lucid dreaming

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here is my first topic, and one I would really like to discuss.

I'm wondering if any other people here are familiar with lucid dreaming. I have been doing it ever since I could remember. I used to always think I was dreaming just like everyone else. people say that normal people may experience it once in a lifetime. wondering if autism can make you more apt to do such things. last night I had a dream about a bear, and than I dreamt that I woke up, and had a dream about a bear. the bear was still there of course. classic example of a lucid dream (may be possible animal spirit stuff, but that is a different topic altogether). it can be self taught, by telling yourself to look at your hands, play with a ring on your finger, turn on a light switch, etc, before you go to sleep. and when you go to sleep, you do just that. and BANG, you're in the dream. I command myself to fly around and stuff. it feels wonderful. some cultures refer these practices to some forms of shamanism. according to them, there may be some things that you can do while you are in there.

just wondering if any of you have experiences like this. when I ask almost everyone about such things, the responses are usually always pritty blank.

My dreams are lucid 99% of the time. There's always a short period, in a dream, where I'm not really sure, till I get "held back"; not being able to read, not being able to run, not being able to fight back, something like that, and that will trigger me into realising it's a dream and from then on I can control my dream like it's "the matrix", giving myself superpowers, changing the surroundings, anything I want.

What -I- find interesting/disturbing is that 1% of the time where I'm completely clueless because the dream seems so real and doesn't feel like it's holding me back in any way. Pretty much always this dream will be me just living my life, months sometimes even years passing, finishing school, falling in love, getting married, getting children, till I "really" wake up and find myself completely clueless and baffled where I am. It can sometimes take me days to really understand "I'm awake now and it was all a dream". I've cried many tears over losing my "dream wife and children", it can sometimes take weeks before their faces start fading away from my mind. Those dreams make me wonder a lot about "reality", am I -really- awake -now-?

I wish dreams had proper science to back it up. Somewhere far away in philosophy land, one could think the lack of understanding dreams could be the "holding back" part of what we perceive as reality.

I experience vivid, bizarre dreams every night. A lot of the time I can control certain aspects of the dreams, or the entire sequence a dream will follow, but other times i'm at the mercy of my dreams. it's a great feeling when you can steer the direction of the dream, and perhaps it's my subconscious way of fighting back, since i feel completely at the mercy of circumstance when i'm awake, that it makes me wanna do this. it's a great feeling when i can rewind time after i realise i made a big mistake, such that i go back to a time before i made the mistake. (my obsession with the prince of persia game here, i guess). other times i can levitate or even fly. i experience sudden changes in perspective in the dream as well. i will for example be looking a particular person and then i'll become that person for some reason. i'm not sure if that is part of the lucid experience but ones dreams do take a significant twist when you sudden change character.

my dreams take a lot out of me though, and i wake up really tired, almost as if i never sleep at all. i don't know if you ever experience this. i'm not really sure when my dreams became this way, but if i could take a guess it probably happened in my early teens and became more vivid as time has passed.

I can't do that. I'm at the mercy of my dreams. Frankly, it would seem to me that with weak central coherence, there ought to be a lesser tendency amongst autistics to dream lucidly, because of a lesser tendency to grasp the detail in light of a whole.

Count me in - I have long, detailed dreams where sometimes after waking I can't tell what was real and what was a dream.

And yes, I have the dreams where I dream I wake up and something weird happens and, then I really wake up. Those can be scary - really, really scary.

The other night I dreamt my wife came home from work - but she was driving a different car, and her hair was darker. The cat walked around the corner but it was a tortoiseshell instead of a tabby - and the wife called the cat by name as if nothing was wrong. A few other minor but noticeable things in the dream but the rest was as expected.

After waking up from my "parallel dimension" dream, I was kinda messed up for a full day. The dream really threw me off.

On another note, after having a nightmare I have been able in the past to fall back asleep with the determination to "fight" the demon in my dream and have been able to do so and defeat the monster.

that is very interesting to me indeed. the only person I could ever relate to in an actual discussion about lucid dreaming has high functioning autism. no other that i know does this. some have claimed to, but when i ask the right questions, they come up short, and i have been asking around for years and years. I put it on facebook for everyone I know a couple of times, and got nothing too. here, I got hits from people in one day. WOW!! ! I would not like to talk about some stuff I have done in an open internet discussion when it comes to lucid dreaming. don't want to come off sounding like a coocoo nutfreak, but I do believe there are some quite interesting things going on with it. science knows almost nothing about lucid dreaming, and there is no scientific value for awareness. in fact, I could bet almost every scientist out there cannot lucid dream, and probably believes there is no value to it, due to the fact that you cannot put bones in a jellyfish. for all we know it could be the next new frontier. there is some literature out there about it. some of it is truly ancient. for the most part, it is a genuinely undiscovered, unmolested pseudoscience. if in fact there is any reality to it. and from the sound of the aspies, and autistics out there, it just very well may mostly belong to us. is this a qualitive issue that most NT'S do not posess? makes me wonder. I wonder if there are any other threads on the subject here? nice to hear i'm not alone with this one. thank you, and sweet dreams.

