[Context is included because it shows a clear buildup toward a lucid mindset with a resulting lucid dream.]
2017-01-20 1:05 pm
[Phase Evolution's new video tells what my mistake is--using the Suction of Sleep to go to sleep, promising to try hard later, when I should be using the Suction of Sleep to experience multiple Awakenings and then when that's happened, lie down and let the awakened dream bodies draw me out of sleep into an unworlding . Notice embedded assumption: "Multiple Awakenings will wake up the dream bodies so they are primed and ready for action." Will start with meditation sitting on floor and if I get sleepy I'll sit in chairs by this notebook to record experiences.]
1:10 pm
[Lounging on dream bed, stretching, relaxing.]
1:17 pm
[Meditation sitting on floor.]
1:25 pm
[Can't sit on floor because of recent overstrain pulling against vines at farm, resulting in lower back spasm, will lie in bed with waterfall and shamanic drumming sounds loop, notebook next to bed.]
1:35 pm
[Lying down.]
1:43 pm
[AWK] "...bank bank bank bank bank bank bank bank..."
1:51 pm
[AWK] [Made it to point 4 in Library Beanpole --taking a book off the shelf and looking at it.] Orange taxi is following me.
***
[AWK] Screendoor closing as I leave. It's made of a grid of thin slats [the Nowhere].
2:01 pm
[AWK] Lila I.
***
[AWK] [Couldn't make myself roll over and remove mask to write it down.]
2:33 pm
[AWK] [Mild choking/panic sensation --this also happened in some of the above.]
[Got up to pee, unlock downstairs door so T.'s returning home from school won't force me out of bed, then lay back down.]
[Went through the whole Beanpole twice and started a third.]
2:47 pm
[AWK] [Tiny choking and Jerk.]
2:55 pm
[Turning off sounds, leaving on mask.]
3:08 pm
[AWK] To my wife: "Cmon, it's not your job to stand around waiting for the kids to come home." Sweeping dust out the back door of this house downstairs.
3:26 pm
[AWK] [As approaching elevator in Beanpole...] "Others turned home; this one didn't."
3:31 pm
[AWK] Trying to generate lots of comments on a YouTube channel. [Head Jerks to the right.]
3:35 pm
[AWK] [Hovered close to sleep for a long time.]
3:38 pm
[AWK] Standing inside our front door waiting with papers to give T. the minute he arrives. He arrives and calls out, "Ma! Ma!" and I open the door and [wake up--and he did physically arrive seconds later.]
6:05-6:45 pm
[Lying down Noticing in main bed, wearing mask. Want to WILD. T. is using the computer a few feet away, a dog on the roof is barking outside my window.]
[Went to sleep but hovered close to surface.]
8:20pm
[Lying down.]
10:45 pm
[I have the feeling of being in a light state of sleep and partly aware the past two hours.]
[Dreamlike state vs. having a dream:]
Watching a TV, a bug is walking on the screen. Words: something like, "In what was once a little like America..." [We plan to wake up and watch the inauguration of Trump at midnite. T. is excited because "we" are going to drink beer at that time.]
[It never happened, TV station wasn't on that late, so will watch on YouTube tomorrow. Stayed up reading and writing instead, no beer.]
2017-01-21 1:50 am
[Back to bed, will try WILD, already slept from 8:15-10:45 pm. Focus is to retain full awareness.]
3:50 am
[No dreams recalled, will try to WILD.]
6:55 am
I'm trying to design something thinner and better than what other scientists know how to do. It should hold only one layer of molecules in it [the Nowhere] between two thin sheets of metal. [No other dreams recalled. Bad mood and bad lower back pain. But at least this typing is done so I can now write in my journal again without thinking in the back of my mind how far behind I am in my typing already.]
3:35 pm
[Will eat and go to bed. Already had a massage and got herbs shoved up the back of my shirt.]
[Still planning to drink beer and watch inauguration at 8 pm. Added note: The beer turned out to be an act of sobriety. Somehow it bounced me out of a deep purple funk and I started lucid dreaming again. Not recommended as a daily device for lucidity. I usually drink a bottle of wine once a month and a quart of beer once a month, maximum. In this case it broke a nasty crust off my eyes. --ed.]
4:10 pm
[Lying down in dream bed wearing dream mask, heavy rain, still have leaves stuffed in my shirt (slept). No dreams recalled.]
7:20 pm
[Lying down in main bed, Noticing session.]
2017-01-22 12:01 am
[To bed, after drinking most of a quart of beer over the past 3+ hours while watching pres. inauguration and related videos. Having ignored politics for months, this was kind of fun. I enjoyed it. I don't like or love Trump but I enjoyed tipping my hat to politics and then quickly looking away again.]
4:55 am
[See music.]
"You're the Good Thing That You Make"
In Kansas, in a used paperback Bookstore--large, SQUARE room with WHITE PAINTED BOARD SHELVES, restroom at right rear, arguing with a tall guy about whether or not I have any RELIGION. He says I do and I say I don't. I'm trying to explain a subtle point, but have to pee and I close the bathroom door a little too hard. My mom and I leave after I take a NOTICE that was stapled to the bulletin board in a stack of similar notices saying "You're the good thing that you make." She turns and swerves sharply down the road and I have to hold on to the side of the window frame and door as it makes me sway and too dizzy. She TAKES A LEFT from the right lane into a CONVENIENCE STORE/GAS STATION on Santa Fe Ave. East side near south end.
***
Back to Santa Fe Ave, Kansas, east side near south end, CONVENIENCE STORE. [Chained dream content.] I'm looking for some candy bars and all I can find is one. Going through large empty plastic bags of various colors, thin soft plastic [like what they put on clothes at the dry cleaners, but colored] red and green xmas colors. I go out to the parking lot which has a railing along the south side because it's six to eight feet higher, ELEVATED from the parking lot next to it, which is full of people including a teenage boy lying on his back holding a YELLOW cell phone in a vertically upraised arm. Another boy smilingly grabs the cell phone and takes off with it as a joke, and he is beaten to death for it. I try to decide if I should report this or stay aloof from it.
***
Here at home, BalBal and another guy are hanging out at a PING-PONG TABLE talking and socializing. I go over there and challenge him to play ping pong with me: "Dula ta! Dula!" (Let's Play! Come on, let's play!) He seems a little taken aback as if I might be out of order, or inappropriate, or interrupting something else, but I ignore this and plow on. We start removing some small plastic boxes of party supplies that have accumulated where the net should be. He seems to be getting into the idea and starts pitching in to get the GREEN ping-pong table ready to use.
***
"The Good Thing"
I'm visiting a Pacific Island culture that is in modern times but culturally pure, like the Philippines would be if it had evolved without the invasive influences of Christianity, Spain, and the USA. In a big house with very large, soft, darkish rooms, some men [Soul Retinue] welcome me, smiling and friendly, gentle and not too pushy. The one I see is big, slightly rotund and tallish. The men easily make me feel comfortable so I prepare to play my [unseen] GUITAR for them. I get my guitar pick out with a bunch of other junk from my pocket and set the handful down on a big banquet table in order to sort through it for the guitar pick. The men distract me away from my planned action and I end up across the room from my stuff in a big comfortable chair holding their traditional GUITAR instead of mine. It is BIG AND DARK GREEN [the Nowhere].
I feel a bit resistant [the Urumara] to the change of plan, but the instrument I'm holding has an attractiveness to it and as they begin a song, I am irresistably drawn into pouring my heart and soul into playing the big green guitar the best I can. It has double strings like a 12-string guitar and is tuned in such a way that anything you play tends to sound good with their native music style. I fumble around a little at first, but find it easy to start playing beautiful music and my effort merges into theirs. This is extremely enjoyable.
I leave the dark comfortable room and go through a door into a brightly-lit room with a WHITE carpet [the Nowhere] that has PINK highlights. The moment I enter the room, a native religious service begins in which the women all cluster together and start gibbering nice things to each other. It's as if they were trying to outdo each other in saying the nicest things about the most people. There must be 25 women in a cluster; all look like Cory Aquino, the ex-president. Fortunately, when the men start their version, and include me, there are only about three of them and they're much more subdued about it.
[I wake up in an exquisite mood of high emotion and gratitude. 6ness rebalance about three days after recent lifestyle change.]
[Arms vibrating for a long time, so I lay perfectly still for a long time, waiting for something to happen in spite of noise and disturbances including a crop duster flying over the house several times and T. walking through the room singing loudly.]
[By Noticing I was able to see through the Urumara into the Projection Room. A smallish Screenshot opened at bottom center of the visual field covered by a field of goldish-brown fractal patterns, vertically corrugated like a stage curtain. In the center a vertical line would appear and the curtains would begin to open. By maintaining the right balance of focus and detachment [ Metsuke ], I could allow the curtains to open, revealing ever more intricate patterns behind, finally Noticing a dot of fractal energy in the exact center of the screen which generated the rest of the image. Willed the scene to enlarge and fill the visual field, but it lost resolution when this happened, so I let the state go. During this experience, I was quite aware that trying to force, push, or hurry the opening of the curtain made the whole scene disappear, but I could bring it right back by rebalancing focus and detachment.]
3:55 pm
[Awakening session lying down, back still hurts.]
[AWK] "Doomed to failure."
[AWK] A male doctor stands over me explaining in no uncertain terms that "We will know" what's going on with me. A petite woman doctor in her 40s stands next to me holding a stethoscope. She looks friendly, short dark brown hair and black plastic frame glasses.
[AWK] An English-accented male nurse is going through my prescriptions in a box on my bed including a "Huuuge" bottle of liniment and "those noted black pills that..." [Woke up.]
[AWK] Award is given "for purple grape for things working themselves out in the end," since the office was closed over the weekend and no official support was available.
8:30 pm
[Intent Agenda is to identify my Personal Lucidity Objects in an unworlding tonight and I also need a generic term for such a thing.]
[When waking I WILL REPLAY EACH DREAM while adding notes-to-self as to where I should have become lucid.]
[When putting T. to bed, I told him to rub his hands, clap and shake them, and look for them in his dream, then ride his dragon. At the time I felt this was worth 20 reality checks of the usual kind. Something about sharing it made me feel unusually enthusiastic about it.]
[AWK] "Listen! Look at me!" Sharp rapping sounds.
10:45 pm
[My Personal Lucidity Objects are 1) quartz 2) musical instruments.]
I live in a big old-fashioned building from the old west [Fiddletown]. It's one big room inside and perfectly square. [Also see this morning's dream (4:55 a.m.) about being in a large SQUARE store.]
11:06 pm
[Back to bed. I mentally go over the last dream to point out where I should have become lucid. This is the MILD technique. Added note: I think this is actually DEILD or Chaining dreams. MILD and DEILD are two different forms of Chaining. In DEILD you Chain two contiguous dreams together, but in MILD you Chain dreams to waking suggestions and intentions to remember to do reality checks and get lucid. Whatever it was, it worked. --ed.]
2017-01-23 4:30 am
"Going Downtown"
I arrive at my parents' home on the bus [the Tunnel --no visual] and my dad [SC] is waiting to take me to register at my High School at night. He parks and I go in and register and THEY PAY ME $30. I head back to the car [I don't recall ever seeing a car or anything else yet for that matter; all is experienced as thought up to this point; is this what happens when we talk to ourselves in our sleep? A dream in the Froth or just past it, in the Tunnel?] and as I walk in the dark across the lawn I LOOK CAREFULLY at the ground [scene starts to stabilize] because I Notice the ground is wet with standing water [grass and sheet of water = the Nowhere] and I don't want to get my feet wet. I look THROUGH THE WINDOW [the Nowhere] TO MY LEFT at the MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS in a classroom and I'm GRATEFUL [building 6ness] to be back in the USA, the land of opportunity, materialism and ordinary public schools that are practically playgrounds for the wealthy. Somewhere TO MY RIGHT, a boy is saying confusing things to his father [unseen] about what can be done with the musical instruments and whatever that is, he BADLY WANTS TO DO IT. [I had just decided earlier in the evening that musical instruments were my Personal Lucidity Objects.]
I'm in the car [the Tunnel] and my dad is not, so I assume he has his own plan, but as I drive off [car unseen], I CAN RECALL him saying [pseudo-memory] that he intends to "get rich off" this school registration, and I imagine giving him the $30 proudly as I have no intention of stealing it from him. [SC is trying to jog me out of the fog. He's hinting around, "Hey, why did the school pay you to register? Isn't that odd?"]
Now it's daytime. [The scene stabilizes] at the parking lot gate where I WONDER why I'm pulling up to a man gate that's too small for the car to go through [the Urumara. I still have no visual of the car] but as I sit waiting and watching, an old woman backs her car perpendicular to mine, out of the tiny guard house [another Fogjogger !] across the opening of the wee man gate, and at this point it becomes clear to me that there's no way through for me, so I pull my car over TO THE LEFT where a car has just entered through a larger opening in the gate, but I'm stymied again [the Urumara] as a big white arrow painted on the gray asphalt road surface [The Nowhere] indicates I must turn around and go back. I'm vaguely aware of a uniformed guard [Dream Usher] as I turn in accordance with the arrow and head back the other way. The arrow is ODD, seeming to point one way then the other, indicating a u-turn is required (no exit here).
