Thread: Stress, Studying, and Personal Experience Regarding Lucid Dreaming

Hello all,

This is an interesting story I have to tell regarding the end of my first year at university and its subsequent effect on my ability to lucid dream along with a few mental theories, queries, and musings. I warn you that this is a bit of a ramble, as it is being written at 3 am. Hopefully you can extract something useful from it

I recently finished a very stressful and long year at a fine university where the end of the term was filled with the normal exams, but I found myself worrying significantly more than usual as I was enrolled in some very difficult classes which weren't particularly my strong suit, among them, Behavioral Neuroscience. At the same time, I had just written a paper posing the theory that lucid dreaming was an off shoot of traditional Freudian analysis but with an inward focus rather than an outward dialog.

At the time I spent a lot of time doing reality checks etc, and spent time trying to get to sleep and repeating mantras with only the occasional lucid dream. However, after finishing my exams and returning home to sleep, instead of the random one or no lucid dreams I might expect in a typical week I have experienced approximately twelve with at least 5 separate ones last night. To me, this is understandably mind boggling as I have effectively done nothing to propagate it.

I wonder if anyone else has had similar results. I found that my control was better than usual as well, but instead of longer lucid dreams, I had a series of fragmented DEILDs tied together to form a coherent sequence of events instead of the normal LDs I am used to.

For example, I had a dream that essential took my university and divided it up and assigned portions of my mind to each area. One class room was filled with characters and they represented my memory, while a room of blind folded people attempted to determine things by touch (there was one of these for each sense). I wonder if this was result of my psychological studies.

Every time I have become lucid recently was with the same dream sign (the only time I've ever had them really) and that was my hands appearing abnormal. This sort of came out of left field for me along with my decision not to wake up to record my dream which allowed me to have several shorter LD's that intertwined.

I realize that this is probably a complete jumble, but let me try to lay out what I've sort of gathered over the past few days in the form of a few questions or ideas:

1. Stress inhibits lucid dreaming, this is widely accepted. However, what if it could be treated in a manner similar to REM rebound? Is there a way to artificially increase stress levels mentally for a time to facilitate lucidity? By making it so that you are extra stressed by your own doing and then abandoning it before bed, could one possibly trick the logic centers of the brain into still being analytical while being relaxed enough to counter the inhibitory effect.

2. I woke up long enough to take a walk to the other side of my house this morning before returning to bed. This may have been an unintentional WBTB, but also involved me having to activate my logic centers to deal with an issue (the computer wouldn't turn on). Theoretically, does this mean that a short WBTB trying to solve something logically, but still simple would provide a better frame work for LDing as it would highly excite the logic centers in a small time frame and allow a person to still remain tired enough to return to bed.

3. My studies about lucid dreaming seemed to encourage them to occur. Instead of trying to achieve it, I found myself having to argue about it philosophically and spend a significant amount of time engaged in describing it and its utility, especially in writing. Perhaps the act of writing something, that isn't inherently automatic like a mantra would yield increased chances to become lucid?

4. My lucidity was somewhat bizarre at times as I acknowledged I was dreaming, but it resulted in a sort of dual consciousness. By this I mean, that I seemed to transition between bodies as I began to wake up. I could feel my real body when I was losing touch with the dream and this realization would often jar me out of my dream.

5. Obviously the increased sleeping after exams helped, more sleep = more REM = more chances at LD's, not much to say here so we'll move right along.

6. My dreams were different as in I managed to maintain lucidity longer overall by having a series of short DEILD's recorded at the end rather than trying to maintain one LD. This might be helpful for people who are having issues maintaining their length, like me. Instead of waking up and recording it, merely try to remember what the context was and keep it in your mind as you go back to sleep, the result for me was that one can drop right back into the dream. It seems an alternative to trying to lengthen one particular LD, but has the inherent risk that you aren't recording it right at waking. This is in effect a standard DEILD, but rather instead of trying to stay lucid, at the end of the LD, tell yourself you are waking up and use that as a spring board to make the DEILD easier by bracing yourself for the transition. If you know you're about to wake up and can force yourself not to move, you can drop right back in. This may be more useful than spending the effort trying to drag out a particular LD.

Well that's all of my ideas, quickly jotted down before I hit the sack. I hope you can extrapolate something from that wall of text. If anything there interests you, please comment on ideas on how to attain lucidity, prolong it, or drop back in more easily.

I look forward to your feedback,
Draxis