steeph

Wow, that today was definitely a better lucid dreaming episode than Sleepless in Ponyville. What do you think? I laughed when Sweetie Belle thought she was dreaming again when she saw Luna again later

Sounds like it. But you don't appear to me as someone who suffers from it. Maybe I'm mis-interpreting your post.

I don't believe you. How do you know?

I found this topic via a search engine while I was searching for something other lucid dreaming related. I'm a brony, so I found the idea of a lucid dreaming thread on a pony board interesting. That's why I'm here. While reading I thought of a few things I'd like to add, so I signed up. Because I wrote so many replies you may get the impression that I'd think I knew everything about lucud dreaming. That's not the case. Actually there posted quite some people in this thread who have much more experience than I have and had more lucid dreams than I had. But I've read a lot about the topic and I've known some people for years who use different lucid dreaming techniques. I've had two attempts to get lucid dreams. One was many years ago and lasted only a few weeks, the second one is still ongoing. This time I'm serious So, I hope you don't find it intruding that I start my membership in this forum with such a long post (I've already abbreviated it where I thought I may be telling too much about things I have not enough experience with or that I haven't tried myself enough), or that I've signed up just to post this. It's really just because I think there are quite some posts that deserve a more detailed or different answer than they got so far. Or one at all. Thanks. It felt good. It's a great experience to know that it's possible and to know how it feels to be in a dream, and to know about it while being in a dream. Other than that, my first attempts were pretty short (as in a few seconds). It took quite some time to learn how to stay in the dream for longer, and I'm still trying to archieve longer lucid dreams. It's very unlikely to affect you in such a way. There are very few reports of people who developed a mental disorder or got similar problems from lucid dreaming. And in all cases the same or similar problems could have appeared without the person having lucid dreams. As long as you usually can distinguish between waking life memories and dream memories, it shouldn't be a problem. If you are currently in psychotherapy, ask you therapist if they know about lucid dreamin. If they do (and not only have heard of it) they can advise you whether you should try it or not. In fact, lucid draming can be used to treat mental disorders (it's not only esoteric healers who use lucid dremaing techniques for their patients). I think it became a hobby of mine. It's just the single most interesting thing I've ever heard of. It's easily mistaken to be an esoteric topic and many people instinctively think it's nonsense because it can't be possible. But there is scientific proof of that lucid dreaming exists and that these experiences happen during sleep. And that people can intentionally perform tasks in their dreams that they planned in waking life. But there's still so little research about it (Well, compared to other topics at least. It's not easy to study dreams scientificly.). I think that's in part what makes it so interesting to me. Well, I wouldn't want to spread rumors. I think that's an interesting fact: If you train motion sequences while in a dream that you have performed in waking life before, you will get better at them, just as if you trained them while awake. Yes, I've possibly got a lot of tips. But it makes more sense to give them when you've already read a guide and are practicing some sort of technique or if you already have lucid dreams. Because if you're at the very beginning, my only tip is: Read about it or watch videos for beginners, e.g. on Youtube. There are a lot of guides online. I won't write another one here . But, in my oppinion, most of them are either not very structured or incomplete or they focus on or are written upon the experience of a single person. Since there are many different techniques and at the beginning you don't know what will work best for you, it's better to start with a book that covers as much as possible, in my opinion. If I had to name just one, it would be (and is, apparently ) Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming by Stephen LaBerge. You can get it really cheap. He's focussing a lot on MILD, the technique he (developed and) had the best success with, but it also covers other approachs. LaBerge doing research on lucid dreaming since the 70's and wrote this book after more than 10 years of experience. There is a newer book from him from 2004 (Lucid Dreaming: A Concise Guide to Awakening in Your Dreams and in Your Life). The title is promising regarding what you're looking for. But I haven't read it (yet). It's not happening naturally for many, at least not in this part of the world. Dreams are not very important in our society. If you occupy yourself a bit with your own dreams, that alone increases your chance to become lucid in a dream. Especially if you already heard or