The Crafts: Wixes, Spells, and the Weaponized Placebo Effect

I've tried to change things but it never really worked. On very rare occasions I have been able to change the environment, or at least where I was, but i can't remember much else except that my senses can be very good.

I have tasted things (one is particular was some delicious cucumber-sour cream flavored muffins which I fully intend to recreate) and then as far as feeling things go there have been a few uber fluffy things which I was very pleased to cuddle/pet/experience.

What does fighting mean, as far as dreams go? And I wish I was better at controlling things. I keep trying but it is difficult to do so when one does not know how.

(I have a few posts in the dream thread if anyone cares)

 

....I have noticed that, and it is a pain. When I can sense a nightmare/unpleasant dream is about to occur/in that vague, right before dreamland time, i can wake myself up. But while the nightmare is going on it's like it isn't even an option for some reason. I...just thought it was a weird fluke?

 

I am glad you are all right and that everyone was okay and that it wasn't your real family and I am also glad you managed to beat him.

I'm gonna be honest, I really like the idea of what you did to the thieves. but that sounds very interesting. I was always of the opinion that my dreaming had some kind of impact outside my own mind, although it's entirely possible it doesn't, as a lot of what I deal with has also ended up being morality or integrity situations...which is an interesting similarity to me. but I question if it's personal training, then what for? I believe all training must lead up to something, so I'd like to know what.

oh my god xP death is fairly uncommon for me, although I have died a few times, but I can keep going.
I have a very set sense of what I want to look like in my dreams, so my dream body is always the same; my age, gender, sex, height and weight are pretty fairly set, the only thing that changes on occasion is my hair and eye color.

I do enjoy visiting places that exist in waking, although it can be a bit strange and mundane in comparison to the places I usually go. it's always nice to...creepily watch my friends sleep, I guess?

yeah, they really can be. especially because a lot of them when I show up, are very confusing and mid-battle type places, and so I don't always know what's going on--I just know what I'm there to do, and I have to get a grip of the situation as soon as I can whilst all this confusing shit is going on. it can be...difficult.

that's probably what's happening for me, although I've never caught it in the act of sending the info.
hmmm. see, I've never questioned the info I get; sometimes I learn later on that it wasn't right about a situation, but usually it ends up being correct. the whole 'situations aren't as black and white as they appear' is a thing I have yet to learn, though; I still struggle with that and I end up getting sent to lots of places where there's a lot of gray area involved, I suspect so that I can learn to deal with that sort of thing properly.
I try to aim for ending conflict as soon as possible, but....sometimes there's no option for me but to fight it out with people, which is, I suspect, why I was given/have (I don't know which it is) such good fighting abilities and the dream ability to channel lightning and other energies.

it's....hmmm. how do I explain this.
an empty world is a world without...people, or really any living thing. I'm never very sure what happened in those sorts of places, but they're always very sad to be in. I suspect that in at least some, some kind of conflict wiped out most of the creatures/people living there, and in others I'm still working out what happened. some of them, I think, are just new worlds that haven't had a chance to create people yet; they have a different feel, sad but almost...hopeful, if that makes sense. most of the worlds where conflict happened (I think it did, at least) have a kind of melancholy air to them, and they're always in some form of disrepair.
I think that one of my abilities is supposed to be telling what happened in a place, which is why I'm sent to empty worlds, I think? but I'm not entirely sure yet.

generally, I think it means I'm visible (or there are just a lot of people with scan in the worlds I go to)

hehe, maybe! that might be kind of nice. :P

yeah, it's interesting. but I imagine they do probably enjoys myths as much as we do, so they probably do spread as quickly around there as they do here.

my reoccurring person: she's a girl, and she's about twelve, with brown eyes and wavy teal hair. she's never offered a name, but she shows up to tell me when I'm about to fuck up, big time, in an irreparable kind of way. generally this means I've gone off script or I didn't have all the information, and that I need to take a step back and rethink what I'm about to do and figure out something else. she sort of....appears to stop me from seriously hurting others, for the most part. if I fuck up big time and hurt myself she won't stop me, but if others are at risk then she comes in.

