Confronting your deepest fears in LD's

Quest for Lucidity
1

I’ve heard countless story of someone in a nightmare, realizing it’s a dream, and with the flick of a wrist completely eradicating a lifelong phobia…

unfortunately I’m not one of those kinds of people.

I’m quite afraid of spiders… it all stims back to playing Sim Ant as a child, i think… i used to be afraid of snakes (adopted by my mother screaming at one) but I quickly realized snakes weren’t scary by watching a tv show about them not a few weeks later.

Unfortunately I never had the fortune of seeing some laid back childrens show about spiders that wasn’t too intense.

So… just today I had a rather screwed up LD, this alien looking thing (from the movie Alien) randomly attacked me while I was talking to my subconscious and I could not fight it off, it was too strong, I wandered over, I think at my grandparents, and you know, I sort of caught the glimpse of behind their back fence, a giant spider.

See, I think my mind was mad at me and wanted me to stop being lucid, because I prematurely forced myself awake.

anyway…

I’ve never once managed to bravely confront one of these things… they aren’t particularly “agressive” it is the THOUGHTS running through my head and my ACTIONS that bring them to life… example one time I saw one, it was not moving, but the second I ran and flew up in the air it jumped up and bit me and woke me up.

What good does running do me? I once tried to throw a knife at one but had no confidence and immediately forced myself awake…

fighting isn’t the answer either.

Confrontation is.

I swear though, even though it isn’t real, it’s probably going to be one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my life… in comparison, it would probably be easier to hold, say, a harmless wolf spider in my hand (hell that probably wouldn’t scare me)…

confrontation… god… i’m not happy just thinking about it.

But it’s something that eventually has to be done, isn’t it? I’m better off for it, aren’t I?

What should I do? I know, no matter how bad it gets, the only damage that will occur will be psychological (yay!)… I know that, if I go through with doing psychadelics, a genera lack of phobias would help me a lot… (i wouldn’t be doing 100% dissociative doses though)

I mean… but… knowing it isn’t real doesn’t help me at all… that’s the thing, that’s the point of a phobia, it’s an irrational fear, I know it… but I can’t help it… I absolutely love Tigers, they could maul my face off, I don’t give a damn, no phobia there… it’s not the fear of harm, it’s just… well… it’s a very normal fear to have, they CAN harm you… but still.

they’re so god damned ugly and freaky too.

someone help me, have any of you ever point blank decided to confront a very severe phobia? Did you go through with it, did it help? Did it make your dreams more pleasant afterward?

part of me wants to get it over with tonight… i can handle the feelings, it’s the visuals I have never ever confronted… i’ve sat there and let feelings happen plenty… let there be a feeling of spiders on me… but… visuals…

2

also why is my sucbonscious so hostile to me sometimes?

Is it a reflection of me as a person? Or does it simply represent inner turmoil, or is my subconscious not hostile at all, just, somehow I think it is, so it’s presenting itself the way i subconsciously perceive it (haha… weird)

…?

I mean, lately my sex demon theme is back, I’ll be getting it on and the women turn into demons… and I mean, I chastised my mind to no end about this, I think…

what’s so horrible is ever since I went to astralpulse.com i’ve halfheartedly believed in “energy vampires” so I always worry that these “demons” are REAL and they are draining my “energy” so I try to channel energy back into me to compensate, but then they just suck my dry… i tried gold energy because i thought gold was heavenly and it would be bad for them, but it wasn’t in particular.

(i don’t think they are real but i’d prefer being like i used to be where I “knew” it was all nonsense, i’m too open minded to just say “nah it’s fake”)

oh and I mean I was trying to use a mantra to get a hot girl to sit next to me (in real life yes, why not? it’s worth a try), and one would have, except this guy took this chair next to me to use it to try to fix a projector,a nd right when he did that girl walked in and couldn’t find a place to sit, as there were only like 3 places left, so she chose the one that was far away from me because no chair was near me.

is this the work of my subconscious? I mean, iif so, the thing is simultaneously helping me (be more confident/social etc) and playing rather mean jokes on me… and giving me bad dreams about traffic accidents… something involving November 12th no less…

3

Wow. Two long double posts. Phobias suck. I know exactly what you mean. All my life I’ve hated cemeteries, corpses (rotting i mean, a guy whos just been killed like in a movie didnt scare me), and that kind of stuff. And so when I started Lucid Dreaming, this would plague me occasionaly when WILDing and such. So, I just confronted it. I went up to this corpse that was doing its best to scare the crap out of me and I had a conversation with him. I asked him his name, he said it was Bob. I asked him what he wanted, he said he wanted to sell me house insurance. Corpses have never bother me since and I no longer fear that kind of stuff, though I will admit that cemeteries still make me uneasy and nervous, its not terrible anymore.