know that it's possible. That would probably not be easy. It's usually used to get rid of nightmares. Often it's enough to realize it's a dream to make the fear disappear. If you can create or induce a scene that scares you, you probably know that you can even easier escape. So it wouldn't be a nightmare. And if you didn't know that it's harmless because you forgot that it's a dream, then I guess it wouldn't be any fun. But maybe you meant a different kind of nightmare. A mare for the night? Nightmare Moon? You could meet her in a dream It could be a good idea for the same reason. Maybe it's funny as hell (then try to not wake up while you're laughing) or it gives you stuff to think about. Mirrors are often used by lucid dreamers to talk to theirselves or their subconscious. Your reflection can tell you quite a lot about yourself, especially if you expect it to. If you get a disfigured reflection and it really scares you or something, you can always just wake up (and look in a real mirror to eassure yourself). Five dreams per week is not the majority. Due to the different sleep stages you can assume to have at least five to seven dreams per night if you get enough sleep. Depending on where you count the beginning of a new dream/new story it can be a lot more. It's very unlikely to remember a dream in the morning if you didn't wake up during or directly after a dream. Even if you don't remember waking up, you may still remember the dream you had when you woke up in the night. Most people wake up several times during a usual night (I think about 6 times if I remember correctly) without remembering it. So when you had (or remembered) four to five lucid dreams per week, that's a good or very good result, but not nearly the majority of dreams you had. For people who have no relation to their dremas, like most in these parts of the world, it takes usually at least a few weeks. A few months is not unusual either. For some it even takes several years. Not many keep practicing for such a long time with the same effort. So that makes it take even longer. You are right that patience is an important aspect of learning it I find remembering my dreams the easiest of all related things. And it is important if you want to learn to have lucid dreams. It helps a lot to keep your eyes closed and to not move during and after waking up. An alarm that stops after a few seconds can help, so you don't have to move to turn it off. Or going to bed earlier, so you don't need an alarm. You can also drink a lot before going to bed, so you're likely to wake up naturally during the night. Ask yourself what the dream was, what persons, places, feelings or other things were involved. The most important thing is to try to remember directly after waking up. If you remember a dream in the morning and it's not of great importance to you at that time, it's normal to forget it again soon. That's one reason why many people like to write them down. Well, you could argue that when you want to lucid dream and do things that you think will make you lucid dream and then you have a lucid dream it still just happened unintentionally because you didn't decide to become lucid at the moment where you did. But even if you'd see it like that, there are also techniques where you go from being fully awake to dreaming without loosing your consciousness. So, it's definitely possible. It's good to be sceptical, though. But if you would want to have more lucid dreams, it may be counterproductive to be that sceptical in this case It's not easily done, but nearly anyone can learn it. You can also try too hard, though . What are you doing to get there? Ah, so that's where this story came from Good to know. Inception is of course one of the best known movies that have lucid dreaming as a topic. It's interesting and I think it's a very good movie. But as it is with these movies, reality is different in many important details. That's a common mistake to say that. You may not remember any dreams, but you're stil dreaming every night. Try taking some time for remembering your dream every time you wake up. There are good guids on the net on how it works best for most people. Have you tried Wake Back To Bed (WBTB)? Especially WILD works a lot better when you do it after you have slept for some hours. If you do it in the morning where you have longer REM and less NREM sleep that increases the chance of success a lot. In short: Wake yourself up or let something or somebody wake you after about 4.5 to 5.5 hours after you fell asleep. Then get awake and do stuff for a few minutes or up to two hours (whatever works best fou you), maybe wash you face with cold water or watch a movie. Then go back to bed and WILD. (Should I mention that there are also ways to delay REM sleep with drugs so you get more or all of it in the second half of the night? So, there's a reason to experiment with alcohol, if you're old enough ^^). The other way to get from waking directly into REM sleep is to overtire yourself so much that you skip the entire NREM stuff right away. The advantage of that is that you will get even more REM sleep if you can sleep in. The big diasadvantage