Thread: Has lucid dreaming helped you in real life?

I'm a very introspective person. I think about everything, all the time. This can be good for positive thinking, but bad for negative thinking. Since I'm also very nervous inside, lucid dreaming has helped me a lot with calming down, enjoy the moment (when I'm worried, I do ADA to fill my mind). Just the fact that I can lucid dream, and the person next to me in the bus does not even how to wake up inside a dream, is a great exercise I perform when my day seems to suck. How can your life be meaningless when all your experience can be used to create your own world?

I also suffer from apathy, so lucid dreaming has helped me work on that: I try to talk to my few friends about it, and I feel a bit more connected in those moments. Also it's because I really want to lucid dream that I'm able to keep a good sleeping schedule, since I had before many troubles falling asleep (due overthinking). I'm also much more social: a year ago, I would stay at home reading/at pc, but now every social invite is a change to practice ADA/critical state testing in any place I visit.

Not to mention I started giving way more importance to world details and sensations. I think I'm actually living right now paying attention to the world around me

I know books like telling us how we can do stuff in our lucid dreams to overcome issues and practice skills for RL. I think I am only now getting to the level where I can see the possibility of this. It's not really a good incentive for starting out with as these are really complex things to do for someone who only has occasional LDs with minimal control. It has however helped me very much in the ways zoth00 said. I feel I have this special place I can go and this skill that other people are oblivious too. When I don't feel I measure up to people's RL accomplishments, I remind myself I can LD It has also been something of a lifeline in the bleakness of apathy.

Well lucid dreaming inspired me to get my 8 hours of sleep every night. Which not only gets me more REM sleep, but it makes me feel better in the morning. And since I'm going through puberty at the moment I have to get my sleep so I can grow taller.

Also I stopped playing that many video games. Now that I have 3-5 lucid dreams every week and since I've learned how to change the dream scene and summon more items, I have all the entertainment I need ;o

The essence of lucidity is self-awareness, and to a degree it has helped me find it in waking life.

nope.avi

Lucid Dreaming has definitely helped me in my real life, but not exactly in the ways you normally hear people talking about. I haven't stopped having nightmares or solved waking life problems or things like that, but now that I've learned to LD I handle those things differently, and in a better way. When I have a nightmare, I now know how to explore it to discover its source rather than try to just shove it aside (nightmares always have their roots in real life issues). And when I have a real life problem I need to solve, lucid dreaming has helped me pull back from it for a while and just unwind so that I can better deal with it in the morning, and also to get my mind in 'creativity mode' so that it's easier. In fact, creativity in general is just a life-enriching thing to possess...and where better to find creativity than in dreams?

It seems to have helped me with my memory and awareness. I am much more perceptive than I used to be, something I believe I learned while LDing, and remember small details, another thing I do in dreams.

Recently, I went through a hard breakup, but LDing helped me heal and let go of all the bad feelings I had surrounding the situation. There have been a lot of other times like that where dreaming has helped me through anxiety or depression about something IWL.

Ld's have helped me become an all around more centered, enthusiastic person. Although I think it happened in a very indirect way.

I did not become better at some specific skill directly because of dreams. But I had dreams where I was able to ignore or laugh at something that was troubling me and this gave me less fear in real life and a greater ability to enjoy things I really love instead of doing something I don't enjoy just because its expected.

I still wonder though, whether LD is something to approach as if it were useless. What I mean by this is that I am often more successful with LD's if I focus on them just for their own sake and don't worry about how they will help me. It's like I see LD as its own reward, and I'm ok if it has no other use.

Strangely when I approach it that way, there is a change in my waking life because I am more aware of birds chirping, smells, sights and sounds of life and nature and so on. So my thought is that when I don't worry whether LD is useful, I indirectly find a use for it.

Originally Posted by Olysseus

I am often more successful with LD's if I focus on them just for their own sake and don't worry about how they will help me. It's like I see LD as its own reward, and I'm ok if it has no other use.

Strangely when I approach it that way, there is a change in my waking life because I am more aware of birds chirping, smells, sights and sounds of life and nature and so on. So my thought is that when I don't worry whether LD is useful, I indirectly find a use for it.

Exactly this.

I didn't seek out lucid dreaming for self-improvement; I was just interested in learning about dreams and fascinated with the concept of being able to use them to go to amazing places and do amazing things. Yet, self-improvement has been an indirect result of that multiple times.

If we analyse it, lucid dreaming gives very useful rewards even if you don't seek them:

- It gives you joy for the experience;
- Sense of accomplishment for having them;
- It strengthens your will, because you can hardly have a lucid dream without working hard on focusing your mind to make it happen
- It makes you more aware due your natural sense of observation without accepting everything that reaches your mind (distance gives perspective).
- It relieves your stress, because at some point, you know that you have that small corner of world that just belongs to you.

And all these advantages are there just from the practice. As people like Naiya reported, lucid dreams themselves can help you way more than the simple objective of having them

Originally Posted by diamondrust

Has anyone overcome real life obstacles by overcoming them in LD? For example, things like anxiety, creativity, depression, confidence, etc. I was wondering besides it being fun, what other benefits people have gained from lucid dreaming.

Well lucid dreaming has indirectly helped me improve my perspective of other people and my outlook on life. Many dreams I have that change how I look at things are not lucid dreams though. But because I lucid dream I can recall these life changing dreams. So in that way lucid dreaming has helped me.

Mostly I've become a more caring, loving, and accepting person.

It helped me feel like a wizard.

In my LDs I do just about anything I want, even though I still can't induce them willingly, I do enjoy the moment. I also tend to be highly violent because it's one of the few times in life I know I can do anything I want without consequences. At times it does help me relieve tension, other times it annoys me cause I don't wanna wake up. I hasn't really helped me in terms of waking life skills, but my LD skills are improving. For instance years ago I could only hover a few inches off the ground and float very slowly. Now I can outright fly, and hover and or run at incredible speeds