You already know that there is no physical harm if you were to confront a spider, so I suggest you do confront one. Conjure up the biggest, meanest, ugliest spider that you can, give him a human voice, and talk to him. Ask him for a name, what he wants, even ask him why your afraid of spiders. It worked for me and I’ve heard of it working for other people. Give it a shot I say.

And about the energy vampires thing, well, no offence but it seems kinda stupid. Just ignore it.

4

my sub C is kinda like a old friend
sometimes makes fun of you, but its all in good fun
practical jokes too…

5

I think you should confront them as soon as you become lucid and see them. I have turned to lucid few times when someone attacked me in a dream (dogs, evil Japanese who throwed me with sharp things, etc), and i immedeately went boldly to them and asked why are they attacking me. Every time they “turned rational” and started to explain the reason, and did not were violent anymore (i must say they looked pretty friendly and helping).

What still disturbs me is flying high in LD-s. I’m bit afraid of heights and even as i know in LD that nothing bad can happen to me, i still hesitate to fly too high. One reason might be that my fear might make to fall down and wake up from LD. But i have set it as my prior goal next time i see LD and i have time for that: to fly into outer space no matter what! :wink:

And overcoming fears in dreams have MUCH helped me to become more bold when encountering different people IRL and also reduced my fear of heights in some degree.

6

Philosophy and Science say: Use the simplest full explanation.

Coincidence, in my opinion.

7

hehe well it was just something i felt like throwing in… the problem is i never get paired with good looking girls and when i do it’s in circumstances where they are seated far away from me in the case of a group situation… maybe it’s for the best.

so anyway i was walking along and saw some weird spider in a tree and I was like “no i don’t think i’ll confront it” but then it attacked me and I woke up… it wasn’t “scary” exactly but it wasn’t pleasant… it was some big black thing… talking to one, well… i’ve never been able to get dogs to talk or anything, it might be kind of hard.

some of you might recall in my dream journal my “subconscious” took me for a ride in the car and told it me was going to eliminate my fear of spiders and proceede to scare me with random encounters the rest of the night… well it helped a small bit but… it sort of stopped… i also asked it why it couldn’t just automatically remove the fear or make it in a controlled non-scary situation and it told me it didn’t want to, or something.

i finally had a “normal” sex dream though, that’s good.

8

Confronting the spiders in your dream may well be a good thing to do. If you decide to do so go with confidence. Remind yourself that this is just a dream and that can’t really harm you. Then go face them. Who knows perhaps this will help cure you of your real life phobia. At the very least it should prevent them from tormenting you in your dreams.

9

well they don’t usually torment me in my dreams, they’re just kind of an occasional appearance to keep me in “line” if you will.

i mean i can tell the fears are gradually fading too…

10

Yeah, facing one’s fears is hard, especially when your fears lie within your mind itself.

The funny thing is that with getting over fears, its like it all suddenly disappears at an unnoticed point. What i mean by this is how once you start facing your fear, the fear disappates, and you still have yet to understand the fear (which usually happens the first time).

11

well i said “fly 50,000 ft in the air” it actually worked, then it occurred to me to summon spiders, they looked really weird and i was punching them and fighting them and then i thought well i need to solve this non-violently so i said “turn spider neutral” or something and tried to talk to it, but it just kind of fell down and disappeared.

damn though, much weirder than that is i must have spent hours with some sort of dream woman, from “space” or something… i’d just “summon” her and she’d lie up against me and we’d sort of rest in a half sleep trance for long periods of time…

when it finally occurred to me to get up I asked her to take me on an adventure and she said she’d have to kill my physical body for that to work, and I was like “you can’t do that” and she was like “yes i can” and I’m like “well then, please dont’”

her name was weird, she told me to google it and the first thing that came up would be a picture of her, but i can’t remember it…

hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

well anyway… yeah… weird times.

oh yeah and in real life I had left my clothes amassed on the bathroom floor and some damn brown recluses were lurking in them…

i really need to stop doing that.

12

Woa, your dreams are really interesting. Hey, ive experienced something like that (like a verify-in-real-life thing) but i always forget the most-important aspect of it and thus go ‘damn!’ :tongue:

:eek: Woa now thats freaky, those things are dangerous! and they look freaky too

Image 1

Image 2 (better one)

lol, why not: VERY INFORMATIVE site

13

:cool_laugh: I hate spiders!!! I tried to confront them once when I stuck my foot in barrel full of them (LDing). I closed my eyes concentrated on scooting them off my leg, but that tingling betraying sensation was creeping into my chest and the darn thing bit me. I woke up. Haven’t seen one since, hope I don’t, and if I do, I can’t guarantee I’ll be able to confront it. I just got shivers thinking about it.

14

i’m certainly not clicking those links…

they are rather docile and fearful though so I mean… you just have to be careful and you’ll be fine around them… i’m not necessarily sure that they are recluses but they hide in clothes and inside the walls so maybe.

if you want to see something really screwed up look for pics of bite victims… it’s rare that they get as bad as they do but if they do… ughhh.

15

Slaying it is force, right? So is “turn spider neutral”. You were relying on your dream powers to fix everything up. To solve the problem, maybe you should have tried to talk to it “proper”?

Couldn’t put it better myself. :wink:

16

Wow that’s weird.

I have no fear of spiders at all yet I met people that go crazy when they see a spider. I’ve seen some of the buffest guys I know get so scared when they see a little itsy bitsy spider.

I just don’t understand how someone could be so afraid of a spider… I’ve talked to people with phobias like your self but I just don’t get it… I really don’t.

I handle spiders all the time just because I try to find out what’s so damn frightening about them but I still haven’t found out what. I’ve been bit by spiders too and I’m not scared, I got a nasty nasty nasty bite while playing with a brown recluse but I still don’t think there is much to fear.

How can someone be scared of something like that? And why can’t lucid dreaming help? I don’t get it. I was deathly afraid of something too but dreaming got me over the fear.

:confused:

17

I have a bit of a phobia myself, yet I share your confusion. For some reason I’m mostly freaked out by the daddy-long-legs spiders, and those are completely harmless… :eh: … I know they can’t hurt me, but I’ve actually had a few nightmares with them recently…! (hey, maybe they’d make a good dream sign! :content: )

I’ve been thinkin about this for a while… Why ARE they so scary to me??

I’m going to try to “confront” this fear too, and see what happens.

18

yeah i suppose it is… but talking to a spider properly is using your dream powers too… I turned it neutral so that I could talk to it, as I was previously fighting it andthe preconceived notions of it being hostile were making it so.

heh… i was at a camp once infested with daddy longlegs, at first i frekaed out whenever they’d crawl up on me at stuff but i got used to it real quick and didnt’ care so much anymore.

…

phobias tend to be related to traumatic childhood experiences and also because of parents passing them down onto you… in my case both apply.

(it wasn’t traumatic per se i was a pansy that was afraid of everything as a child… and i was playing sim ant and a spider ate me and it SHOWED you know this big nasty chomping face and i freaked the hell out… prior to that, i wasn’t at all in the slightest bit afraid of spiders… and plus then, sometimes my mom would scream if she would see a big one, so that scared me even more.)

don’t let your kids know you are afraid of things or you’ll make them phobic too, and if your kids become phobic you need to correct it as soon as possible…

(used to be germo-phobic but i realized how stupid it was and plus you can’t see germs…)

oh and yes so anyway today i’m walking around and a spider crawls on me… and I’m like “go away” (it felt really “icky” though) and so it finally left me be and this maggot was like inside my foot, and that felt even worse, and I managed to get it to leave me alone… so then I flew up way into the clouds, just like I did in the other dream where I summoned a big spider…

and I was like “okay, enough fear today, stop for now” and then a woman was in the clouds with me and I’m like “okay, you are not going to turn into something weird” but she did, she grew vampire fangs and morphed all nasty and freaky looking as I was trying to kiss her…

:grrr:

i think i finally found a few women who didn’t do that to me though but that was in a later lucid dream.

19

I had an arachnophobia, that was quite extreme.

however, few months ago my sister purchased a tarantula. next day i decided to confront it and it wasnt scary at all. My fear of spiders greatly diminished.
right now I’m thinking of taking one in my hand (small one, not a tarantula)

Sometimes I have dreams of spiders, and they are quite diverse. I saw transparent spiders and whatever. I remember summoning a plastic cage over one of them, then avoiding the rest.

and another thing - all spiders in my dreams a huge (ranged from size of a human hand to a big melon…)

I’d say go to the pet store and just confront one

20

Let a spider run across you, and stay on your hand. You will find that they are pretty harmless. Infact, most are much more scared of you than you are of it. Lol, I bet you heard that a million times. But it is true.

Ofcourse, I tend to avoid touching BIG spiders, but I don’t mind small ones.

I used to have a phobia of wasps. But it just wore off as I grew up, although I still don’t like them. Anyway, I got stung in the leg and didn’t notice until a few hours later when a stinger was stuck in my leg. Lol. It hurt pulling it out though.