Lucid dreams

[dtbog]

A few times in my life, I've experienced a dream where I could control everything that happened. If I wanted the walls of the room to be red, they would be red. If I wanted to bang two chicks at the same time, I wouldn't even need a million dollars to do it. You get the drift. For the unaware, this is known as a lucid dream.

Do you any of you experience lucid dreams on a regular basis? I've heard of people who train themselves to have lucid dreams, and I've heard of associations with sleep patterns or psychotropic drugs or all sorts of other things.

Enlighten me.

[Macdaddy Warsaw]

Um...if I wake up during a dream, I can trick myself back into it. Describing it as such makes it sound like day-dreaming/imagination but it's much more vivid and I feel as though I have total control, but sometimes it slips away and I get caught in a loop. Sounds weird I guess...

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A few times in my life, I've experienced a dream where I could control everything that happened. If I wanted the walls of the room to be red, they would be red. If I wanted to bang two chicks at the same time, I wouldn't even need a million dollars to do it. You get the drift. For the unaware, this is known as a lucid dream.

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I have this happen at least a few times a week, but it's not really lucid dreaming.

[dtbog]

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I have this happen at least a few times a week, but it's not really lucid dreaming.

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Why not?

[fluorescenthippo]

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I've heard of people who train themselves to have lucid dreams

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A few years ago i tried this and it worked in about 10 days. I kept a notepad by my bed and everytime i woke up from sleeping whether it be at 4am or in the morning i would write down everything from all my dreams i could remember. at first i had 1-2 seperate memories. a few days later i was remembering 4-6 dreams per night.

i was training my brain to remember dreams long after they happened and to recognize them in the first place. i started to have lucid dreams a few days later. at first, they were very powerful and having them cause me to wake up in excitement.

I stopped writing down my dreams a few days later and i stopped having lucid dreams. Im a really light sleeper and having to write down all my dreams whenever i woke up made me too tired for this to be worth it. but now that im in college i think i might try this again.

Even though I can control certain aspects of the dream, I’m not aware (or at least convinced) that I’m in a dream. On occasion, however, it does trigger lucidity.

[drexah]

Lucid dreams are friking ILL. When i've experienced them, it is usually ALWAYS in the morning when i have already woken up (it seems that you're like 90% asleep, 10% awake) i couldnt necessarily matrix control everything, but i could control myself and a few other things, not just like change locations.

[crownjules]

I've tried this, but with very little success. There are times where I'm dreaming and I know that I am in a dream, but I can never actually control anything. Usually when I start to try and exert control over the dream it wakes me up.

What are some techniques to try and control your dreams and get to that lucid state? Writing down dreams after you wake up from them...but what if you don't remember dreams often enough? You know, when you wake up in the morning and it just seems like a few moments ago you were trying to sleep.

[HopeydaFish]

I used to have them all the time when I was a teenager. I don't think I've had one in the last 10 years, though.

From what I remember of them, I'd be dreaming and behaving "normally" in my dream (ie. unaware that I was dreaming) when suddenly I'd come to the realization that I was dreaming. From that point onwards I'd be able to control what was happening.

I've also done the "writing down your dreams after you wake up" thing. It's amazing some of the f'cked up [censored] that you'll find written the next morning, 99% of which you would have totally forgotten about had you not written it down.

[fluorescenthippo]

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What are some techniques to try and control your dreams and get to that lucid state? Writing down dreams after you wake up from them...but what if you don't remember dreams often enough? You know, when you wake up in the morning and it just seems like a few moments ago you were trying to sleep.

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when i started i thought i never remembered dreams after i awoke. once you try and do this everyday you will start remembering more and more each day.

[jhall23]

I've been slacking recently and no longer have them regularly, but I have had a decent amount of experience with them in the past.

As another poster mentioned it is really important that you can remember as much about your dreams as possible upon waking up. This is the most important piece and a pre-requesite for training yourself. Keeping a notebook by your bed and recording your dreams imediately upon waking is an easy way to do this. Recording them immediately is important, you will quickly loose a lot of detail if you get up and mosey around.

This part is important obviously because the more you remember the more likely you'll remember if you had a lucid dream. That's obvious. But also by doing so you will become aware of patterns in your dreams and in the future wil be more aware that something doesn't seem quite right which will trigger you into realizing you are dreaming.

Another technique is to do "reality checks" frequently throughout your day to day business. This usually consists of simply stopping what you are doing to survey your surroundings to pick up if anything seems odd. You can ask yourself "am I dreaming" or try doing something like changing the color of the wall which you could only do in your dream. The idea is that by doing this frequently in your day to day life, you will start to subconciously do it in your dreams as well. Then when you do it will trigger you to realize that you are dreaming.

The really tricky thing for me was not how to have lucid dreams, but how to maintain lucidity once I got there. This I think just takes time. What would happen to me at first was after the realzation that I was aware I was dreaming I would be in such shock/excitement that I would wake up and/or the dream would fade. There are some techniques to help over come this but I think experience and time are the biggest things.

One thing you can do is when you notice that your are slipping away is to pick an object and put all you attention on it. Your hands are usually a good idea because they are always there. Bring your attention to your hands and then as you start to slip look away at the surroundings. Then repeat. The dream will become more vivid and strong as you do this.

Another thing to do which worked for me (I have no idea why) is to spin around in your dream. Something about the movement causes you to stay in the dream and not wake up. It helps to remind yourself that you are dreaming while doing this or you might go into another dream and forget that you were dreaming.

I had one really interesting experience with this once where I was lucid in a dream that where the scene was pretty much in my bedroom. I almost lost lucidity several times but everytime I did I would spin. Immediately after I stopped spinning I ended up in the very same spot where I had first beome lucid. Eventually I couldn't move at all from the spot.


Oh, one last thing too. It much easier to have lucid dreams after waking up for a little bit and then falling back to sleep (or napping even). I think the theory has to do with certain brain waves and activity. Basically if you sleep for a good 6-7 hours, then wake up for about 15 minutes or so your brain becomes more active but your body is still tired. When you go back to sleep it is easier to become aware of the fact that you are dreaming.

[MrTrik]

I'm one of those people that has recurring dreams. The same dream over and over on many different nights. Usually I'm the guy in the back of the plane who is called up to the cockpit because the pilot and co-pilot are passed out from bad food. Just like the spoof in the movie airplane. There are a few other scenarios as well, but the plane one is the most frequent.

Sometimes in the past, when thinking about the dream after waking up I come to a solution to how to get that big damn airplane through a tight fit. So, anyway, at some time in the future, while dreaming, I actually employ the solution. I seem to be able to affect the dream because I've thought it through while not sleeping. My girl thinks I'm effing crazy, but it's happened more than a few times.

[astroglide]

i focused on it for months when i was like 13 trying to have crazy sex dreams. i would usually wake up once i realized where i was though, and when i had a dream where i thought i was in a coma and that i would never wake up i didn't try again.

[fluorescenthippo]

something to add to jhalls post. another good way to do a reality check is to find a clock and remember the time. look at it again a few seconds later. if its a completely different time, you are dreaming.

or you just live in some [censored] up reality