Thread: Why I beleive I started having lucid dreams. The Natural. Please read and respond.

Hey, sorry to hear about your sleeping troubles, but you sure are lucky to be a "natural lucid dreamer". It took me months of effort before i could even have a brief, pathetic excuse for lucidity, but it sounds like you can do it at your own will!
It sounds like you had a very bad experience with sleep paralysis there, which I guess must have kicked in whilst you were sleep walking. Its weird cos sleep paralysis is meant to stop you from moving round in you sleep, but obviously your body stopped you a little too late
Sleep paralysis is perfectly natural and normal; it happens to everyone every night, although we are usually asleep and therefore completely unaware of it. You were just unlucky enough to experience it in the worst way possible!

Hi
and thanks for the reply.
You know the upside of those sleeping troubles, was definately, controlling my dreams. Once I could force myself from asleep to half awake at will, change things in the dream, then re-enter the dream, there would never be bad dreams.

I dont recall a bad dream for 20 + years, even if one started, I stop it change things in it. Before you know it the dream is whatever you wished. Anything from flying to swimming with dolphins and whales, or being in whatever place you wanted. So 25 years of amazing dreams was well worth it.

Lucid dreaming is natural to everybody that chooses to do it.

I actually found myself wondering the other day if it was possible to lucid dream and sleepwalk simultaneously? It would be interesting if one was able to be aware both in his/her dream and in waking life, while sleepwalking. I would think that if one is able to get to that level where they are able to make themselves sleepwalk and lucid dream, then they can probably cause themselves to hallucinate during normal waking life and control the hallucinations, if they practice enough. It would be very interesting to experiment with that (though getting to that level seems very difficult).



It's surprising to me that some people have trouble escaping sleep paralysis. I remember the first time I had sleep paralysis (I didn't know what it was or what a lucid dream or anything was), I woke up and it felt very uncomfortable and I didn't know what was going on, and I hoped to simply go back to sleep but it was too uncomfortable, so I just decided I will get out of it. Getting out of it seemed completely straightforward, all I had to do was wake myself up and that was that. I was only in sleep paralysis for a total of 10 seconds, and I got out of it the very second I had decided to. Is it abnormal to have such natural control of sleep paralysis? (That night, I went back to sleep and had it again shortly after, and I woke myself up again. I didn't know what to make of the experience and I stumbled upon the words "sleep paralysis" by chance and thought that might have been what happened and looked further).


I'm afraid I cannot comment further, as my experience so far is limited only to sleep paralysis. However, I will say that I'm jealous that it came to you so naturally! It seems like it would make sense that your sub conscious took it upon itself to solve your subconscious problems, through lucid dreaming. Nightmares (as far as I know, and have experienced) are a result of your subconscious being at a state of unrest, and although nightmares may often appear to be completely unlike anything your waking life, the emotions experienced during them usually feel the same as the emotions that you have probably felt subtle hints of deep down inside, and have chosen to ignore. I see nightmares as a sort of way for your subconscious to communicate with your conscious to let it know that something IS wrong and that you WILL hear it out, whether you like it or not. I think it's kinda cool that you have developed a sort of defense system where you can just take whatever problem your subconscious may have and just kick it's a** face to face. I'm not sure if you have considered this at all, but do you feel like lucid dreaming has been an effective way to conquer your unconscious problems? Do you remember if you found yourself suffering from a sort of uneasiness while you had the reoccuring nightmares, and if this uneasiness went away as soon as you gained control of your dreams? I would be interested to hear what you think.


Edit: Are you allowed to swear here? I bleeped it out just in case.

I believe mild swearing is aloud, ive seen other members swear.

For those trying to have Lucid Dreams... baby steps, or one step at a time. When you have your next dream try to change one thing in it, or if you wake from a dream try to re enter that dream changing that one thing.

In my case it was at first removing anything bad, replacing it with something good. Gain this control first!
I did this for a while, eventually I could control the entire dream.

Good idea actually, removing something and replacing it with something good. Like a good technique to practice to get used to the dream state and its capability.

Hi

First Lucid Dreaming and sleep walking, I have had that experience... A few times... Sorry for the content here. In my case those Lucid Dreams were sexual in nature, and well... you can imagine what was likely occuring in the dream... well at some point I wake up and I am totally shocked that my body and my girlfriend are along for the ride. In other words I am sleep walking through the sexual dream, I have fondly called it 'sleep sexing', it doesnt happen that often, but I did sort of have to warn past girlfriends both of the sleep walking and talking and... you get the picture. When I wake from this, I will say it is somewhat scared, as I believe it is a Lucid Dream, so I am a little more shocked to see the occurance in the real world.

So yes, I have experienced Lucid Dreams while sleep walking, although no walking was involved.

Yes, I absolutely had a fear of my bad dreams. Worse was that they were re occuring, so when I would wake from one, I knew it was likely to return when I fell asleep again. I would often re enter where I had left off, even for weeks on end. That perticular bad dream, of being chased by something in the blackness persisted for 6 months - 2 years, not nightly but fairly regularly.
So uneasiness while having the reoccuring nightmares is an understatement. Terror is a bettter fitting word.

Learning to half wake, change the bad thing, then re enter the changed dream. was definately the first step.
I did this for quite a while, having a bad dream... stop dream.... half wake....change bad... re enter into nice dream.
Probably more than a year.

Eventually I did not have to half wake, and I realized that the dreams could be altered without half waking. Then I had full dream manipulation. I have had it ever since.
Yes, any sort of uneasiness did go away as I gained control, and more than that I found that I was more likely to have day naps, or sleep in, so as to continue whatever lucid dreams I had been having.

I think it would be really hard to simply try to control your dream,
Baby Steps!
Try to control one aspect of a dream you have,
Like in my case take bad dreams, when you wake, dont fully wake, change the bad thing, and quickly reenter.
If you can do this you will be a step into the direction of WILD.
I suspect controlling this one thing will lead to controlling soooo much more.

Well it worked for me.

Thanks for the response.

I was not referring to uneasiness during the nightmare, I was referring to uneasiness during normal waking life, that was perhaps what had caused the nightmare to come about in the first place. In my experience, Nightmare's always come from the emotional uneasiness of your subconscious. If you have a nightmare, there's a good chance that you felt that same emotion that makes the nightmare so terrible during waking life, except during waking life the same emotion usually does not seem very dramatic, and is just barely detectable. Basically, if a nightmare is produced, then you have probably been experiencing some sort of uneasiness in your normal, real, waking life, that feels like a much much more mild version of the nightmare.

If I have a nightmare and I am unable to connect what ACTUALLY happens in the dream with things that go on in my life, I then try to recall the emotions I've experienced in the dream, and recall EXACTLY what they felt like (did I get a pressing feeling in my lower gut? Did it feel like there was an explosion in my chest?). Once I have a good idea for what the feeling was, and I am able to sort of hold onto that feeling for awhile, I try to remember where I've felt it before? Often times, I felt the exact same thing before in a more mild form, and I now know that whatever caused it is bugging my subconscious more than I had originally thought.

I dont know that I had any fears different than any other 13,14 year old would have, nothing special that I can remember.... So no, I probably dont know why I was having that scary a dream, or why it was reoccuring. One big problem is that it was 25 ish years ago....so it would be tough to isolate where it came from.