Thursday, April 22, 2004

First Lucid Dream

I remember going through about three different dream sequences last night, all of which contained plenty of clues that I was dreaming, of course, though I didn't catch any of them until the end of the last one. I was walking home at the end of the dream, across a large field. I don't know what tipped me off -- all the people in Renn Faire outfits, or the giant green statue pulling the bell in a clock tower, or what -- but somehow I realized I must be dreaming. As soon as I thought that I looked around myself in excitement, but moved so fast that I woke myself up.

My alarm went off about then so I got up, but then decided to put it on snooze and lay back down. As I was dozing off again, my bed started shaking. Not like an earthquake, but more like one of those vibrating alarm clocks, only big enough to shake my entire bed. That seemed pretty strange, plus it occurred to me that I never use the snooze button on weekdays, so I think the combination of those two things clued me in to the fact that I had just had a false awakening. I moved a pillow aside to check my alarm clock and the time was 7:50, about right for having hit the snooze button a few minutes ago. So I covered it up briefly and then looked again, now it was four-something, plus I realized that the clock was on the right side of my bed instead of the left. So I did it once more, deliberately choosing to see it as 1:51, and that's what it changed to.

So now I know I'm dreaming. I go back to the field that I left in the last dream, and it's filled with random dream characters there to welcome me, though they're all sort of cartoon-style people. Everything's a little blurry too, and I'm having trouble figuring out how to focus my eyes. I can see things with my eyes closed or half-closed, but not very well, and I feel like opening my eyes will wake me up. Unfortunately, I'm also somehow taking a bird's eye view of the scene, rather than being directly in it, so I'm getting more distanced from the dream, which doesn't help. Pretty soon everything faded out and I woke up (for real this time). It turned out to still be 15 minutes before my alarm would go off, so I just stayed awake and jotted down some notes on the dream.

So anyway, not much there, but it was something. I'm making progress at least, and that's exciting.

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