How I Used Lucid Dreaming to Cure Anxiety

[SuperOhm]

When I first introduced myself here, I promised I would extrapolate on this a bit. First, some background. I used to suffer from both generalized anxiety and social phobia. At one point I practically had agoraphobia. I actually would have to go to work early so that I could have time to freak out until something in me would break, at which point I would essentially have an OBE and watch my body perform my retail job while I sat safely in the back of my mind. I was pretty bad. It got worse when I realized that my lack of a personal life had gotten me to the point to where I had enough money saved up that I didn't have to work for a year. So I quit, and did just that. I couldn't go out, so I turned inward. There was much I wanted to do, but I was just too paralyzed by fear. So I turned to lucid dreaming, a hobby I had cultivated for years. In my sleep, I could go anywhere, do anything, be anyone. I was as free as could possibly be imagined. The problem was that when I woke up, I was faced with the reality of a bank account quickly approaching zero and anxiety so terrible that I couldn't even talk to people on the phone, let alone call back for a job interview. The only social activity I could muster was a local philosophy meetup, which I managed because a good friend, around whom I felt perfectly safe, would take me. At some point I began to think more about the nature of the mind, the nature of human consciousness, and the nature of human experience. Eventually I would have an epiphany. I can control my dreams, because everything which happens in the dream world happens inside my mind, and I can control what happens inside my own mind. If this is true when I'm asleep, the same should be true while I'm awake! In fact, our experiences are all dreams. When I'm asleep, they're informed by internal states and cycles. While I'm awake, they're informed by all of those as well as my senses. I might not be able to control that incoming sense data, but I can control my experience of it. Then I dove head first into researching this in my lucid dreams. By day, I would cook up experiments to perform. By night, I would test them in my sleep. I decided that if I wanted to test something, I should try to fix my phone anxiety first. I needed a job after all. The first principle I had discovered was that expectations and preparations color our experiences. That which we expect, that which we prepare for, tends to be what we will experience. It's not that we summon such things, it's mostly that we're primed for them. In any case, I sorted out that my phone anxiety came from the expectation of negative social scrutiny. So, what dream better symbolizes this than the classic "naked at school" dream? Yep! That night, I became lucid, went to school, and stripped naked. After trying several different things, I managed to discover that complimenting people made them stop making fun of me. It wasn't even just compliments either. If I scrutinized them at all, they could not also play the role of the scrutinizer. It seemed like those roles were not just polar opposites, they were necessary exclusive polar opposites. That is, each needed the other to exist and yet the role could not be experienced at the same time in one person. So, I tested it. The next time I got a phone interview, I applied what I had discovered. I went from being so paralyzed by anxiety that it took me four days of procrastination followed by three hours of yelling at myself before I could call someone back, and then bomb the interview, to being able to read about a company for half an hour (scrutinizing them), call them immediately, and nail the interview. In a week, I had a job. In a month, my anxiety was what I would consider manageable, and now two and a half years later people don't believe that I ever had anxiety. That's how much this has changed me. I'm simply not the same person I was back then. There's a lot more to it than just this. I have spent many nights since then using lucid dreams to explore the nature of human consciousness, and then applying what I've learned to my waking life. To me, lucid dreaming didn't just change my life, it saved my life. It is literally the most powerful tool available to us for personal development. If you remember only one thing about this story of mine, remember this: You have control over your own experiences. After all, it's all happening in YOUR mind. Now, I have to admit that I'm here with a purpose. I read dream journals like others read scientific journals. I use them to gain as much understanding as I can about the structure and nature of human experience. From the beginning, I have had a motive. I want to continue to help myself become the person I want to be. I also want to save my sister, who has worse anxiety than I ever have. After that, I want to save everyone else. If this stuff could change me so drastically in such a short period of time, then it can change anyone. It can change the world.

[Blackhammer]

Thanks for sharing your experience, I never looked at waking life that way you described it. This was a very interesting story to read.

