My First Lucid Dream Was Weird

I used a a guided meditation on YouTube every night for about two weeks before I had my first out of body experience. I did I find myself floating above my body and I was terrified. After that initial sensation I saw myself and felt like I was was falling from a skyscraper into an empty concrete pool. I woke up suddenly and breathing heavily. I would like to experiment with lucid dreams but that was too spooky for me. Am I doing something wrong or was the fact that I was terrified by being both awake and asleep just set the mood for my dream?

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Originally Posted by Owlette

I used a a guided meditation on YouTube every night for about two weeks before I had my first out of body experience. I did I find myself floating above my body and I was terrified. After that initial sensation I saw myself and felt like I was was falling from a skyscraper into an empty concrete pool. I woke up suddenly and breathing heavily. I would like to experiment with lucid dreams but that was too spooky for me. Am I doing something wrong or was the fact that I was terrified by being both awake and asleep just set the mood for my dream?

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Well I can't really speak much about OBE since I've never had one. But I can say that mostly everything in lucid dreams is all based on expectation and feeling. So I think the fact that you were terrified about being out of body probably had a pretty strong impact on your dream. Sort of incubated it if you will. Basically the main thing I would say is if you're interested in continuing the guided meditation and doing OBE is to conquer the fear and try to stay calm. That's what I initially did when I first started WILD and I would get the sleep paralysis type hallucinations. And my advice would just generally be not to let that one dream discourage you or to set the tone for your other lucid dreaming experiences. If you hold that one dream as your view of lucid dreaming as a whole then it would probably have a negative impact on future attempts, because like I said it's all about expectation.

Owlette, in addition to what Kraom said it sound that you had more of an HI or HH experience rather than a full blown dream... This kind of sensations are a common precursor for a full blown dream, and usually you can feel them while transitioning from an awake state into a sleeping state (like what you did as far as I understand, by meditating from an a wake state before sleep). What I'm trying to say is that a full LD (as well as OBE, at least for me) is a far more stable experience - but to get there you first need to fall asleep and these sensations (falling, floating, etc) are a common thing we tend to feel in the transition period.

So in my opinion it's not an actual LD or OBE - but a transitional stage. To go thru it, try next time to not be afraid or stress and just wait it out and not focus on it. Just wait until things stabilize a bit, or try to create a more stable scene with imagination.

Plus, this method to have LDs (and OBEs) is referred to as "WILD", and works much much better if you had previous sleep (at least about 4 hours) - did you have previous sleep before you experienced this? Without previous sleep you can also get to the transition but the full dream is unlikely to come (so you'll probably end up either losing awareness or waking up).