Salutations & Greetings & Stuff!

[neuroalesence]

Hello everybody! Ok, so I'm new here! First of all let me say how pleased I am to have found this forum & look forward to many interesting discussions, stories, etc from other memebers. My profile says pretty much everything I have to say about myself at this point but I shall breifly reiterate/elaborate here: I've been trying to have lucid dreams for over a year now, but find myself slightly frustrated. I often find the feel or atmosphere of my dreams to be quite dark, as if saturated in sadness & anxiety and THIS - along with a superficial amount of knowledge, understanding, experience & a head filed with quotes from Waking Life & Inception - is what seems to be holding me back. I had a dream earlier this year that I was in a lift at my local bus station. The lift was slowly somersaulting as it rose up out of the building & into the sky, apparently unattatched to any supporting mechanism. This was quite frieghtening in the dream & I was aware of the bizarreness of what was happeneing so I checked my hands. Sure enough I had the correct amount of fingers & thunmbs but the anxiety I was feeling was having a gravity-like bending effect on my fingers. Thus I thought to myself, "this is a dream" BUT the lift was still rolling up into the sky, the ground looking smaller by the second & I remained quite scared & thought "so what do I do now?!" And that's really as far as I got. I have no recollection beyond that. So this notion of lucid dreaming being dangerous is where I'm presently at. Inception was quite the cautionairy tale & waking life was a little unsettling the first time I saw it. How legitimate are these concerns? Is there a danger that people end up liking their dreams more than real life & thus loose interest in their real-world activities & relationships? Is the time difference an issue? If I became lucid in a scary dream I'd hate to think I'd be 'stuck' in it for what seems like hours. Sorry to ramble on! Any thoughts, anyone? x

[ZedCa]

I wouldn't worry terribly about getting stuck in a dream, besides the spin or fall techniques are like the 'abort' buttons of dreams. I may not have many LDs, but I can at the least vouch you can spin yourself not only out of a dream, but out of lucidity as well. Anywho, reality checks are where it's at for LDs. 2 out of 3 LDs I've had were made LD from the old 'pinch your nose and breathe through it' test, though I have a set of four RCs I do when I check. All in all, read the tutorials, keep a dream journal, and eat a toasted peanut butter banana sandwich before bed for those lovely B6 and B12 vitamins. (Course, the sandwich is optional.) Good luck!

[neuroalesence]

Thanks Zed! I have quite a few reality tests I do when awake - breathing through pinced nose, checking my hands/fingers, adjusting light levels, double checking clocks, etc, but I wasn't aware of abort techniques. So I just deliberately fall over or spin around to abort, then?

[ZedCa]

Basically, but they can cause false awakenings from what I read. So always do reality checks after these techniques. (If you're just hoping to reboot the dream for something different, tell yourself you're dreaming to avoid losing lucidity). My very first LD snuck up on me, I truly wasn't expecting to get one 5 days after taking interest. So when I went lucid, things started to get blurry and shakey, I had only glanced through stabilization as I was still mostly working on recall. Anywho, spinning can stabilize a dream if done right... I didn't do it right. So I spun like the frikkin' tazmanian devil and lost lucidity (I did another RC later in the new dream and regainedit.) Second time, I spun to escape the 'void' (Collapsed dream, all you see is black.), I kept lucidity by repeating "I'm dreaming" as I spun, but didn't think of a destination while doing it. It did give me a new dream, but I woke up directly after RCing. So read ahead a little, 'cause you won't be expecting your first LD.

[ZedCa]

Stupid browser... Sucks not being able to edit (Or enjoy using the internet >=/ ) Didn't see you already had LDs. Expectation iskey in dreams, if you expect something to happen it usually will. The reason my dream collapsed in my previous post? For whatever reason I expected a plane to crash into the room I was in (My kitchen, no less.). It did, and my brain was all like "Screw this mess!' and everything froze and faded to black.

[neuroalesence]

Well, yes I achieved lucidity for a very short time once & was unable to cope & it stopped so I don't really count that. The expectation thing makes sense, though, as I was terrified that the lift I was in would continue elevating, unattatched, into the sky & it did so I got really scared! I'm wondering if expecations could also be a reality check? If I expect for something not normally possible to happen & it does, at my will, then I'm dreaming? The only other time was years ago when I was still at school. I was in a dream, about to cross the road by school & the crossing signal began to beep in a louder-than-normal, intrusive way. I recognised the sound as that of my alarm clock rather than the usual, more pleasant beep that crossing signals have & realised I was dreaming & my mind was integrating the sound of my alarm clock into the crossing. Then I woke up, annoyed!

[Robot_Butler]

I can't see many risks, even if you use your dreams purely for escaping reality, ignoring all possibilities of self exploration, learning, or growing. I think dreams are a healthier form of escape than many other things. The risk of addiction is lower than almost anything else, including television, video games, books, drugs, ect. You're naturally limited to a certain number of dreams each night, and all the content comes from your real life experiences. As a human being, you are forced to dream, no matter what. Might as well enjoy them and learn from them as much as possible.

[neuroalesence]

Thanks Robot! That's quite reassuring. And as far as I can see there are no 'dream junkies' on here! I think I may have taken Inception too literally!