is, though, that it's very unhealthy. So, I don't recommend it! That sounds so familiar. I did that too in one of my first dreams where I became lucid. It's not a wasted experience, though. Now you know how to wake yourself up if you get a nightmare or something. It helps to plan to do something in your nect lucid dream. Something easy that doesn't require a lot of planning inside the dream, no mapper in what kind of envirement you find yourself in. But even if you have one simple task and think of it every time you fall asleep, it's easy to forget about it when you are finally there and become lucid. It's a problem many have, especially at the beginning. You can train you memory (try the usualy mnemonic techniques) in waking life. Other than that it's just practicing. The time you stay in the dream after you became lucid or the time you stay lucid becomes longer with each time, just because you get a feeling for it and learn what works and what doesn't. It may seem that easy when reading some of the posts here. But the perception is distorted of course. People with no or little success are less likely to post about it here. It's certainly not that easy for "everypony". Quite the opposite is the case actually. Keep that in mind when you read dream reports from more experienced lucid dreamers. Then they can bring a lot of motivation. There are a lot in English also. I mentioned my favorite English lucid dreaming book above. It's also worth having a look at the different webforums and other sited. I don't want to pick one site out especially, just do a web search and you will find the big communities. That's what many (or most?) get as their first lucid dreams. Being too excited can end a dream, too. There are simple tricks that are mentioned often to help stabalize the dream, but they're not very reliable (probably just pracebos). They weren't much help for me also. Things like getting aware of your senses, look around and focus on details, rub your hands, touch (all the) things. Maybe it helps, maybe not. Ultimately you have to get a feeling for it. You have to stay asleep but maintain an awake mind, so to say. I found (and sometimes still find) this to be the hardest thing to do of everything lucid dreaming related. When the dream scene starts to fade, worrying doesn't help. But the more experience you get, the better you will be able to stay in the dream. It can take a while, though. Especially if you "only" have one or a few lucid dreams a month. I'll just answer with my first lucid dream that is more than a sentence long. I had been tyring to get a lucid dream for I think about two weeks by just being aware of the possibility that I'm dreaming whenever I haven't called the situation I'm currently in into question. So I did reality checks throughout the day, read a lot about lucid dreaming and hoped for one before falling asleep. This does work and today I had most of my lucid dreams from doing a reality check against my feeling of being awake. But I was impatient, so I tried WILD. I was incredibly tired that night (that possibly helped), lied down and thought of nothing else than remembering that I'm trying to fall asleep consciously. Every now and then (probably every 15 or 20 seconds) I raised my arm to check whether I'm dreaming or not with the nose check. Moving your arm like that doesn't really help when you're trying to fall asleep. But I didn't know enough about this technique to tell whether I already did it or not. And this turned out to be a good thing. Probably because I was so extremely tired I must have fallen asleep without noticing but also without letting my thoughts drift. So I was still lying there, nothing changed, I did another reality check and this time it was positive. I thought a bit what it means to get up with my dream body. It felt strange knowing that my actual body would still be lying where it was. I stopped thinking about that before I would get a doubt about my body being still in my bed. I aproached the window of my room, wanted to open it, but then it already was open. I just jumped out. I flew above the street. It should have been the second floor, but it looked a lot higher. I wanted to fly to a certain location, where I had flight dreams before (the kind of flight dream I wished to have more). Before I could think of the way to get there, I was already flying over the area. That's all I had planned for then, and I woke up. I don't know if I really have to explain the feeling(s) I had. The success after what felt to me like a very long time. Having this weired experience to move my (dream) body while knowing that my real body would not be moved by it. Feeling perfectly safe while jumping outside a window in the second floor. Flying with no sort of aids. Feeling the summer air in my face while flying freely. Reaching a/the place of my dreams with such ease. It's just worth it, no matter how much training it requires beforehand. To give personal tips we would need to know more about you, what you have tried so far and so on. If you're interested in reading about other's personal experiences, I suggest looking into lucid dreaming forums or the subreddit. A lot of people publish their logs and dream diaries there or in their personal weblogs. Well, that's not helpful Take it easy, educate yourself more about it and keep on practicing. If you make no progress whatsoever in a long time but you feel you're still motivated enough, try a different technique, other WBTB times or change your bedroom in some way. That's very unliekly to happen. Sleep talking usually happens during NREM sleep, lucid dreaming is a lot more likely to happen during REM sleep. And if what you are saying also comes out IRL, then it also would if you're not lucid. The difference is that in a lucid dream you would control what you say. Sleep and dream researchers would probably love to get study participants who reliably lucid dream _and_ can talk about it while in the dream. But that's not how it works, unfortunately. Eye movements (and breathing, and, to some extend, muscular signals) however are another thing. Only few people are successful after just a few days. Some people spontaniously get a lucid dream in the night after they learned that this is possible. But other than these exceptions it's something most people have to work on for at lest a couple of weeks. You shouldn't get disappointed too quickly, because after a few months it's still not unusual to have had no major success. I say you should, if you're interested in the topic. Even if you're not trying to get lucid dreams, it can be quite interesting. But if you are, a dream diary can help a lot. By breafly analysing your dreams you can get an idea of how your dreams are constructed and what you should look out for to identify a dream as one while you're in it. You can look for recurring dream signs and check whether you're dreaming every time you're in a similar situation. It really increases your chances a lot. Besides, if you get a better dream memory, you'll remember your lucid dreams also better. It's not absolutely necessary to write them down, though, especially after you have more practical experiance. I guess you were using the WILD method then. That sounds as if you may have been already there (depends on how and how quickly you usually fall asleep). These voices are part of hypnagogia, the state you are in while falling asleep. Most people see images first, others start to hear voices first or both start about at the same time. Other sensory impressions can also occur. They can form a dream if you don't wake up at that point. Sleep is a requirement for lucid dream, yes. I've seen a thread about insomnia and lucid dreams on a lucid dreamin board. But I don't remember where. Search for it, you are definitely not the only one. Or I may try to find it if you are interested. It's a bit similar, actually. But as long as your brain gets input from nerves all over your body, it's not the same. It's what makes the difference between imagination and dreaming. But getting more aware of your daydreaming can help you recognize dreams as thoughts as oposed to perception of what is really around you. But I assume you are already trying to handle the insomnia thing. I wish you luck with that. Possibly. At least you could turn a nightmare into an adventure if you would become lucid at the right moment. If you always have the same or a very similar nightmare, you could learn to recognize it when you're in it the next time. I wouldn't say most children. But many lucid dreamers report that they had their first lucid dream as a child, recognizing a nightmare. I can't say you're completely wrong. From my (and other's) experience you can't read in a dream in the same way you can in real life. Here is an example from one of my dreams: After I became lucid I looked at the computer screen on with I read a long text before i became lucid. I saw the text and I knew it's supposed to have some meaning, but I couldn't recognize any letters or familiar signs. It was just clutter. After I looked away for a moment, then back at the screen it displayed just an empty table. This was the first time I tried to read something in a dream while I knew I was dreaming. I wanted to know whether this sort of reality check really worked (for me). Apparently it does. Another time, though, in a similar experiment you might say, I was in a city and tried to read everything I could find. So I read signs of stores, ads and product names in shopwindows, and I concluded that everthing I read makes perfectly sense. But when I tried to remember, what the actual words were that I read, I couldn't remember them. I tried again, reading the text on a product oackaging. I knew that what I read is what usually would be printed on such a packaging, but I didn't know what I've read. Others report that they are always perfectly capable of reading in there (also lucid) dreams, just like in waking liefe and that the text stays the same, even after they looked away and back at it. So it's possible to read in a dream if you define reading as looking at something that you consider to be text and then knowing the meaning of the text. But what the brain makes out of this can be very different for different people or even every time you try. Here is how many people