Thread: is this lucid dreaming?

Originally Posted by JET123

I am 19 and have bee having lucid dreams for years however i have only just found out they have a proper name lol. im guessing i taught myself to lucid dream as i suffered from very scary and very violent nightmares throughout the whole of my childhood i eventually began telling myself the nightmares are just s dream and there not real. therefore i have only had 3 nightmare in the past 7 yrs. however for the past coupple of years i have been able to remember conversations that have happened around me whilst i have been sleeping/ dreaming. for example .... i was staying at my boyfriends house and his young nieces where there, and in the morning when i was asleep i heard them whispering about going through my bag. i made a concious effort to remember and i confronted them when i woke.... sorry its a bit long winded but i was wondering if this is a form of lucid dreamin.

thanks

I think what you when you heard people going through your bag, im pretty sure that didn't actually happen, it was either hypnagogic sounds, or a just a dream.

as far as knowing that you were having a nightmares, i think that's a form of lucid dreaming.

Nightmares are still normal dreams, however you can have Lucid nightmares. I also agree about the conversation you heard being Hypnogogic Hallucinations.

No the people going through her bag seems pretty real. Especially if it took place in the morning. I have awoke several times but my eyes were still closes, and I didn't move at all.

It sounds like she's saying that she heard them while she was asleep, and it turned out that they actually did talk about going into her bag. You know, like learning by osmosis? Listening to a tape teaching a language while you sleep?

Nightmares are just scary dreams.

As long as, during a dream, you know that you are dreaming- it's a lucid dream. So, your first statement that you taught yourself to lucid dream from nightmares is accurate

As far as hearing external stimuli... who knows. If you can verify with the environment when you wake up that you were hearing real sounds instead of just hallucinations, then all it is is you hearing external stimuli while sleeping. It's not that rare, and the EILD technique uses this to become lucid.

If you are in a lucid dream and hearing sounds from RL, technically yes you're still in a lucid dream, but these sounds don't really factor. It's just two things (you being in a lucid dream, you hearing sounds from RL) happening at the same time.

These COULD be hypnopompic hallucinations, just hallucinations that you experience while waking up from sleep. An alternative possibility is that you are waking up into sleep paralysis- but since you said you were dreaming and didn't make any mention of bodily paralysis, then this seems like the more unlikely scenario. However, people who are in sleep paralysis can accurately perceive what's going on around them. So, just another option. You'd have to be paralyzed and awake and not dreaming for it to be this, though.