5 LD's and 4 ND's in one hour?!?

For about a month now I have been in an LD drought. Last night put a change to that. I’m posting this both because I think many of you would find it interesting, and hopefully give hope to some of the people like me who are having trouble getting lucid. I went through a lot of MILDing before I went to sleep, took B12, and drank chamomile tea. I really have no idea what triggered these dreams… its not like I haven’t tried these before. Could it have been the WBTB that I seemed to have involuntarily done last night? Maybe someone could me an explanation. Anyways, this is what has stuck with my memory.

I knew dream time can be compressed into a very small amount of real time, but this is a bit strange. I woke up a bit delirious at about 3:30 last night, suffering from insomnia for at least 2 hours, just laying in my bed. At 5:30 I climbed out of bed and decided to look at the forum for a bit. I remembered that eating a few crackers always helps put me to sleep, so for a half hour I had a snack. By now it was almost 6:00, so I went back to bed and tried a WILD, before apparently dozing off pretty quickly. About 20 minutes after 6:00, I woke up from a vivid dream, and through the next 20-30 minutes, I woke up right after every dream I had, which is a bit strange for me. This totaled to 4 normal dreams that I can recall in that amount of time. Then the fun began. I managed to catch myself starting to dream as I fell asleep this time, which I rarely ever do. I was at my computer in my dream for one second, then back in my bed, apparently awake again. I was a bit angry at this, because I really tried hard to stay asleep. I was able to fall asleep quickly again, waking up in a dream standing in my dorm room. I immediately did a RC. I stood there for what seemed like 5 minutes, just trying to count the fingers on my hands. I realized I had about 8 on my right hand, and 7 on my left. I jumped up and flew through the walls to other dorm rooms, and eventually out the window, had a great time. That LD seemed like about 20-30 minutes, a very long one for me. Towards the end of that dream I began to be able to feel what my mind perceived as my waking body, and “woke up”. It was an FA. I caught on to this, and had another long LD. Then I once again thought I felt my waking body, and woke up. Still in a dream. I flew around and annoyed DC’s for around 20 minutes in dream time. The next time I woke up I thought for sure I was in real life, so I got out of bed and went over to my friends house, telling him about the crazy night of LDs. The only problem with that is that he was a friend from my home town, over 400 miles away from the town I am living in right now. Then I “woke up” again. I thought to myself “man, I can’t believe I didn’t realize I was in a dream”. Then I climbed out of bed, did an RC and failed it! I was STILL in a dream. I felt like the main character in the movie “Waking Life”. I made the most out of this very vivid LD. It must have been the longest one I have ever had, it seemed like over an hour. Then I managed to finally wake up IRL. The time was not even 7:30 yet. Only a little more than an hour had gone by since I ate the crackers and fell asleep, experiencing 9 long dreams, 5 of which were lucid. Whether I should count the LD’s as one long conglomerate I do not know. If this was a single lucid dream, it lasted for probably 3 hours in dream time, and I experienced a quadruple FA, also with the initial quick LD. I just wish I knew what triggered this…
Has anyone else experienced something like this?

That’s very cool, congratulations!

Pity you have no definite method. Maybe you’ll manage some more though.

I would count it as 1 LD because you never actually woke up.

Well you can “chain” dreams you involuntarily woke up from (the dream didn’t end naturally or else you wouldn’t have been able to go back)
by going back into the dream by WILD. Best used if you don’t move much before going back to sleep. It’s easy pickins to get back into a lucid dream that way, especially if you visualize your dream again. It really was one lucid dream, you just kept waking up and going back into it. Good thing you kept going!

Weird, after reading this topic yesterday, I had something similar happen to me this morning, in the space of about 15 minutes of going to waking up, going to sleep and waking up again, I had what definatly felt like a few hours of dreams, no way it could have been 15 minutes. Time compression is odd, i felt pretty disorientated when I woke up and saw the time.

I chained my lucid dreams this morning! 4 total awakenings and one heck of a time! Oh yeah, Stephen Laberge suggests that “time compression” may result because you skip the boring parts of a dream. How many times have you set out for a dream-destination, but don’t remember what happened in the journey? Anyways thats what he says but I am hopeful that time can be compressed to a degree in dreams.