experience reading in dreams: When you're reading in a dream, you could say you actually just look at something that you think is text and you instantly know what it's saying. That's actually the same we mostly do in real life when reading something. But if we start to pay attemtion to the text - the words and the letters that build it - it makes sense and we can tell that this particular string of letters has this particular meaning. In a dream, though, as soon as you pay more attention to what you are readin, it changes. It changes from obviously making sense to something else. So, reading something two or three times is used by many to check whether this is a dream or not. It's very unlikely to stay the same after looking at it three times in a dream. Except it does ^^. It's similar to counting something (like the number of fingers on your hand). In both cases it's important to not let you fool yourself. Sometimes you would make up random reasons why you can't read something when you try to (e.g. the batteries of the street sign must be empty, there is not enough light, ...). Those reason usually seem obviously phony when you think about them while awake, but they can make totally sense if a non-lucid dream. You are right that recognizing these things, while in the dream, as something that only happens in dreams, doesn't come natural for mostpeople, but your conclusion is wrong. It's absolutely normal that you would think that flaming purple cats are normal while you're in a dream. Even if a dream is completely made of things that you would call nonsense in real life, you still don't realize that it's a dream. You can train a critical view on your surrounding. But you will always have these things in your dreams, that will make you think "Why didn't I recognize this as a dream?!" when you're a awake. Not every oddness brings lucidity, even if you try to recognize these things. But if you question your current state often enough in real life, you will naturally start to do it in your dreams also. And eventually you will think about thinking that happens around you and whether it makes sense or not. An example from my dreams: I usually fly or float in my dreams. I float more often than I walk in the dreams that I remember. It's easier than walking and it's just normal for me when I'm dreaming. I don't think about it when I do it, just as I don't think about how I walk or whether it's normal to walk when I do it. One time I was walking along an aisle and thought to myself, why am I walking? I could just float without moving all these muscles. That's how I realized I was dreaming. When I started to think about why I was walking and not floating, I realized the most likely reason that I was walking was that I can't actually float (in real life). Three hours would probably not be enough. To be sure you should use every minute that you can get for watching ponies for at least a couple of days . If you can't watch ponies all day, at least make sure that it's the last thing you do before getting to bed and the last thing you think about when falling asleep (or watch on while falling asleep). The more you occupy yourself with something in real life, the greater are the chances of dreaming of it later. It's more effective if you think about it also, connect MLP with what bothers you in your daily life. We often dream about unresolved problems, if there are any in our live. Maybe that helps in some way. There are ways to do this that work more or less for most people. Search the web for "dream incubation" if you're interested. Those are actually good things (or at least that's how I think of them). You could read a bit about hypnagogia or hypnagogic voices and images to get more comfortable with it. You actually live through this (almost) every time you fall asleep. It's not dangerous or something. You can also feel vibrating or tingling all over your body. It's just natural. The difference is just that you are aware of it when doing WILD. Very good question . How would you know? There are a lot of ways to find out. Did you try one of those when you typed this? I did when I read it. Even if you feel you know you're awake, that doesn't mean anything. You'd always "know" that you are awake if you never knew that you are dreaming. That means every time you know you are awake without really cheking, you could be dreaming. And that means, you should always check when the question comes up (e.g. you think of it). Where did you get this from? Many people have sex dreams regularly. Or did you mean only _lucid_ dreams? That you can't have sex in a lucid dream without waking up? That's also not the case. Sex is actually one of the most popular activities in dreams for lucid dreamers. Stephen LaBerge even studied the physiological effects or orgasms in dreams. It's quite interesting, because some of the body functions are the same as in real life, others are not. Anyways, you easily wake up if you're too exited and start to breath heavily. That may be the reason why many lucid dreamers (especially beginners) tend to wake up during it. Congrats! While reading the thread I was wondering how long it will take