[skiesAffinity]

oh my gosh im so proud of you.. i hope i can do the same too thanks for sharing your experience download.jpg

[EclecticElectric]

Wow!🙊 I just love your conception of designing a dream experiment to analyze a social problem, such as being naked at school. And wow, it worked so well! What were some of the other experiments that you performed while asleep to help you learn more about life/people behaviors/your anxiety? I love picturing waking life as a dream. Just thinking about it makes me notice my surroundings/thoughts more and feel meditative. One time, I awoke straight from a lucid dream into an awake "lucid" dream mode, and it was great!

[JoannaB]

Congratulations! This is indeed an inspiring story. I kind of knew about the power of lucid dreaming because I always suspected that a large part of the reason why I changed twenty years ago from a conservative closed minded youth to a liberal open-minded adult was due to lucid dream practice. Although in my case I think it was mostly due to the waking life parts of the preparation for lucid dreaming: I became more self-aware because I wanted to lucid dream, and when I analyzed myself, I didn't like what I saw, so I changed. Yes, I agree lucid dreaming can be a powerful tool for changing one's personality so drastically that it is almost like one is a different person before and after. I have now returned to lucid dreaming after twenty years, and part of my goal is to try to overcome periodic reoccurring depression.

[SuperOhm]

If I can help anyone else out with these tools, I'll do the best I can. I've actually considered writing up a little ebook about the process. I'll be honest, if I could help people through lucid dreaming for a living, that would be the best thing ever. Other experiments I've performed? Well, there's one I want to get repeated here about the way language affects dreams. I have found that our minds don't work well with negatives or tense... or rather, that we're not using negation and tense to good effect. For example, if someone told you that you were not an idiot, would you think they were being sarcastic? Actually, I never thought about that. I wonder if ignoring negation is something we learn in response to sarcasm. This would be interesting to test with those whose first language lacked a culture of sarcasm, such as Japanese. As for tense, I found that if you place something in the past, or future, then it's just not going to happen. Present participle is hit or miss, and relies on whether or not the thing happening is a state or a change of state. "You are running" works just fine, but "you're turning into a mouse" does not. I sorted this out with a series of combat dreams wherein I tried to turn my opponent into a pillar of sand (among other things). "You're not going to fight me" had no effect. "You were sand" nothing. "You are turning into sand" nothing. "You will be sand" nothing. "You are sand" and it was as if it were always the case. It seemed like little more than simple predication (a is b) would work reliably. This informs the way I structure mantras, both when I'm heading off to lucid dreams, and when I'm doing affirmations when I'm awake. I tested it again in another dream where I encountered a giant monster. "The monster is a buffalo" and it was as if it were always the case. But it was still trying to attack me. "The buffalo is friendly" and it was as if it were always the case. His eyes were no longer glowing red either. "The buffalo lets me ride him" and there we were galloping across the plains. "The buffalo flies" and there we were soaring across the sky. "We fly to the moon" it was a surprisingly short trip. "The buffalo is sleepy" and I tucked him in with a blanket of regolith (moon dust), before exploring the moon. Considering how useful mantras can be, I was stoked to discover they could be structured certain ways to better effect. Depression is something I would like to tackle as well. Here recently, my anxiety has been almost completely under control, but I've been wracked with increasingly deep depression. I read somewhere that depression can be treated with acts of kindness and selflessness. So (literally last night) I set out as my goal to do a mass healing. I've specifically constructed conduits to certain concepts, one of which is healing. I use this to heal my own wounds, give myself fast healing, heal others, and even as part of reviving the dead (all in my dreams of course). I figured that if I could perform a selfless act in my dreams, such as a mass spam heal, then perhaps the symbolic action might have a real-world effect. It might also "heal" those parts of my psyche which are currently suffering. I feel better this morning than I did last night, but time will tell if this has any lasting effects. I'm also considering going out and doing something randomly selfless. The fun part is that I would need to do so without the motive of eliminating my depression. I would need to find an activity that I can lose myself in and forget my original purpose. The problem I'm having with depression is that I'm not sure where it comes from. I know that our expectations color our experiences, but what sorts of expectations are feeding into depression? I'm a bit stuck there. I don't think just negative expectations are the problem or positive thinking would be the cure. There's something deeper, an undercurrent upon which the negative expectations are floating. Perhaps I'll try to have a lucid dream where I teleport to "the root of depression" to see what it's about. I did this with the "root of experience" to discover it's cyclic structure. Perhaps depression will work the same. JoannaB, WHEN you have success in combating depression, let me know what you did. I'll make sure to post something about it in the forums WHEN I make any discoveries. Can we defeat depression? Of course we can.

