Lucid Dreams: The Lucid Dream Within A Dream

Sometimes I have a lucid dream within a dream, which is a bit different from a lucid dream per se.

Last night I dreamt lying in bed - not my real-world bed, but 'my' bed in the dream - watching a tape of some episodes of a documentary. More correctly, I was listening to the documentary as other things happened within the dream. Because some things being said didn't make sense without seeing the TV I tried to turn towards the screen but couldn't, which is where the dream lucidity within a dream began.

A common pre-lucid state is when you attempt to move your body, and when you think it is in it's new position you find it back where it started. This is a 'confusion' between the real, physical position of the body and the psychological model of it which normal separate during dreaming. In this case, aware now that I was within a normal dream, it's the same confusion but between the 'physical' position of the dream-body and it's psychological representation.

In fact, I was able to move my dream body around just not my head, leading me to fall out of my dream bed as though in a drunken stupour - in a (pre-) lucid dream proper I am unlikely to be able to move any part of my body, a stage of so-called 'sleep paralysis'. I even attempted to hold my head with my hands and move it around to no avail, something I couldn't normally do in a lucid dream. My head was simply anchored to the floor like a rock sitting there.

After a short period experimenting to see if I could do anything about it, I decided to return to the dream and had another longish dream after that, both of which were more 'present' than a normal dream but not lucid. When I awoke I had been sleeping for about 4 hours.

Two tell-tale signs that some sort of lucidity was coming; I was able to switch back and forth between my conscious thoughts and hypnogogic imagery at will, re-entering either at the point I left off several times, and hearing conversations in the background during the hypnogogic state.

The talking sounds like muffled voices in the next room, or the background hum of a cocktail party with odd phrases discernable here and there. When I focus in on it the speech can become quite coherent although tonight it was in French. I only know very little French so I should say "had the structure of French", but as I concentrated on it the voice transitioned to German. I can sometimes pick up at least the gist of what's being talked about in German, but as I caught the switch I went into the dream.

It's a little difficult to place this one on the lucidity scale; as a lucid dream it would be around 25%, but as a dream within a dream it's around 5%. Taking dream control of a lucid dream, or becoming lucid within a dream? Hard to say due to the extent to which the normal dream continued through the lucidity.

EDIT: The nice thing about blogging is that you can bash out your thoughts as they happen and have them there to reflect upon until a better way of expressing them occurs. Here's a little clarification (or maybe reambiguation...) of what this post is about.

It is quite common, almost the 'usual' way of having a lucid dream to be dreaming normally, become aware you are dreaming, and thus take conscious control of the dream - become lucid.

What I am trying to describe here however is dreaming about having a lucid dream, so the consciousness that occurs is within the normal dream, not strictly the 'waking consciousness' that is dream lucidity. By analogy, you might dream about being drunk and so within the dream you are drunk, but this is not quite the same as being drunk in waking reality.

Sick Boy

I know several people now who've stopped smoking cold-turkey since I started this blog. "The new baby's coming.". "I was smoking my self broke.". They make me sick! What weak excuses!

They leave me thinking of one of the great anti-heros of cinema in the last 15 years, Renton, the smackhead - thief - scam-artist from Trainspotting (I guess it helps to have your character portrayed by Ewen MGregor), and his... "known associate"... called Sick Boy.

"...Take Sick Boy, for instance, he came off junk at the same time as me, not because he wanted too, you understand, but just to annoy me, just to show me how easily he could do it...".

This is easier than 'coming off junk'.

"Relinquishing junk. Stage One: preparation. For this you will need: one room which you will not leave; one mattress; tomato soup, ten tins of; mushroom soup, eight tins of, for consumption cold; ice cream, vanilla, one large tub of; Magnesia, Milk of, one bottle; paracetamol; mouth wash; vitamins; mineral water; Lucozade; pornography; one bucket for urine, one for feces, and one for vomitus; one television; and one bottle of Valium, which I have already procured, from my mother, who is, in her own domestic and socially acceptable way, also a drug addict.".

And me with my lovely freshmint chewing-gum and my tasty menthol inhaler.

"This was to be my final hit. But let's be clear about this: there's final hits and final hits. What kind was this to be? Some final hits are actually terminal one way or another, while others are merely transit points as you travel from station to station on the junky journey through junky life.".

==~

Lucid Dreams: Pre-Lucidity

I've mentioned the pre-lucid stage a few times and it probably sounds a little oxymoronic. Surely you're either conscious you're dreaming or you're not, right? The simple answer to this is that consciousness is about thresholds and in-betweens, not black-and white, digital, 'you are or you aren't'.

With the pre-lucid stage that doesn't progress to full lucidity, you might awaken and think "I suspected I was dreaming but wasn't sure", or "I seemed to have control over something there but I thought it was just part of my day, didn't imagine I was dreaming".

There are tests you can do when you suspect you are dreaming but aren't sure, with the caveat that they can be a double-edged sword. The classic one from the literature is 'the light-bulb test'. The idea is that to test if you're dreaming, try turning on a light. In a dream it won't work and so you'll know you're dreaming and gain full lucid control.

My problem with this is that I never had a problem with lights in dreams until I read about this test! Since then, whenever I try to turn a light on in a dream the light-bulb blows and I'm left in darkness. In the pre-lucid state, I can try several lights with the same result and just think "Oh damn, the lights keep blowing" and not realise I'm dreaming. I've frequently (ie. once a year or two) had the experience of having 3-4 light-bulbs blow when I try to switch them on within a 24 hour period while really awake. Highly coincidental but probably due to a glitch in the power-supply or that they were previously replaced at the same time and have approximately the same use and life-expectancy. This means however that it's not unusual to me for a light to fail and therefore not evidence one way or another that I'm dreaming.

I've since learned how to control the 'failing lights' phenomena in full lucid dreams, but it can take a lot of concentration and often isn't worth the trouble. It's usually easiest just to get on with the dream and let the light return in it's own natural course.

The most reliable pre-lucid test for me is the ability to defy the laws of physics. If I can jump and remain suspended in the air for an unnatural length of time, or take extra long strides where I can take a couple of steps in the air before touching the ground again I can confirm that I'm dreaming and become fully lucid.

I've woken a couple of times in the the last few days and realised I was pre-lucid without becoming fully lucid. I'll rate those experiences at about 3% on our lucidity scale.

Sucking Stale Minties

The inhaler works quite well. If I'd known before I bought it that it's flavoured with menthol, it might have put me off - the point was to avoid interfering with the natural beery goodness of beer flavoured beer.

Fortunately the menthol is very subtle, almost unnoticeable. The main problem is that you have to suck quite hard on it, it would be much more pleasant to use if you could draw on it... like a cigarette. It does at least have that 'something to hold in your lips' oral gratification besides delivering a decent drug hit, once you find a satisfactory way to suck at it.

Lucid Dreams: Recording Cycles

I started a natural lucid dream cycle this week, that is, one that wasn't precipitated by anything different happening in my life (2mg gum was after), one that's just going to happen because that's what they do. So I want to start recording things like their frequency and intensity and so on.

Let's devise a scale on which 0% is a normal, non-lucid dream and 100% is the most complete lucid experience I can concieve.

We'll make a record of the induction. There's a few ways this can happen. And the Good Vibrations, there are different types and intensities, some just in the ear, some the head, some throughout the whole body.

Monday night went like this. Go to bed. Start thinking about the things you think about when you go to bed. Not getting to sleep. Turn over. Repeat.

The cat starts annoying me. I haven't recognised it yet, but this is the pre-lucid stage. When he really sleeps on the bed, he comes in quietly and nestles down around my legs. He has other ways to draw my attention to the fact that the cat-food fairy has waved her wand and magically emptied his food bowl. When I've slipped into dreamscape but still think I'm awake and trying to get to sleep, I sometimes dream that he's pawing at my head, or sitting on it (often a sign of sheet-suffocation).

This time was slightly new in that he'd actually sunk his teeth into my index finger. He doesn't do that, so I have recognition that I've slipped into sleep. The Good Vibrations start. Short, jolting pulses. 1 -2 - 3 - rest. 1 - 2 - 3 - rest. Each pulse about a second long. A second or two of low buzz rest, then more pulses. My body awakens to the point where I regain control of it, and I roll onto my back. The duration of each pulse lengthens until they merge and become a continuous wave of oscillating low to medium intensity vibration throughout my whole body.

