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Catching Up
May. 16th, 2011 09:44 pmI haven't been posting a lot lately. I suppose I haven't really had a lot to say. I've just been keepin' on keepin' on. Still taking my hormones, noticing slow emotional shifts but not much else. I'm only a month and a half into a very low dose regimen, after all. But there's definitely a difference, and I'm very glad I've gone ahead with this. It's just difficult to articulate at this point. I see my therapist again on Wednesday, and I'm pretty excited about that, because I really enjoyed our sessions together and I haven't seen her for a good four or five months.
I've been keeping a dream diary lately. My natural dream recall is nothing short of dreadful, and that really annoys me. Keeping a dream diary supposedly helps to improve it, and after two weeks I'm definitely noticing an improvement. I spontaneously recall details and that leads to fully fleshed out narratives, something I really couldn't do even a month ago. I still have trouble remembering dream conversations verbatim, but the gist of them is pretty solid.
The ultimate purpose of this is not just greatly improved dream recall, though. Eventually, I would like to get to a point where I can reliably induce lucid dreaming. There are techniques for this that exploit the neurology of sleep paralysis, but those haven't worked for me so far, so I'm currently just trying the easiest and most basic way of doing it, which is realizing that you're dreaming during your dream. So far, all I've been able to do is be "genre-savvy," and act like a lucid dreamer without actually being aware that I'm dreaming (stopping time to clobber a super-speedster, for example). It's a little frustrating once you wake up and all the dream signs are glaringly obvious in hindsight, but I suppose it's progress.
I'm tempted to type up my dreams here, but I'm not sure I really want to go ahead with that. Some of them are kind of personal, after all, and most of the rest are really boring. I may change my mind, though, especially if a dream is particularly amusing or poignant. Like last night's, in which I discovered an office literally stacked to the ceiling with business cards for Barack Obama's backup business, in case he didn't get elected President. You could not move in that room without knocking over a tower of little yellow business cards. This was probably the least bizarre part of the entire dream.
Onward, oneironaut!
I've been keeping a dream diary lately. My natural dream recall is nothing short of dreadful, and that really annoys me. Keeping a dream diary supposedly helps to improve it, and after two weeks I'm definitely noticing an improvement. I spontaneously recall details and that leads to fully fleshed out narratives, something I really couldn't do even a month ago. I still have trouble remembering dream conversations verbatim, but the gist of them is pretty solid.
The ultimate purpose of this is not just greatly improved dream recall, though. Eventually, I would like to get to a point where I can reliably induce lucid dreaming. There are techniques for this that exploit the neurology of sleep paralysis, but those haven't worked for me so far, so I'm currently just trying the easiest and most basic way of doing it, which is realizing that you're dreaming during your dream. So far, all I've been able to do is be "genre-savvy," and act like a lucid dreamer without actually being aware that I'm dreaming (stopping time to clobber a super-speedster, for example). It's a little frustrating once you wake up and all the dream signs are glaringly obvious in hindsight, but I suppose it's progress.
I'm tempted to type up my dreams here, but I'm not sure I really want to go ahead with that. Some of them are kind of personal, after all, and most of the rest are really boring. I may change my mind, though, especially if a dream is particularly amusing or poignant. Like last night's, in which I discovered an office literally stacked to the ceiling with business cards for Barack Obama's backup business, in case he didn't get elected President. You could not move in that room without knocking over a tower of little yellow business cards. This was probably the least bizarre part of the entire dream.
Onward, oneironaut!
