Nobody can tell you exactly what an experience will feel like for you as an individual or even if it will be possible for you as an individual. I think it helps to understand the way that dreams work. One hypothesis is that your mind works on a set of templates. Your brain basically feeds you a plot line that it knows you will accept and then for a given situation it pulls the next thing that fits the bill. For example, if I try to pick up a girl while in line for communion at church she slaps me. If I try to pick up a girl at a bar she begins to flirt. These are templates that the mind has picked out for me in those situations. To push the edge of what you can accomplish in LD you have to push the boundaries of what your brain accepts as possible. If I want to travel back in time I cannot open a worm hole in front of myself and zap through space. My mind does not accept that. However, I can ask someone if they know where I can find a time machine and then use it to transport myself. For some reason my brain accepts that as a possibility.
On animal transformations
I sometimes turn lupine. I would describe the experience as gracefully flowing into a werewolf form. Generally the sensation accompanies running through fields of rye and feeling the moisture and air on my skin as I race along under the night sky. I jump really high.
When I walk through walls
There is a rush of cool air and a feeling like I have passed through the wall of a bubble.
Dalorin is right in that everyone is different and in principle one person can never really know what it’s like to be another person, nor what it’s like to do what they do. However, I think he’s also right in that your brain builds upon these ‘templates’ from waking life.
For example when I fly in dreams: this has a very distinct feeling. In real life, I know what it’s like to feel the ground under my feet, I know how it feels to move my muscles, to feel like I weigh something, and so on. So when I fly in dreams, it feels like I don’t weigh anything at all, but I can still feel myself moving my muscles…I suppose it feels a little bit like swimming without the water. I can also feel the g-forces when I turn very quickly, or fly up or down very fast. Of course, I also know from waking life what the air moving past me feels like over my skin, or the sound it makes when it rushes past my ears, so I tend to notice these things as well when I am dreaming.
Of course, your experiences may be a little different than mine. The only way you’ll know for sure is when you have a lucid dream and you get the chance to try out some of these things
For transformations at least, they should feel how you expect or want it to be. And this is going to be different based on how you think the anatomy of whatever you become works. If you became a naga, as an easy example, your lower body might feel like your legs had fused together, or maybe it could feel more like an extension of your spine and as if you had no legs. How you would interpret that would be up to you or how you wanted it to be.
It basically all works based on what you expect, or what you choose for it to be like. I can’t think of any exceptions where it wouldn’t.
Interesting to know, and I also thought of the thing that experiences may differ from person to person.
But noone answerded on the question how suizid may feel like and I really, really want to know that because on the things you should try in a LD this is one of the most suggested things and it is often mentioned quite at the beginning of those suggestions. So if anyone could answer on this i would be really happy.
Every time I died in a dream (lucid or not) I woke up (sometimes, to FA s). That includes 2 suicides in LD s and an another one in a ND. How it felt like? Well, I felt nothing. Or rather, as if I was waking up. Nothing more than that.
Regarding to becoming an animal, I love it. It’s amazing to feel the air under your wings when you are flying as an eagle. It’s amazing to run as a wolf (my favorite form). It’s hard to describe in words, let’s simply say that it can be amazingly realist
However, as the others have already pointed, I’m quite sure that what you feel depends on what you believe that will happen if you do those things in a dream. Regarding to suicide, this is especially true depending on your view about the afterlife.
I first had a lucid dream at the age of 9 or thereabouts. I was in a large shopping mall and all of the patrons were made of clay. Nobody would respond to my pleas for help. Hours and hours and hours went by the time dilation was terrifying. I was so alone and so scared that I would be trapped in the dream forever. I knew that if I fell I would wake up. So I climbed to the top of one of the fountain sculptures (the fountains in malls always had tall elaborate sculptures back in the 80’s) and I threw myself off. As expected I woke up. No thrill in that. Can’t believe anyone would want to do it.
Going through a mirror felt cold and very scary.
The other side was very shadowy and unwelcoming that it woke me up.
I tried a second time a few months later but woke up too soon.
Transformations for me vary greatly, sometimes its merely a perception shift, other times its a painful flesh ripping experience, often being in between.
Oh getting eaten by zombies… PAINFUL
I had to wake myself up a few times before it got too ugly.
Random fact: I can almost never pull the trigger on a gun, guns are a big no no to me:P no idea why.