There's a short sensation of levitation. When the vibration reaches my legs, they lose the feeling of mass and begin to float. Until I was a teenager, I would experience the sensation of full body levitation for prolonged periods, or often wake up to the feeling of my body falling with a crash back to the mattress. Probably the psychological model and the physical body disconnecting and reconnecting as it does in normal sleep and dreaming. Normally, we're not consciously aware of it happening.

I'm re-entering sleep, with psychological consciousness. Beyond the buzz of the vibrations, I can hear noises, voices chattering. Possibly auditory halucinations from my own dreaming mind, possibly penetrating from the outside world. As a shift worker I go to bed when the world is waking up, I sometimes hear my neighbour in his garden talking to his clients on the phone as I go to sleep. I am in the hypnagogic state, in the between of the waking world and the dream world.

After a few minutes of this the vibrations have subsided and I am lying in my bed wide awake. Except I'm not. I'm in a full lucid dream. Someone I knew well in the past comes into my room, sits on the bed, and we begin to talk. I make no attempt to excercise control over the dream because I want to talk to this person, hear what they have to say. I chose to control only a few small aspects of this dream because I was interested to explore the scenario my non-conscious had brought up. I could have changed much more, but this time not the whole dream as I sometimes can. There is a sense of 'anchoring' to a scenario, the strength of which determines how much can change. Let's describe this dream as having a weak to medium strength anchor.

We go into one of those dream-rooms which has always been part of my house but in reality doesn't exist or belongs to someone else's house. There are people I've never seen before sitting in there, but I understand who they are intended to represent. One of them shows me written on paper, and tells me "Your time is 3-16-25.". This is interesting - I expect I shall talk about dream interpretation another time - I don't think it's a date (16th March 2025) because I wouldn't use American date format. There was no foreboding about it, just a matter of fact statement.

Another tells me "Evan has his own room in the garden". I don't personally know anyone called Evan, but I have an idea about the origin of the use of this name. I break from the flow of the dream (ie. take lucid control) and go to my garden to see what's there. There's an animal hutch in the corner that doesn't really exist. Evan is a tiger kitten snoozing in it. I greet him "Hello Evan", but sleeping cats don't like being disturbed! He lifts his head, turns to me and snarls, then closes his eyes again.

I wake up. The more strongly anchored a dream is, the more likely I will either wake up or be snapped back into the scenario if I take control of it's natural flow. Sometimes it is very difficult to wake up from a lucid dream even if I want to, becoming trapped in the dream or having many 'false awakenings'. It's been about 3 hours since I first went to bed. I soon fall asleep again and have some normal non-lucid dreams which fade from memory soon after waking.

I'll start the scoring by putting this down as a 50% lucid dream on the above scale. The weather changed, it's noticably hotter this week. I want to keep note of that to see if a pattern of correlation develops between change in atmospheric pressure and the air pressure in my eustachian tubes (the audiologist suggestion) acting as some sort of organic barometer.

I'll need to define some terms more carefully - 'scenario anchor' etc - and work on the scales of measurement for lucidity, types and strengths of vibration and so on... work in progress...

Where's Me Bloody Drugs Yer Bastard?

Well... it wasn't quite that bad.

The inferrence of having said last time that I've routed the habit of smoking from the working week is that I don't have that 'pure indulgent pleasure' of a cigarette with morning coffee. I don't remember when I last did and in retrospect I'm suprised at how easily it slipped away. Being English by birth I was, naturally, weened onto black leaf tea. Perhaps the caffeine hit is more powerful? Been addicted since the age of 4... let's not even start on that one!

I bought a box of 2mg gum and a nicotine inhaler on the way to work today. The inhaler is so I can get a hit (and I mean a wallop that slow release patches don't provide) of nicotine without smoke and without the unspeakable evil of minty beer should I happen to have a drink this weekend. The gum I started on right away, 14 pieces today. I'm not so concerned about that, it will naturally reduce like it did with the 4mg.

