NationStates Jolt Archive

A couple of weeks ago, my friend and I watched Waking Life which is a distinctly odd film, about weird retro hippy stuff. In this distinctly odd film is a section about dreams, lucid dreams in particular. Theres a guy in the film who says that if you've got any inkling that you might be dreaming then find a light switch, and switch it - because you cant change the light settings in your dreams - its fixed (I have no idea why). If the light doesnt change when you flick the switch then you know you're dreaming (or that you need a new light bulb). Then, once you know you're dreaming, you can have a lucid one and do what you want.

Well, this didnt really work for me as i never remembered to find a light switch in my dreams...............until! I thought that maybe if i did it all the time then i'd remember in my dreams as well, since dreams are usually what happens in your day. So I did. For a week, everytime i went into a room, i switched the light switch. And at first, it didnt work and i thought i'd just made a fool of myself. BUT! Last night it worked. I remember to switch it, and nothing happened, and i became conscious of dreaming. And it was fantastic.

Now I don't know whether this is a well known fact at all and im just making a fool out of myself again, but i just thought I might as well pass the information on because its alot of fun when it works.

I have "lucid" dreams all the time, and I'm usually able to control them at will. I dunno why...I guess I never really buy anything that happens in my dreams as ever having a chance of actually happening.

My dreams often become lucid just before I wake up

Oh my I can't wait to try this..

Don't know if you seen my post earlier about my crazy dreams

http://forums.jolt.co.uk/showthread.php?t=433127

This will be fun :D

I'll try the lightswitch idea and let you all know what happens :p

I've only been able to realise im dreaming a few times once I got bored of fighting in my dream and woke up. Only recently have I been able to throw a real punch in my dreams its usually like being under water.

Ah yes. The lucid dream. I love lucid dreams. They're my personal playground. I can fly, walk through walls, and turn invisible. For a while, I could shoot DBZ-style "Kamehameha" fireballs. But I haven't done that in months.

I've blown away nightmares with awesome power, escaped destruction by simply willing myself into another dream, and I've even...well, there may be kids reading this.

Of course, the dark sides of my Dream Paradise are the freaky, wierd dreams. Some I can fight against. Some I wake from screaming. But it's no biggie. It's just a dream...

I once had a dream where it was a WW III scenario, a bomb went off in the back round and everyone around me started to bleed to death(it was an Ebola Virus bio-bomb I later figured). I remember wiping my nose and found blood on my hands. I rembember waking up and found that my hand was covered in blood and my nose was bleeding. That freaked me out a bit for a while....

I usually get lucid dreams in the morning before getting out of bed. I find, If you sleep damn alot, you tend to get many of them. Mostly during the holidays :p

Yea lucid dreams are very cool. I've had quite a few but not so many recently :) I'm one of the unlucky ones that has to keep a routine (like the lightswitch thing) to increase the chance of a lucid dream.

The way i used to have them was everytime i became fully aware (basically watching your own thought processes) i looked at my hands, because if you see yourself in a dream, you instantly become lucid... its a pretty cool trick that works well.

Also i didnt know that light levels cant change in a dream... im sure they can... well maybe in a lucid dream, tbh i've never noticed :)

Try reading in dreams. I saw an episode of the Batman cartoon years ago (before Warner Brothers had Japanese artists doing their crude drawings of him). It said that reading in dreams was impossible because reading is a left brain activity and dreaming is a right brain one (or possibly vice versa, I get them mixed up a lot).

Well, I can never read in my dreams. Whenever I try, I find the words changing on me. I've even had dreams where I got lost in the supermarket because I couldn't read the signs telling me what aisle I was in.

I'm curious to hear if any of you have tried it with any success.

Try reading in dreams. I saw an episode of the Batman cartoon years ago (before Warner Brothers had Japanese artists doing their crude drawings of him). It said that reading in dreams was impossible because reading is a left brain activity and dreaming is a right brain one (or possibly vice versa, I get them mixed up a lot).

Well, I can never read in my dreams. Whenever I try, I find the words changing on me. I've even had dreams where I got lost in the supermarket because I couldn't read the signs telling me what aisle I was in.

I'm curious to hear if any of you have tried it with any success.

I can never read, I never get the chance to read, my mind is just like "ok... we can't read... so lets just teleport to where we need to be next..."

and whenever I am having a scary dream (which is very frequent, damn those horror movies and their silly antics!) I have to do a silly thing to wake up. Whenever I get scared in a dream, I somehow then realize I am dreaming, then I try to close my eyes tight for a period of 10-15 seconds then open them and bam, awake...

Man... I've never had a lucid dream. What's my problem? It pisses me off... I want to fly.

