I have had the “can’t dial” issue, too. It’s frustrating.
As for guns, I can never seem to be able to squeeze the trigger hard enough to make it fire. Not that I’m too weak, just that the trigger won’t move far enough back to fire the gun. Again, quite frustrating.
I have the experiences with reading and with the light switches.
In relation to the shooting of a gun - does anyone else have “fight” dreams where they’re trying to punch someone but it’s like your arm is moving in slow motion and you inflict no harm whatsoever? It’s SO frustrating.
(maybe it’s because I’m an out-of-shape chick and I always worry that in any kind of physical confrontation I would be totally helpless)
Anyway, that usually clues me in that I’m dreaming. As for the reading, I always think “wow this is an amazing story - I’ll have to write it down when I wake up - it will be a BESTSELLER!” 
I have actually speculated in the past that this may be a result of sleep paralysis. Or at least a vague awareness that your brain is suppressing the movement functions so you don’t beat the snot out of your spouse who’s sleeping next to you. The function that prevents you from sleep walking.
I’ve surmized that in dreamworld you think “Swing a punch!”, paralysis responds with “Oh, no you don’t!”, so you feel the “resistance” in dreamworld.
It only seems to happen with imperative functions like “run away” or “defend yourself”. I don’t have problems moving when I need to open a dreamdoor, turn a dreamsteering wheel, or walk around looking for clothes because I’ve gone to dreamschool naked again. It only seems to happen when there is some urgency.
Hence my theory: Your instinct to fight or flee tries to override the paralysis, but fails. So you feel the “resistance” in dreamworld as your brain tries to resolve the conflicting data of “I’m punching. / No I’m not.”
I figured that out as a kid too when I had nightmares. In the dream I tried reeeeaaaly hard to open my eyes, with the idea that if I was dreaming, I could open my eyes and peek at my bedroom. In dreamworld, I would have to physically reach up and try to force my eyelids open “extra-wide” with my fingers – in realworld I would eventually overcome enough of the sleep paralysis to get a sliver of a peek, see my room and tell myself: “Told ya, so. Just a nightmare, sit back and enjoy.” Then the dream would continue, just as scary, but this time I new for sure it was a dream, so it was okay.
Now I’m a little odd in that I almost never don’t know that I’m dreaming. When I found out that other people thought they were awake, I was shocked. I can agree with:
Also people and things are often shaped differently. Buildings in particular look nothing like what they look like awake, I just know which building that odd shape is supposed to represent. And I tend to remember what’s about to happen. I don’t always have time to change things, sometimes I have to replay a scene several times in order to get it to come out the way I want.
A lot of information comes without specific dialog. Like the books mentioned above, if you already know what’s being said, the actual words aren’t really necessary. But the biggest givaway is just that I’m dreaming. Seriously, it feels totally different than being awake.
I was shcoked to find out that most people don’t dream in colour. 
I’ve always dreamt in vivid super-saturated colour.
And how could you possibly NOT know you’re dreaming if the world is suddenly black and white?
Oh, and in dreams I can breathe underwater if I breathe just a teensy-weensy bit, veeeery slowly. Note: Do not forget that this only works in dreamland. I hurt my sinuses when I snorted a noseful of water in a pool one day. Ow.
This whole thread is making me very depressed. Because I never, ever, EVER dream without thinking it’s real. And the very instant I put it all together, and take notice of the inconsistencies, and realize that I’m dreaming… poof… I wake up.
Have never really had a lucid dream because of this. And the worst part isn’t that I can’t figure out I’m dreaming. It’s that this realization ends the dream. i don’t see how I could get around that. 
Same here.
And here. I can’t even conceive of dreaming in black and white all the time (I had a dream once in black and white, but it was truly bizarre, and took place in the 1400s or so.)
Hasn’t this thread ventured into IMHO?
I’ve never had trouble reading while dreaming. I’ve done calculus in a dream! It kind of surprised me because I remembered (while in the dream) the one isn’t supposed to be able to read while dreaming. Yet I looked at the integral and figured out the value (it was some simple polynomial).
I can’t remember ever trying to change the light levels while dreaming. I also don’t have trouble with machinery while dreaming because I never really use machinery. For instance I never dream-shoot a gun because I Force-choke the monsters instead. (You know you’re weird when you’ve integrated Jedi powers into your dream-self.)
My main cues thats I’m dreaming are 1) I know things without looking at them, 2) I realize I’m floating/flying instead of walking/running, 3) things happen because I will them too.
As for dreaming in color vs monochrome, I’d say I don’t do either. I don’t dream images as much as I dream things.
I was thinking the same thing. My original question was fact-based because I thought it was factual in the sense that there are statistics on dreaming in B&W vs. color. And the “not being able to read” stuff has been described as a common phenomenon in research-type stuff.
But we’re having fun chitchatting about some pretty cool personal experiences and hypotheses.
I’ll ask Xash or someone to nudge it over to IMHO.
Omg, tell me about it! It really is bloody annoying when that happens, there has only been like 2 times in which I can properly punch someone.
And also, even if there are loads of inconsistencies in my dream, and am about quarter-lucid, I still feel scared that I might hurt myself in my dream world!
