necrose - glip

i had a dream about being Sphinx Deca today ^_^ happy birthday me it is such a good birthday present and exactly what i wanted

today i had a really long lucid dream. i've been training myself so i can lucid dream more often and frankly i love it. i have one every month or so now, sometimes more frequently. today my lucid dream, i got to again experience a clarity of seeing around me that just felt like literally being in another world, because i could just... see. i could see, i saw people with deep clarity, i could see my environment, i was having conversations with full sentences i could recall clearly...

my dream was so long! it took an hour to type up. i had like 8-9 mini lucid dreams before the big one at the end. it's taken so much dream training to get to this point!!! but it makes me SO happy to be able to do this. i love this genuinely so much.

i want to know if others have had lucid dreams or what they've been like? if you've had one, will you share about that experience? i'm really curious what it's like for others. i kind of want to type up a lot about how i go about inducing lucid dreams and what the "intro" to lucid dreaming is like, and how i manage it, because i do just like going on about this subject a lot.

^the above is an example of notes I'll take and then the dream as I write it out afterwards

okay i'm gonna talk for a bit about my thoughts about dreams generally and then veer into thoughts about lucid dreams

training yourself to remember dreams

so a few years ago, 5 1/2 years ago actually, i started keeping a dream journal for my dreams daily. i've got 3,615 messages in my #dreams personal channel, which is where I record them. it's the first thing I do when I wake up and actually start using my phone or whatever... I know it can feel kind of hard to remember dreams at first, but actually this is something you can train (and I've done that).

it's not really something that's as easily done if you have to wake up and rush out of the house though... my schedule is fairly lax often unless i've got an appointment or something so i've got the luxury of being able to spend as long as i want remembering my dreams and writing them down too. but even if you don't have a lot of time in the morning, you can still train yourself to remember the main details and take notes on those for later transcription. (I write them down later and not immediately on rare occasion, like when something else is calling my attention first.)

when I'm lying in bed after waking up but before moving, this is the important time to remember dreams. if you move around, open your eyes, etc at this point, you might start losing a lot of your dream if you don't run through the dream mentally a few times and take "keyword" notes. once you've gotten a good lay of the land of the dream, this is when you want to open your eyes and actually take notes on the keywords. these are the words that hold the "meat" of the dream content for you when you're running through it again, words that you can recall the rest from. you don't want to get distracted by your phone during this!!! if you're using your phone to write them down, RESIST the urge to check messages or whatever at this point! this is a huge dream recall killer, checking messages first.

after you've got the keywords down, you've got a decent window to start writing the rest of the dream down, but you'll lose clarity if you hold off for too long... which is a trade off of doing it later. i generally try to do it right away.

additionally, it's important to try to transcribe the "literal" of the dream without overlaying your interpretations on it (more on this later). you can ALSO add your impressions, but i find it important not to say "this dream Definitely means this and that" because then you're locking in meaning, when there might be more meaning to the dream you're shutting out by doing this!!! i want to elaborate on this because this is the part about dreams i'm most interested in! we've got a couple of dream channels in the servers, and in the Owel flora server, people post their dreams daily when they remember and feel like it (I post mine basically daily).

i'm gonna veer into a related tangent to the dream stuff! so bear with me.

character RP related tangent

so... i've had character RP stuff going in the servers on and off for the past three and a half years or so? and in these RPs I try to encourage an atmosphere of treating the characters with respect, out of character. so like, treat them as people. they're not just dolls to play with, their feelings matter. and this is because when we put feelings into them, they become "real" through virtue of... our feelings being in them. when we interact with our characters, we become entangled in those feelings too, because... we're connected! the way we respect the characters reflects how we respect each other too, and this is really important. it can seriously hurt for instance if someone just casually talks about wanting to kill a character or hurt them or something, whether it's your own or someone else's... because people care about the characters!!! we want well for them! we want an atmosphere of respecting life and creation because generally this just... makes for a better RP atmosphere AND a healthier attitude overall. i say this having used to treat characters poorly at times, when I didn't grasp that people really actually felt things about them and wanted well for them. sometimes this came from just wanting to see my character go through something awful I experienced too! but yeah, it still matters to care about the character and what happens to them! I strongly maintain this.

so, this is important regarding the dream stuff because i found over the past years that... the more the characters are treated with respect (and not just as plot props! but as individuals who matter and ought to have agency within the setting)... the more the characters showed up not just in the dreams of the person who made the character, but in the dreams of those around them in the RP (and sometimes out of the RP too! like months later).

