Brain Regurgitations

After re-reading the my post from a few hours ago (see source for the link), I realized that I can never create a character fully based on myself and expect anyone to care about the story.

Realistically, nobody wants to read about a character who
A) has no interest in love,
B) does not want any form of serious or long-term relationship,
C) is unsure if they even believe in love,
D) is the main character,
E) all of the above.

In my life, I am “E) all of the above.” (And I’d be extremely concerned if answer D were not true.)

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(Source: theycallmecheeze)

Everything is under the read more, and I tagged my trigger warnings. Please, PLEASE look over the tags before reading this. This post addresses the issue of Pewdiepie fans’ reactions to the anger and outcry over his rape jokes.

If you are going to comment on or reblog this, PLEASE ACTUALLY READ THE WHOLE THING. I do not want my thoughts and opinions glorified, criticized or getting spread around at all if it’s based on a false impression. I’d rather be criticized and argued with by people who have taken the time to see what I actually have to say, than have people agree with me and make me out to be some sort of hero for their “side” because they only read the parts that they think have made their point.

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Even the embarrassing ones.

Alternate subtitle: In which Cheeze lists off all of her stupidest scars.

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These are all things I’ve been thinking about for quite a long time, and I’m sick of keeping quiet and not seeking out like-minded individuals.

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Spoilers under the Read More. Do not read if you haven’t already watched the video.

ALSO, if you are just starting to watch EMH, or if you’re having a hard time following it, use this wiki:  http://everymanhybrid.wikia.com/wiki/EverymanHYBRID_Wiki.

It really helped me keep track of everything. There is a list of the videos you need to watch and in which order, including videos on other people’s channels (e.g. the “Rabbits’” boxes and HABIT instructions. There is also an in-game timeline, a timeline of events and tweets, pages for each character, transcriptions for each video, links to each video, links to every document found, links to Damsel’s blog and Twitter, to HABIT’s Twitter, to the EMH Twitter, and literally everything else you would ever need to understand the series as well as anyone who has been following it since the beginning. (I’ve only been following the series for a year, and I’m only as lost as those who have been following from the start lol.)

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These are all things I’ve been thinking about for quite a long time, and I’m sick of keeping quiet and not seeking out like-minded individuals.

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I don’t know how many of you out in the tumblrverse read The Oatmeal, but you all should. It’s incredibly funny, insightful and witty. (And even has some posts about grammar, which makes me - an anal-retentive self-proclaimed editor - very happy.) If you haven’t read anything on the site or looked at the comics, I suggest you go check it out. Peruse some comics. Read some blog posts. Then come back here and get some information on this legal shitstorm that even someone like me - who has only taken two law courses over both my high school and college careers, one of them in business law - can see is fruitless and just plain stupid.

This is the original blog post from Matt Inman (the creator of The Oatmeal, the original defendant in the lawsuit, and generally a funny guy if you ask me):
http://theoatmeal.com/blog/funnyjunk
If you don’t feel like reading it all, he is complaining - not maliciously or with intent to do harm to or take business away from Funnyjunk - that not-so-Funnyjunk’s users post his (as well as A LOT OF OTHER ARTISTS’) work without crediting him on their website. He also complains that the owners of Funnyjunk claim that they have no responsibility in this, as the site is created through user-generated content: they just accept anything users submit - with or without credit or watermarks - and cover it in advertising. This post was made about a year ago, if memory serves me right.

This is not-at-all-Funnyjunk’s response to the original post:
http://theoatmeal.com/blog/funnyjunk2
If you don’t feel like reading this one either (it’s super-short though, don’t be lazy), I’ll sum up: Funnyjunk’s owner claimed to all of its users that The Oatmeal: 1) is going to sue FJ, 2) is trying to SHUT DOWN FJ, and 3) in the original post about FJ, hates the users and spoke viciously about the users of the site. Funnyjunk users flooded Monsieur Inman with incredibly rude emails attacking him BECAUSE OF THEIR LEADER’S FALSE ACCUSATION. Furthermore, a lot of stolen content is still on Funnyjunk despite FJ’s claim to have taken everything down. Really, you should just read the blog instead of this TL;DR. Monsieur Inman ends this post very well, I think: “To the users of FunnyJunk: I never had the plans to sue FunnyJunk and get it shut down; I just wanted my stolen comics removed — your admin is a moron who chooses his words about as carefully as a mule chooses where to take a shit.” Wordsmith.

