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The original was posted on /r/luciddreaming by /u/Tallglassofsex on 2023-09-26 19:58:15.
Recently i was telling a friend about a dream i had the night before and i just say well I could tell it was turning into a nightmare so i just woke myself up real quick and she looked at me like I was crazy. Then she looked confuses. Then She was like, "you're a lucid dreamer?! I never knew that! Im jealous af!" And up until that very moment, i thought everybody dreams like i do. I had heard lucid dreaming before but never even thought for a second thats what im doing every night. I never knew it wasnt common at all for people to control their dreams. But now that I know it's truly special to be able to control your dreams, I would like to share with people how I got to this point and maybe it will help them achieve lucid dreaming, if they're struggling with it now.
So, I am 33, I've had nightmares all my life, my earliest one I remember was when I was 5 and they just got worse and worse over the next 2 years to the point I was terrified to go to sleep. I would lay in bed at night and tell my 6/7 year old self over and over "its ok., its just a dream. It can't hurt me., remember when the room gets heavy, start trying to open your eyes" and these little pep talks I gave myself right before falling asleep every single night are what gave me strength and awareness and reassurance that while asleep, this is my world, I will leave my dream whenever I want, its my choice. and for a few years, anytime a nightmare started to form, I'd be yelling at myself while dreaming, "its just a dream! Pry your eyes open! Just open your eyes! " And that was so difficult to do at first. When you're asleep, waking yourself up out of nowhere is hard because your eyelids feel so heavy, it didn't feel like I was still asleep, I was aware and conscious but the dream would still be playing out so I'd just zero in on prying my eyelids apart and ignore the dream around me. by the age of 9, I still got nightmares often but rarely experienced any of it. Because at that point i had learned to recognize the change in how I felt physically when I was dreaming. Nightmares, the air gets heavy, my body feels weighted down, normal dreams I feel light almost weightless so I would wake myself up before the nightmare even started really. Recently I started having more nightmares again and one night I guess I just decided to see how much I can control during my dreams, not just being able to wake myself up quickly but if I could create my own dream while I'm already existing within a dream I did not choose. So, I doze off and im at a friends house hanging out in their garage, its like a small house party, everyones having fun and joking with eachother and then, I felt my body becoming weighted and the air got thick, I told myself "hurry and hide" so I ran to some tall metal cabinet in the garage and hid in it, and peaked through the cracks between the doors so I could see what "monster" I was dealing with before having to actually deal with it, and I see it's a man and he's got a knife, he's not speaking but I feel his anger even though he's calming walking and walks straight to the cabinet im inand i close my eyes in the dream bc, i knew there was a chance this wouldnt work and then idk what would happen but i knew i didnt want to see it if the nightmare continued,he yanks opens the cabinet doors and I pounce on him. I begin yanking his clothes off, im on top of him on the garage floor and kissing his neck and lips as passionately as I can and at first he's not responding, I still feel the weight of the dream and know it's still a nightmare, I wanted to wake myself up, but I keep going until...he starts kissing me back and in that exact moment, the air got lighter, the room, a little brighter and that's when i knew immediately, i fucking did it. I was in a nightmare, decided i wanted a sex dream, since they're much more enjoyable, and it fucking worked. And every nightmare since, I have turned into a sex dream instead of waking myself up. Idk if my story will help anybody with lucid dreaming or not but, I just wanted to make sure everyone knows, this has been the coolest experience of my life and it's 100% possible to do with nothing more than repetitive pep talks that you truly believe in, right before falling asleep and most importantly, be aware of how your body feels while dreaming. That's the key.