Wood’s World

The last few nights have not been very fruitful. On the plus side, my dream memory hasn’t faltered. I also had a slightly odd experience where I thought I might be in a dream but for some reason didn’t do a reality check, so nothing really happened.

I’ve come to the conclusion that the reason it worked on the first night was because it was at the very forefront of my mind, having read about it a lot that day. I hadn’t been training myself to do reality checks at that point, but I still did one in the dream on the first night, just from hearing about doing them. So I think it’s got more to do with how prevalent it is in your mind rather than training yourself to habitually do reality checks.

I read that eating late at night before you go to bed reduces your chances of remembering your dreams due to your body having to do more other work digesting food. I’m not sure how true that is, but so far it does seem to be helping.

So what’s the plan?

• I’m going to try to read for 20-30 minutes about Lucid dreaming each night before I go to sleep, so that it is on my mind.
• Not going to eat a short time before going to sleep.
• Continue with the reality checks each time I walk through a door (so long as I can remember to do it)
• Continue with the journal and the visualization.

I wonder how long it’s going to take me to crack this.

Related Articles:

• The Lucid Dreaming Experiment
• Lucid Dreaming: Night 1 - A Breakthrough Already
• Lucid Dreaming: Night 2
• Lucid Dreaming: Night 5

In modern day western culture, we live in an affluent world full of choice and decisions. Generally, as time progresses, remaining pleased with a decision you made is likely to make you happy. Whereas becoming displeased with a decision you have made could make you unhappy, depending upon the importance and the ramifications of that decision. So the question is, what makes you become unhappy with a decision?

Usually, the unhappiness or stress is caused when it becomes apparent that the decision you made didn’t turn out to be the best one. Who will you blame for this? Yourself most probably, after all you were the one that made the choice. You will end up feeling regretful. Another source of unhappiness is the choosing process its self, the fear of regret and the desperate need to avoid it.

I’ll give you an example to demonstrate this. My farther recently had a decision to make regarding three different pension schemes. Without boring you with the details, I’ll just say that they were significantly different, but none of them were substantially better than the others. This was causing him quite a lot of unrest and displeasure, even though they were all very good financially and most people would have been delighted with any one of the options. The reason for this stress was because of the multiple choices that he had. If he was only offered one of the three options, he would have been very pleased with it. It wouldn’t have caused him months of unrest and worry about which option would be the best one.

So there is this idea that the more you have to choose from, the harder it is to make a choice and be satisfied with it, which leads to more people being unhappy with the decisions they make. We’ve all been in the situation where we order a meal from a restaurant, only to be dissatisfied with it when everyone else’s meals come out and you wish you had chosen one of theirs instead.

In many situations, if we only had fewer options to choose from, sure we might not have as much abundance of choice (some would call it ‘freedom’) but we would probably be more happy with the choice we made because there is less opportunity to think that we got it wrong and then blame ourselves for getting it wrong.

In most cases, I’m quite good at accepting the decisions I make, even if they were not the best in retrospect. But this is because I’ve thought about all this and I’ve seen on many occasions how decision making and regret can make people unhappy. I’d rather be more accepting and have more of an “oh well, nothing I can do now except learn from it” sort of attitude.

I’ll end with this illustration which was shown in a lecture by Barry Schwartz. It’s a great depiction of the old proverb the grass is always greener on the other side. This is another thing that can limit your happiness given a particular choice or sittuation. If you are always thinking about what could have been or could be, you will never live in the moment and always be looking at how you can change a given situation to make it better, rather than enjoying what you have.

I’m sorry to report that I’ve been slacking on the training over the past three days. This is due to an excursion to climb Cader-idris. However, I have been keeping the dream journal going. My ability to remember dreams is good, I have yet to wake up without being able to remember at least one dream.

I haven’t been able to attain lucidity during nights 3, 4 and 5. As a result of this I’m planning on doing some intensive conditioning throughout tomorrow in an attempt to make up for lost time.

This will involve a new addition to the training. Every time I walk through a doorway I will stop to check my wristband. This will not only prompt me to check the wrist band if I walk through a door during a dream but it will increase the amount of times I check it throughout the day. I can see this method getting quite tedious but I must persist.

On another note, this experiment is in danger of hijacking the blog, it could take some time to make another breakthrough. Therefore, I’m going to begin writing articles again, reporting on the Lucid dreaming experiment only when something significant happens or I make changes to my methods.

It will be easy to follow the progress by viewing the experiment archive, which will filter out any articles which are unrelated to the experiment.

Related Articles:

• The Lucid Dreaming Experiment
• Lucid Dreaming: Night 1 - A Breakthrough Already
• Lucid Dreaming: Night 2
• Lucid Dreaming: Night 10

For the majority of yesterday I tried to follow my training techniques, as I described in the Lucid Dreaming Experiment introduction article.

I didn’t experience any kind of lucidity last night. I even found it quite difficult to remember my dreams this time. I read an article the other day which said that you can remember your dreams in the morning much easier if you remain still when you wake up. Apparently the motor neurons in your brain which allow you to move are triggered and this can mask the ‘dream memory’ part of your brain. To my surprise this actually works very well. If you don’t move at all when you wake up you can not only remember your dreams more often but you can almost feel what they were like too. As soon as you start to move, your memory of them begins to fade, try it next time you wake up. After lying still and trying to remember for a while, I managed to remember bits and pieces, so I logged that in my dream journal.

I remember a point in my dream where I thought things didn’t add up, like the realisation that triggered a reality check in night 1. But this time it didn’t cause me to check my wristband. I’m not quite sure why it did yesterday but not today. It could have been because yesterday I was in a later phase of sleep and I had actually woken up then gone back to sleep again, which is supposed to make it easier to have a lucid dream.

