Sorry to all those who find my dreams boring. I don't care. I'm going to tell you about them anyway.

Because last night, well, this morning, at any rate, a few minutes ago, really, I had my first lucid dream in which I didn't wake up straight away \o/

I have found out that, for me, the secret to having a lucid dream is to be really lazy. You wake up in the morning and it's quite a reasonable time to get up and actually do something useful, then you think, 'stuff that, I'm going back to sleep'. It helps if you doze off with the specific intention of having a lucid dream. It seems to work.

Today I ended up having lots of false awakenings. I think I was dreaming about something or other; I was talking to a girl from my course. Then I woke up and started doing normal morning things like shuffling around in my pyjamas and trying to make my hair look like less of a mess. As I was doing this I then woke up again. I thought 'that's odd, I must have had a false awakening' so I checked my clock to make sure that I was definitely awake this time, but the light on my clock didn't turn on, and I realised that I was still asleep. I had to check my clock a good few times though, because it would be awful if it turns out that the battery had just gone and I was actually awake (not something to realise when you jump out the window). I'm not sure why I didn't wake up at this point, as I had before. I think maybe I just wasn't as excited about the whole thing this time.
So I wandered into the kitchen, where my flatmate was sitting with a load of his friends that I'd never met before. He was wearing one of my jumpers, and a beaded necklace. But I thought, 'I don't have time to waste by talking to my dream flatmate', and I noticed that there was a door in the kitchen that isn't normally there, so I opened it. It lead to the outside, with a big set of metal steps leading to a gravel courtyard. There was a girl on the steps; I think I tried talking to her but she wasn't very interesting. So I went down the steps and into the courtyard where there was a van driving around and some pigs at the other end. The van was scary so I chased it off. Then I ran around a bit, to build up some speed, and had a bit of a fly. I started falling out of the air and got a little scared. But then there was this awesome kind of cutscene where I realised that I was just watching myself flying on my laptop and I was actually sitting at my desk. So I clicked on a different video and went in through the computer screen. I forget what happened next though.
I do remember, at some point, realising that my arm was really hurting. I thought that my arm was probably going numb because I was sleeping in an awkward position. I really didn't want to wake up, but I did because I just had to shift my arm. 'That was a fun dream' I thought to myself. So I picked up my clock to see how long I'd been asleep, when I found out that I couldn't make out anything on the clock. I could hardly even distinguish one finger from another on my hands. 'Aw hell' I thought, 'I'm still dreaming'. Getting up into the dream world was a bit more difficult this time. I think I was only lightly asleep because I half felt like I was getting up and half felt like I couldn't move at all. So this section of the dream didn't feel as real as before because I was always half aware of my actual body not doing any of the things I thought I was doing. So I went into the kitchen again. My same flatmate tried to talk to me, but I through a box of beer cans at him and walked back through the same door in the kitchen, down the stairs and into the courtyard. This time I went to the other side of the courtyard and climbed a pine tree. There was nothing interesting at the top, so I climbed back down. Then I squeezed through this small gap at the bottom of a building and into an underground car park. Walking through the car park and out onto the street I came across the four 'Gundam Meisters' from Gundam00 (note to self: don't look at Gundam00 fanart just before going to bed). Allelujah and Tieria both had the most ridiculous pencil moustaches; I had a chuckle at that. I followed them into this hotel. In the hotel there was a big painting on the wall. (I've been wanting to run into a painting ever sinced I watched it in Paprika.) I tried to run into the painting but it didn't work, and I ended up following the Gundam boys into the restaurant. It was at this point that I realised that everyone in the restaurant was speaking Japanese and I couldn't understand a word of it. Mentally, I applauded my brain for being able to come up with the Japanese all by itself; it was, of course, just jibberish that sounded like Japanese to my ears. At this point I became quite detached from what was going on, and it felt increasingly like I was watching a cartoon of the events. The gundam boys all changed appearance and I was busy thinking about what a good job the character designer had done, and how the hair was animated really prettily. Then one of the walls exploded and the medicine seller from Mononoke came running in. At this point I was getting quite bored, because I wasn't taking part any more, so I woke up.

It took me about five minutes of checks to make sure that I was actually awake this time. I'm pretty sure I am, because I've just rung specsavers to find out if my glasses are ready for collection (they're not), but you never know.

Anyway. That was all rather exciting for me. It turns out that lucid dreams are just as random as normal dreams, and you just end up going with the flow for the most part. For you it was probably tl;dr, but who cares. I really need to have a lie-in on more occasions.

In other news, I may put up a picture of Ritsuka soon, but there's just something not quite right with it, that I'm trying to figure out.