Thread: Looking back... i realized something

Originally Posted by warock

Now that i think about this, i have always been aware i was dreaming since i was a kid.I had a nightmare almost everyday in my early child hood and whenever i did i screamed to wake myself up. But then i realized i always screamed to get away from them when i knew it was a dream.
Im not sure if i am making much sense.

Anyone else had moments like this?

Yes in early childhood as well I had a load of recurring nightmares and I used to do the same thing to try and wake myself up.

I'm quite sure many children are competent lucid dreamers. When I was a child, I used to be able to zoom out of my dream where I would be presented a display of dozens of televisions- with a different dreamscene running on each of them. I was then able to choose which dream I'd want to enter. I often used this ability to escape from nightmarish dreams.

yeah I had nightmares aswell when I was a child, but I didn't scream to awake myself. I just tried to open my eyes as wide as I could in the dream, this would usually make me open my eyes in real life.

Now that I think of it, yes. It's odd that I had so many nightmares back then, and now, I haven't had any in years. I wonder why that is?
My technique for waking myself up was yelling as loud as I could, and I would feel myself slowly rising into consciousness. However, as children, we always woke ourselves up, instead of destroying the monster (or whatever scary thing) and continuing to explore the dreamscape.

I used to always wake myself up out of dreams when they got too bad. Now I regret all of the missed lucid opportunities. I rarely have really bad dreams anymore.

Me too, I used to wake myself out of scary dreams as a kid. I still do it occasionally when I don't like the way a dream is going, I will myself to wake up. Then I have to stay awake for a few minutes because if I immediately drift back off to sleep, I'll usually reenter the same bad dream.