this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2024
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You can train yourself to remember dreams if you start writing down everything you remember.
You can also learn to recognize that you are in a dream and take control (look up lucid dreaming).
Every single dream I have is lucid. Nightly I live entire lifetimes and wake up and have to convince myself this is reality and I don't have those friends and families. To this day there are times I have to ask my irl friends and family if a certain memory is real or not.
It's interesting but also heartbreaking and exhausting.
As with the above posters, any idea if regularly dream journaling (and potentially lucid dreaming) is actually healthy or not?
I say this as someone who gets pretty bad nightmares and has had numerous lucid dreams (even transitioning from nightmare to lucid dream)
I have no idea if further engaging with my dream state is healthy or not?
On rare occasion I’ve taken control of nightmares in a Lucid dream state - typically waiking up momentarily and then going back to sleep.
I’m just not sure if the psychic cost of having these types of intense dreams encoded in memory is healthier than just sleeping and not remembering.
A bit plagued by my dreams ( thereby my subconscious ) if I can remember them.
That was the question I guess, I hear the idea I should engage more to remember dreams, but not sure if that is healthy for people to do who have vivid and disturbing dreams regularly (eg. Under attack, people I love getting hurt ect…)
I have never heard of it being dangerous before, but if I had to speculate I'd say it probably depends on how you use it: You might be able to take command to end the nightmare but I'm not a doctor or psychiatrist but maybe in avoiding the nightmares altogether you're denying yourself some sort of personal growth or insight?
The real answer is probably: More research needs to be done.
It's probably safe. The very reason I started getting into lucid dreaming was to control my nightmares.
This is anecdotal, but I read a story by someone who learned to lucid dream and regretted it. They said they never felt like they slept anymore, because they're lucid all day and night.
No idea about that, it never interfered with my sleep but I also didn't do it frequently. These days I don't even remember my dreams the majority of the time and I've kind of lost interest in the whole thing, takes discipline to accomplish in the first place and I kinda lost interest TBH.
Or don't, maybe we are supposed to forget them. For instance I do not want to remember my dreams as I have barely ever had a pleasant one. I'd rather wake up in blissful ignorance of whatever shit my broken brain threw together while it tries to suffocate me.
Being able to become lucid in your dreams means you can also have a certain level of control and face whatever it is that causes that fear, and get over it
I don't have fear of my dreams, they are just incredibly disjointed and sometimes jarring if I do remember them. It isn't stemming from abuse or psychological damage that I could go to therapy for, it is likely just because my brain doesn't properly function during sleep.
Signals that should tell me to breathe don't send so I get deprived of oxygen until other signals finally kick in and start my breathing again for a few seconds before the whole thing starts again, for every minute I'm asleep without a CPAP machine I am not breathing for 20 seconds or more.
Lots of adrenaline shocks through the night as my heart gets stressed and I'm sure the mix of stress hormones and neurochemicals mess with how my brain processes dreams. It is akin to the feeling people have described of a bad drug trip.
I subscribe to the idea that dreams are a byproduct of your brain defragmenting itself, or priming its neural-net with images trained during the daytime.
To remember the byproduct might undermine this process, in the same way that feeding a NN its own output might produce garbage output later.
The recent AI generated videos are such an accurate portrayal of dreams that there must be some parallels there
just wanted to point out that most people don't have a lifetime of nightly nightmares, and your could be eased with some therapy, or at least mushrooms and puppies.
and if you LIKE nightmares and want more, slap on a nicotine patch right before you go to bed.
My brain literally doesn't function properly when I sleep, it doesn't send signals for my lungs to exhale so it probably is doing other things wrong as well.
Once I started on CPAP there was a huge drop in adrenaline shocks to my heart while I slept.
ok, so yeah. The only time i've ever had a sleep paralysis experience was when i went to bed with a nicotine patch on. I "woke up" (but not really) to some random blonde lady creepy-smiling while standing over me in my bed. I tired to scream and push her away, but i was totally frozen and couldn't do anything. After a couple of seconds, though, I woke up for real and she obviously wasn't there at all. The strangest part is that when i did wake up, it didn't really feel like I had. It felt like i was awake the whole time and she just disappeared at exactly the same time i regained motor control. It was absolutely terrifying.
I used that stop smoking drug back in the day. Forgot the name, makes you ill if you use? Holy shit the dreams!
I'd have the most horrific nightmares, but they didn't bother me in the slightest. I loved going to bed, it was like going to a new horror movie every night.
Now I have even a slighty spooky dream and sometimes have to turn the light on to shake it. Speaking of, there was a "dog thing" I dreamed the other night that's going straight in my next horror short.
Champix?
Chantix, and yeah, that's probably it. I had the most vivid dreams on it.
I've heard training for lucid dreaming can kinda fuck you up, because it becomes harder for you to distinguish between dream and reality.
IDK about that, but I've only done it a few times. Mostly I just used to to fly around my neighborhood like they'd do in old Kung Fu movies.
Lucid dreaming literally means you're aware you're in a dream.
Thanks, Sherlock.
I've tried it when I was younger (20s). I don't really remember my dreams now. It is something like a muscle you need to keep using. Write down sentences, draw pics, doodle anything that will help you remember when you wake up.
I didn't have problems distinguishing from reality, but I did want to sleep a lot more.
You can always stop trying to distinguish between dreams and reality and just accept whatever you're experiencing as a sort of superposition of both.
The whole point of lucid dreaming is to take control over your dream so you can do all the things that you can't do in real life. So if you start to lose a sense of when you're in reality you might end up trying to do things you'd only do in your dreams.
The more fantastical elements of lucid dreams are as clearly unreal as playing a videogame. You know you’re dreaming and can control it.
My problem has been more that I can’t remember if something mundane happened in a dream or reality. I’ve had and remembered entire conversations which turned out to be dreams when I referenced them to the person in question.
A lot of my dreams - lucid or not - are just me doing my daily stuff, fully in control of my actions but not the scenario I am in.
Yeah that’s the worst kind of dream for me: the mundane realistic ones. It’s usually some combination of plausible anxiety-inducing real world issues, and of course the false memories.
Livin' the dream (literally)