Funnyjunk - despite their name - apparently has no sense of humor. They lawyered up and sent Mr. Matt this response (with Matt’s annotations, of course):
http://theoatmeal.com/blog/funnyjunk_letter
Funnyjunk wants TWENTY THOUSAND DOLLARS in damages from The Oatmeal. I’m no lawyer, but since I’ve been following this story and know all of the supposedly malicious things that Matt wrote about FJ, I think I can safely say this: There is no way for FJ to recover damages based on the exchange that has taken place over the past year or so, because 1) there have been no false statements made by The Oatmeal as far as I can see, 2) nothing said was intended to incite others into attacking Funnyjunk or to take away business from FJ, and 3) FJ is probably not losing advertising revenue just because one of the artists has requested that works of his - as well as those of others - that have not been properly attributed to their creators be taken down, as it is their intellectual property. In fact, based on everything that has happened so far, it seems to me like Mr. Inman could sue FUNNYJUNK instead: the administrator of the site purposely lied to his users by telling them that Matt hated them and their site and had intentions of shutting it down and suing the site’s creators, which caused the users to react angrily and send him harassing messages. The Funnyjunk lawyer, Charles Carreon, has a just plain bizarre internet history (I mean the stuff he’s PUT ON the internet), and seems to me to have jumped on this case merely because it seemed like he could profit from it. Carreon cites part of the code on **every page of the website** - which is ASCII in the shape of one of The Oatmeal’s original characters, The Pterodactyl - as an attack on Funnyjunk and a threat against them. OBJECTION! (http://www.cultofmac.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/phoenix-wright-objection.jpg) That Pterodactyl, as far as I know, was on every page of the site well before Matt called out FJ for copyright infringement. 

Matt responded - in a link in the ABOVE link - with this:
http://www.indiegogo.com/bearlovegood
Matt decided to use Indiegogo.com -  a site used to help people raise money for projects and whatever else they desire - to raise that $20,000 in donations. Instead of giving it to Funnyjunk and their lawyer (***who runs a site with his wife that is filled with weirdass poetry and porn, including a badly-photoshopped comic of George W. Bush and Condoleeza Rice having sex***), Monsieur Inman plans to split the donations between The American Cancer Society and The National Wildlife Federation. The goal of $20,000 was met within the first day. As of this moment, there are five days left to donate and $207,679 has been raised. And Matt STILL intends to split the proceeds between those two worthy charities. Oh, I forgot to mention this: before donating it to the two charities, Matt’s going to take a photo of the money next to a beautiful rendering of Funnyjunk’s admins’ mother (mothers?) seducing a majestic Kodiak bear.

Carreon got butthurt and turned it into a personal lawsuit, representing himself:
http://theoatmeal.com/blog/carreon
Carreon would not give up the lawsuit, and actually said in an MSNBC interview (source can be found in Carreon post on The Oatmeal) that he wants to:

1. Shut down the donations
2. Sue The Oatmeal.
3. Sue Indiegogo, the fundraiser site, merely for hosting Matt’s fundraiser.
4. Sue THE AMERICAN CANCER SOCIETY.
5. Sue THE NATIONAL WILDLIFE FEDERATION.

Naturally, when you want to shut down a funny website with all creator-generated content, shut down a fundraiser website, shut down a charity donation and sue two very worthy and well-known charities, you’re going to get hit right in the face with a big ol’ shitstorm. People have been harassing Carreon, which was not Mr. Inman’s intention, clearly, and is really not Matt’s fault at all. Carreon could argue that if Matt had never brought the Funnyjunk matter to the public eye, it wouldn’t have come to that. Then again, Funnyjunk clearly lied to its users in the hopes that THEY would attack MATT and “rally the troops” to Funnyjunk’s defense. Which seems to me like a lie with malicious intent and intent to gain more business using The Oatmeal’s name. Funnily enough, Carreon now intends to sue The Oatmeal on his own behalf, representing himself. WUT. He also claims that the artistic rendering of Funnyjunk’s admins’ mother and her bear lover was actually Carreon’s mother and a different bear lover. WUT. LAWYER, Y U NO KNOW HOW TO READ??

