Remember back in 2014, when I mentioned that I had started to keep a dream journal and I hoped that it would help me to achieve more lucid dreams? Well, it didn’t work. I stopped keeping my dream journal after a while, because I felt too tired first thing in the morning to write up my dreams. But in recent times, I have had a couple.
Just the other night, I was fast asleep and having a rather uninteresting dream (so uninteresting, that I don’t remember any of it.) All of a sudden, I realised it was a dream and instantly woke up. I thought to myself that it was a shame I woke up, because I could have turned it into a proper lucid dream, if I had stayed in it. So I tried my hardest to get back to sleep in the hopes of having a lucid dream.
The experience was quite incredible. One second I was lying in bed with my eyes closed, trying hard to fall asleep, then I felt like I was falling for a split second and then I was standing in a bright and sunny field. I was impressed at myself for having fallen asleep so quickly and for having been able to create such a realistic and beautiful looking field. It was very similar to a specific field in Corsham, but not quite identical.
After a few seconds, I spotted somebody in the distance. I remembered reading that, in our dreams, any people we see will have the faces of people we know in reality. I decided to head over to test it out – I was delighted to find that the person in the distance wasn’t a stranger at all, but in fact, my friend Hayley (a good friend of many years.)
We said hello and I decided that it would be nice to see some other friends too. I then turned around and a large group of familiar faces were heading towards me. Everyone was saying hello and general chitchat started to break out.
It all seemed so real and I was very pleased to be having such a good experience of lucid dreaming. As it was all so real and so nice, I decided to try and return to an old memory of mine. It’s a memory that’s very important to me of a time when I was very happy – for various reasons, it’s not something I’ve ever told anybody about.
All of a sudden, I woke up. Not into reality, but into a bed in a horribly dingey little room. It was cold and it was dark and all of my friends were gone. It was still part of the lucid dream and I knew it. I got out of the bed and headed towards the door. I came out onto the streets of Bath – it was raining, very late and very cold. It all still felt very realistic
I realised that I had brought myself to the right sort of location, but not exactly. I was about forty minutes away from the place I wanted to be and it made me quite sad to think that my experiences were playing out again while I was forty minutes away and missing them. I decided to try and visit another memory instead.
All of a sudden, I found myself on the streets of another city. I was cold, outside by myself and in the dark in the middle of the night. I had come to the right place, again, but was about forty minutes away. Once again, I felt I was missing my experiences play out again.
Then I felt very sad, because I felt that I had missed my only opportunity to revisit these memories. I thought about how they’d never happen. It made me feel so sad that I woke up – this time, back into reality. I was still a bit sad, but coming back to reality put things back into perspective a little.
It may sound like a horrible, negative experience, but, actually, taking a step back from it, it’s all very interesting. Why does my mind behave in that way? Perhaps it’s my own way of telling myself that romanticising the past is unhealthy. Who knows? Either way, I hope I can experience another lucid dream one day.
