Correlation? Nightmares and Natural LDers?

In particular, is there a correlation between childhood nightmares and strong natural LDers? This was the case for me, and also for some others I have run into over the years. If anyone has anything to share on the subject, I would be very interested in reading about it. That said, I will now summarize my own experience below.

Without going into too much detail (relatively speaking) because of how long my story is: When I was 4 years old I went to visit my grandparents. For some reason I had ended up watching a show about schizophrenia, which happened to show vivid horror themed hallucinations from the perspective of the schizophrenic, as if seeing through his/her eyes.

Immediately after the show ended, I was forced to go to bed. When the lights went out, I was alone with my thoughts, in an unfamiliar room, enveloped in an unfamiliar utter darkness. I couldn’t get the show out of my head. That night something in my mind triggered, and I experienced the first nightmare of what would soon become a very long and traumatic experience. An experience which I consider both a curse and blessing, and for which in the long run overall I am extremely grateful for. (Will refer to nightmare as NM in the rest of this post)

Every single time I slept I would return to that place without fail. Likely due to being raised methodist, and the material which triggered the first NM, the NMs took on a demonic theme since the first NM. When I was there, I was trapped and unable to wake up. False awakenings were common. One of the worst things was that within the NMs my perception of time would become warped, sometimes dilated to extremes. Things became so bad that the NMs leaked over into the waking world. How ironic that watching a show about schizophrenia would trigger something and literally cause me to become schizophrenic.

Almost always I would never really gain lucidity. After around a year of returning to that place every single time I slept, something clicked and somehow DILD became instinctive. Control soon followed, with the first trick I learned being how to wake up. Admittedly, while helpful in a pinch, this alone wasn’t amazingly useful because the NM would simply wait for me to return. A couple of times I had turned to my parents for help, but they didn’t understand the magnitude of the situation, couldn’t relate at all. They would tell me it’s just a dream and to go back to bed, so I didn’t seek their help anymore. So many countless times had I begged God for help, but God was always silent. I realized that to obtain any relief at all, I would have to fight for it on my own. I slowly discovered that I could do more than wake up, I could bend the dream environment to my will in limited ways.

And so after these realizations, I struggled long and hard to gain control over my prison. I studied the DCs, learned from them, and over time I realized anything they could do I could do better. Though it took me nearly 2 years, I eventually became the scariest thing in the NMs. I had reached a point where nothing could fuck with me in the NMs anymore. It took me longer to get the waking world NMs/irl hallucinations under control, but I accomplished that as well. Eventually I could create my own irl hallucinations, and sort of paste them over my irl senses to various degrees, from barely visible hallucinations to maybe 50/50 here/there to hallucinations so strong I could no longer sense IRL despite being otherwise fully awake. This is a bit difficult to explain, but I’d like to move on for now.

I didn’t stop there. I wasn’t satisfied with having merely escaped the constant torture. I continued pushing myself to see what I was capable of. Around age 10 was a huge breakthrough. While I had been mostly lucid before, I discovered a way to maintain lucidity near 100% of the time, with less and less effort required to maintain as it ingrained into me, even while falling asleep and during nrem, to the point where I couldn’t be non-lucid even if I cared to try. Up through this point I had been entirely self taught. I was a loner who kept to myself, and I had no electronics. I didn’t even learn LD terminology until my early teens, when I was finally able to start going online. I found learning about such things online to be beneficial.

I had another major breakthrough in my early 20s, but that is when journeying down the rabbit hole becomes more like falling down a bottomless abyss. So I think I will end the telling of my story here for now.

I had a lot of nightmares as a kid, to the point where I feared sleeping. However, I’m not a natural lucid dreamer. I think most kids have a lot of nightmares.