This is so weird. After a mini lucid dream drought I had a cascade of dreams in which I was lucid. In and off itself, this was not unusual for me but it was the dream characters that gave me pause. They all seemed to be made from cloth (muppet style) and while initially just striking me as bizarre, they increasingly became more threatening.
I actually found I could not ‘wake up’ despite feeling it might be a good idea to do so which is the opposite of my normal feeling when lucid which is of course to prolong the experience for a long as possible. I would not categorise it as been trapped in a nightmare due to my lucid awareness but something close to the same.
When I did finally awake it was with a sense of relief but also a bizarre sense of having been ‘attacked’ or menaced. This of course leads me to wonder about the psychological processes that might underpin such an experience.
Nevertheless I’d love to know strategies others have used for dealing with such threatening dream characters when lucid that they may care to share.
Usually, I just leave the scene if it gets uncomfortable. I turn my back towards them and walk, fly or teleport away. In a lucid dream, it has sometimes worked to “erase” the DC: I wipe them off my field of vision with my hand. We usually get what we expect in dreams, so in my experience it gets worse if I worry about it.
If all that fails, there is an effective way to wake up. You could try closing your eyes as hard as you can and then opening them. This will usually open my eyes IRL so I wake up.
Thanks for your response. I have to say I continued to think about the dream since it was so vivid (hyper real as they say). Some aspects of it where amazing such as at one point watching the landscape around me literally re-arrange and rebuild itself but the characters encountered were by far the most weird and odd I can recall.
I seem to flip flop in my lucid dreaming in encountering pleasant or downright unpleasant dream characters. But given when I do they at least appear to have an ‘agency’ about them rather than some of the other ‘shop window dummy’ type characters I also encounter it makes them at the very least interesting (now if only I could be so rational in dream, all would be good!).
Its nevertheless rather annoying that one can feel locked, nay trapped in a dream while lucid from which there seems no escape, yet when all is fine and dandy and your enjoying yourself its so often a struggle to stay lucid!
