Talk:Warning About Lucid Dreaming/@comment-26394749-20171108202005/@comment-10502460-20180418234908

^This, this, this. So many people who can't dream lucidly seem to think of it as some kind of minor superpower (most of these Reddit pastas concerning lucid dreaming are clearly written by authors who aren't natural lucid dreamers), when really it's just a state of consciousness that can get rather tedious at times, especially during REM.

I've been dreaming almost exclusively lucidly since puberty, and and while it has its moments and I don't hate it entirely, sometimes it can get downright stressful. Like EtherBot alluded to, realizing you are dreaming, especially if you're like me and can dream so lucidly that you can even guess what stage of sleep you are in, often REM which is the worst, can make you feel bored, or even helpless and incapacitated in a way that non-lucid dreaming doesn't. I can't tell you how many times I've been having intense lucid dreams and thought to myself "if I'm going to be aware, can I at least get up and do something?" But nooooooo, instead what you get is a half dozen false awakenings in rapid succession followed by more intense dreaming.

Non-REM and non-deep sleep lucid dreams can be better and even fun depending on what it is, but those are also the ones that are a little bit less lucid and aware meaning you're less likely to care about controlling things anyway and just go with the flow.

Also, the ability to control things can actually end up becoming more limited the more lucidly you dreamed. As a child and young teenager, I could control a lot of things in my dreams. Now as an adult if I want to control something in a certain way the logic-based part of my brain will just be like "I'm not doing that, that's stupid" half the time because now I can dream so lucidly that some of my lucid dreams are basically just having daydreams while asleep and don't actually have that much immersion.

Still, it has its fun moments. Being able to control the weather in my dreams is still kind of cool, and sometimes I'll just explore my mental rendering of my city, though in order to do that you kind of have to try not to be too aware otherwise your brain will just remind you that you're not really outside of your bedroom and shut that venture down.

But being able to decide who appears in your lucid dreams is one of the things you have the least control over, and when you are talking with someone you know it can actually give a feeling of loneliness because you know it's not really them and you wish dream telepathy was real.

Lucid dreaming can be downright exhausting, especially if you are a heavy sleeper like me, and the worst parts are when instead of a dream, you just gain full sensory awareness of lying in bed interspliced with a few short dreams, but can't wake up no matter how hard you try and have this irrational compulsion to wake up somehow even though you typically just wake up naturally in about 20 minutes anyway. This happens to me sometimes when I sleep in to daylight hours and it suuuuuuuucks. And no matter how many times I tell myself to just freaking relax next time and let myself wake up naturally, every time it happens I find myself frantically trying to force-wake. As a kid I used to be able to wake myself up at will with no trouble half the time, but for whatever reason I've lost that ability.