By that I mean dopers actively engaged in trying to induce lucid dreams.
A lucid dream is one where you are able to realize that you are dreaming without suddenly waking up. The realization that you are dreaming is effectively ‘waking up’ inside the dream. You are suddenly as conscious as you are when awake. This results in an ability to control the qualities of the dream consciously. You can fly and add any person or object to the dream.
A few years ago I was into them, and from what I could learn from newsgroup alt.fan.lucid-dreaming (sp?) I managed to have some (about 5 or 6 in my whole lifetime)
Due to dissapointing results I eventually gave up the techniques. Now I am thinking I would like to start again. I have a will to stop drinking for a week (to regain a clear head) and that would be a good time to try lucid dreaming (they say it’s impossible to lucid dream if you have been drinking)
When I tried, it never worked. But I have have several periods of life where lucid dreaming was fairly common. Hadn’t happened for quite some years except for a particularly surreal one just a few months back.
FTR, I do not put much in dream interpretation. This is just some more odd shit that happens to me. I sometimes think I’m an alien trapped in a Human body, because over and over I am reminded by people that I do not think like they do.
Can sometimes be fun, but why do you think my real life nickname is NoClueBoy?
I don’t know if it counts, but I’ve had dreams where I find myself in a sticky situation(say, I’m about to die, or I’ve fallen into a deep pit) and somehow WILL myself to go back in time, before I was in that predictament.
One dream had me being arrested by the Government for smoking pot(Something I don’t do in real life) and put in front of a military tribunal. I am sentenced to death and killed by piranhas in the amazon river. Then I find myself back when I was arrested and put under guard.
Knowing I’m going to die, I break out and kill many of the armed guards with my bare hands. Later, I even open a wall safe by listening at it and then pull it out of the wall. I wanted a gun and suddenly one appeared in my hands.
I KNEW I shouldn’t have been able to do those things, and while I don’t think I realized it was a dream, I could do pretty much anything I wanted by just wanting to do it.
That may not be lucid dreaming, but it’s the closest I’ve had. It’s a rare thing and I enjoy them when they happen.
I’ve never tried to make myself have lucid dreams, but I do it frequently. Last week I was having a very frightening dream (I think I had it three times in a row). Each time I was able to stop and sort of rewind it because my dream self did something that I just flat wouldn’t do.
How would one go about trying to cause lucid dreaming?
I have horrible insomnia, and I’ve had dreams where I am on my floormat trying to fall asleep. As soon as I realize it’s a dream, I can make something happen. Usually a very bad something. I’ve been shot in the back of my head by my lesbian sister, run over by a train, had my fingers chopped off, and a lot of other nasty things. That always proves to me it’s a dream.
On August 31, 1997 I dreamed a big black car ran over me. Than I woke up and found our about Princess Di’s death. It did freak me out.
What techniques were you using? The “Am I Dreaming?” check during the day doesn’t work because you take it for granted when you’re awake and then do the same when you’re asleep. I was an occasional lucid dreamer and now have them all the time. I trained myself by using this: http://www.invisibleclock.com/ set to go off every 20 minutes. Look at the time, look away, then look at the time again. If you’re dreaming it won’t be the same time. I’d bet you’d have your first time check in your dream within a couple days. The key is not waking up when you realize the time was different. One way is to imagine yourself spinning and falling backward as soon as you see a different time.
Basically you train yourself to do reality checks all the time. In your waking moments you check things that can’t be sustained in dreams. For instance you look at a clock, look away, and look back. If the clock has the same time you are awake, if it has a very different time or has changed colour or has turned into a bunch of flowers, you are dreaming.
Same for words. In dreams words have difficulty maintaining themselves. Many times have I been dreaming, but assuming I’m not (a normal dream) and been frustrated that the thing I am reading keeps changing.
Anyway, the idea is that if you make checking a habit, it is likely to remain a habit in your dreams, and if you do it and find that you are dreaming, and manage to stay dreaming, you have turned it into a lucid dream.
A good lucid dream is a rush. You feel as aware as if you are awake, but you can do super-human things.
Whoops. I shoul have read KidCharlemagne’s post.
My problem is I’m a very light sleeper. As soon as I realize I am dreaming I pop awake.
Neither do I.
It’s a dream, Alex! You can do anything you want!
That sound familiar. What’s it from?