Matt Inman’s lawyer sends a letter to Charles Carreon:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/96850920/FunnyJunk-The-Oatmeal-Response
Just read it. It’s simply written and clear, not in a bunch of legal vocabulary you’d need a law textbook to understand, and gets right to the point: if Funnyjunk or Carreon even have cases, they’re not very solid and neither can reasonably expect a judge or jury to rule in their favor. “To be clear,” reads one of the last lines of this letter, “The Oatmeal will not cave to Funnyjunk’s attempts to censor him through legal threats and bullying.” Carreon, as so many of the blog posts, articles and letters linked therein show, appears to want to censor things he doesn’t like on the internet. However, the things he and his wife post defaming public figures - and that, more importantly, are just gross and not interesting or funny in the least, which is the worst part of their poor attempt at satire and “art” - seem to be a-okay in his mind. Hey, Carreon, you seem to be a smart guy, being a lawyer and all: can you define the word “hypocrite” for me? Thanks.

If you’re interested in the actual legality of the case (because trust me, I should NOT be your go-to person regarding legal information), follow the links I’ve posted and continue reading from there the links posted on each of those pages. Actual lawyers and law students have discussed this case, and make it very clear and interesting without a lot of “legalese,” as the writer of the article on Popehat.com calls it when writing about this case. (Link in the last The Oatmeal blog post I linked to.) And these people are also ready to rally to help the defendants (The Oatmeal, Indiegogo, The American Cancer Society, The National Wildlife Federation, and whoever else Carreon is trying to get money from these days) so that the charities involved do not have to spend their own funds on lawyers and legal fees.

As Matt Inman and all of his supporters have stated, please DO NOT HARASS OR CONTACT CHARLES CARREON OR FUNNYJUNK. Harassing, hacking, attacking or otherwise contacting these people will do more harm than good. That is, if you agree that Matt, Indiegogo, The American Cancer Society and The National Wildlife Federation are the innocent parties in this civil suit. This post was made to draw attention to what I think is an irresponsible use of our court system for personal and monetary gain. The above is as factual as possible, with my own opinions thrown in, as well as the source materials (or citations of my sources) when it comes to the facts of the case and the words of the writers of all articles and letters involved. This post is intended to educate and basically light a fire under our asses to jump up and support the victims, not to incite anger or attacks against anyone referred to in a negative light in this post.

The victims and the acts against them:

• The Oatmeal: copyright infringement; theft of intellectual property; libel claiming that he attacked Funnyjunk, written in an attempt to take business away from The Oatmeal and draw it to Funnyjunk; an unnecessary lawsuit; another unnecessary lawsuit, this time with innocent parties dragged into it.
• Indiegogo: an unnecessary lawsuit and an attempt to shut down one of their many fundraisers, despite the fact that this one has good intentions.
• The American Cancer Society: an unnecessary lawsuit. Both charities will now be forced to use funding to lawyer up and defend themselves in this case.
• The National Wildlife Federation: an unnecessary lawsuit. Being the beneficiary of the donations should not make them sue-able, any more than an individual with cancer would have been had Matt decided to donate all the proceeds to that person without having ever met him or her.

This is a frivolous lawsuit attempting to get wads of cash for Funnyjunk and, more importantly, their lawyer, and also seems to be intended to draw negative attention to all the above victims.

Please support Matt Inman and The Oatmeal, as well as Indiegogo and - most importantly - the innocent charities that have been dragged into this, The American Cancer Society and The National Wildlife Federation.

(Please note that the summaries following each link are my explanations of what is said on each page, followed by some of my opinion. The Oatmeal, Indiegogo, The American Cancer Society and The National Wildlife Federation are not responsible for or in any way tied to this blog or its writer. I, theycallmecheeze, claim all responsibility for negative repercussions of this post.)

