Newbie needing help...I want to stop dreaming

Hi everyone. Glad I found this forum and I hope that I can get some help here. I have always had lucid dreams as long as I can remember. Some of my dreams are just terrifying to others when I share them...but to me...while I am dreaming I know they are but a dream and I can be like a "dream master" get away...fly away...change the ending...you get the idea. Mainly, I have not been afraid of my dreams in a very long time. Now I have started having lucid dreams that I wake up from in a "false awakening" and then converse with the person in what I think to be reality only to realize I am still in a dream world. I then try and convince that person to help me wake up. I have actually rocked back and forth in bed and called out for my husband to wake me. This is happening more frequently. And also, I should mention these dreams all happen within my home setting, usually originating from the last thing I did. If I went to bed...I wake up in my bedroom surrounded by people. I have heard people cooking in my kitchen. I have conversed with a child in my bedroom. I saw an elderly women in the last dream. I feel like I am dreaming in layers sometimes. Anyone out there with similar experiences? I dont believe in hauntings....am I just stressed out. I have a whole list of weird things and really too many to list in this posting. Maybe I have a tumor? I dont know, but I am getting afraid to go to sleep and not being able to wake up in a true reality. Please help.

First off, FAs are common and very normal. People who DON'T lucid dream have them, too. A FA is simply dreaming about waking up. Your expectations and reactions determine how you feel about them. Personally I find FAs to be annoying, but not anything more.

It is also possible that you are having HH (hypnagogic hallucinations). These are a very normal and healthy part of dreaming. Most people never even notice them. These are visual, auditory, tactile, etc. HH are the beginings of dreams that form when a person isn't fully asleep. HH can be as ordinary as printed words from a book you recently read, or it can be disturbing. The thing about HH that so often upsets people is the overwhelming sense of fear and danger when it happens. If you want to learn more about HH just google it. There is a lot of medical liturature out there about it.

Perhaps learning more about FAs and lucid dreaming will help you feel better about your experiences. If you find you are still afraid to sleep, I suggest talking to a doctor.

Good luck!

Ok, from what Ive read HH occurr within 30 minutes of falling asleep. I am pretty sure that I have experienced these alot. The jerking sensation of falling,etc. However I have a lucid dream in which I know I am dreaming. For instance.....I dreamt that I was having a conversation with my husband, I saw a woman in a long flowing floral dress walk thru the house...at that point it struck me odd and I knew that this woman should not be in our house and I knew I was dreaming. I woke up on the couch next to my husband, we had fell asleep watching tv. I tried waking him up to get him to go to bed and when I looked up....I saw the woman again and then realized again that I was dreaming. At that point I was frightened. I ask my husband if we were awake he assured me we were. He was sleepy, but said of course your awake. I told him that he needed to wake me up, that I was dreaming. I kept telling him to wake me up...and that is when I really woke him and he woke me up. This happened several hours after going to sleep, so I dont think that this was a HH. Have you ever had this type of over-lapping lucid dream? Is it common? Maybe I just dont know what to do with it and I just get scared because it is a new experience. This is about the 3rd time in the past couple of weeks that I have had this type of over-lapping dream.

Listen to seeker! That's called an FA!

Cemert, I'd recommend getting into the habit of doing reality checks. Especially in your case, doing a series of them. Try to get into the habit of doing them immediately when you wake up, without even looking at your surroundings, to immediately catch if you are in a dream or not before anything creepy is able to happen. If you try to use a "dream power" and it works, you are dreaming, and there's no reason to get frightened. If it doesn't, try a few other ones. Then, take in your surroundings.

Thanks Shift. Just wondering, I completely enjoy my LDs when I am in an unfamiliar surrounding, but just recently I had a LD and then a FA in my bedroom surrounded by people sitting in chairs. I was so frightened. My husband wasnt in bed yet, and was playing PS3. During this FA I called to him and could see him in the background waving to me to wake up, like I was sleepwalking or something, because I found myself crouched down on my nightstand. Eventually the people faded away and my husband was only there. He was convincing me I was dreaming....then I woke up for real and I was lying in bed, not crouched on the nightstand. What is that called? Lately in my LDs I have a FA or maybe 2 and ask the person in my FA to help wake me up? Is that just my way of finding reality? I would love to learn how not to be fearful of that. My FAs always consist of waking up in my house and strange people being here. Does that have a significant meaning. I mean, what if I started talking to the 20 or so people I FA'd to in my dream. I do not know I could handle that. I am Okay in other surroundings besides my home....is that normal for newbies to FAs to be fearful in their homes? And is it significant to dream about people you have never met?

hi cemert,

I am not a very experienced LDer, but I have had similar "bad" experiences like you some time ago. I can really relate to the "afraid to fall asleep" feeling. This makes you stressed when you go to sleep and subconciously makes you more open to "bad" dreams. I have no magic bullet advise for you, I can only tell you my own story and hope it helps.

edit: as the story got too long you can skip to the last 1-2 paragraphs for the actual advise. :P

As a kid (~5-14 yrs old) I was really troubled in my sleep. I had constant LDs and many false awakenings, in some of which I was in my own house and I could see ghost-like people etc. I don't have to tell you I was very disturbed by this. I developed a great fear of the dark, and of sleeping, and many times I would stay awake with lights on all night, and then pretend that I am sleeping when my parents woke up to go to work. It was a horrible time (but I got to read tons of books :)). Later, as I moved out of children fantasies and more in the real world, the dreams moved further apart but many times I would have false awakenings and be terrified to sleep for weeks. By the way, I have found that sleeping with a light on drastically reduces dreams for me (maybe its psychological).