After lunch I started noticing some strange (in the sense of unusual) thought patterns occuring. Thinking about conflict situations. Some that are years in the past. Taking an aggressive tone toward them in my internal dialogue. Why am I thinking about these dead issues in this way now?

Spit out gum. Start new piece of gum. Wait a minute! Start new piece of 2mg gum.

The addiction had cottoned on to the fact it wasn't getting it's full dose and was kicking back. This is a manifestation of the irritability of withdrawl mentioned in the previous post.

I've often seen mentioned that other stresses and anxieties in life should be addressed before removing the crutch of addiction and this illustrates why. Although I imagine that for some types of people the additional stresses could actually help fighting the addiction - "Yeah! Bring it all on!" - this would require a very different strategical approach. I've managed to remove those unnecessary stresses from life that were present a few years ago. These thought patterns rise endogenously. Give me drugs or I make you think about THIS! But life is comfortable. As soon as I recognise it I can laugh it off.

The Natural Mind

Something I read about years ago that I must dig out sometime and re-read (how often I find myself saying that!) was to do with the way drug habits stabilise. Pretty much any drug; smokers are junkies as much as the smackhead or the prescription valium addict ("She goes running for the Shelter \ of her Mother's little helper...").

I'm sure it was in a book called "The Natural Mind" by Dr Andrew Weil. I've not read any of Dr Weil's later books, judging by their covers and his public appearances he cashed-in on the New-Age epidemic in the 80's. But I haven't read them so I can't be sure.

"The Natural Mind" was written in the early 70's (append 'iirc' to all statements made in this post) when as a young post-graduate student he faced opposition to the 'scientific investigation' of altering consciousness, both chemically and naturally. It is a well-balanced treatise on the whys and wherefores , the benefits and the pitfalls, and I would suggest one of the essential pre-requisit readings for anyone wishing to embark on a journey into their own internal states by whatever means.

Drug addiction goes something like this. You start taking a drug. It either mimics a chemical the body produces naturally so the body stops producing that chemical itself (why bother when there's a ready external source available) and / or the body starts producing more 'pleasure receptors' for the drug. Either way, the dosage needs to increase to satisfy the deficit and to accomodate the new receptors until a saturation point is reached. At that level the addiction stabilises... a pack a day, two caps of Hammer, a bottle of scotch, everything is happy.

Coming off a drug, the opposite happens; you reduce the dose, and until the body re-learns how to produce that chemical again, until the extra receptors die off, the body craves with a persistent, gnawing, longing to be dosed up again. The irritability. The sweaty sleeplessness. The purging from all orifices. The DT's. The pain of withdrawl.

I've succeeded in eliminating the habit of smoking from the working week. When I began, this took up to 20 pieces of nicotine gum a day. That has now reduced to 6. Weekends are a combination of cigarettes and gum - beer that is anything but beer flavoured is simply evil. One packet for the weekend, I'll cop to two if you like. It's been that way for 6-8 weeks now (an important part of the game is not to count time too accurately), so the addiction is currently re-stabilised at a lower level.

'Lighter' cigarettes don't work (for me), I just pull out the filter and smoke more of them. Soon it will be time to see if lighter gum (2mg instead of 4mg) does. It's difficult to know how much less (if at all) nicotine I'm ingesting since where you get 4mg of nicotine from 4mg gum, you absorb far less than 16mg from a 16mg cigarette. Interrupting the habituation has gone well. Soon we shall see what impact we've had on the addiction.

New Socks, Please!

Now where were we? I've not had much time for writing about nicotine/dreaming the past couple of weeks while I've been preparing for the imminent test of my other favourite addiction.

Until this week, I've maintained a pack-a-week habit and been (often more than) content to chew gum in the meantime. This week, at the end of a month of working extra-long (12 hour) shifts I find my resilience a little weakened, and enjoyed a few more cigarettes. "Aaargghhh! the whole world tastes like 'freshmint'! Bugger that for a joke!". There are 9 left in this packet, and though I can't quite remember when I bought it, we'll call it two packs this week.

This is a crux situation where 'quitting' fails. If I was quitting cigarettes, this week I've blown it and would say "ah well, that didn't work, back to smoking full time. Obviously the gum doesn't work.".

