At least you don’t go through a series of false awakenings when it happens. Those are generally not the most fun, since at best they ruin lucid dreams (it’s sort of a way for your mind to go back to sleep, and typically resets your awareness of being in a dream), and at worst it fucks with your sense of reality big time.
That’s why I don’t nap anymore… I lucid dream sometimes, but usually not with naps. Those are just hyper realistic emotion bombs with full physical sensation.
So one day I was having one of my awful nap dreams, and it was super negative, so I decided to wake up. So I did. And then I realized I was still sleeping, and tried again.. Dozens and dozens of times, every trick I could think of. I could feel my actual body unable to move (thanks sleep paralysis!), and I kept cycling back to dreaming, starting the whole thing over again.
That kind of sounds like a strategy to trigger lucid dreaming. I've heard that if you envision a specific thing while falling asleep, like for example the StarCraft menu screen, then it will appear somewhere in your dream. When it does, it's supposed to sort of jostle you into consciousness but not wake you up.
It seems that what this person's friend did with his free will in dream land is nope right out of there. He could have turned that nightmare into something awesome though!
My nightmares always turn into semi lucid dreams, it's like "this is so horrible it must be a nightmare" and then
I can choose to just nope out of sleeping.
My old man taught me that telling someone one is having a nightmare stops it from coming back. I've found that just saying it out aloud works as well.
I've used it quite a few times throughout my life, never fails. It's supposedly pretty eerie for others though when I just sit up in bed in the middle of the night, proclaim "I'm having a nightmare" and then promptly going back to sleep.
I started lucid dreaming when I was about 8 years old. This was before google, and when I asked my parents about it, they had no idea what I was talking about. So I didn’t know what exactly was happening, but I did know it was super gay to be conscious while sleeping, so I spent a few weeks figuring out how to forget I was dreaming. I eventually succeeded, but ever since I’ve had the ability to think “Oh, this is a nightmare, I need to wake up.” and open my eyes, wide awake.
My nightmares largely stopped after being awake tired af and terrified of sleeping, when I said "damn you nightmares, you can't scare me into sleep deprivation! I'm coming in there and I'm gonna fight back", and then went right back to sleep. I don't know what nightmare I had that drove me to get angry at my nightmares, I didn't even have a plan to fight back. But that's when it stopped, when I stopped being afraid of them.
That's hilarious because I've done the same exact thing before except it was the watch menu from the Goldeneye Nintendo64 James Bond game. It worked for several years as a young lad.
I remember in middle school I'd always come home with the worst headaches but then I'd just imagine what I did today and select what's important and what's not as if they were files in file manager and drag what I didn't think was important to the recycling bin. It worked too
Starcraft 2 is seriously the only game that's ever given me performance anxiety. There were days when I'd sit down to play and I'd already have nerves and just nope right out and watch GSL VODs of pro players instead. Seeing your rating and all that, Platinum to Diamond, then Diamond to Master, that game was rough and you were always at risk of cheese and basically getting harassed to death playing a traditional build order
For some reason, almost all my dreams are lucid, which means I know I'm in a dream. They're stupid, nonsensical, and usually have people I knew, but have not seen, or thought about in a long time. Occasionally I have a vivid one, which means it seems real. You all know this, just stating it for those who may not know what that means.
Most of my vivid dreams are me trying to find something, or someone in some urban environment, with a sense of urgency. Just me searching for something, someone, or trying to get to some undefined place. Sometimes there are other people, sometimes not, but they never end up helping in my search.
In one of the most vivid memorable ones, it was night, and I was outside of a motel, looking into one of the rooms that had glass walls facing outside. The lights in the room were off, but there were blue, purple, and pink neon business advertisement marquee lights behind me, faintly illuminating the room. I could see living room style furniture, a bar, stools, etc.
I walked around to the side of the building, there was a 2 lane highway, that stretched straight ahead as far as I could see, with multiple hills. Along the both sides of the highway, there were buildings, that were illuminated with typical white highway lights, but the dominant light was blue, purple, and pink neon marquee signs. The entire night sky was illuminated with them.
That one is burned into my memory, it was so vivid, and real. It probably represents loneliness. I'm sure it does.
Never had that, but waking up and not being able to move for 10 or 15 seconds is annoying. It was frightening when I was child, not anymore, but still, the thought "Did I have a stroke in my sleep?" until you jerk into movement is annoying.
I miss LAN parties. I miss the atmosphere in those sweltering bedrooms/livingrooms in the quiet hours of the morning. I'll never forget that LAN party vibe. Big one for my cousins and I was the Desert Combat mod for Battlefield 1942. Also Starcraft, Diablo 2, and later on it shifted to WoW.
Yes, there are practices you can adopt in every day life that make you more likely to experience lucid dreaming.
Certain mindfulness exercises to do during the day that essentially give your consciousness muscle memory that you later kicks in when you're dreaming and helps you you pull a bit of control into the dream.
If you have a Circadian rhythm disorder it helps.
As a kid I learned I could "rewind" my nightmares and go back and do things differently the second time. Lots of nightmares where I couldn't run fast enough to save myself I was able to rewind and run faster the second time around.
As a teen I learned that I could just deux ex machina my way out of any dream.
I was having one of my recurring stress dreams about not meeting societal expectations due to lacking resources. I'd had this dream a million times before, I'm desperate to pee and I'm in a labyrinth of broken toilets. Other people are coming and I going and seemingly peeing just fine and not getting lost in the labyrinth at all. but I can't figure out how they're using these broken toilets. Usually in the dream I just wander around anxiously looking to pee until I wake up (and notably, I don't actually need to pee). But this time I was lucid enough to decide, fucking this, the ceiling had been made of glass the whole time, and a dragon burst through to pick me up on the her back and burn the whole Loo-byrinth down.
So now I do that a lot. I was dreaming I was in a house slowly filling with green water and I may or may not have been a snake, but never fear, I summoned a goat from the thin air and gave it wings and we flew away.
I had a dream where the fat bastard from Austin Powers was roomates with Oscar the grouch and I'd been sold to them as a indentured maid and for some reason they were naked and I was deeply uncomfortable with the arrangement, that's when the lucidity kicked in, so I froze time and just walked away from the weird dream, deciding once I turned onto the main road I'd wake up because this was too bizarre to even come up with something better (I haven't even seen Austin Powers)
Omg, is the labyrinth of broken toilets thing a common stress dream? That’s the kind of “nightmare” that messes with me — filled with plausible mundane stuff that makes it seem 100% real and 0% fantasy. It’s like having a panic attack while you aren’t even conscious.
I had sleep paralysis three times in my 43 years. It feels like someone is in the room and you try to scream but nothing comes out. You just have to force yourself back to sleep.
I remember the first time I woke myself from a bad dream. I was pretty young, and in my dream I was being chased by a monster and I suddenly realized that it was a dream and I could chase the monster back. So I turned around (in my dream) and started to chase the fucker.
I've woken myself up from several unpleasant dreams and nightmares before by literally just going "fuck this, I'm out."
I think I'm often aware that I'm dreaming, but I don't really lucid dream because my dreams are generally more interesting than anything I could consciously come up with anyway. So more often than not I'm just content to be along for the ride.
My newest objective is to lessen to the background people and write as much of their conversations down as i can. As soon as I'm lucid I stop and start to lessen. Depending on where I am I turn and get as close as I can to people. I've yet to succeed but I got the idea from someone who said it's one of the biggest trips.