for you Sleep paralysis actually occurs every time you're in REM sleep. Without it you would act out your movements from your dreams with your real body. For example if you would run in your dreams, you would move your real arms and legs as if you were running, while lying in bed, which would either wake you up, or (more likely) make you hurt yourself. So, sleep paralysis is normal and even necessary. It can happen that you sometimes wake up before the paralysis ends. It ususally doesn' last long and it's not dangerous. But some people get hallucinations and horrible experiences in this state. If you know this before you experience id for the first time, it can help you to cope with it and it may be less creepy. I'm not speaking from experience here, btw. I don't know how it feels myself. But it seems to be at least strange, sometime a terrible experience. But it doesn't happen a lot. I'm not even sure whether I know somebody who ever experienced this. Not a stupid question at all. The best time to do it is actually in the morning, not at the beginning of the night. First sleep 4.5 to 6 hours, then wake yourself up or let something/somebody wake you and do something to get you awake and aware. When you're tired enough again (ususally latest after one or two hours), go back to bed and use this (or another) technique. This way you can get from waking state directly into REM sleep. Search for Wake Back To Bed (WBTB) to learn more. It may take some tries to find the perfect length of sleep time and the best length of wake time. This theory was disproved for the first time in the 70's by tests in sleep laboratories. It works like this. Before the night, the proband and the researcher agree upon a sequence of eye movements that the dreamer will do when they become lucid in a dream, and another one they will do when something specific happens. Eye movement and other things are recorded throughout the entire night. This way it can be recorded when a lucid dream starts and when they see something they are supposed to look out for, or when they perform a task. These tests have been done many times since by different researchers. The scientific community sees it as prove now. This can also be connected with MRI scans to show that the same brain regions are active when a motoric task is performed in a dream, as if it was done with the physical body. Definitely! Why not? Did you have some personal experience with it? Because for most there is no difference between pinching yourself in waking life and doing it in a dreams. It feels just the same. There are. It's not me, though. I don't know how I do it. It's just like lifting my arm or something. I don't have to know how I do it in order to be able to do it. Maybe those that can't do it just haven't found out how. I discovered this long before lucid dreaming. So even if I didn't know I was in a dream, I sometimes had the feeling that I could end all this (by waking up). And so I did every time I wanted to. Recently I became lucid because I had this feeling that I could wake up now if I wanted to. So this is also possible. If you can't just wake up by free will there are tricks I've read of. Apparently screaming can help, or hurting (or killing) yourself (of course you should only do that if you're really sure you're in a dream ^^). You can also try closing your (dream) eyes really hard and wishing to wake up, then open your eyes quickly. Two common ways seem to be staring and concentrating on a point, ignoring everything around you, or breathing heavily. Nice short compressed video. I'd just like to add a small thing. They use an analog clock as an example for a reality check. There are quite some reports of analog clocks working just as they do in real life: They show the time. And if the time happens to be something between 0 and 12 hours, you won't know you're dreaming. If it shows half past 42 you should think about that twice, though. So, analog clocks work for reality checks in one way, but digital clocks or watches work in two or even three ways at the same time because they also show text and they are a sort of eletronic device. Because it isn't a lot of text (no words, etc.) it's quite possible that you read the time correctly from it. But it also happens that the time either changes every time you look at it, or that you can't read it at all or you can't detect individual numbers in what it displays. I recently heard somebody say the only time an analog watch worked for him was when he wanted to do a reality check with his wrist watch and he noticed it was an analog one, while in real life he has a digital one. A few days ago I woke up and it was 37:42. I just thought my phone must be broken. But I looked again and it was 12:42. May still be just broken, with all the electronics there are in there... or I just didn't look right the first time. But while getting up I made a nose check to be sure and I was in fact dreaming. So, don't let yourself fool you into believing it's all normal what you see. It's all just a big conspiracy made to keep you belive you are awake... jk. But seriously, are you sure you are awake right now? I know this