How can I stop having lucid dreams?

Quest for Lucidity General Lucidness
101

Guys,

I thought I would just post back here as I have a friend who like me also suffers from sleep paralysis and totally messed his head up with lucid dreams.

I did find a cure for this in the end, I now have to take antidepressents to sleep. I haven’t had a lucid dream in years now and the dosage I take is very low.

I still sometimes get sleep paralysis but no more lucid dreams. I either wake up or just fall straight to sleep and have normal dreams.

I don’t know what all these terms you guys use, for me a lucid dream is one where you are awake and control the dream, whereas a normal dream is one where you are asleep and it’s like watching a movie.

I still think you are all crazy for wanting to have lucid dreams, it burns your brain out! The fact that you feel pain in these lucid dreams should be enough to put people off. I remember once faling off a building in a lucid dream and was in absolute agony.

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How is it possible to suffer from SP? It is a natural function of the human body which prevents you from moving physically while dreaming, thus preventing you from hurting yourself. And lucid dreams shouldn’t be messing anyone up, they are fun and should be admired, not feared.

Do you take medicine in order to prevent you from lucid dreaming? Do I understand right? Usually people used various products in order to get more lucid dreams. It seems that your understanding of lucid dreams is wrong. They are not dangerous. They are, in fact, supposed to be fun.

You could use the SP to enter a lucid dream by applying a technique called WILD. You’re missing out a lot.

Not exactly. A lucid dream is a dream where you are aware of the fact that you are dreaming. Dream control is not included in the definition of lucid dreams, since you don’t need to be able to control the dream in order for it to be considered a LD. And you are not exactly “awake”. You are still asleep. To explain it simply, it’s the conscious part of the brain which makes you lucid. Usually the conscious part is inactive during sleep, but it may become active, thus resulting in a LD.

No, it doesn’t burn anything out. I advice you to look at threads named like “Does LD’s enhance you life?”. Lucid dreaming is an extraordinary experience and it does not hurt you any more than normal dreams do. Everything is the other way - lucid dreams do infact make your days BETTER, and they do no harm whatsoever. You are misinformed and your facts are false.

You don’t have to feel pain. All the feelings in dreams are formed by our expectations. If you clear your mind and accept the fact that it’s a dream, you won’t feel any pain, unless you desire to.

I would advice you to take up lucid dreaming. It is a beautiful experience. If you reject it as something horrifying or dangerous, I feel sorry for you, since, as I said, you’re missing out something spectacular.

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Really weird topic, as most people would kill for what the author of this thread has… :smile:

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By suffering from SP, I think he meant while he is awake.

I remember this topic, read it from the beginning, this guy has done more in lucid dreams than any of us. I can see how someone would want to rest from it after having every dream be lucid for all his life.

You kind of missed his point, he knows it’s not dangerous, he just wants to rest from them as he feels they tire him :content:

105

Well, obviously he is a natural Lucid dreamer. You can’t do much about that. You need to accept this and enjoy it. Dream possibilities are endless. There would be no reason to try to get rid of them. And I did understand that he was conscious during SP, but the fact that he can use it to get another nice LD makes me wonder why does he suffer.

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Well, the point is, he doesn’t want to use to enter a lucid dream. He’s full of them. If you read his previous posts, he says he’s become tired every time he wakes up because he cannot have a single normal dream.

I can understand how having LDs occasionally can even refresh you more than LDs, but having to be conscious every night multiple times? If he says it’s tiring, I will believe him.

Tho, imagine his potential in the lucid lab. He could test everything.

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Hmm a problem which is not a problem for us but a miracle… It is really interesting it’s like that guy, after he get hit by a ball he is able to remember everything …
Four us it’s like having super power ability, and be tired of them is like Peter paker in the 2nd movie.

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I don’t know if it is possible, but if there are techniques to increase awareness, there should be some to decrease it… :happy:

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cantsleep, you should seek to make use of it, instead of trying to getting rid of it. Do you not know all you could do? I’m not a lucid dreamer yet, but I think it’s like you were God in a LD. If you are bored, do not be. Turn it wonderful. Make it the most amazing experience of your life, by the simple power of will. Don’t you know meditation? Just become amazed by the settings around you. Excite yourself. Look for image streaming. Expand your mind. Improve your talents. Discover new sensations. Become inspired. Find the universal love, be part of nature, explore out of your ego. Take a trip, through all your memories, find the most dear to you, try to get that sensation from your lucid dream. Don’t waste your gift. See beyond. I hope I could get through to you, I hope you find the light of your own. Good luck, goodbye.

110

I’d like to echo Iago’s sentiments. There are always things to do, and if you want to relax, going along with the dream plot works as well.

Oddly enough, you’re not the only person I’ve seen with this ‘problem’. Even feeling drained by it. I can’t imagine why that is. There is nothing different about a lucid dream and a non lucid dream other than the awareness, but I’ve seen maybe 2 other people come on irc and mention the very same thing.

The concept of being bored with lucid dreams also puzzles me. I lucid dream every night/dream. To be bored of being aware would be like being bored of being awake. The productive thing to do would be to practice waking life skills and work out issues, but at least you found a solution that works for you.

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Sorry but lucid dreaming you can actually be in controll, thus controll the pain and take it away.

other than that? SP is natural, you do it every time you go to sleep. just because you feel it while you are awake does not mean you are going to die. end of story it is not bad for you, hope you get better on your hope to end LDing :wink:

112

Actually, I have this problem too.

For me, the problem is that I have chronic anxiety and a bunch of other mental health issues that cause me to experience derealisation on a daily basis.

When I heard about lucid dreaming after I decided to look up the cause of my occasional sleep paralysis, I thought it sounded way cool and decided to try basic techniques-- no conscious attempts, just reality checks and keeping a dream diary.

The reality checks kind of helped my derealisation at first, but the problem is, it seems like I’m just extremely good at lucid dreaming? I never had a LD a day in my life before about a week ago, I had my first one within a day of doing reality checks, and now I can’t stop having them. I’ll be dream-arguing with my mother and be like “Well, it’s because I’m dreaming!” and then it turns lucid. I’ll jump, fly, and realise I’m dreaming, or be in an unfamiliar room and realise I’m dreaming, or be reading a book and realise I’m dreaming, etc etc…

And it makes me have way more false awakenings-- I already get them a fair amount but now it’s every time I try to wake up. Every time I dream I get false awakenings. Every time an outside stimulus disturbs me, false awakenings.

This might be totally awesome for mentally healthy people, in fact I’m sure a lot of you would be super jealous? And I can’t say it isn’t cool, deciding that I’m just going to fly over to a castle, or that those nightmare Nazgul are now under my control, or that I’m going to teleport somewhere and interview my novel characters. I’ve confronted several nightmare figures and had some really positive responses.

However, I’m worried that, being schizotypal, I’m going to start hallucinating or getting headaches and migraines if I keep doing this, which is something I’ve seen other schizotypal LDers report. Or that my sleep paralysis is going to stop being just “oh, can’t move”, it’s going to turn into full-blown waking nightmare stuff. Or that I’m just going to lose my grip!

The problem is, I’m mentally ill. It doesn’t make me less competent, less able to make decisions, or ~crazy~, it just means that I can’t do some things that other people do. And this is really fucking with my sense of reality, which is already super tenuous. It’s not a nice feeling. I’d really like to close this can of worms now.

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To pintsquid: I don’t know if you’re in therapy or not, but you should talk to a professional about your concerns with your lucid dreaming. Hey, it might not be a bad thing, I used lucid dreaming to cure my anxiety. It can be a very powerful thing. Also, even though there are other schizotypal lucid dreamers that have reported bad side effects, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it will happen to you. This is why I think you should discuss with with a professional, and let’s hope that said professional knows what lucid dreaming is…

I also read through the thread, and I’d like to point out that people who have lucid dreams all the time don’t necessary get tired during the day. I believe that those who reported of being tired after lucid dreaming probably were tired from other reasons.

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I agree with Luminous on trying to fix it during your lucid dreams. The ability to control your subconscious mind offers a lot of possibilities for that kind of thing. As for other people not wanting to have lucid dreams, you could try expecting to become extremely relaxed in your dream. Who knows; you might wake up pleasantly refreshed.

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I understand that having so many lucid dreams must be really annoying, and I wish I could give you a satisfying answer.
But hopefully you can get rid of them by not paying any attention whatsoever to them, so your dream recall will drop to a minimum, effectively erasing all your dream memories.

…but! - if I were you I would embrace every single lucid dream, but that’s probably just me.

116

I actually signed up so I could comment on this thread. A lot of people commenting on this thread keep harping on the idea that LDing can’t be boring or tiring because it’s infinite and you should just embrace your dreams, etc.

The problem with that is your dreams are not infinite-- they are a collage of the knowledge you (consciously or unconsciously) possess. Anything that I have experienced or heard about can be in a dream. But your mind cannot process a concept which it has never been exposed to in any form.

What this means is that there is a definite number of dreams any given person can experience. That number is effected by things like age, experiences, education, etc. Most LDers will never have enough lucid events to explore every single combination. Very few will experience every one of those combinations enough times to be bored by them.

For those of us who do there is nothing worse and nothing sweeter than the concept of being unconscious.

Let me give you a little of my story: I started lucid dreaming about 10 years ago in connection with a physical injury. I was experiencing 24/7 pain for almost a year. The pain started to dictate my dreams which would generally be along the lines of being injured or  tortured. At a certain point I came to realize that I was dreaming. I have been lucid dreaming every night since.
Here's the rub. I also suffer from sleep apnea. The boil down is that I never experience deep cycle sleep. Even though my SA is diagnosed and controlled (75-80% decrease in waking events) I still never get below rem sleep.

So, if I spend 8hrs in bed asleep, all of it will be spent LDing. Keep in mind also that dream time and live time are different things. As far as I can tell (time perception being what it is) 1 hr of live time can equal between 4 and 10 hrs of dream time. In ten years I've experienced every combination of "things" that I know.
What ends up happening (for me, anyway) is that eventually you end up having a list of dreams that are least boring. Since I'm constantly conscious my conscious desires end up being the focus of those dreams. I have experienced "everything I've ever wanted" until those things make me sick.

So, I’ve now reached the point where I will cycle through the same dream over and over again. Or a part of a dream. And I will end up changing maybe one single detail in each repetition. Imagine a writer proofreading a chapter, finding a word to change, then starting over at the beginning of the chapter and doing it again. Hundreds of time. Every.Single.Night.

So for those who have been struggling to understand why someone would like to stop lucid dreaming-- here’s one answer. I would love to stop. If someone could show me how I would be eternally grateful.

(ps sorry about the mammoth 1st post)

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Want to stop having lucid dreams? Then stop remembering them.

If you don’t remember it, it didn’t happen.

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That simple huh? By the same logic when I leave work I should just forget I was there-- the stress and fatigue will just disappear. I’ll immediately fell like I just wrapped up a 2 month vacation. When I go in the next day all the dread, loathing and negative associations will be gone.

If I could just erase my memories there wouldn’t be a problem in the first place. Look, it’s not like I remember every detail of every dream forever any more than I recall every detail of every day from this past year.

Ever pull multiple all-nighters? That’s what this is like, except it lasts for years. If you can’t stop LDing more than likely it isn’t physical fatigue that’s weighing you down, it’s mental. Being unconscious is a break from your awareness of yourself as an entity and that’s what I’m not getting.

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There are people like you.
Why don’t you just learn to cope with it?

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I realized that I was probably overly sarcastic in my last post, so I will try to be more understanding this time.

It seems like you are tired of lucid dreaming because you don’t feel that you ever get a break from your own consciousness, and that you sort of get the feeling that you are “always awake”.
And I guess that lucid dreaming becomes less fantastic once you get used to them and believe that you have already experienced everything countless times - I can understand what you are getting at, and the best way to solve this is probably to just pay very little attention to your dreams so you don’t remember them very well.
That way you will at least feel like you haven’t been lucid dreaming much that night, and you will probably also become less “awake” in them so that you might eventually get normal dreams more often.

But, why not try to have a more positive attitude to it all?
Remember that lucid dreaming is generally considered one of the best gifts you can get, and I don’t think you can possibly ever experience everything there is to do in them - there is always something new that you can try out in lucid dreams, and I doubt you will ever permanently run out of ideas.
Have you ever tried some of those small but meaningful things from real life for example, like taking a walk in the dreamscape or watching the skies with your crush or something?