Can Lucid Dreaming help with my mental problems?

[Derry]

Recently, my psychologist has recommended Lucid Dreaming to "talk" to my subconscious. He says that dream characters represent my subconscious and they can help with my social anxiety, Avoidant Personality disorder and my GAD (which includes traits of OCD). He says that, although he alone can treat it, that if I am able to talk to my subconscious in a dream, then I can make it easier to cure my problems. He says a lot is based on my subconscious map that, with conscious intervention, can be changed, but the best way for my conscious to do this is with Lucid Draming. I'm not entirely convinced this is possible. In a dream, can you really talk to your subconscious?

[VagalTone]

Some people say that it works if they say out loud « i want to be anxiety free » while dreaming. you can find this in Robert Waggoner's book and here http://www.dreaminglucid.com/dreamsp...20Salvesen.pdf

[Sensei]

Yep, you can do anything in a lucid dream. I would recommend summoning a DC that represents your subconscious. Welcome to DV. If you have any questions on how to induce a LD, feel free to PM me.

[Linkzelda]

Recently, my psychologist has recommended Lucid Dreaming to "talk" to my subconscious. He says that dream characters represent my subconscious and they can help with my social anxiety, Avoidant Personality disorder and my GAD (which includes traits of OCD). He says that, although he alone can treat it, that if I am able to talk to my subconscious in a dream, then I can make it easier to cure my problems. He says a lot is based on my subconscious map that, with conscious intervention, can be changed, but the best way for my conscious to do this is with Lucid Draming. I'm not entirely convinced this is possible. In a dream, can you really talk to your subconscious? There's so many directions I can give you, but here's something I think is practical. Whether or not you can literally talk to your subconscious is completely up to you to believe. It may sound far-fetched, especially since you're concerned on the practicality of doing so solving your mental problems. Just know that in the basic sense, lucid dreaming and dreaming overall starts with just the confines of your mind. People say dream characters and such are a projection of yourself to some extent to promote the concept behind the vast sets of potential personalities and behaviors the unconscious contains. You have to start being less serious on what lucid dreaming/dreaming can do for you compared to your awareness in waking life. When you're dreaming, or mostly lucid dreaming, you're in a completely different state of awareness, and you are in a more suggestible state than in waking life. Which is why if you transcend your skepticism on the efficacy of lucid dreaming to talk to your subconscious and potentially solve or moderate your social anxiety, Avoidant Personality Disorder, and other traits of OCD, you'll probably just have that same result; having a dream where nothing works. You have to realize that learning the subconscious works on your thought process and how you feel is what will show gradual signs of improvement. Whether or not the whole endeavor becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, just go with it. Take the rollercoaster and see where it gets you, maintain some skepticism, but just see the experience for yourself. If you want to talk to your subconscious, the practical way, like others have stated, is summoning a dream character or talking to someone that's already in your dream. There's many ways in how you sublimate your desire for them to be a medium to access the confines of your unconscious through the subconscious. It's really about placing faith and having the assurance that based on the totality of experiences you have and your minds amazing mechanism to create models of reality to prepare and plan for certain events to almost near-perfection is when you'll have push in the right direction. So if you're talking to your subconscious through an entity/dream character, just start small, talk as if you were speaking to your best friend. Be open about yourself, be honest about how you feel, because after all, you're in the confines of your mind, and you shouldn't feel insecure about your own mind. If you are, just know it's you, and realize that it's based on your attitude that will get you results. If you're pessimistic, you will get negative results, if you're optimistic, you will get positive results. Your thought energy will sublimate to what manifests in the dream, literally. Talk to whatever DC, and just place faith that they will be the medium for your subconscious to give you a range of solutions you can take to solve the conflict with social anxiety and other OCD traits you have to learn to moderate and control. Be specific, and whatever response you get from the dream character, keep interrogating them if you must (don't kill them of course), keep asking for more information (in a non-desperate way), use them all up, you have your subconscious at its potential when you're lucid dreaming. Save the skepticism for later, and just go by how your subconscious in this state works on suggestibility. If you show that you want to find ways to solve this problem, your mind will gradually shift accordingly to that endeavor. You can even think of that DC as your ultimate companion, someone that can be there until the end (which would bring me to talking about dream guides and such, but for your case, I won't go into detail). Ways you can create a DC for this endeavor are: - Placing faith that your subconscious will create the attributes of what a guide or someone of that specific field of expertise can do to help you out. You can just go by pure faith, and let the connection between the subconscious gathering bits of the totality of the unconscious to make the ideal dream character. - Or you can give the subconscious general notes of what you think is practical of a dream character that can help you with your anxiety and OCD traits. This is where you start interchanging with your subconscious and aiming to modify constantly as much as you want until you're content with the result. So if you find any kind of abnormalities (like how they maintain their posture to promote the sense that they're diligent and experienced) .......do so. - You don't even have to even create dream character to be a guide or expert in psychological aspects for what you're going through. You could even ask your subconscious to create what you want to be idealistically. Let your subconscious create the ideal model of who you want to be, and analyze how that specific dream character acts. If you like what you see, work towards its, and even if you're thinking it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, just keep using positive reinforcement until you know you are the person you want to be. You have to realize that lucid dreaming is the basis of having all our desires neatly organized if we want them to be. It can be the ultimate source of experimentation, but it solely depends on your consistency to believe it to be so. Of course, have healthy skepticism and always seek to apply reasoning to what's happening, but don't let it get over to you too much. There's so many things you can do with lucid dreaming, and being too skeptical about the efficacy and practicality of it will only slow down the progress you could've been riding on all the time. If you want to make a change, do some research on ways people solve their social anxiety gradually. Take some notes, try to attempt to lucid dream and reinforce what you learn and see what your subconscious has to offer. You never know, it might pick up on things you took for granted and actually help you out. I know this is wishful thinking, but don't underestimate your mind when your lucid dreaming. It's just saturated with thought energy, you literally make what you think. And if you have to work towards becoming lucid to get there, and you really WANT to make a change, it's something you'll have to fight for. You have to realize that the disorder, the social anxiety, etc. is something you're accustomed to, and to suddenly reformat how you handle it will take time, especially if what you thought before was engrained into you for years. But if you don't want to do that and go for the other options such as taking medication to treat your OCD traits and such, then by all means do so.

