Thread: Ptsd, Nightmares, And Lucid Dreaming

I'm a natural lucid dreamer. I also have post-traumatic stress syndrome.

My particular case of PTSD stems from about eight years of being terrorized by my stepfathers (two of 'em). It's not bad, as PTSD goes; it causes hypervigilance (I'm always checking to make sure I'm safe), very light sleep (from when I was a kid, and wasn't safe even while asleep), and nightmares. As the years pass, it's slowly fading; and I think I sometime during the next 3-4 years they will tell me I no longer have PTSD. I'm wonderfully glad I don't get panic attacks; I had a few, early on, and they're miserable things.

In any case, the main thing I'm interested in are the nightmares, the light sleep, and the fact that I'm a natural lucid dreamer, and how those might be connected.

My first memory of a lucid dream (or any dream that I can still recount to this day) is from age 9. That's also the age I was when my mom married the first of those two stepfathers. It was a dream about a tornado, a mild nightmare in which I had a brief lucid moment.

Over the years, I've had quite a few nightmares that turned into lucid dreams. Sometimes, the fear stayed; sometimes, it went away. In most cases, I was able to control the dream slightly or more completely, or at the very least wake myself up.

My non-lucid nightmares have changed, too. Now, most of the time, I'm no longer immobilized or helpless; many times, I fight whatever monster or situation is frightening me or investigate whatever puzzle I can't seem to solve; sometimes, I even win. The chief problem now with non-lucid nightmares those with predominating sadness rather than fear.

So:

Did my nightmares force me to learn lucid dreaming? Or is it because I sleep lightly that I have lucid dreams, and thus can alleviate my nightmares?

Is the increasing control during my non-lucid nightmares due to my lucid dreaming experience, or is it because I'm getting over what happened to me when I was a kid?