Dreams of lucid dreams

**156curses** · 05-18-2010 02:21 PM

I would have counted this following dream in my signature, if I believed it some more, but I don't.
I've heard before about people who dream about lucid dreaming, and I suspect this may have happened to me some nights ago.

Before I fell asleep I thought of an oral presentation I was to present the following day, and how I could link free will and the brain to lucid dreaming. In my head I was talking to my class the words I may chose to demonstrate what is lucid dreaming, and soon without noticing drifted to sleep. Of course, my previous thoughts had influence on my dreams, cause such is a normal thing. Anyway..

I was lying in bed on my back with my eyes closed. I heard the voice of someone I knew telling me I was dreaming. For that voice to be there, in my room, I believed them, and reality checked. I was scared to open my eyes in case I woke up into reality, so I tried to create a scene infront of me but all that remained was the blackness of my eyelids. I opened my eyes, got up in my bed and RCd. After breathing through my pinched nose, I put on my Where The Wild Things Are hat, that I've always wanted to wear during a lucid dream.. I ran out of my apartment so quickly like bits of the dream was jumping, and pressed the button for the elavator, but decided to run down the stairwell cause the lift would take too long. As I was running/flying down the stairs quite fast like a monkey or something, I could hear my neighbour talking to someone in the lift about me. I was on ground floor and looking around at the unusual surrounding that had changed different. I then woke up.

I feel like this may have just been a dream of a lucid dream. Or maybe I was lucid to begin with, but then subconciously dreaming because I feel like I had little control over some things, and the running towards the front door of my apartment skipped and jumped like a scratched dvd.. In my first lucid, as I walked towards my front door, I felt sensations of the cold kitchen tiles, and emotions of want and nerves, and excitement, and I felt with each step I progressed closer to my desired destination, just like what I would in real life. The dream I described above lacked these qualities.

I would love to read other people experiences with dreams of lucid dreams to get a better sense of these dreams that fool us. Also if you just want to share your experience for fun, go for it.

**Emkinator** · 05-18-2010 06:40 PM

Lucid dreams are dreams in which you know that you are dreaming. Being lucid doesn't guarantee neither control nor clarity.
If you knew you were dreaming, you were lucid, simple as that.
Although I've had a dream in which I thought "OMG I'm lucid!" without understanding the implications. I never really understood that I was dreaming, just thought I was lucid, but I didn't know what that meant in the dream, so it wasn't a lucid dream. But I had pretty good control, so it was pretty awesome anyway.

**username695** · 05-19-2010 07:23 AM

Yup, sounds to me like a lucid. I once had I dream where I started out in a dream and went in this portal, and I became lucid. It was really blurry and I lost control, but instead of waking up I went back to the place where I entered the portal, still thinking it was reality. It was trippy

**OldMan** · 05-19-2010 11:04 AM

Hi 156Curses. Lucid dreaming itself, or even thinking about lucid dreaming, are all conscious experiences of various sorts, so, rather paradoxically- although it makes perfect sense when you think about it - you can have dreams about lucid dreams, without being lucid. You might even have a dream about discussing whether you are in a lucid dream, when you're not lucid! It's no different to dreaming about your grandma - just that the subject is ironic.

There are many different grades of dream awareness. Sometimes I see nothing at all - I'm just in a sleep state, aware that I'm asleep, and not able to see anything visual at all excpet maybe a light. I've noticed that the more powerfully lucid I am, generally, the more mundane the surroundings around me - almost as if my brain needs a lot of processing power to form the fully conscious 'me', so it just uses a habitual backdrop - like, my living room, or a basic street. But other times I've been fully lucid and had astoundingly visionary experiences, such as flying around Yrrgdrasil - or however it's pronounced! Or, found myself on or in buildings and ruins that were as clear as being there, but I have no knowledge of those places consciously.

Other times I've had dreams where I've been aware that I was dreaming, but I wasn't fully conscious - and the difference I've noticed is that if I'm not fully conscious I still partake in elements of the dream narrative, like a normal dream. Like, only the other day I was talking to my sister on the phone and I said 'Hold on, I think this might be a dream' - and it was. At other times, I'd not only know it was a dream, but I almost certainly wouldn't be doing things like phone calls, because I'd know it was a dream fully and usually there wouldn't be any semi-conscious involvement in a dream narrative - only conscious involvement with elements of the dream.

Personally, I've noticed that there aren't simpy two dream states, there is a continuum of various levels of awareness - fairly obviously. Just like, if I'm not lucid, never the less, I often deliberately choose to end dreams that I don't like - maybe with a 'ok I'm going to wake up now' - even though there's no actual conscious lucidity except that decision to leave the dream, and even that isn't the same as reallucidity.

So in short, it's possible to have many different levels of awareness, and it's also possible to dream about being lucid - I've had a number of dreams where the dream narrative was that I was lucid dreaming, but I actually wasn't - it was just a subject matter for the dream, borrowed from conscious thoughts, like any other subject matter.