How do you hurt your self in real life aes?
and will im assuming you mean when you move in a dream and your waking body limb moves as well?

The Tetris effect leads to absolutely terrible experiences when it involves actual Tetris, Starcraft, or writing in any sort of programming language. Basically the least-restful nights imaginable that actually contain sleep, because everything changes when you look away, and nothing works how it's supposed to.

I haven't had that kind of problem, though I've sometimes had an odd effect where it feels like my brain keeps concentrating and working out some kind of problem through the entire night which I have no memory of when I wake up.

A while back I spent most of the day working on NikkyBot and wondered what kind of “Tetris effect” I would have. But I only just had some totally unrelated dreams about “evil” sorts of subjects. (can't remember what they were now, frustratingly enough)

Has anyone had the Night Terrors ? Effectively it is a nightmare from which you can awake but you are still dreaming. The dream does not end untill you can put a light on or physically move. Occasionally they are accompanied with paralysis of the muscles. I have never had anything more frightening....

I've had one in my life.
I don't remember anything except opening my eyes and my dad shaking me back and forth.

I can remember all of them. You'll know when you have had one.

@geekboy
No, I was referring to when you wake up, and you think what was happening in your dream was real.

Ohh now I understand and actually thats backwards and even happens when you are lucid. This that happen in real life occur in some form in your dreams as a method of self preservation. For example in my dreams when there is a loud bang in waking life i have an explosion or something in my dreams. I find it pretty nifty.

@ti83head i have not thank the lord I have heard horrors about those

I have lucid dreams on a regular basis, so I am rather used to it and it is nothing special to me.......Sometimes I can control like everything else except of my actions which is kinda a twist ^^

Once again, this topic has been nearly dead for over three years. Has anyone made any more progress with this? I know that last year I tried for several months to learn, starting by keeping a dream log (which worked very well and I remembered at least 2-3 dreams most nights), but never had a lucid dream. I had several false lucid dreams, where my dream self thought he was lucid but really wasn't.

One funny example of this false lucidity: I was in some large warehouse or something and there were rows upon rows of boxes; I was using Google Chrome on some computer (Windows, I'm sure, though it really didn't matter) and I noticed that, when hovering over the [X] button to close a tab the grey [X] grew slightly instead of a red circle appearing around it, and then my dream self instantly realized that this must be a dream. Then I just ran outside and started flying. (I think it was night? But there were no stars... I don't tend to pay any attention to the sky/lights in any room while dreaming, so "night" and "day" are pretty much arbitrary.) I was flying really really fast above houses, but lost control over time (in a dreamy way, not in a flying way if you know what I mean), then got stuck in some big building and couldn't fly out. I was very annoyed, then woke up.
(I'm actually surprised I still remember that so well... it must have been at least a year ago.)

There were several other examples of this. I feel confident that once I do actually become lucid I will be able to control it, and have plenty of ideas of things to do. (Flying is obviously fun, also some 4D-related thought experiments)



YES. So many times I realize that I KNEW I was dreaming on a subconscious level, and many times my dream self will briefly considers this when making a decision even though I am certainly not lucid.

I have plenty of lucid dreams, but I can never control them because they always come true later.
Dreaming the future can be a bit creepy at times, but I got used to it.

At least now I know when I will or won't have a pencil with me.

I've had this tab open for a while because I have some semi-relevant stuff to contribute but was debating because it's not exactly a lucid dream. I figured I could at least share this and either get feedback or help others enter a lucid state while dreaming.

I got a TV in my room when I was young. Maybe, 9 or 10 if not younger. At first it was really basic, it was a 13" CRT TV that I hooked my PS2 up to. No basic channels or anything. I don't exactly know how it progressed but now I fall asleep to the TV every night, part of me wants to remove this dependency from my routine. We're in a day of age where pretty much anything we want in our first-world life is endless but I happen to believe that I'm being wasteful when I fall asleep to the TV and Netflix.

Anyways. It's gotten to the point that I sleep better with the stimulus from the TV than without. I sleep super well when the TV is on but the moment it turns off I start dreaming. The other night I had a dream that I was in my work truck with a coworker when we got to a tunnel with two entrances, one for each direction of traffic with a wall down the middle. Our side, the left side (not the right), had a sign in front of it that said "CAUTION: Fire Danger" and I could see flames on the dividing wall of the tunnel. Those flames got larger as I argued with him not go down that side of the tunnel. I eventually got him to agree that we'll go down the wrong way since it was open, well it didn't say it was closed.

We get to some arbitrary point in the tunnel when all the sudden we're outside flying and slowly flipping over a freeway. I see the roadway through the windshield and, while hanging on to the "Oh Sh--" handle and the seat remember "I'm dreaming." So I open my eyes, roll over to my iPad, unlock it and select a video I had saved and return to a deep sleep. Not sure how to accurately describe the "open my eyes" thing when my eyes were open during the dream but... dreams.

