Is everyone wasting their time?

I'm not sure if most "normal" people feel this way, but I feel like I've lost time if I don't remember my dreams. Seeing as how most people sleep six to eight hours a night, you're pretty much sleeping a third of your life. At this point in time, I don't know how I'd handle essentially blacking out for hours at a time. I think up until I started utilizing dream recall and lucid dreaming, I wasted so much potential. I work full time as well as attend school and I used to grapple with finding recreation or "relax" time. Dreaming has helped me cope with that.


Does anyone else feel similar to this, like they've extended their lives?
Does dreaming help anyone else cope with stress?

Lately, it's been a hella stressful school year. Lucid dreaming hasvery much helped me destress more than any other activity I pursued.

Funny you brought this up, I was actually just thinking about this earlier this morning. It's so strange knowing that we spend a third of our lives asleep... and most people do nothing either productive (well, except sleep) nor satisfying during that time, and don't care either. School's on my mind and I started thinking about how I could write that into a persuasive essay; the first line being something like, "Imagine spending a good third of your life doing anything you want without consequence: fighting ninjas, flying into space, wildly speed cars, even climb the Great Wall of China or have a tea party with Abraham Lincoln. Even better, imagine if you could do all of this within the space of your bed."

More on-topic, lucid dreaming really does help for me with stress and all because it's like a form of escape: you leave reality and go into a world that you know is your own and you can doing anything you want it. I feel like more of the world should know about lucid dreaming. It truly is a phenomenal thing once you learn how to do it, there's nothing like the freedom of being able to do whatever you want, and it's definitely worth the effort in the end.

Yeah my life was hard for a few months and dreaming has been a great help. Though for some reason, I still can't dream well enough maybe because of daily stress.
I got in a fight with one of my friends, oddly enough I had a dream of us being friends again, a few weeks later we became friends again exactly how it happened in the dream. Much stress relieved.

I am so grateful that I have discovered lucid dreaming. Even just remembering my normal dreams is such a blast. I had no notion that we dream all night, every night! I had a super wild night last night with so many wacky, wild, bizarre, weird dreams that I could only hold on to a few fragments of them all, but I held the feeling that there was so much more that I wasn't remembering. I'm resovled to continue to work hard on increasing recall to get more of all this fascinating world that we enter every night!