Last night I didn't sleep very well at all for one reason or another. I woke up at 5:00 this morning not able to fall asleep again, so I got up and played some FFVI. I felt tired again around 8:00, so I laid down to see if I could fall asleep. I don't remember at this point what I was thinking about, but quite a while into my thoughts, I realized that I had fallen asleep, which was a startling sensation. Like my previous lucid dreaming attempts , my heart started racing (though I don't consider this time an attempt, since I wasn't trying to LD), but I managed to calm down this time and stay asleep. It was very strangely easy to do this time.
A few seconds later, I thought I had opened my eyes, since everything in front of me was perfectly normal, the way it should be. I looked across the bed at my hands and started wiggling my fingers. My fingers started spazzing inhumanly fast and flew around the room. This also startled me and I almost woke up, but I again held on. When the imagery came back, it was all unbelievably crisp and super bright and awesome.
Knowing that I was finally truly lucid dreaming, I wanted to dive in and do all sorts of awesome things. My better judgment told me to take things slow though, since I had almost woken myself up twice by now (and it's not like I could wake myself up on purpose either; I couldn't feel my body at this point, or sense where I was physically, which was bizarre).
Anyway, I ended up like, looking at the wall and opening up a giant menu from the wall. It was pink but similar to the Wii menu. For some reason, I thought of animated gifs, and suddenly the entire pink menu was full of fucking INSANE gifs. Some of them had sound, and they were all pretty fucked up in one way or another. I kept telling my brain to give me weirder and weirder images until I just thought it was so ridiculous that I stopped.
Around this time, I thought I heard some noises in real life, and figured someone must be home. I didn't want to stop this awesome experiment, but it felt like an invisible hook was dragging me back to the surface, and I woke up.
In fact, this was one of the weirdest parts of the whole ordeal. Normally, when you're awake, you feel like "you" are your outer shell, since our senses are used for things that are happening all around us, and your subconscious is just kind of there, chugging along in the background. In this case, I felt like I was inside of my body, and my "outer" body was a separate entity urging me to wake up. Bizarre indeed.
Ah, I also am realizing that I never fixed that rock climbing update. I'll do that later today.
Monday, June 25, 2007
Saturday, June 23, 2007
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
I went rock climbing tonight with Mel and her friends.
Bouldering
This is Trish climbing the elevator shaft. It was infinity feet tall (i.e. 4 stories).
The gym, Vertical Dreams, is in Manchester, NH, in an old mill building. We went into the basement after climbing. It was a very eerie place.
After that, we all ate at Margaritas in Manchester, the best one I've been to by far.
Bouldering
This is Trish climbing the elevator shaft. It was infinity feet tall (i.e. 4 stories).
The gym, Vertical Dreams, is in Manchester, NH, in an old mill building. We went into the basement after climbing. It was a very eerie place.
After that, we all ate at Margaritas in Manchester, the best one I've been to by far.
Monday, June 11, 2007
Tonight my dad took me to a sort of run down house that belonged to the church that my stepmother goes to. I guess they asked my dad to help out a little with the front porch. Anyway, I learned a little bit watching and helping my dad tear apart the rotten wood. One day I'd like to have a solid understanding of carpentry and have my own set of tools.
Welch and Dickey
Yesterday, Ben, Mel, my dad and I went on an awesome hike up in the White Mountains.
Peaks Welch and Dickey are basically one congruous mountain, with a dip in between that helps distinguish the two summits. It's easy to see here in this video from one of the mountains' dozens of awesome ledges.
The ledges themselves were one of the best parts of the trip. As I said, there were about a dozen open rock faces that required a scramble or a crawl up. The views from these ledges were great, and you could even see open granite ledges higher up the mountain with other hikers scrambling up. Some of them were slippery, however, and one ledge was almost impossible to get up. All of us ended up slipping and falling back down to the base, which was kinda fun actually.
This is the first ledge we reached. Unlike the rest, though, it wasn't steep. You can kinda see the project to rebuild the shrubs and vegetation. It was an impressive mountain garden.
Some highlights of the trip
This part of the trail featured a narrow scramble up an almost vertical rock face, which ruled.
The low point of the col in between the peaks was marked by this massive cairn.
After climbing back up the col and looking back to the peak we were just on.
Hiking up here in Holderness has reminded me of the Squam Lake Science Center that my dad used to take me to back when I was young. Though it's sort of a place for kids, I would still go today because of the bear and bobcats and foxes and otters and shit that they have there. I think I'll go when I start making money again. I need a fucking job and I can't seem to get a call back from anywhere I apply to.
Peaks Welch and Dickey are basically one congruous mountain, with a dip in between that helps distinguish the two summits. It's easy to see here in this video from one of the mountains' dozens of awesome ledges.
The ledges themselves were one of the best parts of the trip. As I said, there were about a dozen open rock faces that required a scramble or a crawl up. The views from these ledges were great, and you could even see open granite ledges higher up the mountain with other hikers scrambling up. Some of them were slippery, however, and one ledge was almost impossible to get up. All of us ended up slipping and falling back down to the base, which was kinda fun actually.
This is the first ledge we reached. Unlike the rest, though, it wasn't steep. You can kinda see the project to rebuild the shrubs and vegetation. It was an impressive mountain garden.
Some highlights of the trip
This part of the trail featured a narrow scramble up an almost vertical rock face, which ruled.
The low point of the col in between the peaks was marked by this massive cairn.
