Thread: Not wanting to fall asleep even when tired

It's always been hard for me to fall asleep, because I used to be scared of dying in my sleep. At some point I overcame this fear, since I paid attention to finding myself not having died after waking up frequently. Later this fear replaced with losing consciousness; what this was supposed to mean for me. I just couldn't allow my mind to lose consciousness if I were aware I'd be losing it. Usually it'd take around half an hour for me to fall asleep that way. Now I'm trying to pay attention to my dream recall and how I feel that time has passed since I went to bed. Today I couldn't recall any dreams and it felt like something did happen between falling asleep and waking up, but not much.

For some reason I'm kind of scared of my normal dreams. No. I'm not scared of (intense) nightmares, because they always make me lucid. There always seems to be so much going on and I'm not even sure what most of the time. I do enjoy analyzing my dreams as far as I can remember them, but I can't help being afraid to fall asleep to experience 8 hours of odd exhaustive stories.

Any suggestions to overcome this? I'd like to be able to fall asleep with an intention, but I can't seem to relax when I figure I'm doing this until the point that I lose consciousness. And do I even lose consciousness or does really odd exhaustive stuff happens that I forget afterwards?

My mind wishes to give itself some rest, being mindful in dreams like I'm trying to be when I'm awake.

(I smoke pot every day, because during the day it makes me feel at rest. I'm thinking about quiting pot or just doing less, like my psychiatrist suggests me to do and I feel about it the same way, but I'm not quite sure how to combine it with lucid dreaming. It feels like I have to choose between pot and lucid dreaming. And lucid dreaming is only something I can do while sleeping.)