Thinking that I woke up, but am still dreaming… Kinda freaky, so I’m scared of LD because of that.
SP/Old Hag
I’ve had natural instances of SP before, its not fun. Supposedly LD-ing can make it occur more often?
I once saw this Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode. In it, one of the monsters would sit on the bellies of sick children (they were laying on their backs) and suck out their life-enery with tubules from their eyes. Ever since seeing that episode, I have been afraid of sleeping face-up. That was a good 2-3 years ago. Anyways… I fear that an Old Hag expeirence might be like the buffy episode… Or in general, the concept sounds very scary, even If I havn’t seen a moster/being like that before.
Just plain scary content
I suppose that since its a dream, things wouldn’t really scare me. But, some of the thinks DC’s say in people’s DJ seem pretty bizzare, thinks that would haunt me for a while if someone said it to me in RL.
Maybe I’m just a disturbed person. But, the\se are my fears. Are they rational/Justifieable?
It’s not fun until you fear it. If you realize that SP is perfectly normal thing that happens to all people while they sleep (although most people don’t feel it, because their mind already went to sleep before their body), then you could use it as a great tool for OBE-s.
I suggest you to believe less fiction, and take things as they are. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is as real as old hag. In other words: they are both fiction. Old hag was invented because people in old times could not explain rationally the phenomen behind SP.
I think you need to get more concious that you are dreaming and your real body is lying on bed next time you have LD. This will assure you that everything that DC-s tell to you are the product of your own mind, and there is nothing to worry about.
They are justifiable, because everyone has certain fears, and anxieties. But they are not rational
You still have FA’s without LD’ing.
Though I don’t see why you fear them. They’re actually quite funny. You wake up… then you wake up again… you’ll laugh (well, I did).
Even funnier when you have multiple FA’s, one after another. I found that hilarious when it happened to me .
You can still have SP without LD’ing. IF you reallu fear this, then just don’t do WILD.
You still have nightmares without LD’s.
Actually, with LD’s, you’ll find you have less nightmares, as they are easy to become lucid in, allowing you to confront and subdue the fear.
I agree with Cyrus and Sureal on this one. I’ve only ever had a false awakening once and I wasn’t lucid at the time. All it is after all is dreaming about waking up. You dream about every other daily occurence so why not that?
I have lucid dreams quite a lot but I have never had Sleep Paralysis. I actually posted a new topic today about sleep paralysis because one of my mates was telling me about it over the weekend and he doesn’t have lucid dreams. Therefore I don’t recon that an increase in lucidity would bring about an increase in sleep paralysis but if it did then I think if you know what’s happening (ie you know that it’s sleep paralysis and not some crazy disease or something) then you should be able to stay calm and think to yourself “so this is sleep paralysis, not a lot of people have this, hmmm, interesting” and so on!
Lastly, and what I like to stress most importantly to people when they question this as a potentially negative aspect to lucid dreaming, having lucid dreaming does not make things like nightmares more common or more scary. Quite the opposite in fact. Think about it. If you become lucid then, by the very definition of lucidity, you are ‘aware that you are dreaming’, you know that you’re in a dream. Therefore… let’s go through a quick comparison:
If you’re not lucid and you have a nightmare you do not know that you’re dreaming and therefore whatever is happening which is bad or scary seems like it’s actually happening. You think it’s real because you don’t know you’re dreaming.
If you are lucid and you have a nightmare then you DO know that you’re dreaming and therefore whatever is happening which is bad or scary can be cast off as ‘not real’. You can simply choose to ignore it. Take comfort in the fact that you’re just dreaming, then find something fun to do (which isn’t hard, trust me ). A personal example of a nightmare is when some type of monster was chasing me, and another where something bad happened to my mum. One made me scared the other made me upset but in both of these dreams I became lucid which made everything better. I realised that I wasn’t really being chased by a monster so my life wasn’t actually in danger, I was just dreaming. So I stopped. The monster could do whatever it wanted and nothing bad would happen to me! The other dream, when I became lucid, I realised that I was dreaming which meant that nothing bad had happened to my mum. This came as an enormous relief.
Moral of the story: Lucidity = goodness
If you’re concerned that lucidity is going to make something disturbing, which is already real enough for you, seem even more real then don’t worry. It will make it seem far less real as you realise that it’s all a dream and you’re actually lying safe in your bed, or under the table covered in beer or whatever!
Hi Orpheus SP can occur without WILD, you might for instance wake up from a normal dream with your body still paralysed. with WILD you try to fall asleep consciously. So if you enter REM sleep while still being aware of your body you “might” experience SP. I say “might” because I’ve never experienced SP while WILDing. The only 2 occasions of SP I had was waking up from a normal dream but not being able to move, and strange things happening in my room. And because I knew that this is SP, and everything I see or hear is only a dream, I remained calmed and there was nothing scary about it. The only bad thing that can happen to you in SP is you get afraid. I hope that helped!
Edit: I should have mentioned I do sometimes when WILDing after I wake up from a dream get the vibrations and and loud buzzing noise, but I can in a sense move out of my body and I don’t feel trapped. Sometimes in a dream I get transported back into my body I become paralysed too but with no funny SP feelings. I only had that “real” SP with evil presence twice.