First time lucid... can't breathe? help?

Lucid Adventures
1

Hey all,

I’m new on here but I am pretty sure I just had my first lucid dream. I have been wanting to for years but could never really do it.

So I read on this site about waking up and thinking about lucid dreaming while falling back asleep. When I woke up in the middle of my sleep I decided to try it. I told myself “OK, what’s something you can do in real life but not in a dream? Swim. I can’t swimg in a dream” (At the time I thought I had read on this site somewhere that you can’t swim in a dream but apparently I just made that up.)

So I imagine a pool (it’s mostly dark around the pool) then I imagine myself diving in. This is when I got this really weird sensation of being sucked in like a vacuum. I felt like I was going through my bed. Not unlike the beginning of the first drop in roller coaster. It was kind of cool.

I never made it into the pool though. It was just completely dark and I’m thinking to myself “Holy crap, I finally did it! This is a lucid dream” I recalled reading that if you spin around you can prolong your dream. Almost instantly after I was sucked in, I had a very hard time breathing. In real life right now I have pretty bad allergies and my nose is stuffy making it hard to breath from my nose. So in my dream I decide to breath through my mouth, but I can’t seem to get air. My breaths in were very short sharp and choppy.

At this time I said to myself “OK this is bad I can’t breath I have to get out” It was what seemed like maybe 2 or 3 seconds before I completely woke up. The entire dream felt like it may have lasted 5 or so seconds.

My question is: what happened? Why couldn’t I breathe? If I am supposed to be able to control my dream world why could I not breathe in it?

I definitely felt like I needed air when I woke up in real life, so would I have died if I wouldn’t have been able to get out of my dream?

2

hi :wave:

When you dream you enter SP. At one point, if you’re still conscious, your SC will take over breathing so you can dream all you want and not have to worry about your physical body breathing. What happens is when the SC starts controlling your breath your conscious mind starts losing control, so if you try to consciously breathe you’ll have the feeling you can’t! In reality you are breathing just fine. It can be scary and take some practice to learn to ignore this. It’s not every time you’ll feel this, though… and usually after you are completely immersed in your LD you’ll be able to breathe normally.

I’m almost completely sure this is the case. You said you woke up feeling you needed air… do you suffer from apnea? I also have allergies and it can be annoying sometimes. Anyway, your mind/body wouldn’t let you die just because you’re LD’ing :tongue: If you were in fact not breathing I think you’d just wake up.

Oh, and congrats on your success :grin: