Are you too scared to try lucid dreaming because you’re afraid of nightmares?
You’d rather not remember your dreams, that way you won’t remember the scary stuff?
This is the most common excuse people give me for not wanting to become a lucid dreamer. I hear it a lot. Is this you?
That’s your choice. Let’s see why it might be a good idea to look at it differently.
Will you remember more nightmares?
Yes, you will. I remember nightmares and I’m sure every lucid dreamer does. Lucid dreaming won’t make them go away. There will still be times when you dream regularly. A lot in fact.
Luckily you can do something about them while you’re lucid.
What happens during a lucid nightmare?
If you encounter something scary during a lucid dream you can completely cancel it out by accepting it’s just a dream and realizing there’s nothing to be scared of. Embrace your demon.
Even if a giant killer bunny rabbit is coming at you with a knife, it can’t hurt you if you don’t let it. – Click To Tweet
Your mind is powerful. If you accept nothing can hurt you and it’s only pretend, the nightmare will go away. I’ve had a monster try and attack me with its huge claws. It was more like a video game than a nightmare, but it’s still scary when something is coming at you with sharp blades.
You can hit the kill switch at any moment
Just close your eyes and it all goes away.
If you don’t feel up to facing your nightmare you can just close your eyes. Did you ever close your eyes as a child and think you were invisible? It’s the same thing in lucid dreams.
You can face your nightmares another night when you’re ready. Once you stand up to your nightmares you can do it all the time. You just need to be strong the first time. You can handle a split second of danger, right?
It will improve your life
Just because you can’t remember nightmares won’t make them go away. You can’t just forget about them. They still affect your mind at a deeper level.
When you wake up after a nightmare you will feel like crap. You won’t feel ready to take on the world. You won’t even know why.
If you can eliminate your nightmare in a lucid dream you can move on to much more exciting things. Things that will make you smile from ear to ear when you wake up. You don’t go flying and not wake up happy.
If you wake up in a great mood you’ll set yourself up for a much better day.
But it won’t affect normal dreams
You will still go through the nightmare in a normal dream.
Whether you remember or not doesn’t mean the nightmare didn’t happen. You’re going to be remembering a lot more dreams when you begin practicing lucid dreaming.
This means instead of waking up feeling like crap, you will know exactly what happened. You can then go over the dream in your head and understand what it meant. Why it was scary.
Once you understood why you had the nightmare you can breathe a sigh of relief. It will put your mind at ease, instead of just not knowing why you can’t smile.
Do I think lucid dreaming can help you?
I do. I think it can help your nightmares.
Once you begin to study lucid dreaming, dreams become much more than dreams. They become part of the game. A tool you can master.
You learn not to fear them because they are your ally. Even nightmares. They help you improve your life and become a better lucid dreamer.
Jamie I have a question that i have to throw your way.
So, I believe that dreams are an opportunity for our soul, unconscious, and mind to wrestle and figure things out. My question is: does lucid dreaming inhibit that experience?
I love remembering my dreams because I feel like it gives me awesome insights into the deeper insights of my mind.
Do you consider lucid dreaming a form of artificial correction? I know that question sounds loaded. I don’t mean it in that way. I just can’t come up with a better way to word it.
I feel like if I am having nightmares than there some deeper issues on the table that I need to deal with. If I can simply lucid dream my way out of it doesn’t that avoid the deeper issue?
I am really curious on your thoughts.
Izzy
Hey Izzy,
That’s a great question. I honestly believe lucid dreams can help out life, especially correcting or even just understanding our troubles.
I think our nightmares are like metaphors of what we are dealing with in the real world only we aren’t meant to know. I think our dreams just play out things from our life because it’s what is in our mind and they aren’t really some magical way to help up. They just happen because it’s easier for the subconscious to create from experience.
I think lucid dreaming is the only way to deal with them. It’s happened to me so many times I can remember. To give you an example, I’ve not been training for a while and I feel I’m getting a big fatter than usual. I ended up having sleep paralysis a few weeks ago and someone was on top of me grabbing me and I couldn’t move. I ended up asking it to take me to a world full of beautiful women.
Next thing I know I’m being pulled through space and I come to this strange land that looks like something from the inside of a ship. All industrial and steel and I can see these sexy women working away, and finally I end up in this room full of sand with a giant bed in the middle. There’s a gorgeous woman sitting on the bed. The thing holding me lets me go and I get up and start walking towards the woman. She starts shouting, “Get him away from me. He’s fat.” LOL
So something like that probably would have made me feel bad if I never knew it happened. I probably would have been feeling like crap when I woke up. But because I was lucid and seen it happen I knew it was just because I was feeling self-conscious about my weight. So that’s why I thing lucid dreaming can help. You sort of know why stuff is happening. Even if you just remember your dreams you maybe have to work it out, but being lucid you know as soon as it’s happening.