Thread: yeah it's exciting but what's the f. benefit?

Well, until today I didn't knew that there is a name for something like this.
In the past I complained to every doctor I had, about the strange things happening in my dreams or during the night. Especially the bad feeling of beeing paralyzed and feeling the pure fear, panic and horror as long it lasts. It took me some years to get through all of this. I was so anxious that I didn't wanted to ever sleep again.

There was a period of many years that I completely have forgoten about this and then it started again. Feeling very familiar with it I knew what would have to come next, all the horror again. However, one day I was so annoyed and sick of it that I decided to get along this feeling and let go even if it means I have to die.

Well, I survived it. I just let go and was instantly asleep like my body was already before.
But this I had to figure out the hard way.

Later on I grew in confidence about what's happening and someday I was hit by surprise when I was aware of dreaming and able to change things for fun. However that wasn't that fun like it was with the music thing. At some nights just a song startet playing in my mind and I was on the track again.

I spent so much time in intropection, that I could explain it in details.
I was sure what was happening, if necessary I'd wrote a book about it.

Today, by accident, I read about all this stuff and found out that my theories were right.

How I wish somebody just could have told me that this is nothing unusual and that I was just awake while my body was already asleep.

Feeling being a freak or having braincancer or I don't know what else all these years.

Well, but that's a new perspective now.

Maybe it'll come handy one day.

So my frustration is gone.
I'm happy I've found a place to talk about it and that another mystery is solved.

"really, it's just about the two opposing states of consciousness...
which don't really oppose at all.
See, in the waking world,
the neuro-system inhibits the activation of the vividness of memories.
This makes evolutionary sense.
It'd be maladapted for the perceptual image of a predator...
to be mistaken for the memory of one and vice-versa.
If the memory of a predator conjured up a perceptual image,
we'd be running off to the bathroom every time we had a scary thought.
So you have these serotonic neurons...
that inhibit hallucinations...
that they themselves are inhibited during REM sleep.
This allows dreams to appear real...
while preventing competition from other perceptual processes.
This is why dreams are mistaken for reality.
To the functional system of neural activity that creates our world,
there is no difference between dreaming a perception and an action and actually
the waking perception and action."

It's just as real as 'real life'.

you quoted that from Waking Life. ^^ i love that movie.

Lucid Dreaming is a Reality you can control. thats the difference from Real Life. its a trip we all enjoy and like having, its better than life itself sometimes but it also helps us in our waking life.

aniki, just take your power to a new level, simply put

I have just got into it this week, three in a row since I started, and I already was able to bring an entire song out of my dream. That's puportedly how Aphex Twin arranges his more melodic music. He doesn't really play piano very well, but can in lucid dreams and remembers the melodies. That's his explanation. A problem is understandable if you are not very well able to recall things, and I would imagine the propensity to have lucid dreams is not empowering if it isn't actuated by one's willpower. Anyone creative, a writer, a musician, I imagine is most adept at seeing the benefit, because the technique is so transparently aligned with innate human convention for the development of ideas. Like, making a door, or a reasonable segue to another location, things like this are unravelling the reasoning behind our subconscious feeling of things in stories or music seeming "right" or appropriately in context, or "wrong" or "forced" awkwardly. If anything, I think there is a benefit in a greater awareness of the limitations and hence possibilites of waking life, especially as an artist. If you don't wake up feeling like you played out your jollies and any possible fantasy, and are pumped to put what change you can affect into motion in real life. Not to mention, isn't an artist's goal to encompass stimulation of the creative mind as a constantly refinable tool, or is it just having a witness to the intention only? If we all could be Tolstoy in real life, then what reverence could we have for dreams?

The experiences you have in dreams become a part of you, even if they may be hard to remember. I like exploring different design ideas in dreams. Even if I can't bring the exact design to life in the real world, the exploration and process is a benefit. I think of it like sketching. You sketch out 100 ideas, throw most of them away, waste a ton of paper. In the end, the experiences you had sketching form your final creation.