hello. can someone explain please.

Hi there. I found my way to this site in the hope of finding an explination for the strange but euphoric experience i had last week. I have read many of your posts now and have come to the conclusion that i must had had a lucid dream, although at the time it felt so real.

if I could just explain a little first about my experiences with dreamland.

I have mostly always had quite vivid colourful dreams with increadibly detailed recall. People often wonder why my dream recall is so detailed when my 'reality' memory is so bad. I have had dream experiences where for a few nights in a row i can go back into the same dream to continue it, a bit like a series on T.V and a few times i have even had end credits appear at the end of a dream ( silly as it sounds ). I have even had a few predictive dreams, unfortunatly though these never have the lottery numbers. A couple of times i have realised i was dreaming and have been able to controll what was hapening but this seemed nothing unusual and i would usualy wake up soon after realising it.

When younger, in my teens i started to experience something rather frightening and upsetting. It would start with aloud whoshing noise and then i would be paralysed but awake or so it seemed. I would have the most awful terryfying halucinations and struggle to move and call for help. then suddenly i would wake up and with relief get up and go and make a cup of tea or something only to find that the terryfying thing wa with me once more and that i hadn't woken at all, i only dreamed i had and then it was back to the paralysis and calling for help. this could be repeated a number of times untill eventually i really never knew if i was awake or asleep. overthe years i learned how to controll this sort of sleep state and now if i get the whooshing sound i know theres no turning back from the paralysis and thebest thing to do is not to fight it and go with the flow of it untill i somehow spot a point in this state where i am morelikely to 'wake up' than at any other point. if that makes sense?

However these are not the reasons i found my way to this board and i'm sorry if this has already made long and boaring reading.

Last week, it was quite late,about 2 am and i was lying in bed with my i pod playing a relaxation meditation hypnotherepy CD ( with subliminal messages) I remember thinking how wonderfully relaxed i felt when without warning i was yanked headfirst out of my body and heading towards a bright white cloud. I remember feeling extreemly shocked at this and jerked myself backwards into my body again but as i did i felt a sort of male presence with me reasuring me that it would be ok. then i was yanked back out again and broke through the white light into the most increadabley vividly coloured landscape you couldn't even begin to imagine. so colourful it was vibrating and so detailed that i could almost see the detail right down to an atomic level. This male presance kept reasuring me and i felt overwhellmed with euphoria calm peace love.. not sure how to define it.. then we were off. flying at increadable speed towards a small town. On the way the presance explained that he would show me a number of things in order to let me know that my life choices were only limited by my expectations. but that no matter what my choices were i would always be supported by him/them. There was a very spiritual feeling to all this but i would have to say that i am not particularly religious though i do sort of believe in some spiritual stuff but not in a fanatical way or anything. I won't bother you with the details of the content of the rest of the 'dream' but i can tell you i visited a number of locations and senarios in it and i remember thinking at the time that this was not a dream becuase i knew I was not controlling it - it was guiding me. anyhow it all ended quite naturally when i asked the presance to tell me what i could do to 'give something back' and he told me to be truthful and kind and to tell people how wonderful they were as their happiness would be my happiness. I said i understood and at that moment i was whooshed back into my body very quickly with a feeling of dissapointment that i was back and Paul Mc Kenna ( a CD hypnotist ) chatting through my i pod earphones. I lay there for a while, heart beating fast feeling quite disorientated but knowing that i'd experienced something very special.

Nothing like this as ever happened to me before but i don't think id mind to much if it happened again. i have estimated from the time the C.D's run on my i pod that this musthave lasted for at least an hour.

So. can you tell me if this is typical of a lucid dream.. or so you think it was something more. A psychic friend of mine says it was astral travel. my partner says it was just a vivid dream and my son asked me where i'd hidden the crystal meths!

Sorry, ive just realised how long this post is.... Is anyone still there?

First of all, welcome to DV.
http://www.dreamviews.com/community/member.php?u=38
Your first experiance sounds like sleep paralysis, read more about it here.

I'm not exactly sure what happened in your dream there, thought the clear definition of lucid is "aware", if you knew you were dreaming at the time, you were lucid.

In response to the first portion of your post, as no-name said, it sounds like a classic case of sleep paralysis. During SP, people tend to have what's called "Hypnogogic Hallucinations" which can include but aren't limited to strange sounds, images, and feelings. A lot have mentioned that they feel a presence in the room when it happens, sometimes a ways away and sometimes pressing on their chest and making it difficult to breathe. It's often referred to as the "Old Hag" and if you search for that term, you're bound to find more information. You're not alone when it comes to this and I'm sure that if you stick around long enough, you'll find plenty of people who have gone through the same thing. :)

As far as the dream/vision/? I don't have an answer. Dreams and pretty much anything mental is very subjective and individualistic. I'm doubtful of the existence of Astral Projection, and while it sounds like an unintentional WILD, I wouldn't say that it's not possibly a vision of some sort. I feel more people claim to have visions when they just have dreams, but at the same time I know that there are those who truly have a unique experience.

I would say to learn from what happened, but don't devote your life to trying to induce visions or contact the great will of the macrocosms. It sounds like a fantastic experience :)

You were visited by the ghost of christmas future! :lol:

What a powerful experience. If that is not a brush with god, I don't know what is. No matter what your definition of god is, it is definitely something to cherish. It makes you wonder how many religions are started by experiences such as this. Imagine someone who had no knowledge of lucid dreaming, sleep paralysis, out of body experiences, ect having something like this happen to them.

Hi again and thank you all for your thoughts on this. I am tending to think this was probably a very vivid lucid dream except for the fact as has been mentioned that lucid means that you are aware that you are dreaming. For me this experience was more like a case of i was aware that i was not dreaming. Anyhow, i have come down on the side of my skeptical head and gone for the lucid rather than the astral. I had to smile when i read what you had said robot butler about the ghost of christmas future as the next day i was thinking about it all and it occured to me that it was something akin to the story of scrooge... perhaps there is a message in it for me after all..Now where did i put that turkey!..lol