Thread: I am new, I have questions. Help!

There isn't really any reason to fear possible lucid nightmares, because when you think about it, lucid nightmares will by definition give you much better chances to change them into something better.
Think about "ordinary" nightmares - if you are not lucid then you have no choice but to endure them until you wake up, but in lucid nightmares you can make conscious decisions and change them into something better.

One important thing to remember during lucid nightmares is that you will learn much more from them if you try to "embrace" the nightmarish figures instead of running away from them.
Think about a waking life example - let's say you feel a great fear during public speeches, and therefore you try to avoid them at all costs, and this only convinces you that they are dangerous so they become even more scary for you; but if you challenge yourself and attempt a public speech, you will probably realize that it wasn't as bad as you thought it would be, and you will find yourself wondering what it really was that you feared so much in the first place - "hey, it wasn't that bad after all!".
Lucid nightmares work the exactly same way - if you run away from scary events and figures, then they will just keep reappearing because you fear them and constantly have them on your mind, but if you try to understand them, maybe even ask them what they want to tell you, then you will prove to yourself that you can stand up to them and you will realize that there was no reason to fear them.

Originally Posted by Laurelindo

There isn't really any reason to fear possible lucid nightmares, because when you think about it, lucid nightmares will by definition give you much better chances to change them into something better.
Think about "ordinary" nightmares - if you are not lucid then you have no choice but to endure them until you wake up, but in lucid nightmares you can make conscious decisions and change them into something better.

One important thing to remember during lucid nightmares is that you will learn much more from them if you try to "embrace" the nightmarish figures instead of running away from them.
Think about a waking life example - let's say you feel a great fear during public speeches, and therefore you try to avoid them at all costs, and this only convinces you that they are dangerous so they become even more scary for you; but if you challenge yourself and attempt a public speech, you will probably realize that it wasn't as bad as you thought it would be, and you will find yourself wondering what it really was that you feared so much in the first place - "hey, it wasn't that bad after all!".
Lucid nightmares work the exactly same way - if you run away from scary events and figures, then they will just keep reappearing because you fear them and constantly have them on your mind, but if you try to understand them, maybe even ask them what they want to tell you, then you will prove to yourself that you can stand up to them and you will realize that there was no reason to fear them.

Wow. That does make sense. I however still cannot believe this is actually something that works and is real. It all feels like a dream to me, this entire forum and the entire idea of Lucid Dreaming. I wonder what my first controlable LD will be.

Originally Posted by damianrossum

Wow. That does make sense. I however still cannot believe this is actually something that works and is real. It all feels like a dream to me, this entire forum and the entire idea of Lucid Dreaming. I wonder what my first controlable LD will be.

I came here a skeptic and stayed a lucid dreamer. Even though I've only had 3.
After my first one I still had a hard time believing it. But only you can take away the doubt.

Originally Posted by damianrossum

Wow. That does make sense. I however still cannot believe this is actually something that works and is real. It all feels like a dream to me, this entire forum and the entire idea of Lucid Dreaming. I wonder what my first controlable LD will be.

It might sound weird if you are still new to lucid dreaming, but it's actually a quite natural state when you think about it.
Your brain is developed to use sensory input to create an accurate model of the world, and it actually keeps doing that even when you sleep, since that is its purpose, and this means that you will be creating mental models even during sleep that are to a large degree based on expectations and assumptions.
For example, you might more or less consciously think about a certain person while you are falling asleep, and since you have a person on your mind you will of course expect that person to stand on something - so your brain creates the ground, and probably other ordinary objects like houses and trees.
Now, you are also used to experiencing gravity, so your mental model will make you feel like you are standing on the ground, since this is much easier for you to comprehend than the feeling of floating in midair.
All of these natural assumptions from waking life can often make dreams feel relatively stable and physical - you see a dream house, you push your dream hand at it, and you expect resistance, so your hand cannot push through the wall; you jump up in the air, you expect to fall, so you fall towards the ground; you fall into water, you expect to float, so you float.
So you can see here that the physical laws can actually be more or less present even in dreams, simply because you expect things to work certain ways.
This means that if you realize that you are dreaming, the dream can appear extremely realistic and convincing, so it actually takes some practice to be able to do supernatural things in dreams, since you need to convince your brain that those things are possible in the dreamworld.

The reason why most of us don't experience lucid dreams that often is probably because we aren't aware enough in waking life - we often tend to rush from point A to point B without caring much about things around us, and therefore most lucid dreamers practice awareness a lot during waking life.
Common ways to practice this are for example to frequently ask yourself what you have been doing the last few hours, test your surroundings to see if you might be dreaming without realizing it, and simply be more observant in general.
Lucid dreamers are often taught to never assume that they are awake without actually double-checking it, because sometimes you do indeed assume that you are awake only to wake up for real a few seconds later!

When I started learning lucid dreaming I made it a habit to always double-check if I had woken up for real in the mornings, because there was a possibility that I only dreamed about waking up since I was so focused on lucid dreaming, dream journaling and stuff at that time.
And indeed, I did often catch False Awakenings (dreams where you dream about waking up) and became lucid, and it was always an incredible realization to notice that I was actually dreaming at that point.

If you are still in doubt about the existence of lucid dreaming, then I should tell you that it is a scientifically proven phenomenon, and there even exist laboratory scans of pre-agreed upon eye signals that lucid dreamers have performed in lucid dreams to show that they knew they were in a dream;
here are some of them.