Thread: Nightmares

I used to have nightmares a lot when I was growing up, and would sometimes become lucid during them. Usually they'd be about someone wanting to capture me or hurt me. Once lucid, I'd hide somewhere and try to wake myself up. In my dream I'd open my eyes really wide, hoping I'd actually open my eyes and wake up. Sometimes it'd work But it didn't work often enough, so that's when I started learning about controlling dreams. Then I would spin in a circle to change the setting instead.

I used to have a lot of nightmares when I was younger. Some of them were so frightening (ex. dolls came to life and chasing me) that affected my real life and I needed days to overcome the shock. As I become older the frequency of the nightmares decreased as well as the level of scariness.

I can still see nightmares but my perception on them is very different. Nothing can scare me anymore! OK, I admit I had some scary experiences with mirrors in lucid dreams and wanted to avoid them, but not anymore.

Yesterday I had a nightmare I need to describe. I was with my mother in an unknown large warehouse and she wanted me to keep the flashlight steady while she unlocked the inner office room. The atmosphere was dark and uncanny. As soon she opened the door, we quickly got inside and she locked the door again. She then told me to close the window at the back. I turned my head and I saw the window full opened with the curtains waving from the wind. Then I asked, who did opened that window and instantly thinking that someone has already entered the office room as the window was looking outside at the ground level. My mother went to close the window and I started looking with the flashlight if someone was in the office. I went through the long dark corridor and suddenly my flashlight caught a figure running towards me. It was a small girl wearing a white dress. She looked strange and spooky. The exact moment I saw her something inside me screamed and scared to death (I actually heard myself screaming but It wasn’t me) while the real me just kept a neutral attitude and feeling. Then I woke up normally and my heart was beating normally, I didn’t scared at all.

All my nightmares are like this. Something is screaming and deep inside me I can feel the thrill. But it just cannot reach me anymore, as like I know that this is a dream and nothing can hurt me. Maybe it is an old fading remaining from my subconscious self that serve as a reminder for my old frightened younger self.

I have had many nightmares. When I was 5/6 years old I used to have nightmares about being left behind and right when I was left behind, something terrible would happen (cannibals who wanted to eat me, ghosts chasing me, etc.). I also used to have nightmares about seeing things happening that DC's didn't see. For example, one time I had a dream where I was in the bathroom with my mother and she was braiding my hair in front of the mirror. I saw a black person (not as in skin tone, but as in the person was a shadow figure) coming up behind her. I screamed and she fought him off, she went back to braiding my hair but the person wasn't dead. It came again and attacked me. I knew it was coming up behind her but I didn't have time to scream so I died in that dream.

When I was around 10 years old I realized fighting those scary creatures wouldn't work, and instead of running away from them, I walked towards them with a loving attitude. I asked them why they wanted to scare me and I came to the conclusion that a lot of my nightmarish figures in my dreams didn't want to scare me. They didn't know they scared me and every single one of them always apologized.

Now I rarely have nightmares, and when I do I almost always turn lucid. A few nights ago I had a scary dream (wouldn't call it a nightmare though) about creepy teddybears coming alive and following me around, which was pretty creepy. I turned lucid and kindly asked the teddybears to leave me alone because they were scaring me. They understood and went back to where they came from.