Mind that I was never religious or believed in the supernatural. I just had a great fear of the "dream-feeling" that now I wait for so eagerly :)

So, later I started getting drunk every night or so, or just stay up all night and sleep in the day (college is perfect for that), and I had half-consiously blocked most of my dreams out. After some years of few/no dreams, I had a completely terrifying false awakening (that I don't want to share with you - not to give you any subcons. bad thoughts) and I thought to search about it on the internet. Surely enough I ended up here.

Since then, I have managed to conquer my fear of sleeping, the dark, and now actually expect LDs as an opportunity for some fun. False awakenings happen some times, but they are just an annoying sideffect if you manage to handle them.

So my advise is: don't feel helpless or that something strange is happening to you. Some people dream less or more vividly, and you can train yourself to respond to dreams as you want. Reality checks when you wake up will help you. Learning about dreaming will help you. Reading stories of people here will help you. Experimenting with LDs, actually wanting to dream instead of being afraid of it will be the most important step towards getting rid of the "bad" dreams. Try to do the things that you are afraid of but consciously knowing that you are doing them and the fear of the unknown will become less. (I feel I am sounding like a zen master or something now, its not intentional :D). So, instead of trying not to dream, try to dream on your own terms. Learn how to fly away of strange situations, learn how to recognize dreams. After all false awakenings are LDs and you can just teleport to another place if you are able enough with the dream techniques.

Really, I think you took the best first step by asking in this forum. Good luck and welcome...:boogie:

Hello.

i wouldnt wanna stop dreaming for it.. i think thats impossible

Ya those bad experiences can happen from time to time. Even though I thought I had really good control over my dreams, a long time back I was having false awakenings that kept leading to other nightmares where they would be extremely vivid and I would have consciousness throughout the dream but I could not control the main part of the dream. Like people were trying to kill me and I could alter random parts of the dream and get aids to help me fight back and stuff but I couldn't escape the "negative" outcome. Sometimes I'd wake up in a false awakening like this one time when I was trying to escape this "lucid nightmare" of people trying to kill me (couldn't understand why I couldn't control it) I forced myself to wake up before getting shot by this corrupt police and ended up in another FA of someone trying to choke me to death... I kept telling myself to try to leave so I indirectly told my mind that if I kill the man I'll wake up and that's what I ended up doing lol... I actually woke up randomly in paralysis and was seeing imagery of flying demons around me even though I felt awake and was like terrorized for a while... When I finally got up I had actual tears running down my face because my mind believed it was so real and thought I was actually dying.

Long post but basically wanted to say that those bad experiences can happen from time to time to alot of us but you get past them.

Sometimes they're from your mind just randomly trailing to negative thoughts, bad control of the dream due to lack of good practice and knowledge, stress and fear or other external factors, and sometimes they just seem to happen. You also should try to go into the dreams with a positive outlook despite the fact that you may be expecting a bad dream. Expectation can lead to more of them and make sure you relax yourself and try to realize it's just a dream and nobody is really out to get you if you are lucid.

With more experience and if you stick around I'm sure you can figure out how to better avoid those, cope with them, or control them for sure. New techniques and strategies help you escape most of these bad situations or change them around to your advantage.

Hey there, false awakenings can get aggravating, but I've never had them to the extent you are (apparently)
Since this never used to happen to you, it occurs to me that it may be for a reason.

Have you tried asking these questions to the person you're talking to?
1) Who are they really? (sometimes they transform into something that means more to you)
2) Why it keeps happening?
3) How can you make it stop happening?

Let us know how this progresses, I'm curious to hear the solution :)

im also a newbie, but maybe your dream is so close to the real world, that you became scared. you felt bad and wanted to wake up from it. however, since you lucid dream so often, your orders to wake up happened in the dream, not the real world body, wich made you wake up in the dream world again! try to control your body, not your actions

i saw a movie a few weeks ago about false awakening, almost exactly what you are having right now! it was really entertaining:
Waking Life Movie
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...94250854515095

SPOILER - highlight textunfortunately the main character cant find a solution

I found some good tips from here: http://www.dreamviews.com/community/...ad.php?t=67995

ForgottenDream says: "perhaps going to sleep while he's dreaming will wake him up. i've heard it somewhere in this forum, it wouldn't hurt to try. or maybe flying really fast in a blur, or spinning around in the same manner, basically "breaking" from the dream.
one reason why he might have trouble waking up sometimes might be because he is in a deep REM cycle at the time, which can last about an hour, so it would be difficult to wake him up regardless."

Seamuslee says: "...anyways, a surefire way ive always woken up from ANYTHING- is just to blink really hard and really fast(you have to FORCE your eyelids open), works every time.
this might not work for you or him, but its worked for me, and my cousin taught it to me, so it should work."

Heres some help, the people in a lucid dream are mostly phantoms created by the subconscious mind so you can command them with your thoughts are tell them to do something verbally. If anyone of them fails to obey you you now know you have the real essense of a person in your dream state, wether they are dead or a living person who is also dreaming and has inadverdently or deliberatley stumbled into your dream space. After all at anyone time your sleeping there are millions of people who are dreaming an unsconsciouly roaming the astral dream space. If you would like to get away from them in lucid state jsut cover your eyes and say, when I open my eyes I will be in such a such place, now open them you are there >)

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Originally Posted by Dragomentis

Heres some help, the people in a lucid dream are mostly phantoms created by the subconscious mind so you can command them with your thoughts are tell them to do something verbally. If anyone of them fails to obey you you now know you have the real essense of a person in your dream state, wether they are dead or a living person who is also dreaming and has inadverdently or deliberatley stumbled into your dream space. After all at anyone time your sleeping there are millions of people who are dreaming an unsconsciouly roaming the astral dream space. If you would like to get away from them in lucid state jsut cover your eyes and say, when I open my eyes I will be in such a such place, now open them you are there >)

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Do you have any evidence to support this? :shock: