Lucid Dream #1

The last entry (REM-Dreamer) seemed to attract more interest from friends and family than the usual chess ones. Feedback included that I was wrong about drugs, that my lack of experience trying to keep myself under control while drunk might make it harder for me to retain the focus you need in a lucid dream, and that a friend has had more pseudo-lucid dreams (and has a greater interest in them) than I had expected. Other people told me that it was unnatural to try to be awake during dreams.

I kept trying different settings on the REM-Dreamer over the past 1-2 weeks. I came to the conclusion that the medium pre-set settings (i.e. medium light stimuli, no audio), with 8/9 eye movement sensitivity and no 'dream alarm' worked best. Also it was better to only have the REM-Dreamer active for the latter part of the night. However the unfortunate fact was that despite a lot more attempts I had had less success since returning home than in the brief attempts while away which were described previously.

This led me to think about the high success rate claimed in Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming for their lab studies, and what impact the environment has. Maybe if you're sleeping somewhere where you're too comfortable and secure you'll pay less attention to environmental cues and sleep too deeply, or something similar. So I decided to try sleeping for the latter part of the night on an air bed in the next room with some quiet background noise playing and... success!

I had a 'false awakening' where I felt I had had enough of trying to sleep on this stupid air mattress and walked back to my bedroom where I found that it was a mess and the computer was set up in the way, and I realised that this couldn't be right. Following that I was again 'awakening' on the air mattress (just following a cue from the REM-Dreamer?) but this time pressed the RT button on the device (should show lights and bleep quietly), with no response. This suggested I might be dreaming. Flipping straight up and slightly into the air without effort confirmed this was indeed my first lucid dream.

One slight complication with this is although I'm pretty sure I was lucid at the start, somewhere along the line it became more like "having a dream about having a lucid dream" and then later the dream became "telling some other people about how I just had a lucid dream"... Two things I did try were visiting my sister, which was unexpectedly emotional for me in a nice way, and also to see 'what happens if I imagine myself playing chess with a strong opponent'. I got the opponent and the board (though I'm not sure who the opponent was a likeness of) but the brief attempt did not go well. We only played a few opening moves, during which my opponent also played two moves at once at one point (i.e. illegally). Could it be that the silence from 'Murrrr' is actually because the idea simply fails?

From here I think the lucidity ended and I went back to fairly normal dreaming. A successful 'proof of concept' perhaps, but the lengths I ended up having to go to for this first lucid dream were slightly ridiculous. Hopefully there will be more and without such a long wait in future, with it getting easier with practice. Or on a less optimistic note maybe I'll just end up becoming too comfortable with this air mattress, and need to seek out increasingly uncomfortable and unsafe locations, until I finally hit the streets! But I had success within two hours of trying this, so I guess I should be positive.

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Update from 2013: Lucid dreaming is completely useless for chess. Things just aren't that ordered, logical or consistent in dreams. Ah well, it was a funny idea.