Dream Frequency and Intensity

I love dreams! <3

When I was a little kid, I used to dream constantly about killing someone. Pretty much every other day, I would wake up from a dream where I just killed a man. It was usually provoked (for example the guy would harass my friend), but not intentional (I'd push him against the wall and his head would explode, or one time I pushed him down a flight of stairs and he broke his neck). My friend would always tell me to run. The rest of the dream was spent running away, running down stairs at first and then just running over land and through foreign towns. I never got caught, ever. The moral of that dream always seemed to be "if you want to get away with murder, just run away".

For a while when I was a teenager I would dream multiple dreams every day, and I had become increasingly adept at becoming lucid in dreams. Did you know that your brain can't actually "draw" hands when you're dreaming? It's a good trick to check if you're dreaming, just look at your hands. If you can't, you're dreaming (or blindfolded). Anyway I dreamt about secret agents and flying around and superpowers and stuff like that. i'm such a boy

Anyway, after a while I stopped doing that because I barely got enough sleep to survive, and I certainly never dreamed (although they say you dream every night, so I guess I should say I didn't sleep long enough to have dreams that I could remember?). The only dreams I would get would be the ultra-realistic kind, which I would mistake for memories. I even went to meet someone once because in my dream we made that appointment.

Nowadays I get quite a wild variety of dreams. I get realistic dreams that I can't separate from memories, I get wishful dreams where I'm married to my girl* with kids and a good job, and I get scary "what the fuck does that mean?!" Freudian dreams. I remember my dreams about once or twice a week, depending on how much sleep I get.

* Sometimes, I dream about casual relationships (there's no sex in my dreams, ever) with other girls, which makes me feel bad. I honestly believe these dreams are wishful thinking on the part of my brain, so it's really bad.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by Skexis

Anyone here tried experimenting with dream control?

Yeah, in my teens I used to be really into lucid dreaming a lot. It is actually super fun, I really recommend it!

If you want to try it, there are a few really easy tricks to have control of your dreams, though not all work for everyone. First of all there's the transition from waking life to sleep. Apparently one of the easiest ways to get into a lucid dream is to imagine walking down a long winding stairwell until you fall asleep, and then step through a door at the bottom of the stairs, and you "enter" your dreamworld while still being conscious of the fact.

That trick never actually worked for me so all the tricks I used were to become lucid once I'm inside a dream. Like I said in my previous post, the easiest and most reliable "check" for me was always looking at my hands--when you're sleeping your mind can't draw fingers. It's also really interesting cause your mind does all kinds of weird things to avoid having to do so.

Another well-known lucidity trick is to have a note in your pocket saying something like "this is real". Whenever you think you're dreaming, get the note out, and if it's not there, you're dreaming.

The hard part is to keep dreaming when you realize you're dreaming. Personally I never had trouble with that but it's supposed to be really hard.

I had more and more control over my dreams as I became more "skilled" at lucid dreaming. In the end the dreams became almost like SimDream, where I could just rebuild the whole dream and then walk around in it like a God. To be honest, it was more fun when it was just a dreamworld and I had whatever superpowers I wanted.

Originally Posted by blue

I'm really kind of relieved that someone else has that problem.

I used to have that problem a lot when I went to college. I was madly in love with that girl (in some ways I'm still not over her, and it was years ago), so it's only to be expected. The dreams generally were of the "we broke up but now we get back together" nature though, so it's kind of different.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Originally Posted by Bernard Black

at random intervals in the day proving to myself I was awake (which I often forgot to do), it never really worked.

That never worked for me either, and I've never actually heard anyone say it worked after they were told to use it--just people saying "try that one, it might work". There was another one that worked for me where you had to recall how you got from one point to another. If you can't recall how you got from one situation to another, you're probably dreaming.

For example I was in a classroom, and I was part of a band. Suddenly I found myself in a big hall at a sort of formal party, and the other bandmembers were saying we should go practice. At that point I became suspicious (I wasn't in a band at the time for one, and formal parties in big halls were pretty unusual for me), so I decided to try to remember how I got to the hall. I couldn't remember how I got there (nor how I got into my black formal suit and tie), so I told my "bandmembers" that I was dreaming and we didn't have to practice. (And they were kinda like "naahh, don't be silly..." )

So yeah, maybe you can try that one sometime too. Unless you're super forgetful I guess...

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.