Remember the post on lucid dreaming? I found my old dream journal from high school. I’m reading through it for the first time in years, and I find it interesting and weird how much we had to personalize this for the assignment. Or maybe I just went a little overboard…

Front cover:
An anime-like self-portrait.
A Sharpie rainbow in the 7 of “70 sheets”.
A random sticker that says “omG!”
One of my bead lizards woven into the spine.
Duct tape covering up the name of the previous class that notebook had been used for.

Inside front cover:
My four favorite colors at the time done in Sharpie: red, orange, blue, black.
A photo of Gerard Way (this was about a month after “The Black Parade” came out, I think, so he had white hair) followed by “= <3”.
Photos of my two best friends at the time, each with half of a “best friends” sticker next to them, and the note, “We are the Three Musketeers.”
A list of my family members with a little note saying, “family pic?” (I guess I forgot one of my pictures. Oops. That must be the entirety of the reason why I only got a 93 on the assignment.)
A sad vampire smiley in lime green Sharpie that says “you make vamp smiley SAD.”
A very bad drawing of the logo I designed for a band in a fiction novel I had started writing in February of that year (2006).
Two photos of my room, followed by a caption saying, “Yeah, my room is orange. Wanna fight about it?”
The saying, “Silence is golden, but duct tape is silver,” written in fuchsia Sharpie.
An emotionless :-P smiley. (Not emoticon, but actual smiley.)
A happy vampire smiley.
A fortune cookie reading “Only you can decide what is important to you.” Next to it is written, “I’ve had this fortune saved for over 2 years. I don’t know why.”
A photo of me and three friends who were all in History Club plays together before they graduated (a year ahead of me).
For some reason, the chorus of ABBA’s “Waterloo” is in the corner.

Inside back cover:
All of these are various quotes. I even cited my sources, for most of them. I’m leaving in any bad grammar, spelling mistakes, notes and censoring.
~”I reject your reality and substitute my own.” - Adam Savage (“Mythbusters” host)
~”Look at me with my pretty bracelet and tiara… I’m a f—-in’ princess!” - Gerard Way (My Chemical Romance’s lead singer)
~”We are The Black Parade, and so are you.” - Mikey Way, My Chemical Romance
~”I am not afraid to keep on living. I am not afraid to walk this world alone. Honey if you stay, I’ll be forgiven. Nothing you can say can stop me going home.” - “Famous Last Words”, My Chemical Romance
~”They say all teenagers scare the living s—- outta me. They could care less as long as someone will bleed. So darken your clothes or strike a violent pose. Maybe they’ll leave you alone, but not me.” - “Teenagers”, My Chemical Romance
~ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US.
~”Cool, we get to torture yogurt.” - Terry, “Mythbusters”
~”The world is a less violent place when people are using Hula Hoops.” - Mikey Way (My Chemical Romance’s bass player)
~”All my philosophies on life are things said by rockstars.” - Me (joking when I said this)
~”Lady, when you lose your ability to laugh, you lose your ability to think straight.” - Henry Drummond, Inherit the Wind
~”You’ve only had to run so far, so good. But you will come to a place where the only thing you feel are loaded guns in your face, and you’ll have to deal with pressure.” - “Pressure”, Billy Joel
~”I wouldn’t say Jamie’s an evil genius. I’m not sure he’s evil, and I don’t think he’s a genius.” - Adam Savage, “Mythbusters”
~”A light to burn all the empires, so bright the sun is ashamed to rise and be. In love with all of these vampires so you can leave like the sane, abandoned me.” - “The Sharpest Lives”, My Chemical Romance
~”I will avenge my ghost with every breath I take. I’m coming back from the dead. And I’ll take you home with me. I’m taking back the life you stole.” - “It’s Not A Fashion Statement, It’s A F—-ing Deathwish”, My Chemical Romance
~”Do or die, you’ll never make me, because the world will never take my heart. Go and try, you’ll never break me. We want it all, we wanna play this part. I won’t explain or say I’m sorry. I’m unashamed: I’m gonna show my scar. Give a cheer for all the broken. Listen here, because it’s who we are. I’m just a man, I’m not a hero. I’m just a boy who had to sing this song. I’m just a man, I’m not a hero. I - - DON’T - - CARE!” - “Welcome to the Black Parade”, My Chemical Romance
~”There is nothing more important than monkeys.” - Me
~”you’re just a sad song, with nothing to say, about a lifelong wait for a hospital stay. And if you think that I’m wrong, this never meant nothing to you.” - “Disenchanted,” My Chemical Romance
~”I see you lying next to me, with words I thought I’d never speak. Awake and unafraid. Asleep or dead…” - “Famous Last Words”, My Chemical Romance