I'm finally out, off campus, onto the city streets, LOOKING CAREFULLY at street signs as I was driven here and need to GET MY BEARINGS.
[Add to list of Personal Lucidity Objects: Street Signs and Maps.]
I'm happy--aware of being happy--happy about being happy [Magical Mindset]--to be back in the USA where I can drive and stretch out a lot more. It was so constricting back where I was before [Philippines where I actually still am, where I don't drive and never will] and driving is not scary anymore now that I'm doing it. I feel safe and free, and there's hardly any traffic anyway. I'm out in the suburbs somewhere, approaching intersection after intersection where I'm constrained [the Urumara] to GO RIGHT, go right, go right. [Dream pun: get lucid. Also given chance after chance to practice going through the Urumara.] I'm trying hard to REMEMBER where I'm going so I can GET BACK, and manage to remember two street names for FUTURE REFERENCE. The first one is "Btylar" [anagrams: Bartley; lab try] and the second one is very normal, starts with an S and is very easy to remember [total blank on what that was...] I scoot along easily on city streets and very aware of being HAPPY WITH MY CIRCUMSTANCES AND SURROUNDINGS [the Magical Mindset].
[Having never seen my car, not so much as a steering wheel or brake pedal, I am now so unaware of it as to be] more or less on foot. More traffic now, more excitement [but still not very visual] and I happen to LOOK TO MY LEFT and shout "YIPPEE!" because there, larger than life, is the huge, old-fashioned yellow 3D wrap-around bulky marquee of a theatrical and grandiose PLACE THAT I RECOGNIZE [by feel, from previous unworldings]. Now I'm really excited [finally visually vivid]. Ecstatic to be out of the residential suburbs and back in the part of the City where I can search for unusual things and have meaty experiences. I intent to find that gaudy Chinatown place [a place I remember from a previous vivid unworlding.]
I'm walking in a Walgreens-type place through the toiletry section and a young man with a WHITE shirt and dark CURLY HAIR [the Dream Usher] wants to help me as I seem to have ended up in a rather mundane location.
I'm outside and I enter what reminds me of a low parking garage without any cars. I'm here because I know the guy who works here [Dream Usher] and he should be able to guide me. There's an ORANGISH-RED cast to the place [2-3-4 Mind is waking up] which is conspicuously made of concrete with a sort of rounded speckly-rough textured finish to it. I FEEL DIZZY and sit down on a bench to wait for my friend. Still dizzy, I WONDER why the floor seems to be moving and I try to work out a reason in my mind. I decide/realize that this is the BORDER REGION of the special shopping/research area where I had found myself in such an ecstatic mood, and being on the border, it actually projects out over the water [The Nowhere]. I hope my friend is doing his job right, as the floor is really moving. The more I notice the motion of the building, the more it moves. Then it occurs to me that this DOESN'T MAKE SENSE: a solid concrete building, even if built out over the water, should not move at all, because if it did, it would quickly CRACK UP [dream pun]. This just makes the building roll around on the water like a boat and I'm so dizzy--
"I'm lucid!" In ecstasy I lay down on the floor as my visual field instantly dissolves into an off-whitish fog [the Nowhere]. I place a book and piece of paper on my chest and use my chest [heart chakra area = the Nowhere] as a writing table. I carefully scrawl, without being able to see anything, the names of the two streets I had memorized earlier, so I will be able to find this place again. I gradually morph into [bed with eyes closed and covered by a dark mask. I realize the white fog is still there after some mental meandering. Going over the dream I realize I can re-enter it, but I'm too conscious of having to pee. I decide to get up and write the dream down, which took over an hour, it's now 5:40 a.m. and have to get T. off to school.]
[The roads I drove down in the earlier part of the dream before I ended up Downtown ended in constrictions such as No Left Turn but the roads themselves were long and curvy through grassy vacant areas and the curving feed lanes ramping onto intersecting streets were more constrictions [No Left Turn--the Urumara]. All suburban curvy thruways with limited branching, you had to follow the roads to the end. I didn't know where I wanted to go, but I knew it when I got there. Downtown!]
[Earthquakes have always been Personal Lucidity Objects, from way back before I even knew what lucid dreams or earthquakes were.]