Light Level During Lucid Dreams

I’ve noticed that in all of my lucid dreams, the dream scenes I find myself in are usually dark.  Dimly light rooms, outside at night. that sort of thing.

My non-lucid “regular” dreams are more brightly lit.  If you’re familiar with Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), I think it may be a submodality or reality strategy thing.  I’m not certain  yet.

Another quirk of most (not all) my lucid dreams is that other characters seem to disappear or just become irrelavent.  For example, in my Deep Trance Identification dream, as soon as I became lucid, the other people in the pub seemed to not matter anymore.  Their voices faded into the background. In the majority of my lucid dreams, though, people just disappear completely. Or I’ll find myself in environments where people just aren’t there to begin with.

I’m curious.  What sorts of patterns have YOU noticed across your lucid dreams that differ from your regular dreams?

A New Kind of Reality Check With Lucid Dreaming

In my most recent lucid dream, I “stumbled” on a new kind of reality check which seemed to work well for me.  I really suck at the whole “look at a watch” or “read a sign”.  That’s mainly because in my dreams, text and numbers don’t chance unless I will them to change.

This “new”  technique basically involves foregoing trying to condition yourself to look for passive clues about the possibility that you’re dreaming.  Instead, the technique involves just trying to control the environment directly.  If it works, I’m dreaming.  If not, at worst I look like a crazy idiot standing there straining myself trying to mentally lift  cars or buildings 🙂  I’ll describe what I mean by way of a dream of mine.

My most recent lucid dream was on January 21.  I’ve been pondering that experience since my last lucid dream prior to that was four and a half years before that.

“I was awake early that morning waiting for someone to come pick me up so we could go to work. We were delivering stuff for Sears Home Delivery at that time.  I had awoken, gotten ready for work, and sat on the couch, waiting for my coworker to get there. I knew I had about 30-45 minutes left to wait based on the time.  So I lied down on the couch waiting. I decided to have a quick nap.  Eyes shut.  Breathing Normal.

Well, I’m still laying on the couch, and I open my eyes and get up, and start walking around.  I walk back into the bedroom.  My wife is laying in bed, asleep.  I have an uneasy feeling this entire time.  I suddenly begin to wonder, while standing in the dark bedroom, if I’m possibly dreaming.  As soon as I have that thought, I start to get excited.  But, my sense of self-control kicks in.  As usual, I can feel that tiny subtle voice in the back of my head automatically keeping me calm.

I suddenly decide that if I am indeed dreaming, I should be able to control the dream environment (since that would mean I have the awareness that is a requirement for lucidity).

I look down and see an unsharpened #2 pencil on the floor.  I hold out my hand, like when Sylar levitated all the pieces of broken glass after Peter turned invisible. I then begin willing the pencil to lift.  After what seemed like a good 2-3 second long eternity of mental strain, the pencil jumps up into my hand. I’m Dreaming!

I then spend the next few minutes walking around.  Just perfecting and playing around with my new found dream-telekinesis.

Then, I eventually find may way back to the living room.

I’m standing in front of the couch, and decide that this is the perfect change to give lucid dream sex another effort.

I look at the empty couch and decide to conjur up a beautiful woman to have sex with.  Since my mental list of women to have sex with in my lucid dreamscape is long and extensive, I decide to trust my subconscious.  Remembering from past experience that I seem to have the best successes with conjuring up dream characters if I don’t try to witness the actual process, I turn so the couch is behind me and I declare “When I turn around, there will be a beautiful naked woman there for me to get frisky with.”

I turn around, and my wife is there, on the couch, stark naked.  Her feet are on the couch and she’s crouched on the couch.  I walk up to her, reach down, grab her and lift her off the couch, and suddenly I’m naked.  We go at it  like we’d never done it before.

At some point, I feel like I could actually reach a climax with her in my dream.  As this happens, a growing realization begins creeping over and and growing…a sense that I am running out of time before my coworker calls to let me know he’ll be coming around the corner.

Just as I am about to finish, the phone rings and I am awake.”

To recap, I tested the idea that I was dreaming by mentally willing the pencil to fly into my hand.  It did.

I realize this dream isn’t a perfect example of that technique, because for whatever reason I already had the growing “hunch” that I might be dreaming.  I’m not aware of anything in that dream which would have tripped my awareness alarm.  I think that, for me, the best bet is to build in anchors like I did for prolonging the dream.  But this time, I’ll build in anchors that will be like little reality checking machines that my subconscious can run (which seems to be what happened in my dream).  I’ll just trust my subconscious to bring that awaerness to me as needed.

If you’re like me and have problems with “normal” reality checking, give this a go and see what comes out of it for you.  Just go throughout your day trying to move shit with your mind. With enough repetitions of doing this, it should eventually spill over into your dream.