well, none of them have ever given names, but the first boy, he's what I'd consider a trickster. mostly he's a nuisance, and I only really consider him an enemy because he likes to show up and get in my way; the last time he showed up, he just made some tricks with light and distracted me long enough for a few minor things to get fucked up, which made my job more difficult. he's generally annoying. he's got brown hair and sea-green eyes and honestly that image reminds me quite a bit of Percy Jackson, though his personality's nothing like Percy.
the second boy, he's got sandy blonde hair and blue eyes. he's more of an issue; the last time he showed up, it was mid-battle, and he turned everything into pure chaos and killed...quite a few innocent people. I didn't really know what to do to stop him, so I attacked him; subsequently, I lost. I've considered him an enemy since, though he hasn't been back since then...I don't know how to beat him, and I'm not sure what to do with him other than hope I never see him again. I don't ever again want to see as many innocent people die as I did that day.
the ghosty girl you already heard about.
the last person, the girl, she's got dark pink hair and red eyes, and she's some form of...energy vampire. she sucked my energy in a dream and prevented me from doing the thing that I was supposed to do; since then I've set up wards that hopefully will keep her out for now, until I'm ready to deal with her.

all right! so basically, there's spirits/ghosts, which I gather you already know about, gods, and then there are energy beings. what most people would consider an angel or a demon? to me, that's an energy being.
essentially, I believe they exist on a higher plane (I believe in energy planes, I think there are seven, and that each resonates at a higher frequency than the last, and I'm pretty sure we're on either the second or third) than us, and are made of either good or bad intentions, dark or light energy. the 'angels' tend towards good intentions but are not strictly good, same goes with the 'demons'; the only way I can tell them apart is how they sound/feel. angels feel more like a high frequency soprano pitched sound while demons are more like a static humming. I...don't know how to explain how I can feel a sound, but that's basically what happens. the angels tend to appear as bright white beings, while the demons show up as shadow beings, but that has absolutely no bearing on whether each particular angel or demon is made of dark or light energy. the only way I can tell the 'good' from the 'bad' (there are all sorts, some strictly evil and some strictly good, but there's a lot of gray, so I mostly class them by whether they mean harm towards me or anyone else...good = no or just mischief, bad = mild to serious harm towards me or someone else) is by scanning them, essentially. scanning basically means I just try and get a read on their intentions, and I can tell by feel what their intentions are, and then if they're not good intentions, then I have certain ways of banishing them because they must adhere to certain laws; say the right words and they have to go, at least for a little while.
I hope that made some sense!

I shall certainly let you know!

yeah....doing that does not feel good, and I am glad I do not have to do it as much these days.

c:

yay! and boy do I know that feel....rereading some of the stuff young me wrote....so confusing....

yeah. it was a Bad, Very Not Good, Generally Un-Great kind of thing.

well that's...hopefully good?

I don't know for sure myself, but I'm fairly certain that's at least some of what they do, and anything that can summon a spirit is something I will keep my distance from, thanks.

yeah....honestly, she was the scariest I ever encountered. the rest have been generally benevolent or even helpful, so I'm not sure how common ghosts like that are? but she was scary, and I sincerely hope I never meet anyone else like her. beating her was....hard.

I try to be very careful about it ever since she told me her name and that actually made the situation worse once I said it out loud; it basically gave her more power, and that was when I learned names had power and to be careful who I named and when.

 

That is cool! It's even cooler because eye stuff like that was what was used in the first studies that proved that lucid dreaming was real. It's still one of the go-to testing methods since deliberate eye movements are easily visible to observers. You would make an excellent dream study participant! :D

Pretty much everyone lucid dreams at some point in their lives. It's still not a very well-known thing and what is well-known about it is often mistaken (I'm looking at you, Inception :T). I've noticed that the common advice given to people with frequent nightmares is to learn to lucid dream, though it's not usually mentioned by that name. I'd like to believe that it's actually a very common thing and that it's just not a very well-known thing. I do know from all the LDing forums I went onto in college (all of them, basically) that it's not common to be able to lucid dream regularly. Also, people who learn to lucid dream on their own without knowing what it is are usually called "naturals" in LDing circles. Nats (naturals) are usually treated either like the experienced LDers that they are, like divine cinnamon rolls, like horrible liars, or like people who have an obligation to teach people who don't come by LDing naturally. Sorry if that sounds mean or cynical. I was found out as a nat on my first day in the LDing forums and I have mixed feelings about the whole thing. Also, most nats become nats due to having nightmares when they're young and not having much of a choice but to learn to LD to make the nightmares stop.