Back cover:
My Chemical Romance’s name/logo around the time “The Black Parade” came out, done by me in red and black Sharpie.
Photo of all of My Chemical Romance.
An arrow pointing to the lizard on the spine, and a note saying “check out this lizard I made. Making stuff from beads calms me.”

(I may post photos of the front and back covers later. I will not be posting the inside front cover, as it has photographs of myself and people who would probably not want their photos on the internet. And the two best friends at the time are not people I want to be associated with, on the internet or otherwise.)

Looking back, there is no use denying it: everyone is fucking weird at the age of sixteen, no matter how cool or interesting we thought we were. (Or are, for those of you who are still sixteen.) For a certain period of our teenagers years, we all think duct tape and Sharpies are the coolest invention since the electric guitar, our favorite musicians are living gods, and anything that makes us sound like we’re cool or different is our personal philosophy for the day.

Lord, am I glad THAT phase is over… 

In all seriousness, I actually am genuinely worried about what is going to happen this December.

I don’t believe any of that “the Mayan calendar ends in December, so the world must be ending in December!” bullshit.

What scares me is that there are enough people out there who genuinely believe that the world will end, and will act like it.

Y2K was bad enough, with crazy rednecks and perfectly sane people alike stocking up on gasoline, bottled water, canned foods, and some people even stockpiling weapons. All because we assumed our computers - the worst of which are actually smarter than the vast majority of humans now - would not be able to recognize that the last two digits of the year changing meant that the rest of the year would change. (i. e. 1999 to 1900, as opposed to 1999 to 2000)

But now an ancient - and do I even need to mention long-dead? - civilization apparently holds the key to all knowledge of the future because they made a calendar. I made a boondoggle, so I must hold the key to all knowledge of weaving for future civilizations.

I’m not even going to cite sources or go into deal about the fact that everything I’ve read on the subject says that the calendar was made at such a time that it didn’t take into account things like leap years, so the year 2013 - according to this calendar - would have been a few years ago. Meaning that the end of the world either never happened, or we weren’t paying attention when it did. The world is not a Nintendo: no one’s going to suddenly trip over the power cord and blip this game out of existence.

Some people genuinely believed the Rapture was going to happen last year. And some people genuinely believed it the second time it was supposed to happen last year. People acted like it.

I guarantee you some people will start selling off their property to blow everything away and enjoy what they believe will be their last few wekks on this planet, only to wake up on December 22nd, homeless, jobless, penniless and miserable.

What scares me even more, though, is the mob mentality. Riots, destruction, general mayhem. Mass conversion to various religions by people who haven’t been to church their entire lives, hoping their soul will be saved, at least. Fear, panic. Physical and psychological damage comparable to the worst terrorist attacks around the world, but happening all within a few months or weeks.

All because of a calendar.

I hope that those of you who read this, at least, are the sane types who realize that the world is not very likely to suddenly implode or burst into flames because of an arbitrary date chosen by men who still committed human sacrifices to please gods no one believes in anymore. (Or at least are so addicted to the internet that you’d spend December holed up with a wifi connection and a case of Red Bull to wait it out.) (ALSO, if you think Monster tastes better than anything other than battery acid, get the fuck off of my Tumblr right now.)

I fully expect to wake up Christmas morning, enjoy Marble Hornets season 3 (if the DVDs are out then… hint hint Troy, Joseph, hurry up…), and spend New Year’s Eve at a big ol’ party and count down to midnight.

I’ll be around for all of 2012, folks, and I expect to see you for all of 2013, too.

Unless I get bitten by a zombie. In which case, I wish you the best of luck. 