Just to put everyone's minds at rest, I'll dispel a long-persistant myth: If you die in a dream, you do not actually die in real life. I know, I've done it (the dream part, not the real life part!). :D

The creepy thing is waking up laying in exactly the same position as you'd fallen, in the dream. :eek: :D

Try reading in dreams. I saw an episode of the Batman cartoon years ago (before Warner Brothers had Japanese artists doing their crude drawings of him). It said that reading in dreams was impossible because reading is a left brain activity and dreaming is a right brain one (or possibly vice versa, I get them mixed up a lot).

Well, I can never read in my dreams. Whenever I try, I find the words changing on me. I've even had dreams where I got lost in the supermarket because I couldn't read the signs telling me what aisle I was in.

I'm curious to hear if any of you have tried it with any success.I can't make up an entire book on the spot when I'm awake either. I did manage to read in a dream, but it was just gibberish. I didn't realize it was gibberish until I woke up

i saw that movie "waking life" like 30 minutes ago, I thought it wasn't great aspecially the start and end but it had a couple good spots. By the way i figured out a way to change the lighting in ur dreams, when ur in a room or whatever just turnthe other way look out the door or window or something, it works, you can change it to whatever you want though it doesnt all ways change to my specification, of course its awfully hard to concentrate while dreaming.

Try this for thought...just go along with it. It actually happened to me, about two weeks ago.

You've just gotten home from work. You're not tired or strained in any way. It's been an easy/normal day at work again, so there's no leftover stress from that. The only possible stress you might have is from your girlfriend's mother having said something to you earlier that day.

You haven't had any alcohol, and you don't do drugs of any sort. Slowly, after about an hour, the room begins to spin around 3/4th of the way around. You're talking to friends on IM still, and begin spouting incomprehensible things to them on IM. Oddly enough, throughout the whole ordeal, you're typing perfectly fine, but you're just not making any sense. You're saying stuff like "brb, gotta fly in water." or "I'm a happy loozy!" or you're just typing "*giggles*" a few times too many for comfort.

You're sitting up, and still, you feel as if you're in the spin cycle in the washing machine. That's how your body is moving now, in circles. You can control that a bit, but you're still feeling quite odd.

You feel displaced from your body, as if you're looking over your shoulder, watching everything. Your eyes are rolling back in your head without control on it. Your right hand twitches sporadically. You even occassionally see things that aren't there, such as strange designs on the wall, or even little people moving about the room in some fashion or another.

You're really starting to worry your friends on IM, as this is highly unlike your normal behavior. At last, you manage to get up and walk to the bathroom, with the thought to splash some cold water on your face, and take an Aleve for the throbbing headache that has grown into a heck of a pain as of now. Oddly, it doesn't seem like a migraine, nor have you ever had one before (at least not that you can recall). You walk into the walls occassionally, your sense of balance totally off kilter.

At last, you pass out on your bed, your computer still hooked up to the internet, and your friends are occassionally pinging you, wondering if you're all right. You're just unconscious now.

You wake up the next day, the strange episode from the night before, gone. You wonder if it was a strange strange dream, or if it actually happened. As you're talking to a friend online later on that day, you are surprised to find out that it did happen, and even better, they've saved a copy of the conversation (apparently at your request) for you to view when you are more...sane.


Crazy stuff huh? I still am not sure quite what it was, but I suspect it might've been hypoglycemia (low blood sugar). Since then, I've been watching what I eat, as I didn't like that experience in any regard. Though, the stuff I wrote cracked me up. I'm still amazed I was able to type perfectly fine spelling wise. I just didn't make sense lol.

Lucid dreaming is awesome. I can fly, discover I'm telekenetic, engage in brutal gladiatoral combat, become liquid, meet old friends, drive a tank, become famous, gain super strength, breathe underwater, become immortal and, (most importantly) have sex with whoever I want! :D

I had one of my best ones recently where I decided to become superman. I made a huge fortress out of massive chunks of steel in the side of a mountain, then outran a train and saved my girlfriend from a giant robot.

I never lucid dream, and rarely dream otherwise; on the few occaisions I do, its about mundane stuff...

But, several times in my dreams, I've checked online forums and read responses and whatnot. When I wake up, I have trouble grasping whether they were real or not.

Whats more fun though, is the half-awake time between awake and asleep when your mind can run simulations of anything and create new thoughts effortlessly. Unfortunetly, you either go to sleep after this and forget any specifics, or you are awake and cant grab on to any, but still feel giddy and creative.

What isn't fun is the half-awake state between sleeping and waking up in which I can engage in incoherent conversations and make promises I have no intention of keeping, while failing to take in information regarding the plan for the day. It really sucks because I honestly have no recollection at all of what was said......