Aren’t people in your dreams required to tell you you’re dreaming, if you ask them? That’s how it always works in my dreams, although most of the time, I don’t think to ask them.
I can read fine, and the light switch thing never occured to me. (I’m more apt to think, “Aw drat, the power’s out,” or something along those lines.) Severe bodily injuries never clue me in either, because in the dream world I always forget those rules don’t apply to the real world – “Oh, my arm’s been cut off? Whatever, happens all the time. Just stick it in my pocket.”
The only times I’ve asked someone in my dream if I was dreaming, I was met with the kind of look you’d expect to get if you asked someone in waking life if you were dreaming.
…
::nominates the above sentence for “Worst Sentence of the Year”.
In my experience memory is the key to figuring out that you’re dreaming. Events usually seem to basically make sense as you go along, but if you try and recall what was happening a few moments ago you’ll realize that everything you weren’t actually focused on was a vague blur.
As an aside, I get the feeling that a lot of you have more detailed dreams than I do. Dreams with characters with actual names? My dreams rarely even include any kind of intelligible language. I can understand the gist of what I or other people are saying, but if I ever try to focus on the actual words they turn out to be nonsense or gibberish. The same goes for anything that would require precise mental activity, even just counting my fingers.
Oh, yeah I’ve had intelligible language.
I even had a serial dream once – way cool! Spanned four nights! The funniest part was that the second night rehashed the first dream in a more condensed verision, kind of like two-parter on TV: “Previously, on Crayons the Vampire Slayer…”
There are also a couple “locales” that make regular appearances in my dreams. So the characters and dream plots are different, but it’s the same haunted house, or catacombs, or what have you. I had a really scarey nightmare once when I went to the same old haunted house that I’d seen for years in my dreams… to find that the dreamworld house had been renovated, a famly was living in it, and the baby’s room was The Most-Haunted-Possessed-by-Evil room in the place! :eek: Freaked me right out because it was as if someone had altered my dream – like there was external intereference.
Scary I tell ya!
This one probably lends itself more to IMHO than GQ, where we’re looking for a nice, neat, factual answer.
Moved to IMHO.
samclem GQ moderator
Usually the problem is getting over excited. I don’t know if you are doing Reality Checks during the day but if you are then add this bit: Imagine what you would do at that moment if you realized you were lucid. eg “If I was lucid I would jump on that branch and grab that leaf” or “I’d ask that old guy for directions to a good restaurant” or something simple “Count how many of those people over there are wearing hats”. Imagine/remember the surprise of realization you’ve had in previous dreams. Try and build up a comfort with recognizing and moving into lucidity through these “dry runs”. GL
I don’t personally try for LD’s much at the moment but went whole hog years before. I get maybe 1-2/month by accident nowadays.(I’ll psyche myself up for a couple of days to have one every couple of months-that’s current effort level).
I’m not sure if I mentioned this in a different thread but a cpl of weeks ago I had a nightmare which I kept ‘waking’ from
Everytime I was sure I had really woke up and when I actually did wake up I apparently told my gf I didn’t know if I was awake or not and thought I might be trapped in my dream still.
I’ve come to realize that there are different degrees to lucid dreaming. Like last night, I dreamt I was bakc in college and for some reason (I can remember) I had to run back to the apartment I shared with assorted roomates (dream creations no one I knew.)
I got stuck in slow -motion running mode. Gah! So right there and then, I knew I was dreaming, I knew that running in dreamtime sucks, but for some reason it never occured to me to take control. So I had to resort to sort of running on all fours, using my arms to scrabble at the ground to help propel me forward.
The whole time I was thinking “Gah! This must looks so STUPID. I hate it when I have to do this dream running shit. I’m teh only dream person that has to do this. It’s embarassing!” Since I knew I was dreaming, I could have flown or done whatever I wanted, but noooooooo, I just kept running on all fours like an idiot.
BTW - Anyone ever get a nugget of information in dreams that they did know they knew? I almost started a thread about this last week. As “I didn’t know I knew that.”
Sometime last week, I had a dream and there was some accident and a younger person was badly burned. I had stripped of my shirt and tackled the kid to snuff out the flames with my shirt and force the kid into a stop-drop-and-roll. All things considered, the teen (?) didn’t have extensive burns, but the back of his/her head was severely burnt – charred black and cracked. Not a lot of surface was burnt, maybe just the size of my hand, but it was a third degree burn.
Some other dream person came running up with water and I said “No, no! That will cool her down too fast, that would be worse. This is a third degree burn. Don’t do it.”
So I woke up wondering…Really? I kinda thought that you always want to try to cool the person down. Why would dreamCrayons believe otherwise? Did it make the infection risk worse? What?
So I finally looked it up. Sure enough. First aid books recommend avoiding cooling off third degree burns (well, they mostly mean immsersing, I think) with water because it might cool the person down too fast and they’ll are more likely to go into shock. And that you can do it if you really have to, but in moderation – not too much.
So either a) weird coincidence or b) I had read it in a First Aid book a long time ago and had forgotten until dreamtime jarred that little factoid out of whatever long-lost mental filing cabinet it found.