Dream Frequency and Intensity

Oh, wow. That sleep paralysis stuff sounds positively FRIGHTENING. I've only ever had that a couple of times. I have this intense fear of being trapped, though, so *shudder*.

Care to share your lucid childhood dreams?

I remember this one where I was bouncing on a pogo stick that was actually a giant pencil, and this guy was standing looking at my sideways very menacingly. I knew he was about to come after me, so I started jumping furiously on my pogo stick. Unfortunately, it would only jump in one place.

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So, I thought this was interesting. Today I dreamed that cats were taking over the world... And we were all like "OH SHIT THEY OUTNUMBER US WHY DIDN'T WE SEE IT COMING?" And we could see them walking around outside the house with guns. Then we started locking them up in various rooms so that they couldn't roam free, and we put some poisonous stuff in their food and blah blah.

Um, watch out for cats.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

I love dreaming. Too bad I dream too much and remember too much too. Nearly everyday do I remember my dreams, which is more like several dreams being 'sticked' one after another. But usually I forget about it after the next five minutes. I only remember the most shocking or puzzling ones. The problem is, I remember about three dreams a week since I was still 6.

My dreams are rarely lucid. Usually it is very complicated, relating to what kind of feelings I'm feeling before going to bed. Most of them includes the destruction of the world, and also about death of anyone, either someone close, a complete stranger, or even myself. I often dream about fantasy places or extraordinary events which resembles Alice In Wonderland. Rest of them are usually nightmares and strange meaningless dreams.

I hate remembering to much. It makes me confused between the real world and dream, especially when what's happening resembles my dreams. But dreams give me a lot of inspirations. I write and draw a lot based on my dreams, especially about the fantasy lands.

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

Originally Posted by Ozma

I love dreaming. Too bad I dream too much and remember too much too. Nearly everyday do I remember my dreams, which is more like several dreams being 'sticked' one after another. But usually I forget about it after the next five minutes. I only remember the most shocking or puzzling ones. The problem is, I remember about three dreams a week since I was still 6.

My dreams are rarely lucid. Usually it is very complicated, relating to what kind of feelings I'm feeling before going to bed. Most of them includes the destruction of the world, and also about death of anyone, either someone close, a complete stranger, or even myself. I often dream about fantasy places or extraordinary events which resembles Alice In Wonderland. Rest of them are usually nightmares and strange meaningless dreams.

I hate remembering to much. It makes me confused between the real world and dream, especially when what's happening resembles my dreams. But dreams give me a lot of inspirations. I write and draw a lot based on my dreams, especially about the fantasy lands.

Your dream schedule sounds much like mine, actually. I get very confused as to what's real and what's from a dream, especially since my sleeping schedule is so whacked up that my waking and sleeping hours are ever-changing.

How ya doing, buddy?

To the best of my knowledge, I don't have dreams every day, but when I do, I remember for about 2 hours minimum, depending on the intensity of the dream.

Like today, I still remember it. I remember waking up and not being able to move anything but my pointer finger on my left hand. Everything else was still and heavy as a rock.
FREAKED THE SHIT OUT OF ME!
Then I really woke up, or just came unfroze.
I still don't know if it was real or a bad dream.

It's strange though, because my mom does the same thing.... weird.

I was speaking idiomatically.

I never experience any dreams, or perhaps I don't remember. I generally sleep very well though.

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Originally Posted by blue

Your dream schedule sounds much like mine, actually. I get very confused as to what's real and what's from a dream, especially since my sleeping schedule is so whacked up that my waking and sleeping hours are ever-changing.

Really? I thought I'm the only one with THIS kind of problem.

The strange thing is that sometimes I dream about something that awakes me, which makes me think that I'm already awake and doing all daily routines, while I'm not actually. Do you?

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Every once in a while I'll clearly remember what I dreamt the night before. For some inexplicable reason though, for the past I don't know, year or two, I've had a recurring dream/nightmare about tornadoes. God only knows what sparked that. I've never actually seen one IRL (*knocksonwood*) but I've always been wary of any severe weather (I'm scared of thunderstorms too ).

Anyway, the dream/nightmare usually consists of me at home with friends or family (the specific people differ from dream to dream) hanging out, doing whatever, until I look out of one of the windows to see a funnel cloud coming directly at us. I panic, and tell everyone that we need to go to the basement. We do that, and hide in the large closet, but then I realize that I need to round up my pets and put them in there too. Unfortunately, I always seem to forget some...

Anyway, the tornado comes, but I wake up before it really causes any damage. I'm always freaked out by it though, mainly because I don't know WHY I'm having such dreams! So weird!

Lately the dreams have changed a little, to where I might be in someone else's house or at work or something, but still.. tornadoes still come.

