Thread: Why does stress affect lucid dreaming?

Originally Posted by dolphin

Stress affects lucid dreaming because it affects its foundation-dream recall. It affects the recall because the mind is more focused on the stress than the dream. Less dream recall equals less chance of a lucid dream.

This makes sense! But I haven't experienced that personally. My dream recall is just as good when I'm stressed but I tend to not get LDs. And when I DO become lucid it's usually a very low level lucidity where I don't remember much outside of the dream, I just know that it is a dream. And my dream control is affected too! I have terrible dream control right now, can hardly even fly.

Originally Posted by BrandonBoss

I would sat that stress has a negative effect on any hobby that you have. it is just bad!

More specifically, there are a lot of things that you can do with more than one thing on your mind. Dreams and lucidity needs focus. The type of focus that stress takes away. This is why when meditating I dont focus on "not thinking of anything." I focus on one thing. Even if it isn't LDinh, the practice is good for LDing.

I can relate to this idea, stress definitely takes away from my focus. Maybe that is related to why my dream control is so bad right now, do you experience loss of dream control too when you're stressed?

I was thinking about this a lot earlier and I thought that maybe I just become less aware in general, becoming more preoccupied/distracted by my stress. Last night I remembered many, many dreams with great recall. I noticed that there were a lot of obvious signs that I was dreaming that I would normally pick up on and I just didn't notice at all. I really want to get to a more concrete understanding of why this happens, maybe it could be useful in some way.