I’ve been here on LD4all for a couple months, and since I started here, I’ve been doing a lot of reading up on dreams lucid and normal alike. I’ve read several times that lucid dreaming can help you to get over your fears, but they never mention HOW to do this. See, the thing I fear most is a rather important part of life; needles, or more specifically, vaccinations. When I reach adulthood, I plan to do a lot of traveling, visiting other countries, and I know that for that, I have to be up-to-date on vaccines. My question is, how would I go about using my dreams to help me stop fearing or lessen my fear of needles?
My suggestion is that next time you are lucid, go see a dream doctor and ask him to give you a shot to, for instance, make your dream more vivid, or to have more lucid dreams, or give you some dream ability you have not learned yet. The Idea is to go get that shot though, so to help you get over your fears, and why not put another purpose behind it as well?
I’m not a psychologist by any means, but I bet you know about Pavlov and the experiments with his dog, also known as classical conditioning. You can read about it on Wikipedia here.
In your case it’d be basically connecting the unwanted needle with something good, and doing this several times. You could do it just as kitsun313 suggested it.
EDIT: Just noticed our sigs are apparently about the same person, Dablooey
Like with any other problem, you have to face it. Here dreams comes handy, because you don’t need to poke yourself for real, you can do it in a dream. Just enough to start feel comfortable around needles!
Maybe you will not feel any pain [which actually isn’t pain, not even IWL] but it would be good to have a sensation in your mind when you’re poking yourself because it would be easier to embrace the problem which is from real life, not dream…
If you want to make your fears dissapear, you must confront them. IRL that’s not always possible, therefore a dream is the answer.
During a dream, you should meet your fear and convince yourself, that no harm will be done. If you’re confident about the fear in your dream, it will also probably help you to cope with your fear IRL.
Oh, by the way, I know it’s not what you asked for, but I guess a fear of needles is relatively easy to overcome IWL too. It’s probably better to do it there, cause I don’t know if it’s a good idea to risk waking up once you’re lucid.
Dablooey 