But I Ain't No Quitter! I'm a smoker now, and always will be. If I smoke a couple of packets in a week, that's because I'm a smoker! But next week, when mind and body are rested and rejuvenated, the gum and it's perpetual-bloody-minty taste won't seem so bad again.

The mint kick satisfies something for me that 'original flavour' and 'fruity' can't touch. Reminds me of an old advert when I was a lad... "Extra Strong Mints, they'll blow your socks off!".

Lucid Dreams: Consciousness

I am awake, I am conscious. I am asleep, I am unconscious.

But that it were so simple. Consciousness is analogue, not digital. Consciousness is a threshold.

Awake, your threshold to consciously process external stimulus is lower, asleep it is higher. But there is always some consciousness for everyone when they sleep. If this is not true, we should form a class-action to sue all alarm-clock manufacturing companies for false advertising.

So what happens when a lucid dream dawns? First the threshold of consiousness lowers. Psychologically you become more aware of both your internal and external state. Physiologically you remain in the same sleep state (well... not quite, we'll look at that another time).

So there is consciousness; that is you, now, sitting there reading your computer screen. A 'normal' dream happens to you, you are the 'I' character within it, and you remember it on waking as a dream. In a lucid dream, you have the same mental faculties as you do now.

But that is not the same as the threshold of control. In the pre-lucid state, you believe you are awake. You rise from bed, go about your morning ablutions, eat breakfast, catch the train to work, then suddenly realise... this is a dream! And find yourself back in bed. This is a 'false awakening', and it can repeat, over and over again, the Groundhog Day torment.

When the full lucid state occurs, the consciousness comes with a threshold of control. You are asleep. You know It. You are dreaming. You know it. Will you have total control over the dreamscape? Sometimes, yes. But it depends (I believe) on what your subconscious is trying to tell you.

I don't like the term 'subconscious', it connotes 'lesser'. I think the non-conscious part of mind (the complement to the conscious part) is both larger and more powerful than the conscious part. Non-conscious is the 'thought', the now, directed by the 'thinker' the part that will determine what we will do next. The conscious is the 'observer', which can program the thinker, and to which the nonconscious will subordinate itself; but how often do we invoke this observer, which will manage the direction of the proactive thinker to produce the reactive thought?

Security Blanket

I somehow managed to 'forget' to buy cigarettes yesterday. I stopped off on the way to work to pay some bills and pick up a couple of things and thought "I'll do the other things first and buy smokes last", then on the way out I thought "I won't need a ciggie at work, so I'll stop off at the servo on the way home and get some". I needed a loaf of bread on the way home and started thinking "Do I really want to pay $4 for bread at the servo?" and I had no cash on me so I came to the conclusion I didn't want to use a card to buy bread and a packet of cigarettes. By the time I'd finished thinking all that, I found I'd walked right past the servo anyway.

(Disambiguation: I work night-shift so I usually sleep during the day. I talk about "last night at work", but to both save and add to the confusion when I talk about dreaming I refer to sleeping 'last night' although it was actually daytime. It's the night to me... my clock is shifted 12 hours to accomodate the 6pm start time for work).

It was interesting to notice the effect of not having the 'security blanket' of cigarettes in my possession, whether I intended to smoke them or not. Right from the time I arrived at work I thought about smoking more, and had the impulse to reach for a cigarette more often. I didn't want the nicotine of course, I pined for the taste of smoke. I didn't chew more gum, my daily use of it is slowly declining quite naturally and of it's own accord, but this morning waking up with no cigarettes in the house I find I've been through four or five pieces already.

The last couple of nights I've been dreaming more again (although not lucidly). I've been trying to fall asleep lying on my back without success, there always seems to be some little itch to scratch which requires me to break the relaxation of a limb, so after half an hour or so I roll over and my mind goes to sleep quite quickly. This morning however I woke up lying on my back, so the suggestive power of thinking and blogging about sleep seems to have had the effect of my sleeping brain choosing this position during the night.

I wonder if I'll decide to buy cigarettes today? I've been tampering with my habit for about 3 weeks now, but I'm trying to avoid marking the time. I'd rather use 'health and wellbeing' as a measure of success than chronology as this is an easier game to win - a single cigarette resets the clock and denotes a loss, when the game must be abandoned and started all over again.

