Thread: I'm back^^/

I took a long break from DreamViews. I forget if I had the intention to come back or not <(^_^), I think not because I was focused on immersing myself in Japanese and this forum is in English, but occasionally I'd get back into lucid dreaming and log back in for a bit.

I've never stopped lucid dreaming. It's something I've naturally done all my life. But the level of awareness, length of the dream, level of control, frequency of lucid dreams are not as strong as when I was on here gaining constant support and insight from the community. Recently, I've been having a lot of awesome (non-lucid) zombie dreams, on purpose. I set out to have them before I sleep, and I do. Learning about how to control my dream content here changed my life. I became unafraid of dreaming and began to look forward to sleeping.

But recently, I struggled with something worse than the nightmares and sleep paralysis I first tackled when I came to this forum. I was facing extremely terrifying hynpopompic hallucinations. I've always had them, but they were much worse than usual. Since May 2015, I've struggled to get back onto the right sleep schedule, and it was affecting my hallucinations. One time, I woke up to the hallucination of someone yelling at me, an intruder, and I really believed it. I ran out of the bedroom and towards the apartment door, tripping in the hallway. My knee was all scraped and bruised. It scared me how powerful a hallucination could effect my actions in real life. Another time, I thought I had seen an intruder at a doorway, I really thought he was real. Normally, I know these are hallucinations. I was just that sleep deprived. I woke up my husband telling him someone was at the doorway and he went to check while I cowered in true fear for my life and his behind my bed. But there was no intruder! From that point on, I became determined to fix my sleep schedule. I removed my digital slide show from my bedroom, and I rarely had a hallucination after that. (Only once after a night of binge watching Netflix, and it didn't scare me.) I thought the blue light must have been affecting my sleep. I went on a huge adventure experimenting with cutting out device use and internet use. I was down to just using my rooted e-Ink Nook for emails and IMs and reading physical books. I turned off all the lights at night. It didn't do anything. One night I was up, mind racing, till late at night. The other, I was up late reading a book. It was my mind, not the devices.

So I'd really like to train my mind and get it back on track through the lucid dreaming hobby, including learning sleep relaxation and meditation. I've always wanted to dive deeper into the hobby, maybe now's the time.