New member introduction, lucid dream detail
This is my first posting here so please go easy on me. I am 26 years old and have lived my life with a range of sleep disturbances. I experience nightmares every single night, often with the same exact nightmare repeating itself, or with similar repeating themes. The themes of my dreams usually center around a person or group of people trying to kill me, with my dream ending when I am killed or when something else interrupts it.
Often in these dreams, I will have my cell phone on me, and just like in the real world (thanks Verizon), when I call 911 I get a busy signal, I get hung up on, or (this doesn't really happen) they will laugh at me and refuse to help. Only rarely does my dream calling 911 ever result in fantasy police coming to help me. The basic idea is that I'm alone, running away from someone who's after me.
These are fast paced rapidly-changing dreams that don't give me a chance to stop and question whether what's happening is real or not. I'm usually very afraid and concentrating all my resources on escaping from a fictitious killer.
Aside from nightmares, I experience false awakenings, sometimes multiple nested false awakenings in a loop, I sleep talk, I sleep-walk and do complex things in my sleep such as use my computer, watch tv, or just go around turning lights on and off. I also experience sleep paralsys which is a horrifying experience (for me anyway).
I learned what sleep paralysis (SP) is a long time ago, so now when I'm lying awake in bed completely paralyzed save for my eyes, I know exactly what's happening with no way to make it stop, which doesn't make it any less horrifying, especially the fact that I can't control my breathing. :eek:
On Sunday morning I had two incidents of SP and I haven't had SP in a few years. I went to wikipedia to remind me how SP works and from there I clicked on one link and another link that brought me to this website for the first time.
I have had a few cases a long time ago of lucid dreams. I was aware of lucid dreams before I started hearing about them on TV about 15 years ago but I didn't know other people had them or that it was a scientifically recognized process.
Most nights, I don't remember my dreams, which may be a good thing once I start detailing my dreams. I've decided that I want to learn how to have a lucid dream in order to stop these nightmares from happening every night.
I have been recording all of my dreams since Sunday, and last night I had three dreams that I was able to record in my notebook:
1) Ending at 11:30pm, I dreamed that I had started a new job (which I am actually going to do in two weeks, I found this out last night!). I came to work and my desk looked like a school desk in a classroom like the kind they have at universities that look like theater seating. For some reason all of my co-workers were 12 year olds, some with missing teath.
My dream-boss, which was the same boss I had in another job from two years ago when I worked for Ebay.com, assigned me two tasks. One was to do some work on a server which had a boom-box attached it to for some reason. The other task was to evaluate some excell file with a wad of money attached to it, dealing with AT&T customers.
I don't remember doing any work, but I remember checking my watch and it was 7pm. Damn me for not checking my watch two or three times or I would have known this wasn't real. Anyway, being that it was 7pm and time to leave, I asked one of my 12-year old co-workers where I was supposed to put all my stuff when I leave or if I can just leave it on my desk.
My co-workers all laughed at me for not knowing what I was supposed to do in this dreamworld office which made no sense. I got mad and asked one of them something like "I want to know why that's so ****** funny. It's my first day here and no one gave me a book of rules so how am I suppose to know what to do?"
At this point my wife woke me up in the real world and I was still reeling from the stupidity of what I just dreamed and wrote it all down as fast as I could.
2) I went back to sleep at 12:30am and had another dream ending at 1:30am. In this dream, my wife and I were at my parents house for some reason and we were staying there overnight. I don't remember exactly why but in the dream it was late, 3am perhaps, and my mother wouldn't let us go to sleep. She was acting crazy and I told her if she didn't let us go to sleep then we were leaving and getting a hotel.
She kept waking us up so I angrily said that we were leaving and going to a hotel for the night. At this point we got in the house's elevator which took us up to a pharmacy. I went to the pharmacy and realized I didn't need anything so then I left. When I left the pharmacy I was in a big city, perhaps the exit to Penn Station in NYC.
I'm not sure what happened next but I experienced a false awakening and woke up in a Hotel 6 with my wife. It was a very strange hotel where every room was somehow connected to every other room. I threw some water out the window and it landed inside someone else's room through their open window.
The next thing I knew, there was water coming into our window from up above and the place was flooding. I woke up my wife but she was acting very strange. In my dream, she was not actually awake but sleepwalking, so she acted like I think a sleepwalker would have acted, kinda delirious and making no sense.
I told her to get all our things so we could get out and ecsape this weird flood. I called the hotel front desk and told them the place was flooding but whoever I talked to laughed at me and hung up. I found my cell phone and called the police. Someone showed up with a ladder and pointed it at me and started laughing.
For some reason at this point, I stopped what I was doing and realized the abject stupidity and impossibility of what was going on around me. Although I was in an impossible situation, it was all vividly real. Not like some kind of weird after-image. I was there and it was all completely real, all of it.
I thought to myself, could I be dreaming? Realizing that my dream was a dream was an intense shocking sensation. One minute I was participating and fully engaged in this rediculous storyline. The next minute I was questioning reality. This is a very hard thing to do in a dream. The dream wants to keep you sucked into it until the dream is over and it's very hard to pull yourself out of it.
I put my hands up like a cop stopping traffic and the dream froze and melted away, leaving me by myself in an empty room kinda like the holideck of the enterprize. I tried to use my mind to conjur up something interesting to fill the void.
I began wondering what would happen to my body in the real world if I started exerting control. For example if I conjur up a person and talk to them, will I start talking in the real world? If I start walking around, will I sleepwalk in the real world? I don't know why I spent so much time dwelling on it. Possibly because my wife and two dogs were asleep on the bed and I didn't want to accidentally roll over on to one of them or kick anyone. But then I woke up and it was 1:30am.
3) I was at another, better hotel, at a tech convention, not sure where exactly. In my dream I was in the "Apple building" which is one city over from where I live in Cupertino. This is impossible ofcourse since the Apple building isn't a hotel.
Someone at the convention was trying to kill me. I spent the majority of the dream running away from the killer, through hallways, hotel rooms, elevators, public places, and on and on and on. I found a phone somewhere and tried calling the police. I looked out the window and saw that the building was right next to a firedepartment station. The fire department came for some reason and was fighting the killer with water hoses, although the killer had guns and throwing darts and other weapons.
The fire department apparantly wasn't too good at stopping him. I was shot in the head or shot someplace else. I took out my cell phone and tried to call my wife to tell her that I was dying. At this point I woke up and refuse to go back to bed and it's 5:40am.