[OneofMany]

In a dream, can you really talk to your subconscious? Yes, there are many ways to "talk" to your subconscious, LD is one method that is a really fun way to do so. I can't add much, other than what I've found out helpful in my own journeys, and what helped transcend certain roadblocks on the way that might help.... In my LD, I wave my hand to remove all the symbology, like I have an invisible eraser and can wipe it clean in one swipe. Then I find the DC who holds the key to fixing whatever issue, by key I mean holds the memory/emotions of the trauma usually for me it's a shadow character or ghost. For you it might be to find the DC(s?) who is anxious. I go and talk to him/her/it, ask their purpose, they may show memories of their "creation", if this happens to you, it might be helpful to ask to watch a movie of the memory rather than relive it or they may show a general slide show which gives the general idea rather than poignant events. Sometimes they have a need to be filled such as being heard, to be rescued out of a memory, or let out of locked areas/confinement and befriended. For example, In working with driving anxiety, I had a child dream character caught in a burning car, brought her to a safe place, I told her she was safe, and alive. Then next LD, I saw the same DC, gave her some crayons, put her in a nice house, the panic attacks and anxiety just slowly dissipated and peace just replaced that spot. I do think it's important to learn or map out one's subconscious, by dream journalling, see what themes, sites, DCs, etc. repeat. It can be fun to see them change as you work on your issues. For example a personal boundary issue IRL showed up in my dreams as a broken fenceline, in LD I started fixing the fenceline of my subconscious, and I noticed feeling more confident with people. Whichever way you choose, follow your heart.

[JoannaB]

I know that dreaming helps me with self esteem issues which granted is different than your problems, but perhaps my experience can help you figure out how you could apply this to your problems. First of all improving dream recall means that I can remember non-lucid dreams that I may have forgotten, and I write them down. I then spend quite a bit of time thinking about my dreams, analyzing them as messages from my subconscious. I have that way learned about things that have been bothering me that I had not been consciously aware of that they had bothered me. I realized for example that a psychological addiction that I thought I had resolved in real waking life was still continuing in my dreams, that I had not left it behind after all, but soon after I realized that, my dreams changed and no longer involved the self-destructive pattern/longing. I was able to discover metaphors in my own dreams what they stand for, and thus could understand things that I did not understand about myself before. As I discover things about myself that I do not like, I am able to either focus on changing them or focus on accepting myself more, whichever seems more appropriate. I noticed that think way more about some stuff than I before realized. Changing nightmares into empowering dreams has given me a chance to think more "I can do it!" type thoughts, and I overcame some fears. By changing the subject matter of my dreams I was able to think about other healthier stuff. And this does not even require lucid dreaming, though being lucid makes it easier, but one can plant ideas in one's subconscious by planning out in one's thoughts what one wants to dream about. Also I tend to be rather obsessive about hobbies of mine or subjects that interest me, and switching the obsession from previous hobby to dreams as a subject has helped me because this is a healthier obsession for me to have, plus it is less costly (my previous obsession, Fishkeeping, has a certain shopohilic component to it, whereas dreams don't cost anything). In general improved dream recall and dream self-interpretation may already have very positive effects in self-examination; however, lucid dreaming adds the increased awareness and increased self-control. Plus the process of learning lucid dreaming may have side-benefits for waking life, such as: increased awareness, improved memory, more patience. Basically if done right lucid dreaming can be a very powerful self-therapy tool. It does require some effort, focus, dedication, patience, and confidence in the process though - this is a skill with a learning curve, and how steep that learning curve is depends on each individual. Personally I think it is worth it.

[Darkmatters]

The last 2 answers pretty much say it all! The only thing I would add - read Stephen LaBerge's Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming. Best book ever on learning about it and how to accomplish it - most of what we talk about in here came originally from that book plus a few more.