[JoannaB]

My current thinking is that a key to battling depression may be a combination of increased awareness and transforming negative into more positive (both of which are also essential parts of lucid dreaming, so I suspect that lucid dream practice can be effective in battling depression). And another part is taking a more active stance.m A large part of depression is getting to a point when one is not aware enough of all the negativity, and one just passively accepts the negativity and lets it overwhelm one. At least that's what I have observed in myself. Part of it has to do with negative internal monologue, telling myself that I am too tired, that my memory is not good enough, that I am not coping - and repeating that subconsciously to myself I think has a large part in causing or sustaining depression. Last time when I pulled myself out of depression, I did it by becoming more aware, and realizing that I had been telling myself for example that I am too tired to exercise, and then I changed that to "I am too tired NOT to exercise." Also I was frustrated with my relative lack of success in lucid dreaming, and then I one morning woke up to the fact that the lucid dream practice (the waking life preparation for lucid dreaming) even when it did not result in lucid dreams was having huge positive impacts on me. By then I was already way on my way out of depression. But basically it was about a change of focus, and viewing the glass as half full instead of half empty, becoming aware that what I had perceived negatively before, I could change my perception of it to be positive instead - the same stuff interpreted more positively, resulting in a more positive experience. Even though nothing changed, but everything changed, based on how I looked at it and how I talked about it to myself.

[Shpadoinkle]

SuperOhm I very much appreciate this post you have presented as well as the wonderful feedback. I am currently going through social anxiety and some mild depression, some of which I attribute to my fear of social situations, and like others on here I am looking at lucid dream to balance/remove the anxiety I feel during my waking hours. Since I am still new to lucid dreaming but having mild to moderate anxiety sometimes I can't bring myself mentally to practice waking life preparation due to other obstructions happening in my mind. Do you have any tips about coping with anxiety and depression? JonnaB your idea of turning the negative thoughts into positive ones is something I am working on, and I think finding this resource is definitely helping me hurdle the problems I am facing. Would love feedback and thanks again for posting this topic.

[JoannaB]

For what it is worth, I wrote a tutorial brainstorming ideas of how some of the lucid dreaming techniques can be applied to self improvement: Lucid Living Tutorial - Lucid Dreaming - Dream Views - I hope that some ideas in this article will be useful to you. Also this is still very much in draft format, so if you have suggestions on how to improve this tutorial please do let me know.

[SuperOhm]

