Not feeling 100% there?

i sort of recently got back into lucid dreaming and i've noticed that my body never feels quite there. like i'm all static. it gets kind of scary, honestly, because it feels like i'm half awake. walking can be like moving through mud and trying to talk most often ends in me feeling like i'm suffocated (but i think this has something to do with me being afraid i'm talking in my sleep). i recently had an ld i managed to make pretty vivid, almost to a scary point, and i could feel the coolness of a door handle under my hand but my body was still slow and i still felt like i was moving in the real world, almost. ideas?

This sounds a bit like Hypnagogic visions. Does this happen only in lucid dreams, or also in regular ones? If regular ones as well, how many of them are like this? How long have they been like this? Perhaps you aren't in getting to a deep enough sleep to fully experience your dreams? If this only happens in your lucid dreams, then you might only think you're halfway awake, but you're actually having a false awakening. Good luck!

I had a similar thing like this in my first few LDs. It felt like moving through jelly, or oil. As if something held me back actively. Check my DJ, the first entry has a detailled report on this.

After discovering that rolling sideways was an easy way to leave bed in this state, the problem soon faded. I can now easily get up when starting a WILD LD. So I guess it is just a self made obstacle, you expect it to be hard to move / not able to speak, so it happens. Dreams (and lucid dreams) are so heavily influenced by your expectations... tell yourself before the attempt that it will be easy to move this time, then just do it. Or try the sideway rolling movement ;)

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i sort of recently got back into lucid dreaming

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Dreams almost always resolve themselves. If this is a recent problem, I would give it a few months. Allow yourself to relax into your practice and not be too concerned about particulars of this dream or that dream. Lucidity is most important, and after that, relaxing and being there. You will have the most fun this way. More things will spontaneously happen. The dream will surprise you in different ways.

Second of all, it's OK to be afraid of the experience, but you should see that the experience itself is not fearful. There is someone there (you) thinking, "This is scary! It's frightening to be in something so real!" or alternatively, "It's scary that it isn't very real! I don't like my static body!" Just recognize that fear (and the thoughts) as part of the dream and then breathe deep. It's OK to feel fear and if there is acceptance the fear will resolve itself.

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Originally Posted by alchemidst

i sort of recently got back into lucid dreaming and i've noticed that my body never feels quite there. like i'm all static. it gets kind of scary, honestly, because it feels like i'm half awake. walking can be like moving through mud and trying to talk most often ends in me feeling like i'm suffocated (but i think this has something to do with me being afraid i'm talking in my sleep). i recently had an ld i managed to make pretty vivid, almost to a scary point, and i could feel the coolness of a door handle under my hand but my body was still slow and i still felt like i was moving in the real world, almost. ideas?

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I have a feeling this is fairly common occurrence among LD'ers, Alchemidst. I've come up with two ideas about it:

First, you actually might be half-awake. LD's seem (at least for me) to work best when you are very close to a waking state, so sleep is light and your connection with your body is just beginning to resume. Because of this, there is a chance that during the dream you are actually sending signals to your sleeping body to move, in addition to the dream body you wish to move. Because your body is still asleep and cannot move easily, it is unresponsive to your requests; this lack of response may be getting reflected in your dream body, perhaps because your unconscious is having a little trouble sorting out which body to move, or whether movement is possible.

Second, and perhaps less likely: because you are not naturally supposed to be awake while you are asleep, lucidity is in a sense an intrusion by your waking-life consciousness into your dreamworld (intrusion might be the wrong word, because you really cannot intrude a place that is already all You, but it's all I got). This intrusion, especially when you start doing things that do not match the imagery that was prepared by your dreaming mind, could cause some confusion, and that confusion is manifest by your dreaming mind having trouble finding the appropriate new imagery to match your freshly input desires. So, since movement in a dream is also imagery, and not actual movement itself, your dreaming mind might simply be having trouble finding and spooling up new imagery that includes moving your dream body. In other words, your dreaming mind could be responding sluggishly to provide new imagery that includes your DC self moving.

* Note that when I say "movement" anywhere here, I'm including speaking (I'm not sure that was clear).


How do you fix, or at least fight this? Here are a couple of suggestions:

I've found that simply relaxing and taking my mind off moving helps a lot. A brief quiet pause from movement might help settle your mind and body back toward deeper sleep, reducing the influence of your sleeping body, allowing your dreaming mind to make moving only your dream body the priority once more. Or, if we go with my second notion, the pause will allow your dreaming mind to adjust to your new demands and spool up some movement imagery. During your pause you might look around, admire your surroundings, generally enjoy your dreaming state as it is; you also might use the moment to remember your current dream goals. After a couple of minutes of relaxation, you may find that your connection to your dream has increased, your connection to your waking-life body has been reduced as it settles back into a deeper sleep, and movement of your dream body is easier.

If that doesn't work, try remembering, during that same pause, that in your dream you have no physical body at all, so movement, including speech, doesn't need to include actually moving any body parts. If you can understand that your dream body isn't a physical thing, then you might find yourself more easily adjusting to new ways of moving, like simply deciding to be somewhere else in your dream or bringing imagery to you rather than going to it (also, things like flying or teleportation are a whole lot easier when you can remember that your dream body has no substance). Speech works the same way: If you simply know that, say, the DC with which you wish to communicate can hear you, you can bypass trying to move your mouth and push out words with your lungs by "speaking" with just a thought.