When I was little, probably around 3 or 4, I started having dreams where I was in a store with my mother and I fell on my back and couldn't get up, much like a turtle. I don't know what provoked those, either. But when I wake up, I feel like it was real so much that for a moment I believe I can't sit up in my own bed.

Dreams are weird.

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

Yikes. Theme dreams are the strangest.

My latest "nightmare theme" has consisted of gators. It doesn't make any sense. I mean, I've seen them before--I live in Florida, after all, and our school mascot was "the Gators"--but I've never been afraid of them or had close encounters or anything like that.

I used to have a lot of driving off of bridge dreams. I was never afraid of bridges, either, but having those constant dreams about them made me a little paranoid. It's like the dreams almost incited a phobia.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Better than dreaming that you're attempting a suicide, right? I've dreamed a lot of times about myself jumping from somewhere high, and woke up just when my body was about to crash the hard surface. I always have goosebumps after that. Not a good dream.

Last night I dreamed of buying new notebooks. Stupid dream, heh?

There's nowhere I can't reach.

^^ Summonmaster

Yeah Sleep Paralysis sucks big time. I used to get them three times a week or such. They usually don't occur much anymore for some odd reason (meds maybe). However I used to always remember waking up paralyzed and trying to move or scream. I was certain that I was conscious since my accomplices often mention that I was trying to say something while I am in that state. Sometimes I am able to pull myself out of that state since it happens frequently, though it usually happens in the daytime. Though the most frightening experiences are the ones where you feel someone pressing down on you (sometimes I could actually see the "entity" that pushes down on you...pretty creepy).

Anyways, I often dream (almost daily now) though I can only remember them if I choose to. Usually I disregard my dreams and forget about them in a few days. However, if they were really interesting then I choose to remember them. Usually the most intensive ones I find very interesting and memorable.

Recently (as in the past few months) my dreams usually had to do with me being in a city. Often times I am at different locations like underground subways, dark alleys, apartments, hopsitals, etc... and usually I am alone. However, I ocassionally run into a few people but I usually ignore them. Different events occur, most times I am hunted by zombies then eaten at the end when I wake up.

Another common dream I have consists of me lying there in my bed while another person (usually someone I am familiar with) comes and converses with me while sitting on my bed. We usually have short interesting conversations. Usually I do not remember these conversations but I usually end up being depressed when I wake up. Often times these people that converse with me are the ones I have most problems with in person.

And my most bizarre dreams, which usually cause me to wake up drenched in sweat, concerns voices. I haven't had one of these for a long while. Usually these dreams appear to be typical dreams, but with a strange abrupt ending. At the end of these dreams, a deep voice suddenly penetrates the dream and demands something from me. After the voice finishes speaking, I wake up immediately. I believe the voice told me its name once. It is the same voice everytime. Overall, it is pretty terrifying. Thankfully I haven't had one of these for almost half a year.

How ya doing, buddy?

When I was young, I used to have dreams which rocked the fabric of my mind. That is, I couldn't establish whether or not I was dreaming or awake.
This is particularly troubling as some of the dreams were quite horrible.

Take this for instance: being chased by a monster for 5 minutes, my foot then gets stuck in a strange jelly, rendering me incapable of further movement. All the while, the monster's footsteps come closer. The tunnel itself was fairly inventive. It was a corkscrew like tower, with each room room consisting of cube like sections, proceeding at an incline. The lighting in these interconnected room was very good...all the more awful to see that my death was quickly approaching, where around the next corner, its awful visage might manifest...

This demonic creature, steadily kept coming...the footsteps inching ever closer, nearly right behind me, but the creature still obscured from view behind a few walls. The jelly meanwhile had plastered itself to my skin and was now beginning to melt through to the bone. I tried to grab my leg and pry it free, but to no avail. Finally, I stopped. I stopped struggling to get a good look at the creature... to meet what was coming to destroy me. The creature was just around the corner I suspected, still mercifully out of view. It stopped moving, the tower started shaking, and the creature let out a roar which could've layed waste to mountains and the heavens and unsurprisingly caused my heart to jump out of my chest, causing me to wake instantly...the scream still echoing in my mind.

I stirred in my bed, not sure whether or not I was awake or asleep. I was in my room...but my bed wasn't in the normal spot that it usually is. There is nothing more terrifying than realizing that things are closely familiar, and yet so far away. (Especially after having a nightmare which brings the mind frightfully close to despair.)
I pressed the covers up next to my face. Strangely enough, there was a strange mirror next to my bed. I despised mirrors, especially during the night. Even my own reflection seemed to take on uncanny characteristics when the moon's natural light shone through the blinds.

