Ever since I was a kid I’ve had nightmares. Instead of
escaping the reality of my abuse, I’d fall asleep and go through the exact same
thing in my dreams.
My dreams have always felt real; I can feel everything and
remember almost every detail when I wake up. It’s so bad that I literally wake
up screaming every single time I fall asleep . Therefore, I’m terrified to go to
sleep. What’s the point of sleeping if I’m just going to wake up exhausted and horrified? Instead, I take one hour naps frequently throughout the day to
prevent REM sleep. After a few days I’ll just pass out and have to deal with a
few hours of torturous sleep, but it’s better than nothing.
I have three reoccurring dreams. I’ll only explain one
because the other two are...disturbing...and I know some people are sensitive.
The first is in a cement room. There are no doors, and the ceiling is just
black emptiness which appears to be the only opening. The walls of the cement
room are about 12 feet tall and are covered in filth...almost rotting. I’m
chained to the ground by one ankle and bleeding from my heart. The blood slowly
fills up the room and I’m left struggling for air, unable to swim further up to
prevent drowning because I’m chained to the ground. At the last second a ladder
appears, my mum holding it at the top of the cement room. As I reach out for
it, she pulls it back up and says “I have to leave you behind. I can’t bring
you with me. I’m so sorry”. I drown in my own blood, and then wake up.
When I was a kid I decided I couldn’t deal with my
nightmares anymore. I took out every book my schools library had on dreams and
began researching. I tried everything from repeating “I will not dream” over
and over again until I fell asleep, to not eating certain foods before bed. I
even tried talking to a priest, but he simply told me that my dreams were “preparing
me so my reality wouldn’t seem so bad.” He clearly had no idea.
How to Lucid dream
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Finally I came across a book about lucid dreaming. A lucid
dream is when you’re aware that you’re dreaming, and have some control over
what happens in it. It’s like your own personal virtual reality, like a video
game. To me, this sounded perfect. I tried everything to have a lucid dream,
and it took me months to actually have one, and even longer to perfect it. Personally,
I have found three ways to induce a lucid dream that work for me
1.
Every hour I ask myself if this is all real.
Eventually it became habit and I started doing it in my dreams. I would ask
myself if this is reality, I would realize it wasn’t, then all of a sudden my
dream would start crumbling to pieces.
2.
I wrote down “Awake” on my hand (and eventually
got it tattooed). Every time I saw it, I would do a reality check and realise
that it was reality. When I saw it in my dream, I would realise that I wasn’t actually
awake.
3.
Holding hands with someone while sleeping. I
know it sounds weird...but it works. My boyfriend moves a lot when he sleeps,
so he tends to tug my hand. In my dream I feel like my world is shifting, so I
realise I’m asleep and dreaming.
The most important thing to do if you want to have a lucid
dream is to keep a dream journal. The second I wake up I write down as much
detail as I can about my dream. I have 12 years worth of dream journals...there's some Butterfly Effect shit going on underneath my bed. There are usually
some things that occur in almost every one of your dreams, if you can learn to
recognise these things it’s easier to tell that you’re dreaming. For me it’s
blood, chains, my mum, rotting anything, a purple shirt and a set of green
eyes. When I see these things in my dream, I immediately know I’m dreaming.
Achieving a lucid dream is extremely difficult, but so is
actually staying lucid. The first few times it happens you become so excited because
everything seems so real that you actually wake yourself up. The most important
thing to do when you first realise you’re dreaming is stay calm. Don’t try and
control your dream immediately, don’t try changing anything until you’re
actually used to lucid dreaming. Just take in your surroundings. Lucid dreams
feel...more real than real life if that makes any sense. It’s like 360° vision,
everything is richer, you become so much more aware of everything around, it can become overwhelming.
Quite often dreams tend to fade or you can feel yourself
waking up, to prevent this there’s a technique called “dream spinning”. It’s
exactly what it sounds like; you literally spin in a circle for a little while.
