First blog post of 2022? Time flies.

We used to keep a dream journal when we were younger because we were interested in lucid dreaming. After some time we got to a point where we could lucid dream fairly consistently and we had some familiarity with the effects of controling our dreams (like having too much control made us feel more tired when we got up, or that pushing too far would give us sleep paralysis). We got bored of it eventually and stopped adding to the journal. Lucid dreams became less and less common after that. We still had them sometimes but it wasn't nearly as often. Some of the effects still seemed to be left over, like waking up at will and having some more awareness while falling asleep and waking up. It's hard to tell what is because of the lucid dreaming and what is simply the result of us changing over time, but some things seem to match what we did in lucid dreams. Our non-lucid dreams were also commonly "free roam" dreams where we got plopped into a plot but ended up doing whatever we wanted even though we didn't know it was a dream. A lot of the time we had control over the free roam dreams to the point where it seemed like we would have known we were in a dream but we were apparently just controlling the dream as if it was muscle memory instead of altering things with a specific purpose.

We recently started lucid dreaming again. Our guess is that it has to do with a recent change in the system relating to members that seem to have more control over our subconscious. These dreams have been weird because we can recognize them as lucid dreams but they're very different from what happened when we started lucid dreaming on purpose. It's like we have less control over the contents of the dream and more control over the dream itself. Before, we would be aware that we were dreaming and we could alter the dream within the plot it gave us. Now, it seems like we can alter how deep we are in the dream while the dream moves on without us. Sometimes we get so far detached from the dream that it acts as if we're spectating in a video game and where the dream's plot expects us to be is the "player." If we go too far away from that position, everything starts to disappear like we're outside of the player's view.

To some degree, we're also more aware of things outside of the dream. Back when we originally got into lucid dreaming we could think things like, "Our alarm is going to go off soon. It's hard to tell how much time has passed so far." Now, we seem to also be more aware of things like noises going on around us. We've been able to hear our alarm and consciously know what it is, approximately where it is compared to where we're sleeping, and the fact that it's unrelated to our dream. If we're relaxed enough, waking up to the alarm feels more like a choice.

The time we were using the dream journal and the period of time we've been aware of each other for had little overlap, so it's hard to tell how that might have changed. We do seem to have more awareness of each other while falling asleep now. Some of us have been able to have a conversation about a dream that only one of them seemed to be controlling (from Front, most likely, while the other person was falling asleep in the headspace). We still can't really tell the difference between shared and non-shared dreams. There might be something more complicated behind it, or it may just be hard to be aware of while in the middle of a dream. Lucid dreams seem to be correlated with whoever is in Front, though.

We wonder how else plurality can influence dreams.

Thoughts

Things