First LD

[sledgegaming]

For the past few years now, I've experienced sleep paralysis a few times a year. Every time until today, I've been horrified and just struggled all I could to wake up. Lately, I've been seeing images and feeling someone crawl into bed with me after my wife has already left for work durring these occurences. Real as anything. I seem to be only able to accomplish them intentionally after I've woken up, gone downstairs with the kids so the wife can go to work. Then not until 20 minutes later when the babysiter gets there, I go back upstairs for a 45 minute power nap before work. Today, I decided to go ahead and try to deal with the fear and actually become "lucid" instead of paralyzed, and it worked. I was all of a sudden standing with a bunch of friends at a party in a park. Their faces all looked so real. I then tried to "spawn" a girl that I havn't seen in years and I couldn't. Just kept being random other women that I know. After that, I just walked around having random conversations with friends. I woke up to the sound of the alarm clock and freaked out because it was supposed to be set for 8:00, but the clock said 3:55. I ran down stairs to grab my cell phone and then REALLY woke up at 7:56. Weird feeling......

[Burns]

Congrats! So you knew you were dreaming when you saw all their faces? Keep up the great work, and welcome to the forum!

[sledgegaming]

Not so much when I saw thier faces. It was moreover instantly. I lay in bed realizing that I was unable to move, felt the regular person crawl up the bed and lie next to me, and I realized there was nothing really there, and I could take control of it. I thought really hard about being somewhere else, and then I was just there, at the gathering with all of my friends. I really didn't pick the place that I ended up, and after writing this, I remembered that just before the fake alarm clock went off, I was talking to one of my friends and a bunch of "bad guys" from the game Crackdown for Xbox 360 were running around in the background trying to shoot at me and somehow falling and dieing themselves, so I know I was starting to lose control of the whole dream at that point. Anyway, it's cool to find this group of people where I can talk about this stuff and not feel like a jackass. I can just imagine going on about this stuff with the other guys at work. Whooo that'd go over well.

[Burns]

haha, I know what you mean! This forum is a great outlet for what other people would consider "weird", LOL. But you knew you were dreaming though, right? Because just because you have control doesn't mean you were lucid. You can control a dream and not be lucid, just as you can be lucid and have no control. Lucidity and control are not dependent on each other.

[sledgegaming]

At some points in the dream I knew I was dreaming. I'm not sure how much of it though, but I remember little things like watching a friend eat a peice of pizza and being amaized at how real the movement of his jaw was for being "just a dream" and how vivid his curly strands of hair were.

[sledgegaming]

But now I'm kind of pissed. I can't get back to that state again. The last couple of mornings I've tried, but the second I realise that I'm in sleep paralysis, I get worked up and snap out of it..... Kind of funny, spent the last few years struggling when it would happen, and now I can't hang on to it.