i need my lucid dreams back

Andrey Reutov, in his book Dream Searchers (which is based from the teachings of Carlos Castaneda, who received the guidance from the great Don Juan - yes, it's complex like that, I know) attributed one's inability to have lucid dreams to some sort of maleficent beings called flyers. I think the flyers got me this time. No really, I really think they did. Maybe they assumed the form of pseudoephedrine tablets, who knows? Either way, I'm not getting my lucid dreams for 3 weeks already.

Well ah, I understand that becoming lucid is not easy - you can't simply tell yourself "I want to be lucid tonight!" and pof! you get em straight away. It doesn't work that way (although I must admit several of my lucid dreams occur when I practically don't do anything to become lucid). Some people practiced for 2 years before managing to get their first lucid dreams. I guess I am lucky in a sense that I have extra-vivid bizarre dreams for all my life that it makes me easier to become lucid when I eventually learned about it.

When I first had my lucid dream after discovering about it, I did what most first-time dreamers would do - wake up as soon as I realized I was dreaming. I didn't remember any single crap about my first lucid dream ever, though - but I do remember that my second lucid dream involved my dad visiting me at Akasia to give me a new blanket. I was like "wtf dad wouldn't do anything close to that even if he tried" so I deduced that it was a frickin dream, got excited, went up from my bed and walked for about 3 to 4 steps before I opened my eyes and it was over like that. Bummer. But hey, not bad for a novice like me. At least I managed to deduce correctly.

Last month, 12th January to be exact (I remember because I have this one piece of paper taped on my bedroom wall on which I would write down my lucid dreams whenever I have one) I had the most amazing lucid dream ever. My previous lucid dreams were painfully short; not more than 2 minutes each I guess (how would you gauge time in a dream anyway?). In this particular dream, however, I managed to maintain my awareness long enough to be able to fly across a strangely barren sea. And God, what a beautiful dream it was. I didn't merely hover, I flew for real. My perceptions were unusually vivid; I could distinguish different colours from the dream (I usually don't dream in colours. That, or I didn't remember the colours in my dreams). When I was done with the flying, I tried to land smoothly, but instead I found myself lunging directly for the beach at high speed. That was when I felt the dream starting to disintegrate, and I woke up almost crying, overwhelmed with the experience I'd just had. It may not be as spiritual as playing with Mescalito (look up Castaneda), but for me, it meant everything. Controlling my dreams is the first step towards having better control over my waking life.

I had two more lucid dreams after that epic one, but after that nothing really came up. I am very confident that I stopped having them after I started taking pseudoephedrine tablets (trippy pharmaceutical jargon-laden entry on my main blog here), which prompted me to stop taking them altogether and switched back to my old pal cetirizine. Now that I've gotten rid of that meth precursor, I'm now practicing MILD, WILD, DILD and many other techniques with weird abbreviations, to accompany my regular practice of meditating to binaural beats/ isochronic tones (and the occasional Shpongle tracks, which are damn awesome btw). I even got my hands scribbled with the word 'AWAKE' here for reality checking purposes. And tonight I'm going to try a NovaDreamer-like approach, an online Dream Machine (don't click if you're epileptic), ideal for lucid dreaming and other technoshamanism purposes as well (like, say, see images behind closed eyelids! How DMT is that?). Anything to get my lucid dreams back. Anything.

In the meantime, do some reality check and ask yourself this question. If the words in this picture appear unintelligible to you, you're probably dreaming. :P