weird dream synchrony

so like... this is fun, and i love seeing dreams like this when they pop up. but the thing that would stand out, especially more recently, is that some of the dreams ended up being extremely connected to events in the story in ways the dreamer couldn't have known at the time. this KEEPS HAPPENING. like, someone will dream something (someone not even part of the RP currently) that's 100% relevant to events the characters experienced, events that neither I nor the other RPers saw coming or understood would be happening. the dreams will be simultaneous with events, or even in one case I'm aware of, the dream happened in advance and the person only SENT it after the events already happened!

this has been fucking crazy to witness, as basically the "DM" of the RP. I started playing a witch character and doing witchcraft in the RP (actual witchcraft after reading books on it for months and getting an idea of what this would be like to perform) and the characters who joined the coven, the players who played them started having dreams that were either concurrent with events happening to another coven member in the RP, or they were predictive of something I had NOT told any of the players yet. and this has been fucking nuts. this is not the only instance of this event - dream synchrony is so common that i've come to expect it every few days now, and especially after some kind of emotionally charged event. it happens between others, it happens about the people themselves, it happens a lot. when people actually record their dreams we just... run into evidence piling up of weird ways we make connections among ourselves that come out in the form of dream synchrony.

i don't know how to explain this! this kind of thing would happen on OCCASION some years ago among the people sharing their dreams, but the frequency of connections that are traditionally inexplicable has gone majorly up since then? i've got theories about how this works and why, and i've been trying to refine these.

back to lucid dream talk

I want to keep it to talking about lucid dreams for now, but I DO want to share stories about some of these other dream encounter things. i just felt it was important to lay out a bit about the character connection thing, because the stronger an emotional connection you have (and maintain! and care about!), the stronger your dreams will connect to things in your life, I feel. I feel this based on what I've observed in my own dreams and others' in the past few years.

so... my first Big lucid dream was when I was playing a character called The Librarian. this is basically the keeper of the continent of Eastar in the Flora setting, if I boil it down. this character tried REALLY hard to emotionally understand everyone who came to see them, which were a lot of characters who showed up at the tree to learn. This character was reserved in large ways but really cared about educating others on emotions and emotional interactions, self-reflection, introspection, this kind of thing. they held a huge feeling of connecting with "the world" for me. I remember playing them could feel very tense for me because it was like... me juggling 20-30 people, like a classroom, all trying to learn about the setting and themselves, and in the most constructive ways possible. (this was not always possible.) but like, earlier on...

I remember I was doing a lot of meditation exercises at this time, back then. I had others do similar in the RP event too at one point. i was focused a lot on trying to connect internally during playing this character...

anyway one day I was lying down, trying for a lucid dream. i was trying SO hard for a lucid dream back then. i hadn't had one in a very long time, and when i used to have them when younger, i'd wake up almost immediately from them. this was such a bummer!!! i'd immediately try a lot of things, like changing my body or flying or whatever, and i'd get so overwhelmed from emotions in the dream that i'd wake up. this has been, honestly, hard to train, but i want to talk about the process at least

technique?

anyway i SUCCEEDED at having a lucid dream while in a very charged state, still in the Librarian mindset. i felt super connected to the world and the flow of things around this time period... and like... I would do this thing (that I still do) where, while lying down, I try to move myself "outside of" myself. so like I'll pretend my insides are rocking back and forth to "roll out of bed", or I'll pretend I'm being "pulled" out of my body by something, like sliding down through my feet or out of my head or whatever. this has been REALLY important! I remember reading this technique in a book back when I was 16, but it was harder because I could only practice this more on the weekends when I wasn't in school. it ALSO helps to already have slept during the day and be trying this during a nap. when I feel tired and want to nap, this is prime time for trying to have a vivid dream or lucid dream, for me. if i set my alarm for a certain amount of time (half an hour to an hour) and then set it for another half hour to an hour, I can end up in lucid dreams more often. this was something that happened here! you really want that half asleep state when you're trying to enter lucid dreams through invoking them. not QUITE feeling in your body! that's when it's easiest to "pull" yourself out of it through imagining it.

anyway i did pull myself out of it. i felt myself pulled out of my body and it was like i was traveling down a tunnel really fast. at this stage (which is super consistent for me) i'll recognize i'm dreaming and i'll have a few moments to decide where i want to go and what i want to do. in this instance, i was like "oh my god I can go to Flora's setting." and I remember thinking this vividly as I was being "pulled" into the dream.