This causes you to stay asleep, but it does change what the dream is so it’s
likely you’ll forget you’re lucid dreaming.
Most people think that during a lucid dream you have control
over absolutely everything; of course that isn’t how it works. Your
subconscious is still more powerful than you are...meaning you can control some
things, but not all. At first it takes difficulty to even control your own
actions or the situations, but over time it gets easier.
To gain control over a dream you actually have to be confident
in it. If you believe it isn’t going to happen, it won’t. Getting frustrated
will just cause you to wake up, so it’s best to just start small then work your
way up. Simply wishing for something won’t make it happen. If you want
to...say...go to the mall, you can’t just wish to be at the mall. You’d have to
tell yourself that once you’re up the stairs, you’ll be at the mall. Dream
spinning can also help change settings, by focusing on something and spinning
it can change the entire situation...but of course that leaves the risk of
forgetting you’re lucid dreaming. Basically dream spinning can get you out of
everything.
There’s a few different ways to change a setting in a lucid
dream other than dream spinning. Walking through doors, mirrors, or televisions
are how I usually do it. Remember that it’s impossible to have control over
every single part of a lucid dream, there’s still your subconscious.
When I mention I lucid dream the first thing people ask me
is usually about flying. Flying is one of the most difficult things to do in a
dream. It’s easy to jump insanely high or swim fast because that’s a skill that’s
kind of possible in real life, flying is difficult because it’s something most
of us have never even tried. I think it took me like 4 years before I even got
off the ground. I found it was best to leap huge distances then flap like a
bird...cute image I know. Even harder than flying is landing. I still can’t
land without crashing and waking myself up.
Thanks to Inception people assume that the only way to wake
up from a lucid dream is to die, or that dying causes “limbo”. Not true. I’ve died
in many lucid dreams, if it’s from something like falling I’ll wake up, but
usually dying just causes a new dream sequence. The only way I found to wake up
from lucid dreams (why would you really want to though...) is to just open and
close my eyes over and over again. Dreams within a dream however are possible
and are quite annoying. Often I wake up in my bed, but it turns out I’m still
dreaming. If you have lucid dreams, always remember to do reality checks as
soon as you wake up.
________
Since I do lucid dream almost every time I fall asleep
people usually ask me why I don’t always do it. I tend not to as much anymore
for three reasons: mental illness, Sunny, and drugs.
Schizophrenia is something I can’t control in normal life,
so that means it's something I can’t control in my dreams. I could be having a
perfectly good dream when someone from my past could show up and turn it into a
nightmare. Schizophrenia uses my memories against me and infects them. If I use a memory as a setting in my dream, I run the risk of something bad happening in it and ruining the memory forever. I can try and escape all I want, but
just like in real life, I can’t. The voices I hear turn into people and the
people I see surround me. The ground they walk on sets on fire. They always
have more power than I do, and it’s fucking horrible.
When I lucid dream I tend to put everything I could ever
want in the dream...of course that includes Sunny. I know I probably sound
annoying and creepy, but I just can’t let go. When I lucid dream I create a
world for Sunny and I...and it ruins my real world. Why should I be awake and
miserable when I could be with him? My created version of Sunny will never be
anything like the real thing, I can only take pieces of his personality and put
it into him. I can’t recreate all of his dimensions. It’s
impossible to recreate a real person and it’s rather depressing. I can’t keep
him out of my dreams though. I always find myself putting him back in, and that
just isn’t fair to me. It’s not fair to my boyfriend that I'm dating him, but I’m
living a double life with a subconscious version of someone else.
Drugs really fuck up lucid dreams. How could I control my
dream if I can’t even control my actions in real life? If I’m high, I don’t even bother. Drugged
lucid dreams turn into nightmares that I can’t escape. I know I’m dreaming, but
I can’t change it so it just seems so real.
Anybody can lucid dream, it just takes practice. Don’t
expect it to happen the first night you try, it takes months or even years. It’s
worth it to live in a world you create with no physical laws.