I cautiously looked at the mirror. I couldn't see a reflection in it. So far so good. To test whether or not it was a dream, I looked in the mirror expecting my reflection. I received it. "PSHEW!" I thought to myself...then something strange. I looked in the mirror a little more closely and realized that while the face was mine, the eyes were not. They were flowing with a blackness that would've shone through midnight itself. I tried in vain to make faces in the mirror just to make sure my eye's weren't playing tricks on me...they weren't.
The face in the mirror looked at me, and I looked back at it, helpless. Then its eyes widened to a space which could've swallowed the stars and it opened its mouth. It wasn't a normal mouth and the mind surely plays tricks on us in times of great distress, but its mouth opened to swallow me revealing a plethora of razor sharp teeth and then it screamed for me...for my soul.

This was the exact same yell of the creature that had been chasing me in the corkscrew tower maze. So the creature had a face after all...and apparently I wouldn't escape after all. I felt my blood rushing to my head, the hair in the back of my neck stand up, and then while the face kept staring at me, eyes widening, mouth screaming like a cave without a beginning and an end, my mind met its fever pitch. Then, a light came on in my closet, the door opened, revealing the millennia stench of neverending blackness, and I was sucked into a maelstrom of darkness and despair.

Sometimes I would wake up in a cold sweat, in my bed...staring at the closet door until sunlight came. It was never soon enough.

I later found that these were night terrors. This is terrifying in that the truly terrible dreams effectively become pyschological death traps. The only thing real about the dreams becomes the darkness which envelopes them. However, that darkness is very real when you are a child and its impossible to make sense of such things.

Its a strange thing that a sleeping mind can't initially tell where one sequence ends and another begins. Most things in life are fairly linear but not in dreams. We sometimes lose the ability to question linearity and non-linearity in dreams because dreams contain their own sense of inarguable logic, at least at the time.

Anyways, the most horrible things I have dreamed were losing family members...such as my brother falling off the bow of an aircraft carrier, and then hearing him screaming, calling out my name while the bubbles filled his lungs. Another involved me being eaten alive by cannibals. Defleshed, skewered, intestines ripped out...the whole shebang. Its like every terrible thing throughout the course of sentient existence made its way into my dreams during childhood. YAY.

Another weird things about these dreams is that they were always accompanied by the most insanely terrifying soundtracks. The noises and the actual music oftentimes accompanied such scenes and were many times even more terrifying than the events as they occurred. Most of the night terrors were A tonal and strangely enough, Symphonic.

So, there it is. Now I prefer the darkness, but even 20 years later I still don't look in the mirror when the midnight sun is burning highest in the sky, through the blinds, shining everything in its path with an eerie light.

How ya doing, buddy?

The busier I am (and the earlier I have to wake up in the morning), the harder it gets for me to remember what I dreamed of the night before. Does stress and the duration of sleep also affect our dream intensity?

I was speaking idiomatically.

Originally Posted by matira_bay

The busier I am (and the earlier I have to wake up in the morning), the harder it gets for me to remember what I dreamed of the night before.

This tends to happen to me a lot as well. I find that I actually never dream at all whenever I'm busy with studying or unusually stressed for some reason. But during very enjoyable times or because of having long vacations over the summer, my dreams are typically vivid and I can recall them quite easily after waking up.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

I'm an every-nighter. They're all extremely vivid. I don't have as many lucid dreams as I'd like though. They're often very close, but not quite there. Sex dreams will almost always be wet dreams; when I'm talking, I often talk aloud; nightmares will leave my pillow sweat-soaked. Some dreams are so vivid and pertinent that I'm left wondering whether certain things actually happened in reality.

How ya doing, buddy?

Hi everyone, since it's my first post on this forum =)
I've been reading this thread and I'd like to share my knowledge about lucidity, which I've breen into recently.

So at first, performing reality checks. This technique, as someone here mentioned, is said to work but appears it don't. I have some friends trying LD who tried doing reality checks, but no one admited it helped him. In my opinion performing reality checks can drive u nuts rather than help with LD.

There's also idea of using subliminal messages, like 'my dreams are lucid'. I've seen software that prints such a messages on the screen, so fast that they can't be seen.

The best technique I found is just being suspicious. When you're dreaming you've got to realize that you're actually inside the dream - often increadibly stupid things happen and we tend to accept them as real right away. The solution is changing attitude to dreams, thinking about them when awake.

Having a journal with dreams helps a lot. Even without writing it down, recall the dream and try to gather as much details about it as you can right after awakening.

Very efficient technique is using brain waves. There are some presets that are said to induce lucid dreams, but they induce dreaming at all rather than LD. Once, I have listened to various brain waves for about 2hrs while reading a book. In 15 minutes I went to bed, felt asleep after while, had a dream and woke up. So be careful with brain waves =)

About having dreams at all - it's theoretically connected with stress and inner tension. LD won't be succesfull for a person who's stressed (sometimes we don't realize how stressed we are!).

Good luck with Lucid Dreaming =)

How ya doing, buddy?