actually I can just go get the dream because I have it logged so I'm gonna do that.
dec 03 2020

i was lying in bed, "oh i can go anywhere? i need to go to floraverse. can i go to floraverse? I'm going to floraverse." i forced myself out of my body because i knew it was a dream. i started to rapidly leave. "oh, uh, andre.. no, he's broken. paige.. that's dangerous. ah uhh orobas? yes, orobas." suddenly I'm flying through void forest and I'm... i think "oh.. oh no... oh noooo i left her here" and all these trees came into focus. key trees. i recognized them instantly, i knew i was indeed in "floraverse" and these trees were unmistakably something I'd draw, but they were special. i ended up in front of a wall with... andre colors on it, and 40 or so murals on this wall. i was overwhelmed. i knew -those i am connected with- put these here. the murals looked just like the trees but more horizontal. andre splatter of paint on mural to indicate, these thoughts, they were REAL. but they weren't put there by him. i said, "oh my god, oh my god" to myself over and over in front of it, i tried to commit everything to memory, i was overwhelmed, this was heaven's keys stuff, and then my snooze alarm went off

anyway the thing that really stood out to me about this dream was 1) I saw these PERFECTLY geometrical shapes in perfect detail. like, this was seriously like you're awake and looking at something. the environment was all perfect, crisp detail, and i was able to move around it and look at things and it was just... real. it was seriously like being in another world. this dream left a huge imprint on me because i... saw... Andre's mural, but like, he wasn't on it. there were paint splatters and notes left here, and it all felt like things I might make, but I did NOT make any of these things. I made them real AFTER I had this dream, but it was like...

i don't think I can emphasize enough what a journey this put me on, and how this contributed to me wanting to treat the setting and characters with respect. because this was basically me... seeing a part of the world I created... but it was real. i was just, really here. it was short lived because my alarm went off, but I had NO IDEA that lucid dreams could be THIS clear. i had NO idea it could be like you're LITERALLY AWAKE but in another world. it wasn't the thing where you have a fuzzy impression, it wasn't the thing where you "sense" it's some way... no, i was seeing what was around me with perfect detail. i was seeing these CRAZY perfect geometrical shapes and there was no "lag" in my brain generating it or anything. it was just like these perfect shapes existed and i was able to move around them and just... look at the world. it was incredible, frankly? i think about this dream a lot.

the lucid dream i had yesterday reminded me of this one because i could see in the final part of my lucid dream with extreme clarity as well. a whole world around me, people i seemingly knew, a whole place. a whole setting. all really clear. i felt so inspired from it.

starting to experiment with dreams, accidentally

after this lucid dream, i wanted to try experimenting. i'd been reading books that explored a lot of metaphysical ideas and I put this inspiration into playing the Librarian, when I wanted to test out some of the ideas in it. there was an idea repeated a lot... "thoughts affect reality". this holds huge implications though? like huge. like if thoughts affect reality, then me thinking about someone can affect them from a distance? and vice versa?... so when would this be true? when would it not be true? is this something i could play with or test? i wanted to find out.

at the time, i was starting to reconnect with Pengo (who's now my partner). we had a rough few years, a "feud" as he'll call it (and man that's kind of an understatement honestly), but we'd been trying to reconnect and mend things for a year and a half at this point?

anyway... i bring him up because...
i had a thought... "if thoughts affect reality, then it should be possible for me to send energy his way, right? like just with thoughts and intentions?" ... and i wanted to try to send something that was overall for reconnecting and healing. but i was puzzling over this. i wanted to try to do something in character, in a way that connected to him and a character i'd made to represent him.

so i had the Librarian, in character, basically tell the library-goers that the Librarian was trying to contact a certain kind of angel ("Static", an entity within the Flora setting), an angel that's good at contacting other worlds and things. this was explained, and music was explained as a connection point to this angel. i then had everyone work with remixing a song i'd made for a flora update ages ago (for Itchy Itchy), a song that held a lot of my sadness about the Pengo situation. I don't think I'd relayed this at the time yet, because I wasn't really talking about Pengo publicly. but I knew this connection.

anyway. this is important because in metaphysical concepts i'd been reading about, emotional connections need to be present for these kinds of things to take place. when you connect to something, it connects to everything that thing has connected to (unless you have internal blocks or boundaries placed). so like... what i did was like... set up a connection of...

