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[Remuthra]

Hm. I shall watch this.

I've had something a bit like lucid dreams several times before, minus the control aspect. They take the form of long, mentally taxing tasks in which I know I'm sleeping but can't wake up, usually lacking any external dream perception. The most recent one involved spending several hours brainstorming and balancing mechanics for a strategy game akin to Total War.

[Yoink]

I, too, used to have horrific nightmares. I eventually taught myself to realize it was all fake, or impossible in some way, which simply brought me on to the next one. And how to wake up by force if that didn't work. The result of that was rarely, if ever, remembering my dreams. When I do though, I'm usually in control of myself but not my environment. Sometimes it's nightmares again, but either way I can remember a lot of detail even several hours after the fact.

Interesting. I think I still usually remembered my dreams, in fact I still recall a few of my nightmares from way back then.
I'm pretty sure the first one where I used that trick and forced myself awake involved me standing outside my house (we lived out in the bush at that time) in the middle of the night, peering out into the trees and seeing these strange figures running back and forth, laughing madly, these weird skeletal people with skin hanging off them who I knew were coming to get me.
I went "NOPE" and woke myself up before they could emerge from the treeline. Suck it, mummified-ghost-zombie-murder-skeleton-people!

I would try this tonight, but I slept for several hours earlier today and I need to actually focus on sleeping more regularly before doing this, I think. Interestingly enough, when I do force my sleeping patterns into some kind of normalcy at first I get very vivid, shocking dreams, even moreso than usual. Whereas my dreams are usually just madness where I'm curiously unconcerned by the horrible things going on, when I started forcing myself to go to bed at a certain time and just stay in bed until morning, I had the first nightmare of my adult life.

[Fniff]

I tried writing my dream journal, then found I had dreamt writing it.

If that's how you want to play it, brain...

[freeformschooler]

I tried writing my dream journal, then found I had dreamt writing it.

If that's how you want to play it, brain...

wake up fniff

[LordSlowpoke]

shh if we wake him up where do we go

[miauw62]

[inception horn intensifies]

[Fniff]

Wait, wait. What if... we're all actually communicating with each other through dreams via some sort of dream internet right now? If that's true, we made a whole new internet through dreams. Question, what kind of porn should we put on it?

[ShadowHammer]

I tried this last night, with some results. Due to not reviewing and subsequently partially forgetting how it actually worked, I accidentally mixed up some stuff, which led to an attempt at inducing WILD immediately upon going to bed, as opposed to 5 hours later. However, some things did happen.

Shadowhammer's log, day 1
Throughout the day, I did several reality checks, all of them passes.

Upon going to bed, I put my hands over my chest and attempted to focus on only my heartbeat.

Presumably due to my conscious still being very active, I continuously had random thoughts drifting through my mind, but I managed to get most of them to simply dissipate before fully forming*. A couple of times, I became so distracted by one of these thoughts (a song that has been stuck in my head for days) as to temporarily forgot about my heartbeat, but only for a few seconds each time.

After a while, I began to experience sensory hallucinations, but these only lasted for a few seconds at a time. The hallucinations included the noise of my ceiling fan going from a gentle swoosh to a gale force roar, my heartbeat feeling like it was so powerful as to lift my chest several inches, and my eardrums feeling like there was great pressure on them from inside, which faded and intensified corresponding to my heartbeat.

Unfortunately, I was lying in such a way that my left hand lost circulation, and eventually, I decided it was better to lose the progress I had made than to lose my left hand, so I moved in order to restore blood flow. The fact that I was able to consciously evaluate such a decision is probably a sign that the pain in my hand was disrupting my meditation anyway.

After having moved, I decided against trying again, and just fell asleep.

While sleeping, I had two separate dreams: in one, I made some kind of toy boat, and all that I can remember of the other is disjointed images: buying ice cream, having a bright orange backpack (which I actually have IRL) that contained navy blue shorts with white stripes down the sides, forgetting said backpack on a bus, and having my dad go back and get it for me. Both of these are recorded in greater detail in my dream journal. Neither were lucid.

_{* I'm not sure how that worked, and I've never done it before. Every time a thought came into my mindscape, I'd imagine it just... going away, and it would kind of fade.}

[freeformschooler]

Unfortunately, I was lying in such a way that my left hand lost circulation, and eventually, I decided it was better to lose the progress I had made than to lose my left hand, so I moved in order to restore blood flow. The fact that I was able to consciously evaluate such a decision is probably a sign that the pain in my hand was disrupting my meditation anyway.

After having moved, I decided against trying again, and just fell asleep.

That's a good first try! Did your left hand actually lose blood flow or did you simply lose feeling in your left hand? Note the latter is what happens, slowly, to your whole body during WILD. It's freaky the first time.

[Kashyyk]

I've always like this idea. It might be easier if I actually remembered my dreams though...