MMMmmm! Minty Beer!

Oh right, yes this is a blog about nicotine addiction and we got side-tracked, and will again ;)

My brain is loving the nicotine hit I get from the gum, I didn't have a cigarette the whole time I was at work. There was one with the coffee this morning, and I'm having a couple of relaxing ales now I'm back home. When I want my beer to taste like mint, I'll quite happily shoot myself, OK?

But it is promising. A couple of times tonight I was chewing away and wanted to reach for a ciggie. There's a sort of subconscious impulse to put hand to mouth and take a drag, and when it happened I chomped a new piece of gum... Oh yeah baby! You know the way I like it!

There's just one left in this packet now, so it probably won't quite make the week. I considered telling myself "Don't buy a pack tomorrow. If you can hold out till Wednesday you've won!", but this sets up a game I'm destined to lose, so I'll ignore that little voice. The "make one pack last two weeks" game can wait for another day. I'm almost 3 weeks into this exercise, and 'the impulse' is suprisingly rare.

Observation: habits are not broken; they dissolve.

Lucid Dreams: Triggers

Here are some things that are likely to induce me into a lucid dream state.

Sleeping on my back (the 'supine' position). This is just about guaranteed to start a lucid dream, but I find it very difficult to fall asleep in this position. My physical body will quickly relax, my legs especially will become heavy, 'paralysed', but my mind will stay wide awake and after twenty minutes or so I will get restless and need to roll onto my side. Although there is a dissociation from my body, I can almost instantly reconnect and move it.

Being too hot. If my body gets too hot during sleep, this external stimulus will often transfer to the dreamscape (ie. dreams of being in the desert) and induce consciousness.

Suffocation. This can be really annoying. The bed sheets cover my face so my mind wakes up to deal with it but my body doesn't. I move the sheets from my head, or turn over, try to inhale only to find it's only the psychological model of my body that's moved and the physical body is still in the same position. Exhaling, I can feel the sheets lift off my face, only to have them sucked back again when I next inhale. Sometimes it can be difficult to wake from a lucid dream, and even when you think you have it can be a 'false awakening' which I'll discuss elsewhere.

My lucid dreams will naturally occur in cycles over a few weeks, although I've never bothered to measure the period between peak intensities or kept a 'dream-diary' which perhaps I should consider doing. I have read that keeping a diary increases the frequency and recall of lucid dreams (they 'fade' from memory in the same way normal dreams do), and a priori it seems reasonable to assume this would be the case; when I think about lucid dreams during waking hours they are more likely to occur.

Sometimes I know during the day I will be lucid hours before I go to sleep. As the peak of the cycle approaches I get an odd subtle sensation. Maybe I'll be at work, and I'll feel like I'm 'wearing my pyjamas'. It's a very low level of the 'good vibrations', too quiet to intrude, the 'hollowness' of the yawn is constantly there. I retain full and normal control of my faculties, but some part of my mind is - only very slightly - 'away with the fairies'. I am not epileptic, but from descriptions I've read it could be similar to an extremely mild petite mal fit which can last for hours.

The healthier I am the more likely a lucid dream is to occur, such as eating well for a while ('well' as in quality rather than quantity) - not always so easy with my lack of culinary skills! Alcohol and other 'certain substances' can initially induce more lucid dreams, but continued use will tend to supress them, and indeed prolonged use can supress nearly all dreaming. I say nearly all, because they can't be stopped altogether. During periods of my life when I've been relatively unhealthy or under high stress lucid dreams have a darker ambience and are more difficult to control although there is full consciousness.

Note to self: need to talk about the aspects of a lucid dream - consciousness, control, light content, when other 'presences' are likely to autogenically appear, when they can be summoned, being trapped in a room or scene, being able to completely change the scene, ... that sort of stuff - and the differences between a 'normal' dream and a 'lucid' one - I seem to contradict myself a bit when I try to do that, so I need to find a way of stating it a little more clearly. It is believed (by some men in white lab coats) that most people have a lucid dream at some point in their life, and certainly that everyone experiences the pre-lucid stage though not with great frequency - maybe once or twice in a lifetime. If you ever have a lucid dream, you will know it and recognise the difference from a normal dream.