SCs do that. Dreams are their territory and they often don't like sharing the control. I joke about bickering with mine (because I do), but negotiating with it and compromising and working together was a big part of how I got better at LDing and dream control. It's a part of you, so trying to fight it is like fighting yourself. Sometimes it really is necessary to fight it, but things are easier when you work together. If it really wants you to do the thing maybe humor it a little while and try to fit in a natural shift to the place you want to go? I like to think of dreams as stories my SC and I tell together. Tbh, I do know plenty of people who can just forget their initial dream stories and go off to do whatever they want without issue, so my method isn't the "right" one. It's just a method that I prefer. Figure out what works best for you, and do the thing your way because your way will always be the right way for you when it comes to dreams. c:

 

That kind of sounds like the lucid dreams I have - there's a whole world and things are happening and I remember previous things that happened, and I'm either an observer or a participant (it feels like pretending to be someone when I don't have all their memories or skills and I'm kind of faking it) or just a random incredibly powerful being passing through. Sometimes the plots are really intricate and I wake up and go "wow, that would make a good story". Sometimes I'm in the middle of the plot thinking "wow, this would make a great story, I should try to remember it for when I wake up" and then I wake up and go "wtf was all that even".

Sometimes as a participant I get killed, and that just snaps me out to observer status. I regularly have powers of flight, phasing throung matter, and I can be invisible until I can't. Sometimes I try to follow along whatever "plot" is happening, but it often ends up beng really frustrating, because there's some goal I'm trying to pursue and it keeps being elusive and then a while later nobody seems to even remember it any more. It's very dream-logic-y.

Spoiler: from my dream log

And then there was this sequence that was like a trailer for some sci-fi thriller. This old and very sick man was being locked up in some kind of futuristic techno-bunker and somehow, he became younger and healthy again. But he was trapped in there and had nothing to do but sit around and mutter "I'm sorry... I'm sorry for all I did". And then he had a gun and he was sneaking around the halls of the bunker which were shifting around mechanically, and he was all paranoid and stuff because he thought there was someone else there.

And then it turned out there *was* someone else, only they were with him. In fact it was the cast of Stargate minus Daniel (Christopher Judge even had the gold symbol on his forehead), but they were playing completely different people. And then everyone was out of the bunker and on a train wearing Santa hats and they had learned the true meaning of Christmas.

Seriously, can you imagine that sort of nonsense actually happening somewhere, outside of a brain that is currently sorting through neural connections with the "rational evaluation" mechanism turned off?

So, sometimes I just change things around for the lulz, or go "screw this, I'm out" and go flying off to find something else to participate in. I've had too many dreams that were like horror movie plots, where I was helpless and in danger and unable to escape, so learning to just NOPE out of situations was kind of necessary for my mental health. I think last time I ran into a jerk with similar dream control powers who toyed around with me I ended up punching him to the ground, manifesting my anger at him as a knife and cutting off his arms and legs. That was still not enough to keep him down, so next went his head. (My dream log says that I "got to the epilogue of the dream, with the higher powers congratulating me on beating the evil and stuff.")

I really hope those are just random neuron firings, because otherwise I might be the worst dreamer god thing ever. Not to mention:

Spoiler: TMI and sexual assault, might be upsetting

Sometimes I subtly manipulate things so that the "me" character gets assaulted and molested, and go along with it. It just feels like a really intense rape fantasy, it's never painful or upsetting, even if I pretend to fight it's just to make it more exciting.

I get sleep paralysis a lot in the mornings. Like, a *lot*. I know I'm in my bed but I can't move, and thinking about anything is very likely to make it feel real. Very frequently, there's a buzzing sound in my ears that resolves to "there is a very loud fly or wasp caught in my hair and it can't get out". Those are unpleasant, but I can usually wake myself up the rest of the way.

 

Maybe I'll try to work with them a little more. Wish I was one of those ones who could do it on command, yes, but i I get better with practice even a little that'd be pretty great! :D I love dreams so much, this was cool to learn about, thank you for sharing.

 

oh, oh, I just remembered, I think I have been in dreams where I remember being before? But not a recurring dream, I just recognize it as a place I've been even though what i'm doing is different or barely related o.o wow the more i think about it the cooler this gets.