I usually become aware of my dreams just before I wake up. I ususlly then become some sort of business tycoon. It is what I dream about.

I never lucid dream, and rarely dream otherwise; on the few occaisions I do, its about mundane stuff...

But, several times in my dreams, I've checked online forums and read responses and whatnot. When I wake up, I have trouble grasping whether they were real or not.

Whats more fun though, is the half-awake time between awake and asleep when your mind can run simulations of anything and create new thoughts effortlessly. Unfortunetly, you either go to sleep after this and forget any specifics, or you are awake and cant grab on to any, but still feel giddy and creative.

What isn't fun is the half-awake state between sleeping and waking up in which I can engage in incoherent conversations and make promises I have no intention of keeping, while failing to take in information regarding the plan for the day. It really sucks because I honestly have no recollection at all of what was said......
i love that half-awake state. everything you think of makes perfect sense and is the most important revelation ever. of course when you wake up properly, you realise it was all nonsense. and of course, when you're in that limbo, everybody else seems to be talking absolute rubbish.

My subconscious and consciousness are not on speaking terms. I don't dream. Bandwith costs too high as well. =p

When I was younger I often had awful nightmares, after a while I learnt to wake myself up from a nightmare by opening my eyes (it's harder than it sounds because you feel like you're eyes are alreadty open and you have to really stretch your eyelids) but now I no longer have nightmares and I've lost the ability to recognise and exit dreams.

I'll try the light idea, could be great fun...

I once had a dream where it was a WW III scenario, a bomb went off in the back round and everyone around me started to bleed to death(it was an Ebola Virus bio-bomb I later figured). I remember wiping my nose and found blood on my hands. I rembember waking up and found that my hand was covered in blood and my nose was bleeding. That freaked me out a bit for a while....

Haha, awesome.

I've read a fair bit about lucid dreaming, but haven't succesfully done it yet. Has anyone here heard of Astral Planing? It's similar to lucid dreaming, it's where you keep your conscious brain awake and send your sub-concious to sleep for an outer body experience. Never actually done it, just heard alot about it. I'd reccomend looking it up.

Most of my dreams now I don't remember. I lucid dreamed a couple of times when I was little but it was horrible - I knew I was dreaming but I couldn't get out and was trying to escape the dream as this killer whale chased after me… sometimes I have problems sorting out dreams and reality. Two nights ago, I dreamed that we had biscuits in the biscuit tin, and I took two :) . Unfortunately, the next morning I went looking for them and they weren't there :( .

Everyone dreams, so anyone who says they don't just isn't remembering their dreams when they wake up (just like almost everyone). It's actually been proven that if you go too long without dreaming (no more than a week), you go insane. I've had three lucid dreams that I can remember. The first time, I realized I was dreaming because my class schedulewas in the wrong order. The second time my dad said a word which I'm pretty sure wasn't a word, but I don't remember it any more. The third time I found out that if I closed my mouth and pinched my nose, I could still breathe. I've heard that if you don't want to wake up from a lucid dream, you should rub your hands (in the dream). For some reason that keeps you in the dream. There was an episode of Star Trek Voyager where there was an alien in all of their dreams, so Chakotay used some technique to fall asleep and make himself had a lucid dream. Later, the aliens made everyone stay asleep, but in a shared dream so they all thought they were awake, but Chakotay realized it was a dream and he saved everyone.

i hate lucid dreams. i mean, they're great in the way that you can control them, but when i try, everything goes wrong.

'NO, NO DONT JUMP OFF THE SHIP! THERE ARE SHARKS IN THE WATER!'
*splash*
'YAY A RAFT, I'M SAVED! IN YOUR FACE SHARKS!'
*gurgle*
'NO!! WHY IS IT SINKING. AHHHH'

Try reading in dreams. I saw an episode of the Batman cartoon years ago (before Warner Brothers had Japanese artists doing their crude drawings of him). It said that reading in dreams was impossible because reading is a left brain activity and dreaming is a right brain one (or possibly vice versa, I get them mixed up a lot).

Well, I can never read in my dreams. Whenever I try, I find the words changing on me. I've even had dreams where I got lost in the supermarket because I couldn't read the signs telling me what aisle I was in.

I'm curious to hear if any of you have tried it with any success.
I cannot read in any of my dreams either. I always thought it was wierd..

The second time my dad said a word which I'm pretty sure wasn't a word, but I don't remember it any more. It was fnord, trust me on this one.Hail Eris!

Try reading in dreams. I saw an episode of the Batman cartoon years ago (before Warner Brothers had Japanese artists doing their crude drawings of him). It said that reading in dreams was impossible because reading is a left brain activity and dreaming is a right brain one (or possibly vice versa, I get them mixed up a lot).


