Thread: Tell me about how your friends/family/colleagues react to your interest in Lucid Dreaming

Originally Posted by PennyRoyal

I'm not the kind of person to hide bits about myself from people. When they ask what's new I'll tell them about my new interests however odd or socially unacceptable they may be.

Good for you, man! There's little point in hiding away the things that make you happy. Let your friends know you for who you are. Life's too short to live any other way.

My 3-year-old was very interested when he overhead me telling my wife about an LD. He's even had (or seems to have had) a three or so lucid dreams himself! They've more or less stopped for the time being, but it was very cool when he would tell me about them. Wonderful, honestly.

My wife has very little interest in any of this stuff. She wants to just black out when she falls asleep. I think she wishes I were less of a sleep-freak but she tolerates it.

As I shared my interest w/ more and more friends, I've found that a bunch of my friends have pursued LD in one fashion or another. By opening up, I learned that I have five non-DreamViews friends that have tried lucid dreaming themselves (four of them successfully, and two are still active.) That was way cool to find out. When I first started out, I wasted a lot of time feeling all alone in pursuing LD. But my isolation was self-imposed!

Some people think it's strange when I mention it, but for the most part, touching on the science helps people feel comfortable that what you're talking about has a firm grounding in reality. Most are intrigued and I really enjoy talking about it now. Unfortunately, I have convinced only a very small number of people to try it themselves. Ah well.

I've found that the more fluidly I can talk about what's going on chemically and electrically w/ the dreaming brain, the more readily people accept the idea of lucid dreaming. Hey, normally this part of your brain doesn't work when you're dreaming. You switch it on and you experience the dream as if you were awake. People seem to get it when you talk about it like that. I also find that referencing the movie "Inception" is a tremendous help in bridging the gap with people that don't get what I'm talking about at first!

I stopped talking to people IRL offline, about dreams about 10 years ago. My (now ex) husband tried to convince me and everyone else that I was insane because I payed close attention to my dreams, kept a journal, and talked openly about them. People who would've cared about it are dead by now.