In Korea I really started to get into self development specifically social aspects and coming out of my comfort zone. I built on that last year in Quebec. But this year it is harder to focus on those goals with my current town and the lack of access to public transportation and the big city.
That is why I have decided to focus more on self development as opposed to social skills. With that in mind I read up on more lucid dreaming and began my program.
Lucid dreaming is a dream state in which a person is able to know they are in a dream and eventually be able to control their actions in that dream. I had first heard about this concept from my psychology professor in university. I had tried to cultivate the skill in university but alas I lacked willpower and could not keep up with my program. This time I am determined to succeed and my first success today was a great boost.
When we sleep we have 4 different stages. From stage 1-3 + REM (rapid eye movement). REM is the deep stage of sleep where we are catatonic and dreams occur. In order to reach the state of lucidity in this stage it is important to train yourself to do reality checks during normal day situations so that when you are in the dream state you will remember to do the checks as well. I choose to pinch myself on the cheek and had been doing it for about two days now. In addition you are supposed to keep a dream journal and write down everything that you remember about your dream. The idea is that there will be recurring images/symbols/themes and once you figure that out you will be able to identify that you are in a dream. The journal also helps with remembering your dreams which is the first step to lucid dreaming.
So here is what happened. Yesterday I had my first class of the new year. I had slept only 3 hours because I had insomnia and didn't sleep until 4am. Today was the second day back to school and I had a class at 8am. Because I had slept very little yesterday I went to bed quite early at around 7:30pm. Unfortunately I was woken up around 10pm by the noises from the kitchen. I live next door to the communal kitchen and my roommate Loic was cleaning up some dishes and I heard the pots and pans clacking. Now fully awake I went on my computer to play some video games until 3am when I went back to bed, I quickly drifted to sleep but at around 5am I heard some clacking sounds again next to my bed, I thought it sounded like the sounds that Loic was making earlier. I was so sleepy I didn't think about how it could be there would be noises right next to my bed. So I rolled over and tried to swat away the noise. But the sensation of hitting the wall with my hands didn't register. That is when I realized! I might be in a dream! So remembering my training I tried to do a reality check by pinching my face. My body wouldn't move! Now I was sure of it I am in a dream! That is when my head started shaking and my ears started to ring, and finally I snapped out of the dream and into reality. The whole episode probably lasted a couple of minutes max.
I had actually read about this earlier, usually this is what happens when you are trying to lucid dream for the first time. You become so excited once you realize that you are in a dream that your adrenaline shoots up and that pulls you out of the dream. There are specific techniques that you can do to keep yourself in the dream for longer and I will try that next time.
I am very happy about my progress and parts of my success I owe to the techniques I read online. But another part is this new application I have been using called sleep cycle alarm. The app uses the phone's accelerometer to detect sudden movements from your bed as you toss and turn in the night. It then wakes you up when you are not in REM sleep so that you can have a good nights rest. In addition it has a helpful graph which tracks your sleep states throughout the night. I was so sure of my times because of this graph which you can see below.
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| As you can see, I feel asleep at 7pm, got woken up at around 10pm. Then I got out of bed and didn't actually turn off the app, so the little spikes which indicate I was in deep sleep from 11-2:30am is actually false. The spikes are the detection of my moving around in the room on my computer. Finally I went back to sleep at 2:30 and I believe the lucid dream episode occured at around 5am - as I was pulled out of the dream I moved around the bed a bit and that registered. I fuckin love this app! This is only my second day of testing it and further testing needs to be done to be conclusive on whether it works as intended or not. But preliminary result are very promising! |
Peace from Guebwiller.
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