Dream Fragments

I want to get back into the habit of recording my dreams, which I find makes a huge difference in their clarity and how interesting they tend to be. I decided to create a blog for anyone who might be interested in reading some of the more interesting ones I've written down (which at times read like stories), which can be found at nautilusdreamfragments.blogspot.com

Lucid Dreaming

I've decided to seriously get back into lucid dreaming. I was really into it for about a year when I first found out about it, then my waking life became really busy and it seemed like my dreams dwindled down to almost nothing for quite a while.

Lately I've been thinking about dreams more, and that alone seems to make them clearer and more interesting... I've even had a few (very brief) lucids where something in my environment would be a little off and I'd announce, "Hey, I'm dreaming!" I didn't do a whole lot with these dreams except trying to change simple things (make boxes disappear, fix a warped door that wouldn't latch, lol).

So my new goal for lucid dreaming: create a dream scene in as much detail as possible, then keep trying to come back to it and/or recreate it. It'll be interesting to see if I have to do less work to maintain the scene over time. My first project is to create a lighthouse. I already wrote out a detailed description of how I want it to look, and I'll be using that to help me visualize it.

I was inspired to do this after realizing that there are certain "locations" that are common between several of my dreams, often with a certain feeling, directional orientation, and characters associated with it. Sometimes these locations resemble a place I've visited often in my waking life, but other times they're completely imaginary.

This made me think that when conscious (or unconscious) thought is given to such a location, it imprints it on the subconscious mind, making it more "stable" (less vague and changeable). So in theory, if I created something in a dream and kept thinking about it and visualizing it, eventually it should be there without hardly any mental effort.

Dreamless Sleep

Dreams. I just had a long stretch of having almost no dreams. I've been so busy, I didn't even notice until a week ago, when it suddenly bothered me that I couldn't seem to remember anything at all that happened during the night. My mind was so focused on staying up late enough to finish that essay due the next day, or the upcoming calculus test or yada yada that I wasn't giving much thought to my usual dream adventures.

I know from experience that the amount of thought and importance I place on my dreams indirectly determines their quality. So, over the past week, I've started to get back a little bit of my dream recall, just from being vaguely aware of the possibility of dreaming as I fall asleep.

I had one the other night where Bob Dylan was a police man (?) and the Samantha character from “Sex in the City” got arrested and was hitting on him. Where did that come from? I haven't watched that show in ages, and then hardly ever. Bob Dylan makes some sense though, since my friend/roomate recently got me hooked on youtube videos of his songs. Still, random famous people don't usually pop up in my dreams. Except maybe a few times that Jay Leno was interviewing me on the Tonight Show.