Alright, from my first post, you already see the basics. If I can control my dreams because they happen inside my mind, then I can control my experiences because they also happen in my mind. There's one more principle which goes a long way. It took me a while to realize it was sitting there right in front of me. It goes like this: If I can use my lucid dreams to learn to overcome anxiety, and I can use the same principles applied to my waking life, then I can use my experiences in waking life to learn how to overcome anxiety. That is, massive changes begin to happen when we stop thinking of stressful situations as things to be avoided, and begin thinking of them as opportunities to learn how to overcome. Does a social situation sound like it could be scary? Awesome, then I'll learn something. Essentially, practice being lucid while awake. Another thing I did, aside from all of this, was make the conscious decision to invalidate "I'm afraid" as an excuse for not doing something. That is, if I were asked if I wanted to do x, and my immediate answer was "no" then I would ask myself why I didn't want to do x. If the reason why, was that I was afraid, then that's an invalid reason. If I could find no valid reason to say no, then my answer would be, by default, yes. By doing all the decision making before hand, it made the cognitive workload quite a bit smaller. In turn, this made it easier to decide to do what would normally be a very stressful thing. JoannaB, Doing mass healing in my lucid dreams does seem to have some positive effect on my mood. I think I may try to think of other randomly selfless acts, but this one seems to be doing pretty well. Perhaps if I meditated on loving-kindness, and created a conduit to that just as I have to the various elements, healing energy and venom. That could be interesting. Oooh, neat. I'm going to be reading that article over next. In Lucid Dreaming terms, I made "feeling afraid" a dream sign such that when I am afraid, I become lucid whether I'm awake or asleep. From a lucid perspective, I am able to overcome the fear which I arrived upon through autopilot.

[EmptyBucket]

Great stuff man, This was really inspiring for someone who suffers from, I guess minor anxiety, This story shows you truly evolved and become a stronger person, and sharing this will help other become stronger people, and so on and so forth.

[SuperOhm]

If I can inspire just one person, then I think I've done a good job. Obviously, I'm doing this for myself, to free myself from my own mind, but even that is a stepping stone. I can't pull anyone else out of the muck, if I'm still stuck in it myself. Once I'm out I intend to set in motion an exponential exodus from our individual shackles. That should be interesting. JoannaB, Loved the article. I've spent a lot of time using what I learned form lucid dreams to tease out the nature of the human mind and develop tools accordingly. Basically, I've been focusing on moving the control aspects of lucid dreaming into the waking world. After reading your article, I can see that I've got it exactly backwards. I learned some interesting things this way, but I now see the usefulness of starting from lucid mindful awareness. If I start there, then instead of simply doing research while I'm asleep, and confirming the hypotheses while awake, the longer I can remain lucid while awake, the more data I can collect. More data, means more accurate hypotheses, and that means faster progress. With that being the case, I absolutely need to make a waking lucidity workbook. Considering the speed I've managed to transform without focusing on waking lucidity, once my speed increases if I don't take aim, I'll only keep running into walls.

[JoannaB]

JoannaB, Loved the article. I've spent a lot of time using what I learned form lucid dreams to tease out the nature of the human mind and develop tools accordingly. Basically, I've been focusing on moving the control aspects of lucid dreaming into the waking world. After reading your article, I can see that I've got it exactly backwards. I learned some interesting things this way, but I now see the usefulness of starting from lucid mindful awareness. If I start there, then instead of simply doing research while I'm asleep, and confirming the hypotheses while awake, the longer I can remain lucid while awake, the more data I can collect. More data, means more accurate hypotheses, and that means faster progress. With that being the case, I absolutely need to make a waking lucidity workbook. Considering the speed I've managed to transform without focusing on waking lucidity, once my speed increases if I don't take aim, I'll only keep running into walls. SuperOhm, I don"t think you got it backward. I think there are several valid approaches. If you had it backward, it would not have worked. Since it worked, it was definitely a valid approach.

[SuperOhm]

Let's put it this way: it seems to me like a more optimal approach would be to practice being lucid while being awake before attempting to practice control just as it is important for a beginner with lucid dreaming to first practice becoming lucid before they attempt to control their dreams. Now, I obviously had cultivated some degree of lucidity, or perhaps it had arisen naturally, perhaps even from my lucid dreaming practice. But then again, some people will randomly become lucid in their dreams purely by accident, and sometimes without even knowing what lucid dreaming is. With that in mind, starting from trying to become lucid and aware while awake sounds like a pretty good plan.

[Karloky]

I hope that Lucid Dreaming could also cure my anxiety and make me more social and help me in some aspects of my life too if I ever learn it but I think I am sure I will

[Astaroth]

Thank you! I need to try this, I hate this stupid anxiety.