Just (kind of unintendedly) had my first experience with lucid dreaming.
Ok so I realized the need to share this because my mind is still blown. Had my first lucid dream this morning and it was nothing like I expected, tbh I didn't expect it to happen at all.
Quick background: Woke up too early, was trying to go back to sleep when sleep paralysis hit (I don't know why). Usually I just try to, you know "wake up", sleep paralysis isn't fun, but this time I was like "screw it, let's try to turn this into a lucid dream.", I had asked chat-gpt before and it told me that I could indeed use sleep paralysis as a gateway into the dream but I did not expect this to work. (yes I have read a lot about lucid dreaming and know the WILD method but I never truly tried it.)
My eyes were closed but I started seeing this TV static kind of thing and hearing this bizarre static/white noise in my ears (anyone else get this with WILD? Is this normal?) I kept imagining opening a door to a dream I could control nonstop. Then it felt exactly like opening my eyes, except instead of seeing my bedroom, I was somewhere else?
So I'm standing in front of this door that literally says "Tutorial Room" on it (lmao my brain apparently thinks dreams work like video games but the text wasn't clear, I just knew it said that). Inside was the most basic room ever - just checkerboard walls like these developer placeholder textures they use in video games (yes I have done video game development so I think it comes from there). There was a "tutorial figure npc" there playing ping pong with a wall, no eyes, face or anything, it was a dummy.
I know I was lucid because I could control stuff, but it felt... weird? Like, I was maybe 80% "there" if that makes sense? The whole thing looked kind of low-quality, almost like watching a crappy stream but it felt truly real. I could make stuff appear by thinking about it (made a baseball bat show up just by wanting it) but things would straight up disappear if I wasn't looking directly at them. Had to keep "remembering" them back into existence.
Ngl the whole thing fell apart pretty quick because I was too busy being like "holy shit this is actually working" to remember any of the stabilization stuff I read about. I really did not expect it to feel literally like I was awake, it felt too real.
Few questions because I'm still trying to process this:
That static noise/visual thing during WILD - is it common?
Does anyone else's brain give them a literal tutorial level for their first lucid dream or is mine just too much of a gamer?
How do you deal with stuff disappearing when you're not looking at it? Super annoying
Any tips for keeping the dream from falling apart when you're freaking out about actually being lucid?
Still can't believe this actually worked on my first real try. My heart's still racing thinking about it.
