New user here. I have a bit of a problem with my lucid dreams and I’m curious if anybody has had any similar experiences or has any advice.
The last two lucid dreams I had degenerated into two of the most horrifying experiences of my life, and I need some tools to use to fight this the next time I have a lucid dream. Whenever I have a LD, I cannot control the environment within the dream at all. In fact, the environment is nearly always the same… I have a false awakening in my bed and things progress from there. I can’t move like I can normally move, it always feels like I’ve been heavily sedated, my limbs heavy and cumbersome. My lucid dreams also always take one of two forms: The first way is that I’m brought into lucidity by having a false awakening, and then have false awakening after false awakening like I’m trapped in a loop. The first time I wake up I can barely get out of bed and I go to turn on the lights and when it doesn’t work, I realize I must be dreaming… then the dream resets and I have another false awakening. Each time I wake up I can make it further out of my bed, but I’ve never made it out of my house. I’m lucky if I can make it down my hallway. It seems like each time I can explore a little bit further, I’m immediately snapped back into my bed by a false awakening and have to start over. This could easily happen a dozen+ times. The other way my lucid dreams begin is that I’m brought into a state of lucidity by being sexually aroused and trying to take all of my clothes off while in bed, again feeling incredibly drowsy, sometimes getting caught in loops while trying to take my shirt off. I’ll take it off and then I’ll have a false awakening and take it off again, over and over. Sometimes this progresses into masturbation and the only way I know it didn’t actually happen when I wake up is that I’m fully dressed. Not entirely unpleasant dreams, but I could do that while I’m awake and it would be much less frustrating.
I’ve never once had a lucid dream on purpose. They always just happen spontaneously. They began a few years ago and seem to come up every couple months, sometimes in clusters. As such, I’ve never had a goal of controlling my dreams or living out some fantasy life. When I find myself in a lucid dream, I just try to hold onto the lucidity for as long as possible and observe what is happening to me. The first few times I had a lucid dream I woke up immediately after realizing what was going on, but now it’s happened enough times and I’ve learned enough about reality checks that I can remain calm. Because the setting is always my room, it’s pretty mundane. I have had one or two dreams that were in other locations and it was much harder for me to remain lucid in those situations. Those were also some of my first lucid dreams so I also had less experience maintaining lucidity, though. And those were instances of me becoming lucid while already in the middle of a dream, which is jarring.
In the last dream I had, I was getting caught in a loop in my room again, but this time instead of exploring more of the dream each time I had a false awakening, I kept being able to explore less. Each time I had a false awakening, I’d feel heavier and drowsier, until I couldn’t get out of bed at all and was having rapid awakenings until I was flat on my back, unable to move at all. I was stuck in my bed and started screaming for what felt like hours. I felt completely trapped. I couldn’t wake up. When I finally started feeling like I was completely losing my mind and forgot that I was dreaming, I lost lucidity. Then the nightmare continued for a little bit, the scene changed to me being a paralyzed patient in a hospital, and then I finally woke up shortly after that. The part after I lost lucidity was like a flash of terrifying images.
And the last lucid dream I had before THAT… that time I had been brought into lucidity by being sexually aroused, but it turned into a rape nightmare. Lucid rape nightmare… kind of traumatic and I’m not sure how I’m supposed to feel about it because it was “just a dream.” Luckily I can’t seem to feel pain in my dreams… it could have been much worse, but it was still weird and bad, and I woke up really not knowing what to think.
I’d really like to avoid having to go through either of those experiences again. Both of these nightmares have flavors of sleep paralysis (being unable to move and being sexually violated are both very common sleep paralysis scenarios) but I’m not sure if that would be an accurate description of the experiences.
So basically… how do you control your environment in a lucid dream? How do you change the environment, or in a worst case scenario, how do you wake up? How do you get out of a nightmare? Has anything like this ever happened to anybody else? I never hear people talk about what could go wrong when lucid dreaming. It stops mattering whether it’s real or not when you want to escape but you can’t… like being on a really bad acid trip.
But, I think you can overcome your nightmares by confronting the people around you. Ask them, “Why are you doing this to me?” Or, “Who are you?” If you want to change your envirornment, cloze your eyes, spin, and think of the place you want to be. If you need to wake up, Close your eyes REALLY tight, then open them. You should be awake in RL. Make sure to do a reality check to check for false awakenings.