I fall asleep to my TV and Netflix but I keep my iPad mounted to my bed frame as well. I have found and downloaded multi-hour long space documentaries, one is 3.5 hours long and another is 4.5 hours long, that I just play every night. With Netflix, I try to get through a show. Picking up on the episode I fell asleep on and everything. These documentaries, I don't bother. I'll play the same one for weeks. I download them to my iPad because that way I'm not consuming bandwidth and if my internet ever does go down, I can still at least sleep!

Here's the thing though. I'm an incredibly deep sleeper when I have the stimulus. On Wednesday I didn't hear my alarm because I misjudged the amount of time I had before my alarm. To elaborate, I usually wake up from my dreams a few hours before I go to work. Sometimes a few hours after I go to bed. For relevance: I go to bed at 7p, wake up at 2a. Last night I woke up at 9:30pm. I play the 4 hour video on my iPad and go to bed. But I have to fast forward a bit in the video, in this case about an hour in, so I can be in a light sleep when my alarm goes off.

On Wednesday I must have miscalculated because I slept through my alarm and woke up 30 minutes late -- Don't worry, still made it to work on time. But this stimulus is the difference between light and deep sleep. My alarm goes off once and I'm up. I've had people knock on my bedroom door, I've had fireworks go off, I've even had an earthquake happen and I slept through it all.

My goal is to eventually try white noise and some smart lights altering their color and brightness to help me sleep throughout the night for once. Even going as far as, when I buy a house, installing a house-wide speaker system but that's tangent to the point Part of me thinks it's the droning narration that helps put me to sleep and white noise won't cut it. So, I might substitute white noise with podcasts or audiobooks since I can easily put those in a playlist that continues to the next one.

Now my question is: How do you guys get a restful sleep with these dreams? I have never felt refreshed when waking up after an entire night of dreaming, which I do rarely. Do you guys have a stimulus that you've managed to discover that is your key for lucid dreaming? When I roll over and play my iPad video, I fall asleep almost instantly there's no "I'm up for 20 minutes" or trouble getting back to sleep. I don't have trouble staying and getting back to sleep, just staying in a deep sleep or getting a well rested night of sleep without stimulus.

A couple nights ago I kinda had a lucid dream. In the dream, I realized I was dreaming and could control stuff, but I shortly woke up. When I woke up, however, I was still dreaming. I had a lucid dream inside a normal dream. So dreaming me had a lucid dream, and could control it, but real me was just normal dreaming. Does that count? Also, in the lucid dream, I could manipulate gravity, it was fun pushing myself off walls and floating through rooms.

I just found this thread so I'll ask the obvious first question:


Howdoi do it?

Wow, I totally forgot this thread existed, let alone that I had participated in it!



I'm still progressing. I've practiced with it to some degree over the last ten years or so, but it was only a little over a year ago that I really started dedicating myself to it. My LD frequency has gradually increased since then; my average over the last month has been just under one per day (though I don't actually have LDs every day). It comes and goes. Also, I'm still nowhere where I want to be in terms of my ultimate goals, but I'm doing cool things and having a lot of fun on the way!



Why do you consider that false lucidity? If you actually realized you were dreaming during the dream, that is a lucid dream. It doesn't matter whether you can control it or not. I think most LDers struggle with control sometimes (or oftentimes), myself included. Control is something that improves with time and practice. Some people progress faster than others.



I'm personally not bothered by dreams at all. I love them! Dreams are a natural part of sleep and shouldn't be a problem with getting good sleep. I'm not sure why they would cause a problem in your case, whether it's just a matter of perception or maybe some sort of weird sleep disorder. I'm unfortunately the wrong person to ask about this kind of stuff. But what normally should happen is that one has sleep cycles throughout the night which typically last from 60-90 minutes, and they include cycles of light sleep and deep sleep and REM (which is where most, though not necessarily all, dreams occur). It's also normal to wake up briefly throughout the night, especially after dreams, though if you frequently have trouble falling back to sleep after that, that might be a problem.

My personal (probably not quite typical, though ) sleep pattern is to sleep about 60-90 minutes, wake up, take a quick couple of minutes to record some notes about the dream I had on a tape recorder (to properly type into a document later when I get up), go right back to sleep, and repeat until I'm done resting. Admittedly, that probably sounds like hell, but for some reason it isn't. I feel perfectly rested as long as I sleep long enough. (Which is typically 9-10 hours rather than 8; maybe I'm a little different, or maybe it's just compensation for some of the waking-time overhead.) But I've also been doing it for quite a while, so it just feels "normal" to me.



If you realized you were dreaming during any point of the dream, I'd call it a lucid dream. You just happened to lose the lucidity when you had the false awakening because you forgot to recheck if you were dreaming and were fooled into thinking you were awake again. This is very common. A common recommended strategy is to get into the habit of reminding yourself that you could still be dreaming and employing reality checks on every awakening at night. You never know when you'll "wake up" but actually still be in the dream.