When I was in eleventh grade, I took a very basic Psychology course for one semester. We didn’t delve deeply into any subject, or even into the works of famous psychologists. (Although memorizing Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and Pavlov’s experiments early on helped me ace my first two years of Psych courses in college.) Most of the time, we would end up watching movies. However, there was one assignment and course of study that lasted the entire semester.

We were told to keep a dream journal. That is, we would wake up, and immediately write down all the details from our dreams that we could remember. As the weeks went by, all of us improved our memories and analysis of our dreams quite a bit.

The only problem with dream analysis is that the subconscious is a really fucked up place to be. So despite having tons of books that explained the meanings behind symbols in dreams, as well as the hundreds of websites that are available on the subject, you always have to use your own judgment to decide whether the giant spider in your dream really does represent your relationship with your mother, or if it simply there because you are terrified of one day finding a three-foot spider in your house. (Yes, one of the sources I checked said that spiders in dreams represent the dreamer’s relationship with his/her mother or another strong female presence in their life.)

While dream analysis is tricky, and does require a little bit of knowledge about the person dreaming the dream and the symbolism, lucid dreaming is something that everyone can do with practice.

How to Lucid Dream
Before you start trying to lucid dream, it’s important that you at least know what it is. Have you ever, while still sleeping and dreaming, become aware that everything around you is in a dream? Keeping in mind that everything was in your mind, did you then start to control the actions and/or environments in the dream? If so, you have had lucid dreams before.

Lucid dreaming is not something that we tend to do every night. Before I took this class, I can remember a very small handful of lucid dreams in my entire life. But by following these steps that worked for me and nearly everyone I have talked to on the subject, I believe anyone can lucid dream.

Step One: Keep a Dream Journal
This can be any kind of notebook or pad of paper that you can keep beside your bed or wherever you sleep. (My eleventh grade teacher made us decorate ours, but that’s not a requirement. Just make sure to keep the same journal with you until it’s full and needs to be replaced.) When you wake up, make sure that the first thing you do is grab the journal and start writing down all the details you can remember from the dream. This step is hard and takes some getting used to, as most of us don’t remember our dreams after we wake up. Don’t force it, and don’t start making up details. You will just end up tricking yourself. Remember that this takes patience and practice.
Your first few days are likely to have little to no detail, which is typical. Over time, you will be able to remember more detail.

Step Two: Become Aware of the Dream
Once you’ve recorded a number of your dreams, and have gotten a lot of details down, it is easier to notice that you are dreaming and not stuck in the real world facing a horde of real zombies. You will probably notice patterns in the environment and among the behavior of the people around you. Here are a few of my “this is definitely a dream” signs:

1. The sun is in the east even though it is supposed to be well into the afternoon.
2. I am very familiar with a city or building I have never been in.
3. I am very familiar with people I have never met, or have never seen before.
4. I do not remember how I got from one location to another. (I once was in an attic that looked more like a cave, after just recently being in a house.)
5. The people I know in real life behave in ways they have never behaved in real life. (I had a dream in which my mother would not stop screaming at me for no reason, something she has not done before in reality.)
6. People have impossible abilities or technologies. (E. g. flying at will; sci-fi movie laser guns; a technophobe hacking into a highly secure government database; etc.)
7. Clothes and objects appearing out of nowhere.
8. I tend never to be hungry in dreams. (However, sometimes I DO need to use the bathroom in dreams. This can be a problem for some, as I’m sure some people have relieved themselves in dreams and quite literally shit the bed.)

These are my signs, and some of them may be good signs for everyone to keep an eye out for. When you record your dream journal, take note of any bizarre things or behaviors, particularly those that are recurring from dream to dream.

Step Three: Taking Action
Once you start noticing the bizarre objects and behaviors while you are still dreaming, you can take action. For a lot of people (myself included), this can be the most difficult part. It requires a sturdy belief that everything you’re seeing and interacting with really is all in your subconscious, and then confidence that it is under your control. It cannot hurt you. No, it is not true that “if you die in a dream, you die in real life.” This isn’t the Matrix. I have died in many of my dreams, and I’m still here. I’ve sustained horrifically painful injuries in dreams, and I don’t wake up with a leg full of compound fractures. You MUST believe that what is trying to kill you, what is chasing you, what you are faced with, cannot hurt you.

