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Alfonzo

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  1. My brother walked into the kichen this morning to announce his first ever lucid dream. He didn't go into much detail about the content, but it did get me wondering whether or not this sort of dreaming is even desirable. It's fast becoming a topic that I find very, very interesting...

    Why would I want to control what's happening in a dream? If the purpose is to find yourself in an environment in which you are suddenly capable of manipulating anything and everything around you, how different is that to simply imagining it as you're awake? Is it because you don't have to constantly apply your mind to the task of creating this world, and merely point at where to go? Or is it simply because, now that you're not just stuck doing nothing for 6 to 8 hours, you might as well make the most of the occasion? It seems much more "profitable" to play out the experience in complete ignorance, reacting genuinely to every event as though it were actually happening.

    Much of my dilemma stems from the fact that there are barely any events that occur within my dreams that might be considered normal. My most recent outing to the land of Nod, for instance, saw me delivering bowls of milky wine to a residency overgrown with vines in which a former classmate was crying pitifully into a waterbed. After fixing a pair of tricycles together he turned into David Frost, and we subsequently transported ourselves to an urban intersection filled with sliding vending machines, polite hoodies, and parliamentary offices. When a gloomy day breaks over the horizon, the intersection we are in is revealed to be the divide between a glass and concrete structure of architectural wonder, situated plainly in the midst of Greenland. And then I eat some pastry.
    ...Now, I think I have a rather decent imagination, but I recognise that, when I'm awake, the sorts of scenarios and environments that I usually think up of are too contrived and represented to best the ones that occur overnight. If I were granted control over what was happening, the whole experience would dumb down rather quickly, and I'd end up imagining myself in places much less interesting than the false hub of Greenland architecture, Centauri Mons, a door factory in Windsor, or the first class section of an 18th century train travelling through a salt flat in a giant cargo hold. The unstable nature of everything would be lost. No chaos!

    This is all granted that I'm not already dreaming lucidly in any case, because I'm completely unsure as to whether or not I'm

    1. Aware and in control,
    2. Aware and simply more entertained by the idea of letting the dream play out, or
    3. Completely oblivious.
    How could I consider the dream that I had last night to be real when all that is happening is too bizarre to overlook? It seems to lend toward either of the first possibilities quite well, yet I remain uncertain.
    I suspect that I am missing the point entirely. Clearly there is something of a difference between being able to imagine any scenario and finding yourself consciously in that same scenario as part of a dream... but having observed the sheer obsession that other people seem to have with the concept I find it hard to shake off the feeling that much of this is going over my head.

    I shall strive to obtain lucidity -- despite the small probability that I already have -- in order to see what all the fuss is about. It's an interesting affair.

    1. Show previous comments  3 more
    2. DuckReconMajor

      DuckReconMajor

      I'm seeing this thread right after finding the lucid dreaming subreddit. I'm going to try some of the stuff in here, mainly getting into the habit of counting my fingers.

      Also as to the mask question some dudes are kickstarting a lucid dreaming mask, which they say will go on sale later this summer for about $90 (71 EUR).

      As for myself, I've told this one before but I can only remember one instance that I knew I was in a dream. I was a lego man walking downtown in a lego city with another lego man. I realized I was dreaming, unfortunately I spent the rest of the dream trying to convince the other guy it was just a dream.

    3. Krispy

      Krispy

      The point is that even if you're aware that you're dreaming, it's still incredibly realistic, much more so than simply imagining being god-like.

      Here's my method to realize you're dreaming:
      Look around and decide if whatever crap is going on is possible. If not, you're dreaming. Simple, I know, but it works for me.

    4. Creaphis

      Creaphis

      I'm lucky when I can remember even the most basic facts of a dream when I wake up, nevermind later on in the day. I can tell you that last night I was in a posh cabin, like a beachside summer home, in the middle of a limitless frozen wasteland. I was not alone in the cabin, the sun was high in the sky and the mood was genial, despite the unmistakable fact that we were virtually alone in the universe. While everyone else was chatting comfortably over coffee in the dining area, I'd gone off on my own to the sunroom to admire the bleak hopelessness of our existence. I was surprised to see, through the large, tastefully-set windows in the rustic wooden wall, a remarkable machine, like a cross between a tractor and an excavator, painted in a bright, glorious red. Its small tires were next to useless in the deep snow, yet it inched along until it managed to reach an inert, boxy object, painted much like itself and nearly as large. Showing remarkable agility and traction the vehicle drove straight up and over the box, and its back wheels hitched cleanly and instantly into it, when I suddenly realized it was an attachable pair of tank treads, well adapted for traversing snow. The tractor immediately took off, accelerating to astonishing speed. Its mysterious driver, buoyed by his newfound mobility, lost control and began a terrifying sideways tumble, leaving massive gashes in the frozen earth and shattering into pieces, the biggest of which finally came to rest beside a long, ridged snowbank. I ran to the next room, and my minute body announced the situation in a high-pitched voice. My parents looked back with a mix of concern and calculated scepticism. But, I can only remember that much thanks to conscious meditation upon the dream's plotline, which has hopelessly obscured any details that might have made it interesting.

      Lucid dreaming isn't for me. It concerns me that the people who seem most interested in the concept are also people who browse sites like 4chan and Reddit. Isn't the internet already distant enough from reality? Is it safe to retreat even further, and nestle one's mind within the solitary unconscious? Before you travel down this dark path, watch Waking Life and Paprika and maybe you'll be able to get the whole idea out of your system.

    5. Show next comments  3 more
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