 

Learning dream control starts small. I think it's pretty impressive that you can change anything! I know people who've spent years just trying to get to the point where they could be lucid once a month only to try to use control and lose their lucidity right away. It sounds like you already have a great foundation! You could probably do all the things with practice and experience. c:

Tasting is supposedly an easy thing to do in dreams, but it's always been hard for me. IDK why. :T

I'd classify "fighting" as confrontation much in the same way as it is in waking. Except sometimes with super powers/elemental control/weapons you make out of nowhere/etc. One guy I know specializes in fighting LDs. His dreams are mostly DBZ-style battles and stuff like that. Trouble is the last I heard he'd beaten so many strong people that he'd gotten to the point where nobody wanted to fight him anymore, and he was getting bored and frustrated. |D;

Also, again; it sounds to me like you're doing better than you think! c:

Nope. Not a fluke. Getting stuck in a nightmare (based on my experience and on what I've heard from others) is kind of like getting stuck in a big wave--you can either learn to swim strong enough to get yourself out or you ride it out. It gets easier with practice and some people are better at it than others, but it was hard as heck for me.

 

Hehe, to be honest I might as well stay in the nightmares, because the stress-caused ones (i don't often have nightmares unless I've been more stressed than usual) have zombies mostly, and I like to think I get my pent up aggression out on them. :)

One last question (perhaps. I change my mind a lot), is it normal to have your weapon lower in quality as you have each new dream? I've gone from a shotgun to a few katana-dreams, to a little knife and the most ridiculous weapon was a spoon. a tablespoon, yes, at least it wasn't a teaspoon, but still. Do you know how hard it is to decapitate things with a spoon? Fighting bare-handed was easier than that, good gravy.

And thank you for the reassurance :) you're very kind.

(I'm going to add lucid dreaming to the list of things I should look up when I have the time)

 

I personally almost always know I'm in a dream, but I just use that awareness to mentally poke fun at the plot while enjoying the ride. Also, waking myself up and/or deleting the bad guy when I'm in a nightmare.

 

Is there a lucid dreaming thread? I don't know if this is relevant enough to Wixes stuff and I get the feeling we could go on forever. XD;

I've heard other LDing people talk about something about a Tibetan belief that when we die we have a chance to be lucid and pass on to another plane of existence or to stay non-lucid and be born again into this world or something like that. I need to look into it more because it seemed really interesting.

I really dislike the urban legend that "if you die in a dream you die in real life." It scares people unnecessarily (looking at you again, Inception :T).

I think that what you described is probably how it is for most people, but IDK. I don't know why my body (bodies?) is the way it is in dreams. It's never really bothered me.

I loled.

My SC uses the dream language for all its communication. I didn't figure out how the info was being given to me until I became able to notice and learn the language, which took a while. If one doesn't know the language (me, a DC, another dreamer) then the information sent via the dream language is translated into their mind as info they just know or ideas they suddenly have out of nowhere or something like that. It's a language that can be manipulative if the other party doesn't know it, thus the, "I need to do this thing, but I don't know why," situation.

Most people I know handle it the way you do. Each person has their own method of dealing with a situation. Heck, I even have a friend (the nat friend who uses the same skills I do) who chooses to be a villain to humans and to only defend nature and animals and stuff. His solution to the war problem would just be to defeat all the humans. So, yeah. Don't worry about a "right" way. Just figure out your way.

Those sound really cool! I haven't been to many (any?) of them, myself. Probably because they don't have people to protect. |D;

The knowing what happened in a place thing could be your SC giving you an info dump or it could be you using scan subconsciously. If you think the going to empty worlds thing might be important to you, it might be worthwhile to explore that theme. :D

She sounds exactly like a dream guide, tbh. That's how they usually behave.

The first one sounds kind of adorable--like a kid playing pranks. The other two sound terrible. I'm sorry you had to experience that. :c

I get the planes thing. I've "seen" them a number of times and have access to a few of them (standard, unseen, and nothing are the three that first come to mind but that's never set in stone as the order and there are often more unseen in there between standard and nothing depending on the place). It's always a very weird, but very cool experience. I think there might be more than seven for me, though. I need to look for my old dream journal posts about that. I also don't think the layers are good/evil. Just kinda there and different from one another. At least, that's how it is for me. Everyone might have a different version of that or some might not have it. Again: IDK.

I also get the feeling a sound thing. It happens to me sometimes. It sounds really cool to do it often. c:

It was weird at first for my brain to "see" multiple realities at once in the same place, but I've gotten used to it to the point where I use them a lot. My least favorite plane is the one with...um..."nothing" might be the best way to describe it. Things made of "nothing" that want "something." They were very hard to learn how to deal with. Nothing I've come across has been purely good or bad, though, even going by the standard of what they wanted to do. I believe in the idea that nothing is purely good or purely evil. Shadow things just want to exist physically or eat, probably. The jerk didn't start out as bad of a person as he became, so there must be a little goodness in there somewhere. This is just my personal cannon, though, and I don't think it's a universal thing. Individual cannon is closely connected to personal beliefs about spirituality and stuff because our brains connect those things to our experiences. It's also why some DCs remind us of real people and so we interpret them as those people even if they don't look or act the same. Your interpretation might be how the layers thing works for you.