Make sure, first, that you have noticed multiple signs that this is a dream! You don’t want to wake up and see that your clock says it’s six in the morning, while the sun is high in the sky, and automatically assume it’s a dream. Look for more than one sign. This example - if there are NO OTHER SIGNS THAT THIS IS A DREAM - could be explained by a power outage in the night and a clock resetting. Pay close attention to details, especially when it comes to how you get from room to room and the every day things you do. If you go through the tedious, everyday actions of a Monday in your dream, it probably is a normal, waking Monday. You don’t want to assume it’s a dream based on one sign and then go to work in your underwear with a loaded Super Soaker under one arm, and get fired.

I have had a number of dreams in which I have taken control. When I take control of a dream, I mime an object that I want to have, and it actually seems to be there. Here are two examples:

1. In this dream, I had been kidnapped from in front of my house, from my car. (This was the first sign that this was a dream, because I did not drive or even have a learner’s permit when I dreamed this.) I was taken across town, expecting to be raped and murdered. I was taken to my old elementary school (which had an interior exactly like my old middle school, sign numero dos that this was a dream), and took my first opportunity to escape. I started running all the way through town, through neighborhoods I had never been in (sign number three). It was suddenly sunny, with the sky in the east despite it being sometime in the evening, based on how much time had passed (sign number four). I was exhausted from running and my legs were like lead. Annoyed, I sat back on my legs, mimed starting a car, stomped the invisible gas pedal, and drove home. I spent the rest of the dream drinking coffee in a fluffy robe and watching the birds in the feeder.
2. This dream was somewhat more urgent. I was in an apartment building I had never been in (sign number one) but that I was very familiar with (sign number two), and all the apartments were identical including the wall colors and furniture (sign number three). Zombies were breaking down the doors, but seemed more like regular people acting like zombies than like movie zombies. I knew I had nowhere to run, so I needed to start gunning down zombies. But I had no weapons. I don’t remember when I realized this was a dream, but I do remember that I cocked an invisible shotgun and started pointing it at the zombies. I even made the firing noises with my mouth, and watched the zombies go down with my unlimited ammo. When zombies stopped falling at the imaginary shotgun blasts, I developed Star Wars force powers and just knocked them down with my mind.

Step Four: Staying Asleep
Perhaps this should have been listed earlier, but this isn’t always a problem for everyone, especially once you get used to lucid dreaming. Once you realize you are dreaming, you may immediately wake up. This will happen less and less often as you will yourself to stay asleep. It does take practice, but you will most likely reach a point in which you can first tell yourself that you are dreaming, and from there decide whether you’ll wake up and end the dream, or take over the dream and make it take the course you would prefer.

In my personal experience, this can be tiring. When you sleep, you recharge your body’s batteries and give your mind a chance to sort out all the crazy bullshit you deal with every day. When you start to take control, you’re not giving your mind a rest. Often, I will wake up after a lucid dream feeling less rested than I would after even a frightening dream in which I took no control.

In general, however, lucid dreaming can be a fun and helpful experience. When you can control your dreams, you give yourself the chance to face your greatest fears without letting any harm come to you. For example, the first time I saw John Carpenter’s Halloween when I was a kid, I had a nightmare in which Michael Myers was stalking me. I was able to overcome that fear by taking control in the dream and believing that nothing could harm me. Michael Myers has never been in my dreams again, and I never found the movies truly frightening again.

Many of us have probably inadvertently had lucid dreams without even realizing, and if we remember the dreams it tends to be a memorable experience. I don’t recommend, however, attempting to lucid dream every night. Like I said, it gets tiring, and you need to give your subconscious a chance to deal with things without your conscious mind taking over, as it does in our everyday lives. Personally, when I can choose to take control of the dream, to only lucid dream when I am in a frightening or seemingly hopeless situation. I have turned many a traumatizing nightmare into a funny story by lucid dreaming.

Enjoy this educational brain regurgitation.