Nice going, Infection! It’s a lot of fun, isn’t it? Few things can top the feeling of waking up again still lucid inside a dream…
I think it was Odd2K that said FA’s can be a sort of “safety net” that will allow you to stay in a dream longer if you lose contact with the dream. It’s a bit of a bummer at first when you wake up in your bed after a nice LD at first, but then it hits ya. Lots of fun…

Well I tried the same method last night to no avail. After practicing WBTB for a half hour, I couldn’t get back to sleep for nearly 4 hours! Insomnia sucks… Still trying to figure out what on Earth keeps me up.

Fenoderee - “waking up” still lucid is fun only when u have had a nice long LD. one night i had about 20 false awakening and the period between them was on average 30 seconds. by the end it got very annoying and i was actually relieved to wake up in RL (if there is one). that sounds like a really fun LD though i’m gonna try to stop real time with voice commands next time to see if it works.

No no, I actually woke up in real life, but I fell asleep immediately after I woke up (WILD i guess…) and went straight back into the dream. This is possible only right after you wake up…

DevilsAdvocate, Sorry to hear that, you’re right, that doesn’t sound like fun. Sounds like an exhausting experience. I’m curious, do you know if anything you did accounted for that many FA’s? Did you try any techniques before you went to sleep? I think I tried the command to slow time in that last LD, just as it was breaking up for the first time. I don’t think it worked, but I probably wasn’t real concentrated on it.

Infection0, I wish I had those kinds of skills. I’ve heard of people being able to enter the same dream several times during the night, but I’ve only been able to do what you are describing maybe once or twice. How long does it take to re-enter the dream after you wake up from it? Like how much WILDing does it take? That would be interesting to do.

i did do a few techniques but just the regular stuff. i took a nap that day on my right side (which i read helps u get lucid) and then that night i went to sleep on my left if that makes any difference. i did a couple of RTs during the day. i wasn’t intentionally try to get a WILD but my mind was active the whole time that i was falling asleep and when i woke up only about an hour had passed so it must have been the first rem of the night. that’s really all i can think of that might have influenced it. i think maybe i wasn’t interacting enough w/ the dream environment while i was in the dream and that’s why i had so many FAs but idk.

Congratulations.

I’m not as experienced as some others, but I, too, have been able to chain lucid dreams together by use of a technique I picked up here, I think. When you feel the dream starting to slip away, and you’re sure that you are about to wake up, lie down and go to sleep within your dream. There’s a good chance that when you wake up, you will be in another, fresh dream environment.

The last time I did this, I woke up in a new dreamscape, and I was lucid right from the beginning. I can understand how it might lead to false awakenings, however.


I can’t explain it anymore… jeeze…

I don’t think we have a name for LDs that contain False Awakenings, no matter how many… except “bad, bad, LD”

What I have termed “chaining dreams” is going to sleep after you wake up from a LD right away… that means you wake up, go “darn that lucid dream ended too soon” and then get the idea “hey lets go back to sleep” and suddenly you find yourself back in your lucid dream or in a normal dream. This is possible because REM continues from the point you left off when you woke up. You don’t have FAs, you have REAL AWAKENINGS. I did this again in the morning, however I was less successful because when I went back into the dream I lost a big fat wad of lucidity and got kicked out of the dream again 20 seconds after entering it, and then gave up.

And I know what chaining dreams means. I was just curious how long it takes to re-enter the dream, as opposed to how long it normally takes to use WILD to enter into a new dream. I would imagine it would be much shorter… just wondering what to expect if I try this in the future. Sorry for the confusion.

Oh much much shorter. A minute at most to do, or else its FAILURE…
well not really. There’s this “spinning” technique everyone’s talkign about to get back into the dream, but I don’t know much about it. I usually visualize the dream and hope it comes back… it didn’t prove very effective this morning though, but I DID re-enter the dream with some difficulty.

I don’t know about that spinning technique either. But on some occasions when I wake up from LDs, I try to imagine myself falling through my bed. It works quite often and it’s always a rush. It takes less than ten seconds.