confusion. And even if you dreamed you had a lucid dream, this lucid dream can also become a proper one. Don't think about it too much. Next time may be more clear. I thought the NovaDreamer has light cues only. They should be more effective than the sounds alone. There are quite a few of these goggles, masks and headbands but I haven't tired one yet or looked into one in detail. I'd be more interested in building my own mask. There were some attempts to create an open source one. But nothing that got so far that it would be motivating to pick the project up and finish it. There are other technological aids I want to try first (like Rythm Napping). The NovaDreamer doesn't have an EEG. It only measures eye movements. I have talked to people you made their own lucid dreaming masks and most said they don't see the need for sleep state detection and that a light cue that is activated at fixed intervals would be enough. I'm currently getting deeper into this topic incl. cheap EEG devices and automatic hypnogram software. My detailed answer to this would be too long, so I'll leave it out. It's not rubbish. But it wouldn't work the way you imagine it, either. Sounds from the real world can get integrated in your dreams, but you can't know how before it happens. The variety sounds can be perceived in the dream is huge. The same sound would become somthing different every time (or nothing). So, you probably won't be able to change a dream in a direction. BTW: the same is true about other cues (like light, electric shock, ...), but some seem to get integrated into the dream more often and they don't wake you up as easily as sound. So you can make light cues bright and flashing and use them as cues to try to make you notice that you're in a dream. When you do this, you should do a reality check every time you see something blinking or flashing (also in real life, of course). It works, but not in a way that you can be sure to have a lucid dream whenever you want to. Another idea is to condition yourself to react to a certain sound with performing a reality check. Then play the sound in random intervals during the day (at least several days long). So it would be helpful if you work on a computer or can wear earplugs all day. And at night you continue playing the sound at random times (you can up it to every few minutes then) and hope to notice one in your dreams. I'm not sure how well that works. Haven't tried it yet. You should read a bit more about it, especially about the intervals and how to combine it with WBTB, before you try it. Have you seen The Matrix? Remember the scene where Neo learns to fight? Whatch it again if you can. It's exactly what I want to reply with. Don't think you can do it, know you can do it. Or how about this: "Do not try and bend the spoon. That's impossible. Instead... only try to realize the truth. ... There is no spoon." It can be tricky. But with some practice I think everybody can master these things. That can be of great help. Somebody to talk about experiments and progress, whether it is over the internet or offline, keeps up the motivation and can give you more ideas. If he is more experienced, that can't harm. I imagine it being hard to do it on purpose and not loose lucidity. Longer dream time than sleep time usually comes from skipping details in the dream. You can compare it to similar techniques in movies. When one scene ends with someone going to bed and the next one starts at the breakfast table, you instantly know that the person that is shown has probably slept until morning, then got up and dressed and so on... A common example in dreams is listening to someone talking. If you do nothing else in particular, then it's quite possible that you are not aware of the single words and sentences they are speaking, but you know what they are saying. The main difference is really what you belive. Some believe that OBEs take place in the same world as the one we are in while awake. So you could observe what is happening around you by leaving your physical body. From my point of view it's just another lucid dream that starts in the same place you fell asleep (many WILDs start like that). There are other attempts of trying to explain these experiences scientifically. But for most cases the lucid dreamin explanation is very likely. Some lucid dreamers also use the term OBE for a lucid dream where you start the dream by detaching your dream body from your real body. More generally said, it works best when you fall asleep directly into REM sleep. You're axample serves as a variant of a late afternoon nap. Even easier for most is the attempt in the morning, after a bit more than half of the sleep time is over. So you'd get up when you think that most of your NREM sleep is over, then get up and when you're tired enough again, you try to enter a lucid dream directly. One thing as actually not so much to do with the other. The word nightmare comes from the idea that a demon (a mære) would sit on ones chest and thus course sleep paralysis and bad dreams. But now that the meaning of nightmare has shifted at least in the English language there isn't really a connection between