Help me understand what's happened..

[jesric1029]

Hello everyone. About 5 years ago I became interested in Lucid dreaming. I began with working on my dream recall and reality checks. (Pinching my nose). Over the course of a year I slowly began to experience some lucidity. For some reason in all of the lucid dreams I had at that time there would be no people, always places I know but no matter where I went they were devoid of life. So to press forwards I tried controlling these lucid dreams to no avail with one exception when i almost was able to fly. Fast forwards a couple years and the negative effects start to happen. By this time I'd given up with lucid dreaming but it wasn't finished with me. Quite often I would find myself in a semi-lucid state where I was laying in bed aware I was dreaming but unable to fully move. (Classic sleep paralysis). In many of these dreams I would sense that some vicious dogs were near my bed.. I knew they were not real but I was scared anyway and wanted to wake up. I usually had to jerk my head. Over time these have become more intense. Sometimes I am able to get out of bed but in my dream state but am usually unable to open my bedroom door and if I do everything is so dark and the light switches don't work. A couple times I managed to roll of my bed and willfully sink through the floor. (Which tells me I am capable of some control). At this point I am just floating in darkness or sometimes with some patterns of color around me. This particular sensation is comforting because I have escaped my room but scary because it's more difficult to wake up from. Furthermore I've had some extremely vivid dreams that are unlike anything I've experienced. In the past if I had a dream where I was about to die or suffer some type of serious injury I'd wake up right before it happened. Over the past year I've had a reoccuring dream of being shot, usually in the face. The circumstance are always different. Once I was outside a store and saw a kid trying to break into my jeep. I approached him and yelled and he turned around with a shotgun and fired. Another time I was driving with a friend and he stopped next to a guy holding a sign, the guy pulled out a pistol and shot me. In both dreams I can hear the gunshot and smell the smoke. My head has a tingling feeling and I can actually feel cold blood running down my face, then I wake up. The most recent was even worse. I was on a military base when some enemy attacked. Troops chased me and I was shot in the leg. I could actually feel slight pain in my leg, it wasn't as bad obviously as a real gunshot but it's alarming I felt pain in a dream. The troops then actually cut my body into fourths starting at my calfs and I could feel pain when they did it. I don't know how I can avoid these terrible lucid dreams and sleep paralysis and turn the skills I developed for dream recall and lucidity to my advantage. If anyone has experienced similar circumstances i would love to hear about it.

[ToukieToucan]

Must be scary but also interesting feeling things after being dead in a dream, anyways: I might have a technique for you called ADA short for all day awareness (http://www.dreamviews.com/induction-...kingyoshi.html) What the technique basicly is that you observe everything you see, feel, hear, smell you name it for a couple of minutes per day and building it up you almost do it naturally. So why might this technique be handy for you? Well with ADA the dream itself is a dream sign.

[sisyphus]

What do you want to dream about? That's the question to ask yourself. Set aside time while awake to do some goal-setting and daydreaming. Pick a few tasks you want to do or locations you want to visit. Look at dreams as full of possibility. You've already seen how powerful they can be. So harness that power for your benefit. Instead of avoiding the negative, try building on the positive. Your recall seems quite good and very vivid. You just want some different content. So, direct your desires toward something you want. And as for the negative, let me offer a different point of view. Dream content is symbolic. It is the primitive language of your unconscious. So, dreams involving pain, death, and loss might be interpreted simply as an expression that you highly value something and want to keep it. That applies to people, objects, body parts, and all of it.

[jesric1029]

What do you want to dream about? That's the question to ask yourself. Set aside time while awake to do some goal-setting and daydreaming. Pick a few tasks you want to do or locations you want to visit. Look at dreams as full of possibility. You've already seen how powerful they can be. So harness that power for your benefit. Instead of avoiding the negative, try building on the positive. Your recall seems quite good and very vivid. You just want some different content. So, direct your desires toward something you want. And as for the negative, let me offer a different point of view. Dream content is symbolic. It is the primitive language of your unconscious. So, dreams involving pain, death, and loss might be interpreted simply as an expression that you highly value something and want to keep it. That applies to people, objects, body parts, and all of it. Haha well it was my Jeep Wrangler that someone was trying to steal in the dream where I was shot so you might be onto something there about the dreams regarding things I value. Your right about the dream recall. I can remember my dreams very well provided I don't take Benadral for sleep (which I sometimes do) and have not had any alcohol in the evening. If I dare to take melatonin my dreams will be so ridiculously vivid I can't even describe it. I think maybe I'll try to start meditating on what to dream about and see if that works at all. Also I really like what someone suggested about observing sights and smells around me in reality. The only problem with that is that I don't have much of a problem becoming lucid, the problem is that scary stuff still happens and then I just try to wake myself up.

[Mantic]

Haha well it was my Jeep Wrangler that someone was trying to steal in the dream where I was shot so you might be onto something there about the dreams regarding things I value. Your right about the dream recall. I can remember my dreams very well provided I don't take Benadral for sleep (which I sometimes do) and have not had any alcohol in the evening. If I dare to take melatonin my dreams will be so ridiculously vivid I can't even describe it. I think maybe I'll try to start meditating on what to dream about and see if that works at all. Also I really like what someone suggested about observing sights and smells around me in reality. The only problem with that is that I don't have much of a problem becoming lucid, the problem is that scary stuff still happens and then I just try to wake myself up. your present choices, beliefs, values, emotions, thoughts act as a (thought) form of passive free will. Idolatry influences the imagination, manifesting into inter-dimensional doorways for negativity feeding entities. These entities are as real as you are, and are there physically (in a different vessel). The reason they look like creatures is because you're in a conscious state on the threshold of the astral plane and this matrix. If another person were to be looking at you during SP, they could physically grab the ectoplasm (vessel for these entities) and feel it's gel-like consistency. This is not just a hallucination of fear, it is a real physical event perceived through two dimensions simultaneously. Imagination manifests into reality at the rate in which you believe it. So the source of SP attacks are directly related to the beliefs an individual has. (I.e: Idolatry, programming, conditioning, subliminal hypnosis (TV,music,video games, movies). It's then clear that decisions which are knowingly wrong (consciously made), bypassing the intuition, form beliefs. beliefs quantum physically form the present. And potentially open doorways to lower (or higher) dimensional parasites.

[jesric1029]

You bring up some interesting theories. I actually consider myself Buddhist for the most part. I do believe in another plane of existence. I've always found meditation interesting and have considered giving it a go with my long term goal being an OBE. From the ages of maybe 15-21 (I am now 26) I dabbled heavily in DXM. For those uninformed it's the active ingredient in Robotussin and a strong Disassotiative. Since then it seems like my ability to LD and the strength of my dreams has increased, I don't know if this is brain damage or just coincidence. I would like to reach the other plane of existence and learn as much as possible I just don't know how to get out of the sleep paralysis thing. When it happens I know I'm dreaming and it isn't real but I can't seem to stop myself from panicking, even when I tell myself before bed not to. I've considered beginning to RC again but I am hesitant because last time I did, that is when the scary dreams started.

[xxPhoebusxx]

Check out dreammoods.com they have an excellent analysis dictionary. You can input all your symbols and they say what it means.

[MinerPhill03]

Next time you get shot do a reality check.

[Raswalt]

place a flower in the barrel of every gun that is about to shoot you in the face.

[dolphin]

You can also avoid scary dreams by no longer perceiving them as scary. You're in control over how you perceive things, so this is possible.