Thread: Have you ever invoked nightmares?

Once I have more control over my dreams, it's definitely something I'd want to try, less for the scare but more to give myself a challenge. I want to try to summon a monster or some kind of scary/powerful thing and giving myself only limited power to defeat it. It sounds like a good way to practice dream control and it would be thrilling to defeat the beast itself.
However, I don't think I would try to create a full-on nightmare for myself, since in those situations I easily lose lucidity and wake myself up. Maybe if I knew I had full control over everything and could easily get myself out of a complicated situation? It's an interesting idea, though.

I tried this out once a few years ago. I'd been reading a short story where a number of characters were in a strange nightmare-world, having to face their worst fears, and I thought I'd try it out myself by incubating the worst nightmare my subconscious could conceive of. I fell asleep ready to face whatever monsters, extreme environments, and other challenges it would throw at me-- and what resulted was the most boring dream in my entire dream journal. Boring, boring, boring. I woke up twice while it was going on, but when I fell back asleep I just ended up back in the same boring dream, working alone in a hot place where nothing ever seemed to get done. A while later, I realized I might have learned something rather significant....

Oddly enough, I seem to be completely unable to invoke nightmares, or anything reasonably "scary" in the typical sense of the word for that matter.

Half of my lucid dreams are dark. Black as night. Walking around in these is dreadful; the "off" feeling, a terrible air of apprehension and suspense, is omnipresent. I'll always try to find a light area (and it has to have been lit beforehand, as light switches rarely work) but rarely do I manage to. Either way, though, the result is always the same: I never get attacked. For all the eerie atmosphere it's worth, there are no monsters of any sort lurking with me.

Sometimes I try to will such a monster into existence, just to get it over with. This too always fails. Sometimes I'll be reminded of the possibility of a LD turning into a nightmare, and will immediately try to will a monster into existence (since then it can't surprise me) but this fails as well.

In hindsight, my nightmares are likely not haunted by boogeymen but by their absence. And the absence of everything else, for that matter. The worst dreams are either the ones where I am alone and cannot find anyone (and in the "dark" dreams, finding light always means finding people as well) or I am with people, typically ones I know, that ignore me. That might be why I can't will monsters into existence in those; if my darkest fear is being alone, shoving a monster in there would contradict the point.



To put it more plainly: I've tried, and failed. The closest I got was one particular LD where staying in a certain place for too long would result in being attacked (after which you would die and "respawn" somewhat nearby), and I decided to stay in that area For Science. The first time, I was surrounded and attacked by an army of skeletons and killed (painlessly). The second time, the skeletons "teleported" to me and slew me again, also painlessly. The third time was apparently my brain telling me to get a move on, because it summoned massive, ridiculously muscular horses that trampled me while gibbering in a demonic language. Fun! But aside from that one instance, no, I haven't invoked nightmares.

I have not had a true nightmare for a long time now. Really don't want one either.

Yes, more specifically, I incubated nightmares by watching some scary movies, on the brilliant idea that since I tended to get lucid in "mild" nightmarish situation, the same would work in shock situations. I do not like being scared and do not watch horror/shock movies, but I watched almost back to back: 1408 and Insidious. Egads. All I got out of it, other than getting extremely freaked out and hung over from all the adrenaline pumping through my system, was a brief nightmare where I saw from outside my window a the figure of a person just standing there and staring at me. I instantly shocked awake, no chance for lucidity. So much for that theory!

I haven't had a nightmare in over 10 years or so. I've had plenty of dreams with content you could read and interpret as scary, but during the dream it did not scare me and in no way would i consider it a nightmare. If I could incubate one, idk if I would, but as far as have I ever? no.

I'm with you on that snoop.

I use it to get over my fears, so I like invoking nightmares once in a while. I usually only do it if there's a trusted DC around, or my DG, so they can step in if things get too overwhelming. I've got a guy named Afiel who usually knocks the hell out of things if my 'fight or flight' response starts leaning towards the flight end. I haven't seen him for a while though.

I've effectively gotten over my weird fear of grays (ya know, them aliens) that way! Now when I see them in dreams, I just walk right past them like they're no big thing.