[ShadowHammer]

Unfortunately, I was lying in such a way that my left hand lost circulation, and eventually, I decided it was better to lose the progress I had made than to lose my left hand, so I moved in order to restore blood flow. The fact that I was able to consciously evaluate such a decision is probably a sign that the pain in my hand was disrupting my meditation anyway.

After having moved, I decided against trying again, and just fell asleep.

That's a good first try! Did your left hand actually lose blood flow or did you simply lose feeling in your left hand? Note the latter is what happens, slowly, to your whole body during WILD. It's freaky the first time.

Thanks. It was still numb after I moved, and it got pins-and-needles a little while later, so I think it actually lost blood flow.

[BlitzDungeoneer]

Read about this a year ago, tried it once, promptly forgot all about it.
It is a rather interesting topic, and I will be trying this again, hopefully with some measure of success. Wish me luck, guys!

[Samarkand]

Is anyone here doing Habit RPG? Because this would make a great challenge for it.

[miauw62]

I've always like this idea. It might be easier if I actually remembered my dreams though...

From my experience, a little bit of effort towards remembering your dreams right after you wake up can go a long way.

[DeKaFu]

I tend to consider myself a "natural" lucid dreamer, though it may be different from what you'd get with this method. Haven't read everything but wanted to post my experiences.

As long as I remember, I've always known when I was dreaming the vast majority of the time (with a few notable alarming exceptions). There's no spot-checking or anything, it's just, you know... everything inherently feels different and like I'm dreaming, so I obviously am.

I had the thing a couple other people mentioned where I had nonstop horrible nightmares as a kid, so I learned to wake myself up from inside dreams out of self-defense. I can still clearly remember the dream where I first pulled it off. My usual method was making fists really hard and squeezing my eyes shut, and occasionally biting my hands if that didn't work.

My breakthrough for actually exerting control over my dreams came years later. I was in one of my "riding in an out of control car on a twisty road with cliffs on either side" dreams, and the car was coming up to a sharp bend in the road. I was afraid I was going to go off the edge, but then for whatever reason decided I probably wouldn't even if it would make sense to. And then I didn't. Which was an incredibly minor thing, except it was instantly apparent to my dreaming self that the only reason I hadn't gone off that cliff was that I didn't expect to, and therefore my expectations were actively shaping my dreams while I experienced them. So then I started paying attention and seeing that effect everywhere across multiple dreams. Bad things happening when I expect them to, or things not happening when I don't.

Next step then was intentionally modifying my expectations, which was harder than it sounded. There's a sort of clap-your-hands-if-you-believe aspect to it. You have the power to shape the world around you to your whims as long as you're really convinced it will happen, but if you doubt this ability then it won't work (because it's based on expectations, not intentions). I kind of had to culture an a-god-am-I attitude to get it working with any kind of consistency. I've used it for various things from teleporting out of danger to transforming into various flying monsters and blowing off whatever's otherwise happening.

That said, my dreams do tend towards cool fantasy/sci-fi settings and plotlines, so a lot of the time I don't actually want to interfere, except maybe to nudge things along and make them more interesting. Even nightmares - I'm a horror fan, so why would I intentionally destroy a fully immersive genuine-feeling horror experience? (answer: it got 2spooky)

I guess my dreams are more quasi-lucid... I know I'm dreaming and can choose to change them however I want, but usually don't and they play out like normal dreams. I have had the more conventional fully-lucid dreams too, though, where the entire world is incredibly sharp and intense and you feel like anything is possible but at the same time you're barely holding it together and everything could shatter at the slightest touch of a thought.

Spoiler: Slight aside on shapeshifting since this post is already getting too rambling (click to show/hide)

Also, my method for manipulating dreams (believe and it will be true) has at least one major drawback. One of the things I want more than anything else is to experience what it feels like to inhabit a completely non-humanoid body. I suspect because I want this so badly, I'm subconsciously blocking myself from achieving it (because of a "too-good-to-be-true" sort of self-doubt). So whenever I transform into something else, I just feel like I'm in a human body occupying the same space as the creature's body, with the mismatch kinda being handwaved away. When stuff has more than 4 limbs, I can only control four at a time and have to shift my arms from "inhabiting" the forelimbs to the wings and back intentionally, for example. It's led to some interesting things (as a quadrupedal werewolf I was physically walking on my fingers and toes) but on the whole is rather disappointing, and I'm not sure I can overcome it.

I also had what I believe was a form of sleep paralysis once, but it didn't scare me and it made me laugh afterwards. (I hallucinated the sensation of a tapeworm crawling out of my mouth and heading under my blankets, and my sleepy brain's reaction was to go "oh nooo i need to catch it but i can't move, it's gonna get awayy" and then realize its texture was inconsistant with a real tapeworm and go "oh, oh well" and fall back asleep).