Done it. Once. It wasn't lucid, though.


I honestly don't quite understand lucid dreaming. I keep a rather in depth dream journal, but rarely am able to tell when I am dreaming. (Guess it is because I never do reality checks in real life) The few times I am concious of my dream are those few times in my life that I recall every aspect of all of my dreams for about a week. I memorize the emotional state pretty well, I guess, so I can detect a dream when I am in one. Unfortunatley, I get jipped on the Neo-powers. :(

I was planning on trying some more lucid dreaming this summer, but I had spree of nightmares that began in March and only ended last night. I swear, if I EVER have another zombie dream, I'm going to start urinating on some graves.

Whenever I have one of those dreams where I know I'm dreaming and can do what I want, I always end up going on a killing spree.

Whats more fun though, is the half-awake time between awake and asleep when your mind can run simulations of anything and create new thoughts effortlessly. Unfortunetly, you either go to sleep after this and forget any specifics, or you are awake and cant grab on to any, but still feel giddy and creative.


I know what you mean. When I've been between sleep and awake, I've created the most interesting rock songs, love songs, and orchestra songs. However, once awake, I remember none of it. And, as I am not musically gifted at all, this is by far the wierdest thing I do.

I am a writer, though, and sometimes I dream whole adventures, novels, and series of stories, only to have them wiped of meaning on wakings. Sometimes, I'm smart enough to write stuff down as soon as I wake up, so portions are kept, and the essence of the dream stays alive.

(Btw, thanks to the guy who also listed his "lucid dream superpowers" I'd forgotten my underwater breathing ability.)

I have "lucid" dreams all the time, and I'm usually able to control them at will. I dunno why...I guess I never really buy anything that happens in my dreams as ever having a chance of actually happening.

You are a good candidate for OOBE if you believe in that. Read up on it if you are interested. There are methods on how to induce OOBE, especially when you are aware that you are dreaming.

I've pretty much always been able to do this. I went through a period of about 2 years when I was a kid where I had no dreams or at least no recollection of any. When they did come back dreaming was like going to Disneyland and having long been denied my entertainment I started controlling them. Nowadays I just go to sleep and let it flow. I need the rest. :)

Try reading in dreams. I saw an episode of the Batman cartoon years ago (before Warner Brothers had Japanese artists doing their crude drawings of him). It said that reading in dreams was impossible because reading is a left brain activity and dreaming is a right brain one (or possibly vice versa, I get them mixed up a lot).

Well, I can never read in my dreams. Whenever I try, I find the words changing on me. I've even had dreams where I got lost in the supermarket because I couldn't read the signs telling me what aisle I was in.

I'm curious to hear if any of you have tried it with any success.

I find that I can;t 'read' in dreams, but my 'sanctuary' (my special little niche that I find calming so easily turn the dream into it) is a small library of all the books I have ever owned, which is therefore primarily field guides and science books: and I can look at the pictures. And I can remember nearly ever picture I have ever seen in one of these books, and for the most part the orders they were in, so I can actualy skim the pictures of the books in my dreams.

Just to put everyone's minds at rest, I'll dispel a long-persistant myth: If you die in a dream, you do not actually die in real life. I know, I've done it (the dream part, not the real life part!). :D

The creepy thing is waking up laying in exactly the same position as you'd fallen, in the dream. :eek: :D

But it can be pretty realistic... I have had things occur like being tortured and waking up covered in... well, pain. No marks, but the pain lingers... I once had an arm cut off in a dream, and when I woke my arm wasn;t asleep, it was simply completely unresponsive UNTIL I used my other arm to feel it, realized it is still there, and suddenly I could move it again.

But it can be pretty realistic... I have had things occur like being tortured and waking up covered in... well, pain. No marks, but the pain lingers... I once had an arm cut off in a dream, and when I woke my arm wasn;t asleep, it was simply completely unresponsive UNTIL I used my other arm to feel it, realized it is still there, and suddenly I could move it again.

Yes it can. I had a deep cut on my arm in a dream and it was really painful and I was covered in blood. And I awoke to find the pain still there.

I;ve also died horribly in a dream or two but I'm still here. And no I didn't awake just before I died either. I was actually dead and trapped in my body while still being dead for a good while in the dream. Also I've killed in my dreams and woke up to find that I was not goign to jail for murder..

Whenever I have one of those dreams where I know I'm dreaming and can do what I want, I always end up going on a killing spree.

"Head Shot-Double Kill-Tripple kill-Head Sh-Ultra Kill-Head-Monster Kill-Hea-Monster Ki-Monste-He-Monst-H-H-M-M-Rampage"