Lucid Dreaming

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I do so love that feeling of edging myself higher and higher until I'm flying!

As a child I realised I could "change the story" of nightmares. Somehow I could ease sideways into a non scary dream. Not all the time but often.

Sometimes I have similar things now. But mostly not.

I did the opposite, I turned dreams into nightmares since I liked them.
Two scenarios I remember was Being run over by a motorcycle and Sword fighting with a pirate (and dying).

/Mats

The dark side beckons... resistance is futile.

I've been lucid dreaming all my life. Almost always, they are dreams in which I'm flying, a "flight dream." One theory as to why flight dreams are almost always lucid, or that lucid dreams are almost always flight, is that you're not actually dreaming at that point. You're ASTRAL PROJECTING!

This also explains why, during flight dreams, the scenery is exceptionally vivid, as vivid as you'd perceive if you were hang gliding for real, or were a bird. Astral projection (out of body experience) would also explain why, in 100 percent of my cases of sleep paralysis, the SP is preceded by a flight dream. The "flight" ends when my astral body re-enters my physical body. The re-entry takes a few minutes, during which we experience a sleep paralysis. But another explanation for SP is that we are paralyzed during dreams to prevent physically acting them out, and the switch-off of this mechanism is sometimes delayed. But then, how come I don't have SP for non-lucid dreams?

All I seem to dream about is theme parks and rollercoasters. Don't ask.

I don't lucid dream and I don't want to really. Dreaming is an escape from reality and so the last thing I want is to be consciously aware that I'm dreaming.

It's happened to me occasionally, but mostly I've just been aware that it's a dream and have only thought to controll it a few times. Usually once I'm aware it's a dream, I begin to wake up, but I've had one or two long lucid dreams. Maybe a couple of times when the dream was a bad one that I wasn't naturally waking up from, I've been able to wake myself up. That can be quite difficult, because my body is paralysed at the time (which is apparently a normal thing, albeit scary if you become aware of it), but I figured out that it was possible for me to escape by focussing on my breathing and making that more intense until the noise wakes me.

I Love roller coasters.

It's not just about being consciously aware of dreaming, it's more about being able to control the dream. With practice you can become the director of any scenario you wish to explore.

Well, that doesn't really seem to be the accepted definition of a lucid dream:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucid_dream
"A lucid dream is a type of dream in which the dreamer becomes aware that they are dreaming. During a lucid dream, the dreamer may gain some amount of control over the dream characters, narrative, or environment; however, this is not actually necessary for a dream to be described as lucid."

Of course if you just mean that for the purpose of this thread you're mostly interested in the control aspect of lucid dreams, that's your right as the OP.

In my case, being able to control them interests me but what fascinates me more is the unbidden content of the dream, which has often been way more artistically creative and beautiful than anything I've ever been able to deliberately create during my waking life. I've noticed that when I know it's a dream at the time, I seem better able to appreciate the beauty of the visual content. During one dream where I was flying around some magical old Oriental country, the architecture and art work was breathtaking. I didn't deliberately design it or tell it to look like that, I was only controlling where I went. I'm not surprised that many cultures have considered dreams to have come from outside themselves, though personally I think it's all done by the dreamer's own brain, just that for some reason its creative abilities are unlocked, so that it seems like it must be coming from out there.

Interesting. Thanks for that. I had always assumed through reading other sources that the element of control was also central to the term's definition. I don't like to control the content of my threads at all (unless it goes all completely OT). Just enjoying the different views here and also learning some new things.

Decades ago a therapist taught me to lucid dream (the control aspect), so I could deal with nighttime acute anxiety. It worked. Recently I have been subconsciously processing deep emotions in my sleep and it goes well. It provides me a lot of relief. I have suggested to both my children that they can lucid dream. So far only one has reported that he's done so.

I remember my first lucid dream. I was about 16 years old. I realised I was dreaming and began to control the content. I willed myself to be in a vehicle that was going very fast - it turned out to be a bus for some reason, but I got my wish, i.e. it was going very fast. Next thing I knew, I'd woken up. At least I thought I'd woken up, but actually it was one of those false awakenings. I was lying in bed in the dark and this barely-visible, beast-like thing was moving threateningly towards me from the foot of the bed. I felt that I'd broken the cosmic rules by interfering with the dream process for my own amusement, and was being punished for it. So I was rather put off trying again, as I was still rather superstitious in those days.

It's likely that my fear of lucid dreaming (particularly controlling them) led to my learning how to wake myself up whenever a dream became lucid, by taking control of my breathing. But what happened was that I got hypnopompic hallucinations:

https://www.sleepfoundation.org/how-sle ... ucinations

Mine were purely visual hallucinations, and the first couple of times it happened I was terrified. There was no sleep paralysis, it was just that after waking, if I closed my eyes again I hallucinated. So I'd keep my eyes open, turn on the light, and sit there for a while until it was safe to go back to sleep. But I was also fascinated by these strange visions, and eventually plucked up the courage to let one happen. It was amazing, like a technicolor film. I saw a blue sky with smoke rising, then the "camera" moved down to ground level and I saw the smoke was coming from a chimney in a greenhouse, and I recognised it as the neighbour's greenhouse as viewed from the bottom of our garden. Then I saw on top of our heap of garden waste two figures, which I thought might be aliens from space. The camera zoomed in and I saw they were made entirely of little bits of brightly-coloured paper, all shaking slightly with the breeze, with nothing between them to connect them, but somehow staying together in the form of those humanoid figures via unseen forces. That's where the hallucination ended. I was amazed.

I'd never heard of anybody else having such visions - it's only recently that info about them started to appear on the Web. But I never thought they were a sign of mental illness or anything to worry about once I'd got past my superstitious fear of them. I certainly wasn't on any drugs. I figured the reason they might be happening was that I'd woken myself up quickly from a dream (which is an unusual thing) and so my brain hadn't had time to fully switch from dreaming mode to waking mode. I was soon doing all I could to encourage them. It seemed to help if, on waking, I immediately opened my eyes for a few seconds and then closed them again (I never hallucinated while my eyes were open). I later learned that a Victorian researcher called George Trumbull Ladd reckoned that visual dreams were caused by the brain trying to make sense of the eigenlicht (the “intrinsic light” or “visual noise” that the human eye generates in the absence of light). So my own observations tied in neatly with that. By briefly opening my eyes I may have been encouraging a bit of "image retention" thus increasing the retinal activity or eigenlicht.

I never had any control over the content of those hallucinations, but it was enough for me to just lie back and enjoy the show. One was a load of coloured cartoon aeroplanes flying around, all in 2 dimensions, each one of a different and creative design. Another was an old, thin man gracefully and energetically dancing and cavorting around in a large, dark, cluttered room.

They began to happen so often that for a short time I was beginning to wish they wouldn't. But they became less frequent, and sadly I haven't had one for a long time. I rarely get lucid dreams these days, so I don't get to wake up rapidly, and the last time I did, there was no hallucination. Oh well, at least the most recent lucid dream I had was only a few years ago, and it was one of the best, so there's hope of more of those to come.