After climbing back up the col and looking back to the peak we were just on.
Hiking up here in Holderness has reminded me of the Squam Lake Science Center that my dad used to take me to back when I was young. Though it's sort of a place for kids, I would still go today because of the bear and bobcats and foxes and otters and shit that they have there. I think I'll go when I start making money again. I need a fucking job and I can't seem to get a call back from anywhere I apply to.
Thursday, June 7, 2007
Recently, I've been trying to gain the ability to Lucid Dream. There are a couple main ways this can be done:
- The simple method is to do reality checks during the day. For example, read a paragraph from a page in a book, look away, and read it again. The text will be the same. Also, plug your nose and close your mouth and try to breathe. You won't be able to. Eventually, after getting used to these habits during the day, you'll perform one during your dream and it will fail. At this point you become aware that you are dreaming. So far this hasn't worked for me, since my bullshit-o-meter is fried beyond belief from years of insane dreams (in other words, when I do the reality check in the dream, and it fails, I don't see anything wrong with it because I accept that reality can change, and that I'm not dreaming, if that makes any sense).
- The hardest but most rewarding method is called WILD (Wake Induced Lucid Dreaming i believe). Basically, you have to go to sleep--get this--while remaining conscious. It sounds impossible, but last night I tried it. I was awake for half an hour trying unsuccessfully to simply fall asleep while remaining conscious. I realized that the way I was remaining aware was by thinking "oh, I'm in bed, I can feel my body." So I decided to just start counting. This way, I could forget all about being in bed, in a room, and focus on relaxing while still retaining a conscious link.
Lo and behold, thirty numbers into the counting, something strange happened. I sort of lost touch with my body, which seemed to float off elsewhere (I was completely aware of this happening, but I couldn't really will myself to move; early sleep paralysis). Instead of seeing the back of my eyes, I rather felt I was staring into some black room with my eyes open. All I could feel was my consciousness, and I didn't really have a body so to speak. It was the most bizarre thing ever. Around this time, I expected pictures and a dream to start forming, but I became aware of something else. Part of my body came back to my attention, my heart. My heart started racing (a common side effect of the WILD technique; this along with sleep paralysis makes it one hell of an experience), and I could literally feel my heart and the arteries going up to my head as they pulsed, but nothing else in my body. Then my eyes and nose started twitching like crazy and I eventually had to stop. When I came to seconds later I had a splitting headache, which I still have well into today. I'll have to try again when the headache goes away. It was definitely one of the weirdest things that's ever happened to me.
Anyway, what's supposed to happen is that you go through the steps of WILD, you retain awareness, and the dream world will unfold in front of you. This is hard to accomplish at night, since a lot of dreaming occurs during REM, and you haven't entered that state yet. A better time to do this is after waking up later in the night or from a nap. Going back to bed immediately after will increase your chances of WILD working. WILD Lucid Dreams are apparently incredibly realistic and quite easy to manipulate, and more rewarding than the easier method above.
Weird shit.
- The simple method is to do reality checks during the day. For example, read a paragraph from a page in a book, look away, and read it again. The text will be the same. Also, plug your nose and close your mouth and try to breathe. You won't be able to. Eventually, after getting used to these habits during the day, you'll perform one during your dream and it will fail. At this point you become aware that you are dreaming. So far this hasn't worked for me, since my bullshit-o-meter is fried beyond belief from years of insane dreams (in other words, when I do the reality check in the dream, and it fails, I don't see anything wrong with it because I accept that reality can change, and that I'm not dreaming, if that makes any sense).
- The hardest but most rewarding method is called WILD (Wake Induced Lucid Dreaming i believe). Basically, you have to go to sleep--get this--while remaining conscious. It sounds impossible, but last night I tried it. I was awake for half an hour trying unsuccessfully to simply fall asleep while remaining conscious. I realized that the way I was remaining aware was by thinking "oh, I'm in bed, I can feel my body." So I decided to just start counting. This way, I could forget all about being in bed, in a room, and focus on relaxing while still retaining a conscious link.
Lo and behold, thirty numbers into the counting, something strange happened. I sort of lost touch with my body, which seemed to float off elsewhere (I was completely aware of this happening, but I couldn't really will myself to move; early sleep paralysis). Instead of seeing the back of my eyes, I rather felt I was staring into some black room with my eyes open. All I could feel was my consciousness, and I didn't really have a body so to speak. It was the most bizarre thing ever. Around this time, I expected pictures and a dream to start forming, but I became aware of something else. Part of my body came back to my attention, my heart. My heart started racing (a common side effect of the WILD technique; this along with sleep paralysis makes it one hell of an experience), and I could literally feel my heart and the arteries going up to my head as they pulsed, but nothing else in my body. Then my eyes and nose started twitching like crazy and I eventually had to stop. When I came to seconds later I had a splitting headache, which I still have well into today. I'll have to try again when the headache goes away. It was definitely one of the weirdest things that's ever happened to me.
Anyway, what's supposed to happen is that you go through the steps of WILD, you retain awareness, and the dream world will unfold in front of you. This is hard to accomplish at night, since a lot of dreaming occurs during REM, and you haven't entered that state yet. A better time to do this is after waking up later in the night or from a nap. Going back to bed immediately after will increase your chances of WILD working. WILD Lucid Dreams are apparently incredibly realistic and quite easy to manipulate, and more rewarding than the easier method above.
Weird shit.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)