I’m saying this regardless of any article, discovery, news, Sci-Fi movie or anything else. I’ve just experience it myself but I want to learn more about it by asking others to share their knowledge and experience.
Some time ago I had a dream and when I thought about it carefully I remembered that just few minutes before I fell to sleep I had thought about what I dreamed. Later I decided to give it a try to see if this can happen again. Two nights passed and it didn’t, but at the third night I dreamed what I was thinking about. I think the subtlety lies in the appropriate time of thinking about the subject, it should be exactly in the minutes you are about to fall to sleep. It was interesting for me, so I continued to do it. But the result is not always 100%. Sometimes I am successful and sometimes it fails.
The other thing I’m working on is to see the possibility of dreaming consciously. I mean while you are dreaming, you somehow control your actions in your dream. For instance, you face a dangerous situation in your dream and by knowing that it’s a dream you try to stand and fight it instead of running away.
Do you think is it possible or has anybody had any experience or read about these two mentioned points?
I have pretty good control over my dreams. I can wake myself up, use extensive superpowers (though they don’t always work completely), and am often aware I’m dreaming and therefore can change what’s happening (generally by “rewinding” and then redoing things the way I want them done). I’m not sure how that ended up being possible though, so I can’t really give advice. I’m pretty sure it’s called “lucid dreaming” and that there is information out there on how to cultivate it.
I don’t know if this had any bearing, but I developed these abilities at a time in my life when I was having various physical illness induced (postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome) sleep disturbances and was becoming quite debilitated in general. I wonder if the lack of control over my life caused me to need to have such control over my dreams or if one of the sleep disturbances led to me learning how to do it. Or maybe it was just a fluke, I don’t know.
I am often aware that I’m dreaming while asleep, and I can often control the course of my dreams. That, or I often dream that I’m aware of dreaming while asleep, and I often dream that I can control the course of my dreams even though I really can’t . . .
In any case, I believe I often control my dreams. It’s as if I were the writer-director of some weird private movie that occurs in my head. Other times, however, things are clearly out of my control and I’m just along for the ride.
Unlike supergoose, I don’t think I can just wake up whenever I like (though I don’t know that this has ever occurred to me while asleep). I can remember a couple occasions when the distrurbing or outright terrifying nature of what my subconscious threw at me forced me awake, but I’m not sure this flight from sleep was intentional.
Anyway, yes, I often dream lucidly, though I don’t know how. Still, it’s pretty neat.
After seeing Inception, sometimes when I am dreaming, I will ask myself how I got “here” (where I am in the dream). When I can’t recall, I realize I’m dreaming. I usually wake up soon after that. I don’t know if that was written into the movie, or if it’s a common lucid dreaming technique.
When I have nightmares, I’m able to reassure myself that it isn’t real. Either way I am not able to control too much, and usually wake up once I try.
If I have claustrophobic dreams it means I’m having problems breathing. If I have a violent dream it means a migraine headache is coming on. If it’s a looping dream it means I forgot to take my BP medicine.
Occasionally I realize I’m in a dream, usually when it’s something really freaky, and then I can try to wake myself up. Sometimes it takes what seems like a while; in the dream, I’ll close my eyes and tell myself I’ll be awake when I open them…sometimes when I do that, I think I’m awake for some unspecified period of time but realize I’m still dreaming.
Other than that, no. I wish I could more reliably wake myself, though, because when I want to, I really want to!
I can always wake myself up from a bad dream. But it has to be a genuinely frightening dream.
As in - most times - it must be a “I’m getting pursued! Oh shit, I’m caught! Bad things are gonna happen to me, I’m afraid! OH SHI—” and I usually pull myself awake. It always kinda feels like dragging myself up from being underwater. But if I’m having a nightmare I nearly always drag myself awake before I experience the bad of a nightmare.
When I was younger I read a book on lucid dreaming and tried to get to where I could do it. I only managed to achieve it once. In the dream, I was escaping from bad guys and passed by a construction site with an open dug-out basement hole. I jumped in, expecting to land with a jarring thud, but instead touched down lightly. “This HAS to be a dream,” I excitedly realized. I decided to try flying, and with three long loping jumps (not unlike a Super Mario 64 triple jump, although this predates the game) I was up in the air. It was exhilirating. After a bit I felt myself start to wake up and tried a trick the book had recommended, which was to make yourself spin like a top until you felt yourself stabilize. It worked!
Unfortunately, right then, a person from Porlock called me on the goddamned phone and woke me up. Hrmph.
I went through a phase maybe 2-3 years long where I had lucid dreams almost every single night. Not only was I conscious that I was dreaming, but I could make decisions about how to proceed. I usually made these based on interpreting the dream’s meaning to the best of my ability, and then making sure I acted in some symbolic way. They were usually very frightening dreams that required me to confront something I feared. In the most memorable dream, there was a hideous ghoul after my boyfriend (now husband.) I didn’t even want to go into the haunted house, didn’t even want to look in its face, but I knew I had to. It taunted me by looking after him as he wandered through the house - he didn’t even know it was there. I picked up an umbrella, stared straight at it, and hauled ass after it. I woke up exhilarated and confident that I had just conquered something real that was bothering me.
I don’t appear to be able to control when I dream lucidly though. It happens rarely now.
I’m unusually bad at lucid dreaming. When I first learned about it as a kid, it seemed like the coolest idea ever, so I did all the exercises that are supposed to make it easier.
One example I remember as being typical of how it worked in practice: I was dreaming that I was on a schoolbus. At some point, I realized it was a dream. Great, think I, now I can do anything! So I open the door of the bus and fly away! … Except I only get 10 feet away or so, and that’s it. The bus kept going, and I’m basically just dragged along diagonally up and behind it. I just can’t go any farther away. Eventually, I get bored, drift back onto the bus, and sit back down. The rest of the dream proceeds as scheduled. Yeah, this lucid dreaming thing is great.
It’s not consistent, but I’m generally fairly good at it as well. Like supergoose I can sort of rewind and replay if things are going in a direction that bother me. I’m not sure when I started doing it, but I know it was a gradual thing and not something I could do as a kid or even a young adult. Nor did I set out to do it deliberately.
But it probably explains why I haven’t had a serious nightmare in decades. Not that all of my dreams are usually pleasant, but these days I often seem to be able to break the pattern if they start getting really disturbing.
I am fairly adept at lucid dreaming, depending on the context. If a dream is sexual in nature, or I want it to be sexual in nature, I can usually guide it that way. I can also generally wake myself up, or protect myself during a scary dream.
I’ve never tried setting dream content up before sleeping, but I almost always know that I’m dreaming. It surprised me to find out that most people don’t.
Once I was so tired that when the kids woke me up in the morning, I could see the dream still going on, like a reflection on a window. I settled who had touched whom and sent them back to the front room, laid back, closed my eyes, and rejoined the dream seamlessly.
In general, it’s like supergoose described. I’m able to rewind if I don’t like something. I also usually know what’s about to happen, or what’s trying to happen, and can plan my actions accordingly. Sometimes I can push on the dream to move things or keep things from happening.
Usually I figure that the dreams are coming from part of my brain for a reason and I might as well let them happen, so I don’t work at modifying them. Well, there’s always the reaction to modify, but dreams have their own momentum and if the dream’s pushing in a certain way, and the usual planning and pushing doesn’t shift it, I’ll shrug and let it happen.