(sorry if my english isn't perfect i'm french)
When I was about 13 (I'm 20 now) I started practicing lucid dreaming. I was absolutely passionate about it and wanted to be able to control my consciousness at night as much as if I were awake. Ever since I was a child, I'd always been very connected with my unconscious. I could already remember my dreams in great detail when I started training. I looked at several techniques, but the one I remembered was to fix on a real-life action which, if it became a habit, could be repeated in dreams to make us aware that we weren't in reality. I'd remembered a line (from the show teen wolf, I think) which said that you can't read in dreams, so during the day whenever I read something I'd say to myself "what I'm reading makes sense, it's real" and in dreams it worked very well because it's easy to realize that what you're reading doesn't mean anything.
Around the age of 14-15, I was a true master at my art. I had fun creating universes in my dreams, could travel from one world to another, create any scenario, do absolutely anything I wanted. I was ecstatic and needed only a few hours' sleep to be perfectly fit the next day. My greatest pride was to have developed a completely conscious state where, thanks to the fact of being asleep, I had more or less unlimited access to an accelerated capacity for reflection and memorization, through free access to my memories. In other words, I could memorize any lecture I'd ever seen, or write essays or presentations in my sleep, and put them down on paper when I woke up.
I didn't expect all this to backfire.
When I was about 16, I noticed that sometimes you can lose control of your dreams, and that having a nightmare while lucid is much more traumatic than just having a nightmare. Whatever you don't want to happen, happens. If you think about anything, it will appear, and maybe even worse than you thought. When I started having increasingly violent nightmares, I realized I had to stop. I'd reached a point where I had no control and I was experiencing sleep paralysis and recurring nightmares every night. I still remember most of them as memories, where I saw my loved ones die in agony or I was raped and tortured by humanoid creatures.
nowadays sleeping terrifies me. I sleep less and less as time goes by and I pray each time for a dreamless sleep. If I wake up in the middle of the night, it's impossible for me to go back to sleep; I have recurrent sleep paralysis where I am suffocating. All this affects my whole life. I have hallucinations in the middle of the day, memory lapses, the impression that my brain is rotting. I can spend several minutes or even hours in absolute void without realizing it, and find it hard to know whether what I'm experiencing is real or not. I find it extremely difficult to read, even though I've always been a great reader. I just wish all this would stop and I could sleep normally again.
Does anyone know how to get out of this?
When I was about 13 (I'm 20 now) I started practicing lucid dreaming. I was absolutely passionate about it and wanted to be able to control my consciousness at night as much as if I were awake. Ever since I was a child, I'd always been very connected with my unconscious. I could already remember my dreams in great detail when I started training. I looked at several techniques, but the one I remembered was to fix on a real-life action which, if it became a habit, could be repeated in dreams to make us aware that we weren't in reality. I'd remembered a line (from the show teen wolf, I think) which said that you can't read in dreams, so during the day whenever I read something I'd say to myself "what I'm reading makes sense, it's real" and in dreams it worked very well because it's easy to realize that what you're reading doesn't mean anything.
Around the age of 14-15, I was a true master at my art. I had fun creating universes in my dreams, could travel from one world to another, create any scenario, do absolutely anything I wanted. I was ecstatic and needed only a few hours' sleep to be perfectly fit the next day. My greatest pride was to have developed a completely conscious state where, thanks to the fact of being asleep, I had more or less unlimited access to an accelerated capacity for reflection and memorization, through free access to my memories. In other words, I could memorize any lecture I'd ever seen, or write essays or presentations in my sleep, and put them down on paper when I woke up.
I didn't expect all this to backfire.
When I was about 16, I noticed that sometimes you can lose control of your dreams, and that having a nightmare while lucid is much more traumatic than just having a nightmare. Whatever you don't want to happen, happens. If you think about anything, it will appear, and maybe even worse than you thought. When I started having increasingly violent nightmares, I realized I had to stop. I'd reached a point where I had no control and I was experiencing sleep paralysis and recurring nightmares every night. I still remember most of them as memories, where I saw my loved ones die in agony or I was raped and tortured by humanoid creatures.
nowadays sleeping terrifies me. I sleep less and less as time goes by and I pray each time for a dreamless sleep. If I wake up in the middle of the night, it's impossible for me to go back to sleep; I have recurrent sleep paralysis where I am suffocating. All this affects my whole life. I have hallucinations in the middle of the day, memory lapses, the impression that my brain is rotting. I can spend several minutes or even hours in absolute void without realizing it, and find it hard to know whether what I'm experiencing is real or not. I find it extremely difficult to read, even though I've always been a great reader. I just wish all this would stop and I could sleep normally again.
Does anyone know how to get out of this?
