectations themselves in sense of “I want this and that to happen exactly the way I imagine it” will ruin it in my opinion but a bit of pressure in sense of “I want it, I know I can, and I will!” can be helpful if it’s not too much. For example last night, I actually put a lot of pressure in because there was one thing I wanted to clarify in second life that was important for me. Well, I ended up at a LD in a completely different location and in the LD I remembered that I need to clarify this one topic but I was so hyped that I was lucid that I literally said “nope, not now!”. When I woke up, I regretted it a little bit but on the other hand I had so much fun anyway. It is so interesting to see that I don’t seem to be fully rational and that the way of thinking in a LD (at least in my case) is very short-term oriented sometimes. Do you have that too?
Anyways, what I wanted to say is that the pressure can also help. Maybe we need to figure out what kind and what extent of pressure is good and which is bad.
No new results on the “can we smell if we want to?” topic though.
Sometimes it is maybe better to unlearn things that you have learnt so that you can learn something else that might work better. Lucid dreaming is science but not the best researched science yet so we need to do all the work and find out what works best for us (also individually). Trial and error. Learning and unlearning. At some point (I hope) our techniques will be perfect for each of us!
Keep me updated
It is odd how easily the scenery can change. Not everytime, but often enough where i think im about to wake up, but instead just go to another place. It kinda doesnt make sense that we dont have more control over when we want to try, given how effortlessly our minds can create a whole scene in the blink of an eye. its not like we are trying to do something inconceivable like have several points of view at a time, just trying to get back to a place we know! Though sometimes we end up in a place we need and didn’t know we did.
I had a dream today that i know is recurring, though I think the details can be different each time. It is a dream of this really nice bus and it is taking a bunch of people to their cars so they can go home after work. Everyone on the bus is calm. There is a small kichen on the bus and you can walk up to the front. Its like a cross between a train and a bus. Its just a safe environment to be in.
I have been enjoying my dreams lately and even if i dont try too hard i get something pretty memorable every few days. just going lucid right before i wake up in most cases. I hope yours go well as well. This whole topic has shown me more the variety of recurring dreams we do have. Maybe our mind is trying to manage the quantity or replay the dreams we havent remembered until we do. im always guessing but also learning from discussions like this!
Now I have not replied for a long time. Sorry for that. Happy to hear that everything seems to go well in your dreams.
Actually, you are right. It is interesting that scenes switch so quickly but if we try to do it deliberately, it seems way harder. Sometimes I wake up for journaling and I’m wondering how many dreams did I actually have? Was it one dream that was just switching scenery in the end or was it several dreams even sleep cycles apart from each other…
The dream you have about the bus to me seems a bit like you’re feeling well. I mean, I don’t know but I could imagine that you dreamed that when everything in your life is OK so maybe this is like your safe space. I have the opposite. I always have a reoccurring dream, since I’m a kid each time I am under pressure in my life or feel the loss of control about an aspect in my life.
In the time we did not exchange messages on here I had several interesting experiences in my second life. I kept telling the people in my dreams that there are just things I cannot do like reading books or watching movies so that if we want to do something together, it needs to be something we both can do. I did not think very much when mentioning that, but then one night some weeks ago I had this dream when second life husband and me were standing in a room that I knew exists but last time I thought about it was literally eight years ago. I remember that exactly because I sometimes wrote down things back then and since those are places that really exist I even have a photo of the room, but I never went there not even in my dreams because I saw no sense behind it. Anyways, we were there and we played a game that I know that we both like. The point is that I would have never ever in my life consciously come up with the idea to go there and play this certain specific game. It was not really a lucid dream. I was well aware of the fact that something is off and I was thinking about things like is this perspective now actually correct etc. so I knew somewhere deep in my head that this is not real, but I did not come to the conclusion that it’s a dream. What I wanted to say that it took me two days to actually realize that after mentioning several times that we need to find something we both can do and we both like so that we can enjoy the time we have, seems to have worked. How did my subconscious mind come up with an idea that fulfilled those two criteria although I consciously know that even within almost 9 years of lucid dreaming, I never had the idea to go there and do this although I know that we both like it and both can do it. It feels like I lent some part of my subconscious mind to those dream figures it is like they have own ideas and own thoughts, although I of course know they don’t. Sometimes they just seem to know better than myself.
Another interesting experience I had was when I was just standing in the dining room and second life husband was sitting in front of me. It was also not lucid dream (yet). There was also a kid. It was none of ours. And the kid came running toward me when my husband said “no no leave her” and tried to hold back the kid. That was when I recognized that the dream was fading and it was also the point where I understood that I’m dreaming and that I’m fading away. I am still wondering if he saw me fading away or he knew that since the kid was running towards me out of the sudden I might lose stability of the dream. No idea if it was that in the end. Fact was I woke up immediately.
For the last point I want to mention I guess I need your help. Since I started journaling regularly or almost regularly, I have a very good dream recall again, up to six per night. I’m doing a lot of reality checks during the day just as I always did for the last almost 9 years. I am regularly dreaming of my second life. Sometimes I can even plan the things I wanna do at least roughly, and it will happen that way, but I do not gain lucidity anymore. I am able to gain lucidity while falling asleep or in short sequences of other dreams but not in second life and I don’t know why. I normally do reality checks if something feels off or if there are people that should not be there or that I have not seen before at that certain place, for example at work or my apartment building. I just do what I’ve learned but for whatever reason I do not do any reality checks anymore in my dreams not even if something is off and I don’t know why. Do you have any idea why this happens? I even started reading books again about oneironautics although there is nothing new in it. Still have no idea what I’m doing wrong all of a sudden.
