This morning I woke up from a fantasy themed nightmare. It was basically a huge fortress city with two ring walls and huge barred gates, and a steampunk zoo with platforms and artificial rain and water pouring into machinery below, and on the first ship-like platform there were big jaguars hating us, and then another ship-like platform with tigers hating us, then a walled island with bisons hating us, and us laughing at the big one slowly creeping backwards away from us, and it hated us so much and then it leapt forward, into a younger bison, and they crashed through the enclosure and there was panic, the mob started fleeing past resigned soldiers moving towards us, to their death, and corrupt officials getting up from a field hospital, not hurt after all, and we were opening the inner gates, and thinking about the troll king surely free from his prison now smashing through the outer gates, surely we wouldn’t open the outer gates, where would we go? The forest was full of monsters, this city a point of light, but the noise of battle and death grew louder and we opened the outer gate… 👹
@stefan started talking about Lucid Dreams but I am a sceptic. Curious, but a sceptic.
I usually recognize when I’m having a bad dream and I can wake from those. In general, however, my dreams are slightly uncomfortable – just not bad enough for me to wake up. So how do you train dreaming?
I’ve kept a dream diary for two or three weeks as a teenager and stopped after these dream diaries got longer and longer. At the end I was writing four A4 pages every morning. Is this by itself supposed to improve the emotional content of my dreams?
This “training” for lucid dreaming seems like something that appears to be outside my control and yet it requires a lot of practice and that sounds like an auto-immunisation: it requires a lot of practice and if you fail, you just need to practice harder. Effectively, an endless time-sink.
The Wikipedia page also makes me wonder. The number of subjects are low (4, 28, 40), the number of studies are low, and the main effect is fewer nightmares. But I can already wake from nightmares. Everything else seems to be wishful thinking, if you ask me.
The *Reflexionstechnik* described in the Wikipedia article appears to be the only practical pointer: to “continuously suspect waking life to be a dream, in order that such a habit would manifest itself during dreams.” Maybe I should try that. One of my usual cues is the inability to read in my dreams, or a sense of foreboding which I don’t have in my waking life. Both alert me to the fact that I’m dreaming. But then the only thing I can do is struggle to wake up which usually works.
Recently I woke from a bad dream where I was involved in a fight on a tram with four bullies who were mistreating somebody else. I soon suspected that I was in a dream because causality was sometimes reversed: I’d hope the main bully wasn’t too strong and he immediately turned out to be very strong. But try as I might, I couldn’t “win” the struggle and I finally woke up with clenched teeth sending a few parting blows through the dream ether... 😂
Does lucid dreaming work for you? Tell me more!
Right now I feel like a month sounds like a reasonable and finite trial period. I might give it a try in August. Expect an online dream journal, I guess? And reports on (failed?) lucid dreaming. We’ll see!
#Dreams
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On 2019-06-14 I wrote on Mastodon:
... this only days after waking up from a nightmare where I was arguing with a stubborn person in French until I finally realized that her arguments were repeating themselves and that it was a dream. I have a new “trick”, too: I tell myself “it’s my dream and I can make them go away” and then the people making me uncomfortable just disappear from the dream – and seconds later I wake up. Phew! 😅
Sometimes it’s working, I guess.
– Alex Schroeder 2019-09-17 06:27 UTC