Thread: Rant from a guy who used to post here 14 years ago

Hey all! I'm in a bit of a deep mood and feel like I need to get something written down, so I'm sorry if this is a bit rambly and personal. Me and Dreamviews go way back, so I feel comfortable spilling my guts around here.

I joined this forum years ago when I was young, around 13, and I'm 27 now. I was a studious, healthy, sociable kid. I'd heard about lucid dreaming from someone and I did some research, came across this site, and was obsessed. I managed to become lucid quite a few times, kept detailed dream journals across another account (I think this one got banned until I was 18 XD), and mainly had success with WBTB and DILDs. Something about lucid dreaming felt so pure, inspiring, and profound - I really wanted to dedicate myself more to mastering it, but I was a child at school and didn't really have the confidence to experiment with sleep patterns much.

As I got older I continued to practice lucid dreaming off and on, and when I joined college I met people who smoked weed and quickly became a stoner. This led to some positives such as an interest in meditation, astral projection, and deeper investigation into lucid dreaming. It also led to me taking LSD as an unprepared 17 year old, and man did it shake up my reality for a few months. Ultimately though, I was still fascinated by this alternative world around me, feeling like things such as lucid dreaming were just too damn cool to be real.

After college, I began university, and I would end up loving the course, getting a first class honors, and even teaching on the course. However, I guess the student life started to mess up my routine pretty bad. I no longer lived with my parents and their routines, drinking and smoking weed had become normal, and my sleep schedule and diet became a mess. Over the three years I had many ups and downs, going through healthy periods and destructive periods. However, habits such as consuming junk food, smoking weed every day, and having terrible sleeping patterns continued unfortunately, until I found myself struggling with a complex Masters course. I was always such a chilled guy, but I was getting anxious a lot, not keeping myself healthy, becoming introverted, and consuming too much. Not only was I consuming too much junk food, drinks, cannabis and tobacco, but I was also starting to fall into deep online content holes, from Netflix and Youtube binges to unhealthily long porn binges.

Almost 15 years after finding this forum, I have found myself as a fairly successful musician and writer, yet with a feeling that the magic of life quickly disappeared. I am still a happy person and I'm not sure I would consider myself depressed, but the challenges of life have certainly put me in a more cautious, numb, and unaware state. I consume so much content, I eat fast food almost daily, and I sit on my ass all day smoking weed and wondering why nothing is changing. Financially I'm great, I have close friends and family, I still make music and do creative stuff, but I feel generally unaware in life. Days go by so fast, weeks and months flash before my eyes, and the same old bad habits prevail.

I've found myself today feeling a bit down about all of this, and have considered starting a journey of improvement with minimizing content consumption. I am a creator, and I spend days upon days of my life consuming other peoples content, barely even digesting what I'm consuming. I think that minimizing the amount of time I spend staring at YouTube, TikTok, video games, porn, it will have a profound effect on my life. I will have so much time in my days to make music, create, learn, instead of mindless consuming things.

This also gave me the idea of getting back into lucid dreaming. The spiritual side of life is something that I truly feel I have drifted away from - I honestly think its through the accumulation of societal constructs, negative habits, and growing skepticism. However, it's still something that I very much believe in and get excited about, and I don't think it can ever be too late. I think I will need to start eating properly, doing exercise, getting proper sleep, and maintaining some sort of a schedule. However with that, I think things such as meditation and lucid dreaming will come back into my world, and I'm really excited at the thought of that.

So here I am, 14 years later, rambling to you on Dreamviews. I feel like I need to start a new chapter right now, and I'm going to try to base my online self on Dreamviews. I'll start up a dream journal again, try to get a normal sleeping pattern going, and check-in on here whenever I'm feeling something along this journey.

Thanks for reading!