the both. That (and other things that make you unconfortable while trying to fall asleep consciously) can be so annoying. If it's just your legs being restless, try getting up and moving your legs a bit. I mean no real sports (or you would become too awake), just enough to enable you to fall asleep more easily. That's not unusual. You can carry a mood from a dream into waking life, even if you don't remember where your mood came from or anything else from the dream. With lucid dreams you often are in a good mood after waking up from one. Some people can't tell the difference between memories from dreams and memories from waking life. Someone with that problem should probably be careful with lucid dreaming. But if you (usually) know the difference now, you will also after a lucid dream. Being lucid doesn't change anything about the ability to remember the fact that it was a dream. On the other hand, you can easily get doubts in a dream whether it really is a dream or not. In that case you can just do a reality check, then you know and can continue with whatever you were doing. And for losing interest in real life, I don't think that would come so easily. Waking life would still be the majority of your lifetime. And since you seem to be social enough to post in this forum, you should be okay. Even if you wouldn't have any friends irl, you'd have another community to hang out with. There are a lot of places, forums, chats, meetups and so on for lucid dreamers. You can get the same in non-lucid dreams, though. The important difference is that in a lucid dream you might be able to change something about it and maybe even learn something about your fears that can help you deal with them, also in waking life. It requires a lot of training for most, but it's not practically impossible, as many reports, also in this thread, show. There is a common misunderstanding to it, though. You won't fall asleep if you move, so it's generally true. But if you have an itch that drives you crazy and you can think of nothing else while trying to fall asleep consciously, that won't work either. So you can move and scratch or turn yourself over if necessary. It will just take a bit longer for you to fall asleep. That's actually the case for most of us. All lucid dreamers know these moments when they write down a (non-lucid) dream report and think "How in Equestria did I not notice anything strange?!" It's something you can learn by paying attention in waking life also. To get a lucid dream every now and then it's enough to recognize you are dreaming every now and then. So you can have both, dreams where you wonder afterwards how you managed to not recognize it and dreams where you do, even if it's just because you have nothing to do for a moment and decide to check your state even though you don't notice anything strange. That's a feeling many lucid dreamers have at the beginning. Often there is no clear line between unconsciousness and consciousness in a dream. You might realize that you're dremaing and know that this means you can control the dream world, but after you wake up you think what you decided to do was not what you would've done if you were really aware of the state you were in and the possibilities you had. It's partly because after waking up, remembering a lucid dream may not feel so much different from remembering an ordinary dream, because it's till a dream. I think you have to have had at least a few to get a feeling for it. The other thing is that you can never know whether you really had the control or not because even in non-lucid dreams you assume you have control over what you do. Or in other words, you always have the same amount of control, the difference is whether you realize it and use it or not. You can dream that you became lucid and did what you wanted to do in a lucid dream, but after waking up it feels like you did "things people do in lucid dreams" but not what you had planned to do. After a couple of lucid dreams you usually get accustomed to it and more often remember what you wanted to do while still in the dream. So much for replies to other bronies' posts. But I have something to add myself. Scootaloo had a (pre-)lucid dream in "Sleepless in Ponyville", when Luna told her she was dreaming. It depends on the definition you have for (pre-)lucid dreaming, of course. She didn't control the dream conciously, nor was she aware she could. But she did get a lesson out of it. She didn't use any technique, too, as far as we know. But she could've made a LILD out of it. It's when you, for example, ask a dream person to remind you the next time you are dreaming. A technique that's not working for most people, according to what I've read. But if Luna is really guiding the ponies' dreams (BTW: Does that make them shared dreams?) and Scootaloo did not just dream of her guiding her dream, then it might work a lot better. So Scootaloo could've just asked Luna, if she's around in her dreams anyway, to tell her that she's dreaming the next time. If you don't consider this off-topic, what do you think Scootaloo would want to do in a lucid dream (other than overcoming a nightmare), if anything?