Lucid Dreams: Good Vibrations

What I'm about to describe may or may not be directly related to lucid dreaming. Often the two are co-incident, but either can also occur without the other. It may simply be an unrelated phisiological phenomena that triggers consciousness when I'm asleep or in the hypnogogic stage.

So... have a big yawn. Go on, do it now. Notice the buzzing, hollow, reverberating sensation in your ears.

Imagine there's a little feather tickling you deep in your inner ear.

Now stick your tounge on the terminals of a 9-volt battery, and add that to the sensation in your ears.

We're approximately getting there. It's not forced like the yawn, it's a self powered vibration that starts out gently, always in my right ear. I took the opportunity to ask an audiologist about it once, he suggested it might be something to do with air being trapped in the eustachian tube. Maybe but...

Turn up the power. It comes in waves, becomes too much vibration for one ear, and spreads through my whole head. It can become so powerful that eventually my entire body is being vibrated until it (or at least the psychological model of it...) is catapulted from the bed and into a lucid dream.

It's an extremely pleasant experience, although sometimes the timing is out and I get jolts and shudders as the waves of vibration overlap. When I was young it was at first scarey and I fought it, but the sensation became stronger until I could not. Now I have some control over the vibrations, I can will them to become stronger and I can, sometimes, subdue them.

This is one part of the pre-lucid state, and other things associated with sleep paralysis can occur here; 'The Hag', the 'presence' in the room, if the vibrations are not so powerful, the presence might grab my ankles and drag me off the bed. I stopped fighting that too, once I knew it was a dream. If you let him drag you right off the bed, you end up... back in bed! Sometimes he tries again, sometimes he gives up.

Somewhere I'll talk about the physiological body, it's physical tactile nerves, and the psychological model your mind creates of these nerve positions and the information they send. I want to find some video clips of 'alien abductees' talking about the way they are restrained. And about the 'drilling in the ear'.

Lucid Dreams: Prologue

This is a subject I've always wanted to write about, but I've never been able to decide what I want to write. So a blog is the ideal place to do it.

I'm going to spam out some thoughts as they occur, then maybe later I'll do a 'link post' so they can be followed through in some more coherent order.

Before I begin, I'll just note one thing about my lucid dreaming that appears to be slightly atypical. Many studies I've seen indicate that most people who experience lucid dreams do so in the early morning, after a restful nights' sleep either just before waking or having woken briefly and returned to sleep. My lucid dreams invariably occur within the first two hours of sleep, sometimes directly from the waking state. Sometimes they continue through most of the night, sometimes I return to normal sleep, and sometimes I'm so refreshed from the lucid dream I remain awake all night only to be tired again five or six hours later.

Try Different Brands

This is probably just a good bit of blind luck for me. The first box of gum I bought was "QuitX" brand. Same amount of nicotine as the better known brand, but a bit cheaper - I'm buying nicotine not gum. Yesterday the local pharmacy only had "Nicorette", so I got a box of that to make sure I had plenty of supplies to take to work.

Now don't get me wrong, if I were a chewing gum afficianado Nicorette is probably better quality gum. It's firmer, and the flavour lasts longer. But I'm really not into chewing gum, I just want my drug hit. I find the softer, slightly larger pieces of QuitX more satisfying. I can play with it better on my tounge and with my teeth. It seems to gratify the 'oral fixation' part of the smoking habit in a way Nicorette doesn't.

I expect other people find different brands better for other reasons, just like brand loyalty with their cigarettes, but if I had happened to try the 'big name' brand first, I don't think this experiment would have lasted the first day. I've tried nicotine lozenges in the past too, sucking mints just didn't do it for me.

So, if you're going to change your smoking habit, my suggestion is by a box of each brand. The texture that suits you is more important than the flavour.

I've been smoking 1 cigarette each day at work, and I enjoy it guilt-free. I'm still a smoker. I now have a packet with 3 cigarettes in it. If just 1 comes home with me tomorrow, it will have lasted a full week.

The next game is to see if I can make a pack last 2 weeks...

Ruminations on Change

Some changes I've noticed already.