I've come across demons before, but I don't think I've come across angles unless you mean "gods." Gods tend to like to hang out at least one plane away from the standard. The demons (who could, arguably, have just been gods with poor reputations) were never that far off from the standard plane and they liked to exist on multiple ones at the same time so DCs (dream characters) could be intimidated by and obey them and stuff. The job where I had to get rid of a demon lady was the one where I put barriers up around the three planets one after the other. The third one wasn't really necessary and the first one wasn't because of her, but I decided I might as well give the third one a barrier to match since it might need one too. |D

That certainly sounds like scan. If you practice with it, then you should be able to figure out how to get pretty much any kind of info you want about anything. It's also the main skill used to learn the dream language. Be careful with it, though; it can influence others and it can give your target info on you too.

I think so, yeah. c:

Thanks!

I hope they're not common. :c

I'm glad you beat her! Good job!

Her name sound, theoretically, also be used against her if you know how. Might be best not to try, though, until you have to and you're really confident you could. ^__^;

 

I often hear it called being "semi-lucid" when you know you're dreaming but can still be convinced that weird things aren't weird.

I have this weird thing where I feel like I'm plagiarizing if I write about my dreams. Maybe because I talk with my SC in dreams so much that it feels kind of like a separate part of myself. Also, I think it might get peeved if I wrote its stories and took credit as my conscious self when my unconscious self was the one that came up with it.

Your movie dream was awesome, by the way. I love the ending. XD

I think they most likely are. Then again, I have a friend who's a participant in a dream study that's being done to try to figure out if dream sharing is real, so who knows? ^__^;

Aw, yeah. Sleep paralysis sucks. I don't have a lot of experience with it, so I don't know of any way to really help it aside from waiting it out. I know the "hag in the room" version is pretty common and that has always sounded crazy scary to me. :c

No prob! Thank you, too! I always love talking about dream stuff. :D

That is pretty cool! :D

That works! XD

Yep. What you're saying matches up with what I've heard--most fighting type LDers tell me to stay away from weapons because they're never as powerful as your body or abilities, and they're not reliable.

I'm familiar with all the forums and most of the sources if you want some suggestions. |D

One thing's for sure: stay away from DreamViews. That place is bad news bears and always has been. :T

Hello fellow SC teaser! XD


Edit: Whoo! Caught up with the dreaming posts! Also, is there an LDing thread?

 

I just had a wonder: do real life spells work with the same list of four that LDing does? Except, you know, with canceling a spell gone wrong (or just at all) being the thing for "abortion"?

 

Dear lord my life and dreams are so very dull compared to you guys'.

 

Shit man, i dont even always know if im dreaming once i /wake up/. Lucid dreaming is hardcore.

Edit: a whole thread for ld sounds cool, someone should totally make one.

 

I don't believe there IS a thread on lucid dreaming, but I'mma go make one right now and then paste this discussion into there (i.e. quote your post so that we can continue this topic in a more relevant thread).

 

the thread is up, @Parsley and @Lissiel and um
everyone else involved in this lucid dreaming discussion, I think @Meagen Image and @bornofthesea670?

 

Well, Mohs scale of polytheism is a good idea then, cause mineralogy's the only thing I've seen with nearly as many numbered lists as Buddhism.

 

That sounds kind of scary to me. o_o

Have you ever tried doing reality checks? The most common ones are to look at your hands, check your watch, or to try to read something. If it's a dream, one of those will be weird. Your hands might not look like hands, your watch might not have numbers on the face, and the thing you read might change itself if you reread it. Stuff like that seems to work well for people first learning to be lucid. They do it throughout the day while they're awake so it becomes a habit and they're more likely to do it when they're asleep.

Thanks, Alex! :D

 

Yeah, most of the stuff they tell you you cant do in dreams (read, see in color, feel pain, die, etc) i do just fine. I used to have a recurring dream about waking up in the middle of the night with cops breaking in swat style into my house, it sucked. For a while i couldnt do the "are you drunk?" thing where you tap your thumb against your other fingertips in a row, but then i did it enough while awake that it doesnt work anymore. Shit really really sucks.