I have had several lucid dreams before, though I had not identified them as such and was not able to exert any control over the dream content. Below is what I wrote down immediately after awakening from my last and most intense dreaming experience. I would love to hear anyone’s comments. Here goes.
I just had the strangest dream, no…strangest experience, I can remember. I hope this is not the beginning of my first psychotic break or something. I feel so out of sorts that some small part of me feels like I’m still in a dream and some nightmarish thing is about to happen, like in some B-thriller of the '80s.
My dream involved me being in a series of rooms from my past, cluttered with random things and people that were familiar to me and of greatly varying importance to me. Characters from “6 Feet Under,” my toys from when I was a child, Jan (my significant other) was in almost every room and seemed to be leading me around. It was all very dream-like, in a stereotypical kind of way (and, in retrospect, was like that scene in “Being John Malkovich” where he enters his own psyche).
At some point I realized that it was a dream–which is not entirely unusual for me. This time, however, maybe because I was deep asleep and not just on my way to waking up or something, I also realized I could control evrything that happened and everything that happened seemed as real to me as if it was occuring in my waking life.
I remember my first thought was that lots of people can fly in their dreams, but I’ve never had that experience, so I ought to do it. And I did. I went flying around the room. It was really fun. Then I realized I could live out any sexual fantasy, and I did a couple of those too. It was during this part of the dream that I first realized that my other self, the one that was sleeping in a dark room (what I’ll call my corporeal world), was completely paralyzed. This makes physiological sense, as I remember learning in medical school that during REM sleep, when the most vivid dreaming occurs, the rest of the body is essentially paralyzed. And hence while I was able to acheive a climax in my dream, I was unable to physically stimulate myself and reach ejaculation back in the corporeal world. (Sorry for being so graphic, but that was my experience).
At this point in the dream I came to another realization: in addition to my power to live out any pleasurable fantasy, I also was capable of conjuring up any nightmare scenario, and indeed, when I thought of some awful image, a demon or a rotting corpse, there it would appear right in front of me. (The closest thing I can compare this feeling to is the few experiences I’ve had on mushrooms or LSD, in which I became aware of the vastly negative direction in which my thoughts could go and then realized the fine and largely arbitrary line between a good and a bad trip.)
For the first time I began to feel vulnerable–a prisoner of my own semi-conscious (or whatever you want to call it)–and that I wasn’t sure I wanted to exist in a world where my train of thought controlled my reality.
At this point in the dream I started to panic a little. I began desperately want to wake myself up, reconnect with my boring yet safe corporeal world. I tried unsuccessfully to wake myself up, pinching myself and the like. I began to fear that I would be stuck in this dream world forever. Several times I thought I had succeeded, but then, to my horror, I realized the dream was still going on.
Finally, I can’t remember how, I was able to pull myself into wakefullness. It was a jolting experience, like having a bucket of icewater poured on your head. Everything was just how I imagined it would be: lying in bed in a dark room with Jan on my right. I looked at the clock and was surprised to see that only about two hours had passed since I estimate I fell asleep. It seemed like it had been much longer than that. I awoke afraid and unsure of my situation, as if reality was no longer real. After a few minutes of lying in the dark, scared to go back to sleep for fear of being sucked into another dream, I roused Jan and related this experience to him (which I’m sure he promptly forgot, since he went right back to sleep). Still unsatisfied (and also a little afraid of the dark), I decided to write my experience down, lest I forget it like I have so many other dreams.
Maybe tomorrow this will all seem completely silly and unremarkable, but somehow I don’t think so. As I said, viscerally it feels like one of the strangest and most intense experiences of my life (though, already, some of the “un-real” feelings I was having are beginning to fade as I write this). I have never been a religious person or even considered myself a particularly spiritual person, and even though there is nothing manifestly super-natural about what I’ve described, I feel that somehow this is what an intense religious experience must feel like.
That’s what I wrote about a week ago in my journal. I thought about it a lot the next day, but haven’t given it much thought since then. Still, I had heard vaguely about lucid dreams before, and I thought it was worth seeing what was out there on the web. I’m interested to hear what other lucid dreamers think of my experience and if others have had similar expereinces that first brought them to this forum. [/url]