There are tutorials and forums floating around, which are probably the best place to start. The one I participate in (and recommend, if only because it was the first one I found and good enough to stick with before looking at any others) is DreamViews. It has a number of excellent tutorials and resources, and it's a great, friendly community, especially for beginners. There are a number of people with decades of experience who regularly share great advice as well.

By the way, keep in mind that lucid dreaming is more of a lifestyle change than a quick hobby you can build in a weekend. It can take lots of time (years) to get really good at it, but it can really pay off in the end. Some people seem to be naturally good at it and pick it up almost immediately (or have been doing it already their entire lives), others take a really long time, and everyone else is somewhere in between. So personal progress will vary, but being persistent and patient is the ultimate key.

The thing is, I don't really know if was me who knew I was dreaming, or dream me.

There are probably some on the LD forum I frequent who could answer better than I, but I think it can be a personal judgment call sometimes. Some people believe it's possible to have a dream that one thinks they are dreaming without actually possessing the self-awareness that actually defines lucidity, and others disagree. Making it more complicated is the fact that lucidity is not binary; it is a spectrum where one can either completely be their waking-life self with 100% memory of their waking life during a dream or just barely, nearly unconsciously, aware that they are dreaming but still ruled by the false memories the dream provides with no recall of their waking life, or anywhere in between. I have to admit I sometimes struggle to decide whether I've had a non-lucid dream about lucid dreaming or if there was just a very low level of lucidity. (Though if it was a higher level of lucidity, I know I was lucid for sure.) Although some experience (and a few high-level LDs) may help one develop more of a metric for judging their lucidity in a particular dream.

In the end, you may just have to decide for yourself.

I know this thread is old, but I wanted to post something about my recent lucid dreaming experience. I saw a video on YouTube that recommended something like this:

Have a friend put something in a box, but not tell you what it is. Then, before you go to sleep every night, you look at the box, wandering what it is but not opening it.

The idea behind it is that do to curiosity and stuff you end up opening it in a dream, and realize you're dreaming. It's supposed to be something like a reality check, a passive thing that you happen to do in a dream, which would alert you you are dreaming. I have had more success with this over the past 2 months then I have had with reality checks for the past year or so. I never was able to go lucid with reality checks, sometimes I would do them in a dream and say I was dreaming, but it was more of a dream about having a lucid dream (I wasn't actually lucid). Before the whole box method, I had 3 lucid dreams (and those were just me realizing I was dreaming, no reality checks (I think the dream journal helped a lot)). Since the box thing, I have had 4 (and its been over a short period of time, about 1 lucid dream every 2 weeks). I think part of the problem might have been that when I did the reality checks I never really was like, "Oh, well if I did have 6 fingers I'd be dreaming", so it didn't really make a connection in my mind. It also might help that I have the box on my nightstand and try to think about it before falling asleep.

Well, that's all. Just wanted to tell you all what was working for me. Here's a link to the video:

Cool! I saw that video (and others Daniel Love has posted), as they were mentioned on the DreamViews forum I frequent. It's an interesting idea, but not one I'd personally be able to bear to do (and I wouldn't be able to get over feeling that it would be a terrible waste to have nice items in a box that I'd never be able to use ). But it seems to be a helpful idea for a lot of people, so it's cool to see it's working for you.

There are a couple of important things about reality checks, though, that a lot of people and tutorials don't often seem to mention and that I thought might be worth sharing. First, they usually only do one good if they're done with the right attitude and mindset. It's important to make sure you're attentive and sincerely asking yourself if you're dreaming while doing them and not to let them become a mindless habit that you do all the time without paying much attention. It's normal for RCs to sometimes happen in dreams and produce something that isn't truly a lucid dream, but if it happens a lot it can sometimes be a sign that the RCs aren't being done correctly.

Also, although it's a popular idea that you're supposed to happen to perform a reality check in a dream and then become lucid, many of us who have been practicing lucid dreaming for a long time have found that it actually normally happens the other way around: We start to get an inkling of lucidity first, then we perform the reality check to verify our suspicion that we're dreaming. It's not the RC itself that actually causes the lucidity. But that doesn't mean RCs are useless; they're still valuable tools for most of us, but mainly because they help instill a global mindset of lucidity, I think. In other words, they're one of many available tools for improving self-awareness (our awareness of our active place in our local reality) and reducing the amount of zoned-out "zombie" time we have as we go through our daily lives, instead recognizing all those subtle little things that can alert us that we might actually be dreaming at the moment, things that most people never give a second thought to.

I think that was somewhat of my problem with reality checks. Also, I find it really interesting that some people can tell when they're dreaming easily (or at least easier than me ). I have a hard time doing that, which is one of the reasons I've looked into WILD... but for some reason I feel exhausted after trying it for 30 minutes or so. I do practice WILD most nights, but not pairing it with WBTB I don't expect much success.