My appetite has improved. Nicotine is an appetite suppressant and I'm probably getting more from the gum than I did from cigarettes, so I suspect this is a secondary effect of chewing. Chewing produces saliva, saliva improves digestion, etc...

I imagine I look like I'm chewing my cud all day and I'm pondering things while I do it... I guess that's why they're both called ruminating, the one compliments the other. I have found that when I'm playing at my other favourite addiction the chewing can be a distraction and I spit the gum out, although the nicotine is an aid to concentration. I wonder if this qualifies as 'drug cheating'?

Then there's the dreams... I've always been a natural lucid dreamer, one of my earliest childhood memories is of having an 'out-of-body experience' (I'll discuss what I think this really is elsewhere). Since the change of habit I've had either pre-lucid or full lucid dreams nearly every time I've slept. What's going on there I'll save for posts when I've got nothing better to prattle on about, this is as good a place as any for some off-topic discussion.

My chest is not so tight, and already I can draw a full breath without feeling pain or congestion. I like that.

Psychological Warfare

The morning cigarette with a good strong cup of freshly brewed coffee... this is smoking for the pure indulgent pleasure of it. Arriving at work and sitting down for a few minutes to chat with the guys and have a quick puff before clocking in... this is habit. Reaching for a ciggie after taking a draught of cool refreshing beer... somewhere in-between.

I keep the chewing gum together with a packet of cigarettes. I'm a smoker, I can have a cigarette any time I choose. When the urge strikes, I reach for them both. At the moment, the gum is winning. I've smoked less than a pack and a half in the last week and a half, some improvement on a pack a day.

I make some rules about what I can and can't do, what I must do. Rules for a day, just to try them out and see how they go. I'm a smoker, so I can't 'fail' if I break them. "Today I must smoke 5 cigarettes"... "I must have a smoke when I don't feel like one". A big stumbling-block for quitters is when they're really good and fight the craving for weeks, then in a moment of weakness they have a few cigarettes and believing they've failed give up and go back to their old habits. I'm a smoker. Always will be. So this cannot happen.

Now I can thoroughly enjoy every cigarette I smoke. The way it feels in my fingers, on my lips. The ritual of lighting it. The sensation of drawing on it. The taste, the smell, being surrounded by the plume.

I continue chewing the gum long after it has yielded all of it's nicotine, it's a substitute for the oral gratification a cigarette provides. My jaw ached after the first couple of days, but I think that strengthened the muscles and I don't notice it now.

If I had known before that you get such a good nicotine hit from a piece of gum, I might have started using it years ago. Replacing the 'habit' smokes with gum has turned out to be remarkably easy (at this early stage). In fact, so good is the hit, that when I do smoke one of my strong cigarettes now, it tastes like a much lighter one and I'm left wondering where the kick is. The gum provides a lot more nicotine than a cigarette does, so possibly my tolerance has increased. I read something about how addictions form and stabilise at a certain level somewhere once, I'll have to look it up again.

Addiction and Habituation

I smoke virginia tobacco. Good and strong, full flavour. Marvelous stuff. They stopped printing the nicotine and tar contents on cigarette packets because 'lighter' cigarettes are not 'less bad' for you. "If you're going to do something, do it properly", this is a motto to live by.

Smoldering plant matter is carcinogenic. Nicotine is in some ways quite good for you. It has been linked to birth deformaties when used in pregnancy, and get some on your skin and it can kill you outright. But you can drown in an inch of water too if you try.

Smoking is part habit and part chemical addiction. In the last week and a half I've been addressing the habit side of it, with the idea of tackling the addiction later. Habits are behavioural patterns, one approach to changing them is to interrupt the pattern - when you notice you're doing something from habit, you force yourself to do something else until the pattern is broken. The theory says it takes at least 21 days to make or break a habit.

In the past, if I've planned to stop smoking, the addiction has fought back. So this time I'm not quitting. I was out getting a new power-supply for my computer, and as I passed the chemist I went in on the spur of the moment and got some 4mg nicotine chewing-gum.

I Ain't No Quitter

Last Wednesday, I changed my smoking habit.

I enjoy smoking. Quitting is not an option. The gifts of Mother Nature are here to be appreciated while we have mortal coil to do so.

But...

This is a blog about the 'but'.