Who is MercuryLime?

Although I may write an autobiography later, I just wanted to explain my current web presence.

I have a Xanga. It's my personal blog, and I use it to communicate with my friends.
I have a Facebook account. Facebook is kinda of like a real-time yearbook, and you can leave comments and do all sorts of cool stuff. It's for high school and college kids.
I have MySpace. - another blog-type thing. I'm signed up, but I don't use it very often.
I have GMail. That's the email I use.
I run www.lousygames.com - It's my video game portfolio site.
I run www.mercurylime.net (or.com) - Although it's currently not doing anything, in the future I'll use it as my biography site, with links to all my websites and archives and a history section, that sort of thing.
I run www.nexblast.com - My music site. In the future, it will be used to showcase my music and perhaps offer my services.
I am a member of the forums at forums.xgenstudios.com - I post there occasionally because I like the people in the community, and it's where I've spent a bit of my free time the past two years.
I am a member of PsiPog. Always a fun read.

That's it for now. The better version of this will someday be on www.mercurylime.net

Thanks for stopping by!

And a minor update on lucid dreaming... Didn't have one last night. Or if I did, I don't remember it. I'll try again tonight.

Lucid Dreaming

Steve Pavlina recently released a podcast on lucid dreaming. Actually, he only did the intro. His wife was the main speaker.

I've never personally had success with lucid dreaming. I remember once, several years ago, when my dad told me about lucid dreaming for the first time. I was so excited and determined to have one, that I spent maybe 10 minutes telling myself "this is a dream" before I fell asleep. That was my dad's recommendation to become lucid during the dream. Amazingly, it worked. That night, while I was obeying the mysterious orders of a floating rock statue (a gigantic tiki face) on a snowy mountain, I realized - this is a dream! I don't remember what I did after that, but I think I fought the gigantic tiki statue and then went exploring. (I've heard several stories of people becoming lucid in their dreams for the first time, and they're all very interesting - almost more interesting than real life.)

Anyway, I was overjoyed with my immediate success with it, and decided to keep doing it often. Unfortunately, for some reason, I slowly lost my ability to have lucid dreams. I think it was because the shock wore off. I vividly recall the dream where I first flew. I was on some sort of peninsula - it was grassy with palm trees, and some houses. There was also a weird kind-of pit or weird shaped hills where there were lots of palm trees. Once I realized I was lucid, I was able to fly out over the water and do all sorts of cool stuff. In a different dream, I was in the backyard of my old house - I don't think I was fully lucid (I didn't feel myself), but I DID realize that I was in a dream. I jumped off of the slide in my backyard (I was young at the time) and broke my arm. It didn't hurt! I was in a dream, of course.

Writing about them actually brings back more memories. I remember one time, my friend broke his arm, and then in my dream, his arm was still broken (it was in an old-west cowboy town). This worried me at the time. And actually, that brings me to something else from long ago. When I was only a toddler, I remember I had one amazingly lucid dream. I was in the desert, and there were some very oddly shaped dunes everywhere - they started round, and slowly became a flat-topped square about 6 inches wide. I was tired, and so I sat on one. Suddenly it started gaining in height and I had to fall off into the sand quickly to avoid being too high. Then I realized that there were huge, black, holes in the ground - holes that led off into perfect darkness. Minutes later, I accidentally sat on one of the weird sand pillars, and it shot upward. By the time I realized it, it was too late to jump. I got higher and higher and saw that the desert and holes went out forever. There was a large hole growing by the pillar I was on. I gave up, and jumped, and fell through the hole. At the same time, I woke up, bouncing on my bed (like I had fallen through the ceiling). The rest of the day was uneventful - all I remember was playing with my toy train, and seeing my mom.

I've gotten totally off-topic, but I've always wanted to right down that memory. Back to lucid dreaming: I've decided to start doing it again. It'll be fun to see how much grander my dreams will be now that I'm older. I plan to make full use of the fact that I'm dreaming, by using extreme psychic powers and awesome environments (rain forest, volcano, etc.) where I'll fight epic battles. I may get bored of that pretty quickly, but I definately want to try it out.

Steve's wife suggests an exercise to help you dream lucidly, and also recommends you start remembering (and writing down) your dreams. This might be a problem for me - it's been a long time since I've remembered my dreams - now I only remember them once every few weeks.

I think that there are several hidden meanings in dreams, and it'll be great to not actually *lose* all those hours every night. Who knows? I think it'll be fun.

I highly suggest you listen to the podcast, and try lucid dreaming. If you do, share with me your results.

I think I had a point in writing this, but it got lost somewhere. Still, I hope you found this helpful. You can here Steve Pavlina's podcast at http://www.stevepavlina.com/podcasts/Pavlina-010-Lucid-Dreaming.mp3 , or you can read some background info for the podcast at http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/01/stevepavlinacom-podcast-010-lucid-dreaming/ .