I didn’t do much visualization yesterday, I mostly just kept checking my wristband, which may not be enough. So today I’m going to try to do a bit more visualization as well.

In night 3 I am going to try to wake up early then go back to sleep, like I did in night 1 to see if that will help me spark another reality check. I really want to be able to realise I’m dreaming and not immediately wake up.

My curiosity needs to be satisfied.

Related Articles:

• The Lucid Dreaming Experiment
• Lucid Dreaming: Night 1 - A Breakthrough Already
• Lucid Dreaming: Night 5
• Lucid Dreaming: Night 10

I’m not sure if I am going to be able to express my disbelief properly in this article. I was quite skeptical about this even being possible when I was researching it yesterday, but after a bizarre turn of events leading up to me waking this morning, unlike any experience of awaking I have had before, I definitely know it is possible.

I’ll start by laying out the time scale. I went to sleep late last night, around 4 am. I had set my alarm for 11 am, but before it had a chance to go off I had been woken up by someone leaving the house. I later found out that this happened at about 10:45 am. I remember switching my alarm off before it went off, I reset the alarm for 12:30 pm. I lay in bed going over the dream I had just had over and over again, trying to gather together all the events and cement it in my memory, just as the training advice I read yesterday had told me to do. I remember several instances of bringing myself back whilst in that stage between awake and asleep. After a while I fell asleep again without really noticing.

I Was in my breakfast room, I just made some bacon and sausages in the frying pan, I sat down and ate them (I can’t remember actually eating them, all I know is that I ate them). Then I can remember that my mum made me some cereal in a bowl and I was eating that, I didn’t have enough milk in the cereal so for some reason I was pouring milk directly into the cereal packet, and now I am eating out of the cereal packet instead of the bowl. My mum is sitting on the other side of the table, and she hands me a letter in an orange or red envelope, there are two identical looking letters but I assume that one of them must be addressed to one of my brothers.

I have this sudden realisation that I seem to have been eating a lot of breakfast, in fact I remember saying to my mum in a jovial fashion “why have you made me this cereal? Now I have had all three types of breakfast in one morning” I can remember thinking that this cereal was the third separate meal I had eaten that morning (I can’t remember what I ate between the sausages and bacon and the cereal but I know there was something). I remember thinking that it is odd that I have eaten three different types of breakfast in one morning. That’s when it happened.

I remember Tom telling me just yesterday when we were talking about lucid dreaming techniques that he had read an account of a person who looks at one of his festival wristbands whilst in his dream, to check to see if the writing that is on it is how he would expect it to be. I usually keep my festival wristbands on for quite a while, currently I have 4, 2 on each wrist. I decided to check my wristband. It was the Glastonbury wrist band that I was looking at, trying to read the words on it. All I could read was the word “farm” but struggled to read the rest (I now realise that was probably because I didn’t really know what was written on it, but I knew it had something to do with the farm).

At this point I was fully aware of the fact that I was checking to see if I was in a dream, but I still didn’t realise it was a dream even though I couldn’t read the writing properly (which is apparently a common occurrence when trying to read something in a dream). I thought that I must be awake because I didn’t really beleive I was going to be able to do this. Anyway, I looked away from the wristband and then looked back to check it again (something that I had read was a technique for convincing yourself you are in a dream, called a reality check as I wrote about yesterday).

This time I couldn’t read any of the words on the wristband, it was a blur. At this point I felt very strange and I was almost in a state of shock because I had actually become aware that I could be in a dream, it only lasted the briefest of seconds before I quickly awoke.

When I was in the process of waking up a very odd feeling came over me, almost like the world spinning then me getting sucked out of it, passing though some kind of barrier (it sounds crazy I know, I probably wouldn’t believe me either) As I was passing through this barrier (this lasted for what seemed like less than a second) I had enough time to realise that what happened was actually a dream and as soon as I was awake for some reason, I involuntarily said the words “oh my god” (which is not a phrase I normally use). I don’t know if I actually said it out loud or if it was in my head. It was quite overwhelming at the time, because as I said earlier, I was quite skeptical about this lucid dreaming even being possible.

I couldn’t quite beleive that I had managed to do it, even though I had woken up almost instantly the moment I suspected that it was probably a dream. I wasn’t even 100% sure it was a dream when I was trying to read the wrist band a second time, I just very much suspected it.

A few moments after waking up, the way the whole thing felt was still quite fresh in my mind, I felt almost the same as when I was actually in my dream, so I had to make sure I wasn’t still dreaming (for my own sanity, haha). I checked my wristband and I could read it fine, looked away and then checked it again, I could read it fine, then did it a third time just to make sure. Then I grabbed my lap top and started writing this.

When I realised It was likely I was in a dream I don’t think I wanted to be there anymore, which is probably why I woke up. I was a bit freaked out by it. However, now that I have got that first breakthrough under my belt, hopefully I will be able to have a bit more control over the situation the next time something triggers me to do a reality check. I’m quite apprehensive about it happening again really, I think that’s just because it seems so out of the ordinary to me. But I keep telling myself I have to progress with it.

I think it happened so quickly because I had spent quite a while reading, talking and writing about it yesterday. I have got to try to keep it at the forefront of my mind during the day today and I’ll try to spark a discussion about it with Tom later tonight, to keep me thinking about it. I’ll try to continue with the wristband reality check technique as it seems to have worked once already.

This has been a very enlightening experiment so far, and it’s only one night old.

Related Articles:

• The Lucid Dreaming Experiment
• Lucid Dreaming: Night 2
• Lucid Dreaming: Night 5
• Lucid Dreaming: Night 10