# Can you wake yourself up from a dream?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-wake-yourself-up-from-a-dream/557606>\
**Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\
**Created:** [October 19, 2010, 12:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-wake-yourself-up-from-a-dream/557606 "2010-10-19T00:41:50Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 2

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**Author:** ![norinew](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/eb9ed0/32.png) [@norinew](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/norinew)\
**Post date:** [October 20, 2010, 1:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-wake-yourself-up-from-a-dream/557606/21 "2010-10-20T01:09:12Z")

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Sometimes I can. But something called “Directed Dreaming” _has_ worked for me. My mother was not a good mother. She was never physically abusive, but was often neglectful, verbally abusive, and I’m pretty sure she was bipolar. After she died, I had frequent dreams about her. Bad, bad dreams. In the dreams, she would come to me and criticize just about every aspect of my life.

Then I read about ‘directed dreaming’, in which you can _tell_ the ‘subject’ of your dreams (in this case, my mother), ‘you’re only a dream, and you’re _my_ dream, and I don’t have to allow you to be here if I don’t want to!’

The next time I had a dream about my mother, in my dream I talked to her. I said “Look, you’re a dream. I know it. I know you’re dead. You really must stay out of my dreams now; you are not allowed in”.

I haven’t had a dream about her since then.

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