I don’t really remember how I started lucid dreaming. It just sort of did, as an exercise in attempting to levitate.
In the last few years, though, I’ve started to regret messing with my head. But only just a little. Mostly I’m annoyed that I can’t remember more after I wake up. I’ve had some damn good ideas while I was dreaming.
I looked into lucid dreaming about… oh… 6 years ago I think. At the time, I tried conditioning myself to look at the clock, look at something, look away, look back at it, etc, etc. I also remember it was closely linked to meditation (at least the sites I looked at were), so I started to do that. I don’t think I ever actually experienced a lucid dream (at least, not to the point where I was actively controlling the environment knowing that I was dreaming - I’ve definitely had experiences like other posters have said, i.e. feeling something was odd, changing things in the dream world but not realizing that it was a dream), but I did start keeping a very good dream record. I don’t believe a bit in dream interpretation, but it’s pretty fun to read over my old dreams. Ever since I started the journal, they’ve been getting more and more detailed, with complex plots and many characters. Maybe I’ll try the lucid dreaming thing again.
Often I have dreams that feel like they would surely make an amazing sci-fi story but I can never put the essence of them into words without losing most of it.
Occasionally I do lucid dream, but I never have the level of control I want to have. I often realize I’m dreaming and will do various things, but I find myself limited to the parameters of the dream oftentimes. For example, I dream I’m at a formal dinner and realize I’m dreaming, so I go over and kiss the woman across from me just to see what happens, but I can’t escape the room or make her react the way I want her to. But I still derive great satisfaction out of these kinds of dreams.
I often have dreams about driving, and invariably they involve the car not responding, so now when I find myself behind the wheel in a dream, I will stop the vehicle or refuse to drive it because I know what will happen. Funny that I can refuse to drive in my dreams but I am unable to make the car behave normally.
**dotchan[b/], I too am sometimes uncomfortable or frustrated with my lucid dreams. I think they are a mixed blessing. Sometimes I wake up and wonder if I should be committed to an insane asylum!
LobsangOne time I had this amazing dream that I swear I am going to write into a science fiction novel, it was totally amazing. I woke up in utter awe at the creativity of my sleeping brain…
BTW, avoid marijuana and alcohol or any other depressants if you want to do this type of dreaming. Marijuana especially. (One of the side effects of quitting smoking pot is extraordinary dreams, including lucid dreaming.)
I can’t help with causing lucid dreaming, I’ve just always done it. I remember reading an article about it during college and being shocked that so many people didn’t know when they were dreaming. I mean, you can levitate in dreams. You can teleport. You can remember what’s going to happen and work to keep it from happening. How can you not know that’s a dream?
I can count on two fingers the number of times I was dreaming and didn’t know it. Both times the dream was about going through my regular daily routine: no odd events, no odd archetecture, no collapsed or noticably variable time. Once was in junior high, the other was at work. Both times a woke up just before lunch and then had to do the day over.
The only thing I can think to contribute is the daydreaming. I’ve always daydreamed a lot - long involved storylines kept going for weeks. That kind of practice may help you recognize when you’re dreaming. I must warn you that it won’t help with much else.
I’ve watched alien spaceships land on top of my neighbours house and not known I was dreaming.
More often than not something really weird happens that doesn’t make me realize I am dreaming. It just doesn’t register as being out of the ordinary to my dreaming brain.
One of the other LD techniques is working out what common things happen in your dream and then training yourself to associate that thing with asking yourself “Am I dreaming?” so the next time you are dreaming and you see this thing you ask the question and then do a check.
I often have quite lucid awareness of my hypnagogic (halfway into or out of being asleep, before and after sleep) imagery.
Has anyone ever read a short story called "The Kings of Tarshish Shall Bring Gifts’’ by Stephen R. Donaldson? I think of it anytime someone mentions luckid dreaming.
I haven’t had a NON-lucid dream that I’m aware of since the seventies. I always know I’m dreaming. Sometimes I can control it, and sometimes I just use it to wake me up. It’s not always possible to control it: I have a lot of dreams about not being able to wake up. Shudder.
It amazes me that people, including those in this thread, lucid dream all the time. The few that I’ve had have been memorable experiences and have felt nothing like ordinary dreams (which themselves are usually special). Even though the fear of losing them has reduced their quality and length somewhat, they’ve still been very special.
I suppose any rarely experienced phenomenon is special.