The two Fs of Lucid Dreaming

by phil on Saturday Jan 17, 2009 11:58 AM
lucid dreaming

Lucid dreams are dreams that you can control. One of the main techniques for increasing the number of lucid dreams is to habitually reality-check. The most common one people are familiar with is pinching themselves. If you do this every hour, on the dot, then you will start to do this in your dreams, and you will become aware of how rich your dream-world is. See, we dream a lot every night, but in the process of waking up, our brains erase them.

The following is a story of an interesting lucid dream I had recently. I'm sort of working with @squidhelmet to turn these anecdotes into a fiction story or screenplay. A word of caution, though. This story mentions fantasy sex. This should be expected in an honest discussion about lucid dreams. For me at least, the two things I seem most interested in when lucid dreaming are flying and fucking.

So, in this dream, I was walking around the neighborhood where I grew up. I then walked behind this Chinese restaurant, and all of a sudden I found myself in an enclosed mini-Chinatown. "I don't remember this being here," is what I thought to myself. So I started meandering around, and the deeper I got, the more intricate and compact the Chinatown became. I saw floating Chinese lanterns everywhere and lots of families milling about. "Where did all these people come from?" The neighborhood I grew up in was definitely more quiet than this.

My pulse started racing. Whenever I get the drift I might be dreaming, I start to get excited. I also get nervous because I know that over-excitement will shake me out of the dream. This then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. So I started running around the mini-Chinatown, looking for my reality-checks. I wanted to be confident I was dreaming before going to town with the world, Grand Theft Auto-style.

The first reality-check that came to mind was the text-check. If you look at a string of text in a dream, and then re-look at it, often the words won't appear the same. So I started rushing around corners and around people, looking for something to read. I couldn't find anything and I became anxious.

So I ditched that reality-check and went to the next one: looking at your hands. If you look at your hands in a dream, often they won't appear right. And so I checked, and lo and behold, it seemed like I had four fingers! "Ah-ha!"

I only felt 80% sure, though, because I also thought, "wait, isn't this how hands normally look?" My sense of logic was corrupted in this dream.

But there was no more time. If I kept running around I'd wake up. And so I decided, "Ah, what the hell" and I just leapt and flew over a picnic table, landing on the hottest girl in sight.

Shortly thereafter, I woke up, ruing the brevity, but with a renewed interest in lucid dreaming.