Thread: Dream meaning?

Ok, the first one is a very standard scenario when someone is starting to explore lucidity. I don't know if you've been deliberately trying to become lucid - it seems you only just joined the site very recently. But another thing that can cause lucidity is nightmares - in fact that's often how people first experience it and learn the sorts of things that can be done when you're aware in the dream world, though often because it's nightmares they get a negative impression of it all. But for some reason many people do have dreams just like you described of some menacing figure attacking them in their bed, and of course being too weak to call out or to fight is a standard nightmare thing. In the case of a lucid or semi-lucid dream which it seems you were having, it's because your mind was receiving signals from your sleeping body, which isn't supposed to happen when you're dreaming, and of course the signals are saying "Hey - I can't move or speak!" Because in this situation, when you're frightened and trying to get away or fight and you're sending and receiving nerve impulses to your sleeping body, the messages you get back are saying that muscles don't respond properly. It's a sort of crossed wires thing, a glitch that sometimes happens when you're a little too aware in a dream. Once you understand what's happening it's no real problem, no worse really than any bad dream, and what makes it better is that you can actually realize it's only a dream and that nothing is going to happen because of it. I should also mention this is why people tend to dream a lot about being in their bed - because they've become a little too consciously aware and realized that they're sleeping now, so they dream about laying in bed.

As for the second dream - what makes you assume the headaches are from lack of sleep? I mean it definitely can cause that and I'm not saying that's not it, but sometimes it's the other way around. Sometimes there's some actual physical problem that's causing symptoms and creating bad dreams and lack of sleep etc.

Or possibly it's something that's going on in your life causing a lot of stress. That's a prime candidate for causing nightmares and accidental lucidity.

One thing that will help explain it to you is something called 'dream schema'. What it means is this - once you begin to believe something will happen in a dream that's exactly what is going to happen. Especially if you get scared, like when a nightmare begins. Dreams are built from your own moods, fears and desires etc, so there's a snowball effect - you get scared by something and that sets up a negative dream schema so it becomes a scary dream and terrible things start happening. It can carry over into other dreams too, even if you wake up in between. Your fears and moods can stick around for a while and still be there when the next dream forms, so these bad dreams have a way of going in cycles for a while.