I guess rather than asking pritty much no one if it is a qualitive issue. I should be asking if it can be considered a skill. I know most all of the "modern" world would probably just call it a useless thing, however it can be used (in dreaming), and it can be taught, and honed with the right people. nice debate for all those people who don't get it, and probably never will.

I am aware that I'm dreaming most of the time when I dream. I can take control of the dreams and direct them, but I find it a lot more interesting to let them unfold as they will. I find the dreams jump from a trapped situtation through an implausible event, and suddenly you're in a different town, a different room, different vehicle. But the story line continues. It's fun and crazy.

Most of my dreams are in a dark sepia tone colour, having just enough detail to recognise the location and features. But I also often dream in full colour, full texture, full animation, from near to the far horizon. I have been woken up by the sheer beauty of some of the scenes I've seen. Breath-taking.

Sound in dreams seems to far less common. But I do get it on occasion. One dream recently, the sound of a T-Rex jaws snapping while attacking a giant greeen snake, was so loud that it woke me up.

dreams to me are very real, sometimes I see things that have never appeared in a waking life. like luminescent colors, and objects, and things. beautiful for the eyes to see. in fact, if such a thing was made, it would be a one of a kind masterpiece. a couple of my lucid dreams have been quite intense. one time I realized something, and saw something that seemed soo real to me that I woke up in a cold drenching sweat from head to toe with my heart pounding right out of my chest. my sheets were literally wet. the only other times i can remember sweating that much, is when i have been very sick. it scared the bajeesus out of me soo bad, I stayed away from trying to do anything in them for about a year, and just let the movie play so to speak. still though... super fun.

When I was 7 I dreamt that a man was chasing me down a path and I was scared. The path split in two and I wondered where to run. Then I thought that it didn't matter what I picked or if he caught up, because it was just a dream.
Then I ran on and was scared again, so I only knew temporarily.

That's the only time I have been aware of dreaming.
I have had some dreams where I have dreamt something and then dreamt that I woke up and either wrote down the dream or told my mother about it.

I'm glad I don't have a lot of lucid dreams, because when I dream of something fantastic or good, I want it to feel entirely real and not know that it isn't.

yep. you did it. more than once from the sound of it. so far that is 5 replys in one day. and one of you does it soo much, I think he should go to a university and get plugged into a bunch of wires when he is sleeping just to see if they can figure out what the heck is going on up there. hehehe. i do believe that is a pritty substantial thing. now im begenning to wonder if it is something about us that people have not caught on to. never heard of it in anything about autism. in fact there is no mention of dreaming at all that I have ever read. the dsm-iv or whatever the heck it is must believe that dreaming is not good for anything, and does not matter. in fact, every time I need to take pain meds and stuff, I have the most horrible dreams ever. what the heck?????

I like to nose around my neighbours houses in my lucid dreams.

I like to fly as well.

Sometimes if a dream takes a turn for the worst I just remind myself that I'm dreaming and then I can just relax about it.

I'm pretty good at lucid dreaming too! It is soooo much fun to be able to take the reins on a dream and let it go in the direction that you want.

People say a lot of BS.... I think it`s pretty normal and has nothing to do with autism.

In periods I have lucid dreams but my dream control is not that good and frequently I will wake up shortly after getting lucid.
I will force whatever girl is around me in the dream to have sex, if there is no girl around I will try to make one appear but that usually result in a monster attacking me instead. If not focused on sex I will fly, often flying over the ocean and then go for a dive.

it just may not be bs. there really is no proof that such a thing exists, but tests have been done on people who supposedly do it, and foun that brain activity occurs between 13-19 hertz. just between waking, and dreaming brain frequency. most all people are at 4-14hz (normal dreaming), and 0.5-4hz (sleeping in a dreamless state). it is also interesting to know that one of the first to write about it (at least a white guy anyway) was Aristotle. who people have controversy as to weather or not he had AS. probably did. there are also benifits for us. it has somehow supposedly been proven that lucid dreaming has theraputic benifits for things that alot of us are suffering from. like for instance... nightmares, depression, and self mutilation. for those reasons alone, it may actually be a natural potion that some of us desperately need.

it just may not be bs. there really is no proof that such a thing exists, but tests have been done on people who supposedly do it, and foun that brain activity occurs between 13-19 hertz. just between waking, and dreaming brain frequency. most all people are at 4-14hz (normal dreaming), and 0.5-4hz (sleeping in a dreamless state). it is also interesting to know that one of the first to write about it (at least a white guy anyway) was Aristotle. who people have controversy as to weather or not he had AS. probably did. there are also benifits for us. it has somehow supposedly been proven that lucid dreaming has theraputic benifits for things that alot of us are suffering from. like for instance... nightmares, depression, and self mutilation. for those reasons alone, it may actually be a natural potion that some of us desperately need.