Anger and hurt – healing with LDs

I had a fruitful LD summer. During this period, there were two goals I wanted to work towards whenever I became lucid. One was improving my flying, the other was more serious: when lucid, I wanted to be able to talk to my Dad who died of cancer a few years back. We had always had a very difficult relationship, and for many years I had been carrying around a lot of anger direct towards him, as my parents went through a very painful divorce when I was a child. For the record: I was aiming at accessing and interacting with my own memory of my Dad – not at contacting the spirit world!

For fifteen years he’d shown up in my dreams – shouting at me, chasing me. I would wake up feeling pretty bad. On other occasions I’d hear his name and get angry and have violent thoughts. Not good.

So, I thought that if I could get lucid and access my memory of him in my dream state, maybe I could do something about fixing this problem. I did, and I believe it has worked (but of course time will tell).

Before going to sleep, or during the day, I would remind myself that once lucid, one of my aims was to find my Dad, and engage in conversation during which I would tell him that I forgave him for the past, and that things were all going to be ok.

Once lucid, finding him was easy – I just had to remember to look for him, and he soon showed up. He often looked tired and sick (as he indeed was before dying), but I was able to tell him I loved him, tell him I forgave him, and could give him a hug. Even in the LD state these moments could become quite emotional, and I had to remind myself to keep calm or I would wake up. It’s amazing how vivid and real it could be. I could actually feel the tears running down my cheeks (I once wondered, in the dream “gee – will my pillow be wet?” – but when I awoke it was dry as my physical eyes had not been crying). I would wake up feeling very relieved, relaxed, and good.

I was able to do this three or four times and I really have the strong impression that this has done much to ease (even erase?) a great deal of the anger and hurt I was carrying around. Pretty damn amazing, I think. Now I can concentrate on the flying! ;-)


:dancingcow: (humm, a dancing cow - could I be dreaming?)

sounds like a new therapy method, accessing the unconscious and all.

And from what your wrote it seems pretty effective.

Wow – planecrash – I think I saw a pic of you playing the beer trumpet somewhere. I’m sure it sounds great. Must try sometime.

Yes, I think that LDs can allow you to directly access your own hard drive, as it were, and go to work on it. I sure got results by doing what I described above. Too bad I don’t have that many phobias to experiment on, but would be curious to know if someone with, say, a fear of spiders could get over it by having a talk with one in a dream (or some such approach). Maybe I could get over my addiction to chocolate (but not sure I want to…).

I used to have a fear of snakes. I was so fearful of them. Anyways, snakes used to be my dream sign because all my dreams had them in it. Shorty after I found dream Views, i had a lucid dream where a big orange and white snake was on my bed. I decided i was going to defeat it. I picked the snake up ( it was sooo heavy and it struggled) and threw it right out of the window. I woke up and was feeling very good. Ever since then I have not been afraid of snakes. I can hold them now and even think the baby ones can be kinda cute :P

ya they should like do a tv news things about lucid dreamingand coping with ur fears, that whoud get ppl to be intersed in lucid dreaming :D :D :D

Awesome! :D However, this idea has been around for a while. I recommend "Book of Dreams" by Sylvia Browne. She goes into further detail about this. Good read.

I'm glad you were able to reconcile old hurts. Carrying around scars and resentment is a great burden that I wouldn't wish on anyone. The fact that you had the courage and determination to find a way to overcome it, and that you were able to go through with your idea is really great. Congratulations on your success! You've really got the idea. Confronting your fears (like Barbizzle's snakes :)), and more importantly, talking things out when we have issues with the people that are important to us is a big part of, and a good way to move towards, living a healthier life.

I hope that this is an inspiration to others who harbor resentment or hurts. In your case, you had to go to a more extreme way, since your father had died, but the idea is the same. Congratulations again on working this out.

So it also works with snakes! I guess it just confirms how much can be done along these lines. Basically, I was trying to follow chapter 11 of EWLD. There is a passage there where :bowdown: SLB describes how he reacts when grabbed by “a huge, repulsive barbarian with a pockmarked face”. Suffice to say that he doesn’t whip out a lightsaber.

The same chapter also recommends: “Don’t slay your dream dragons; make friends with them”. Which I think would be my approach as they are, after all, part of our own minds. But it looks like Barbizzle’s “throw the snake the window” technique works just a well… (could you have lifted a dragon though? ;-) ).

I’m now wondering how other phobias / strong dislikes could be dealt with in this way. The thing is, they don’t all take the shape of snakes or barbarians. Example: for as long as I can remember, I’ve been driven crazy by ticking clocks (or dripping taps)! My concentration just focuses on the sound and all else vanishes, and all my brain can perceive is “tick tick tick / drip drip drip” ** reaches for his lightsaber **. It has just occurred to me that I might be being trivial and obsessive: after all there are people who use their LDs to talk to God and the Virgin Mary, and I’m getting wound up by clocks… :oops:

Anyway, there are the two questions: do we slay or feed cookies to our demons :cookiemonster: , and what sort of LD therapy could be used to no longer be bothered by repetitive sounds…