Library goers -> Librarian -> Static angel -> A character about Pengo

I had the library goers put a lot of personal feelings into the songs, and we discussed each song. the Librarian was straightforward that they would be trying to contact the Static angel, and the Static angel served as a filter (it was an angel representing me) to filter out anything Pengo didn't want to connect to, and then I had the angel connect to his character.

The thing is... I did NOT tell people out of character, ANYONE, I did not tell ANYONE I was going to be trying to send energy to the specific character about Pengo, nor did I tell them I'd be trying to connect to Pengo. he was still very reserved in talking about me at the time, and I was reserved about mentioning him (because he seemed to want this), so our connection wasn't super outwardly open. And furthermore, I didn't trust anyone not to tell him, if I DID say something. he and i weren't texting much or DMing much at this time and I hadn't heard from him in weeks. I had NO idea what would happen if this "succeeded", nor did I have any idea what form it would take. I had no idea! the whole point was just... if i try this, what will happen? will anything happen?? will i have ANY IDEA if this did anything???

something happened

two days later Pengo texted me a dream he had which was unusually vivid, and there was a lot of music and singing, and it concerned students and a teacher. i won't relay all the details here, but i was frankly shocked. because I didn't even tell HIM I would be doing this experiment on "sending thoughts". i need to be clear, he did NOT text me his dreams often. he lamented not having dreams he could remember well! this was a whole thing. we had a discussion about how he wished he could remember his dreams better, and so i'm sure that's part of why he texted me his dream - he knew i liked that, we'd discussed dreams before, but it wasn't super common for him to share them with me, and again we hadn't really been talking for some time.

i felt i would come across as fucking crazy if i told him i was trying to send him thoughts from a bunch of people, about music. but then he had a very vivid dream two days later which felt like... processing related pain, pain that connected to concepts the characters represented and tapped into. i don't know. i couldn't explain this at all. again, i just... hadn't told him i'd be trying this towards him and he didn't know any of the library goer players. my logic was like... "well, if i tell him then he'll be primed for something and i don't want that. i want to see what happens if i tell NO one what i'm directly doing." I didn't want my experiment to be contaminated with someone letting him know in advance, or something like that!

i ended up just kind of holding onto this for... what was it, another 6 months? i didn't tell him about my experiment until then. my logic was like, "if sending thoughts and affecting people ISN'T real then this shouldn't affect anything except my internal state. but if it IS real then something really incredible could happen here, and if i filter the energy involved through myself, then i'm filtering it through a connection that pengo's okay with". so i felt either way it should be fine. but i was still REALLY startled that it "seemed" to do something so quickly? i wanted to investigate more. i've basically been investigating more since then, planning out more elaborate tests and experiments with characters in the setting.

and that's the thing!!! working with characters in the setting means getting to work with magic as a filter, magic as an idea, and getting to do it with an open mind and heart, because these things are real within the setting. it creates a barrier where when i need to disconnect and be out of character, i can still look out for myself and others and try to do this in healthier ways... because i feel like having emotional grounding to one's own life, treating one's life with agency and so on, is really important for this. i feel like when you get in the realm of treating PSI stuff as real, you REALLY need to ground to your life. people can get really detached in these unhealthy ways and this isn't good here. dreams are awesome and apparently can convey a lot, but you need to have a healthy connection with your own life and own connections or else i feel like it can go into a place where you or others could be emotionally manipulated with this stuff, which you really don't want.

i started doing heavy research on the PSI phenomena and what kinds of research exist on it. i like this because there are some really well documented experiments and tests out there and these have been inspiring for coming up with new kinds of tests and ideas for playing with this kind of thing in the RP. i've read about very controlled lab experiments where people have tried to send each other dream imagery to large success, and... to this i have to say... yeah

i've done way more "dream sending" experiments since my first shocking encounter with trying to send Pengo something as the Librarian, and I've tried to receive dreams from others too, and just... i don't know what to say. it seems to work, even if the symbols sent or received are sometimes in the abstract and not the "literal" thing someone's trying to send. and this honestly fills me with so much excitement

I'll probably keep writing about this later but I want to stop it on this point for now. this meandered into dream experiment stuff but i'm genuinely very interested in this topic and personal research... so... i do want to talk about it more and go into some of the stuff i and others have tried

if you've got thoughts about dreams i'm very interested in them. thanks for reading if you read this far