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...