Lucid Dreaming & Re-losing Control

I have personally been involved with lucid dreaming for about 10 years of my life, and have had many wonderful experiences and adventures. However, the more involved i got, the more serious it became.

It started with the awareness that i was having a dream WHILE the dream was taking place. It moved onto having VERY real dreams concerning an ex girlfriend who had killed herself. The strange thing about these dreams was the fact that while every other "character" in my dreams had this sort of empty personality that i perceived to be a facet of my own self portraying someone i knew, Jacqueline started to become much more her own person. One dream inparticular was VERY real. I knew what people would say before they said it, i knew what people would do before they did it because i knew that ultimately *I* was the one controlling everything in my dreams. This one dream was very disturbing because i controlled it all up until the very end when this "spirit" in my dream suddenly turned to me and said "I love you Nathan." I said "Jacqueline?" and she began to move down the stairs, despite my intense desires to NOT end the dream. At this point in my dreaming i was totally capable of extending a dream as long as i wanted, controlling every possible situation. Except for that spirit girl. There was something very, very real about her.

Things really started to change after that, albeit gradually. Things began to spill over into my waking life. I had a pretty disturbing experience in a park in salt lake city one night where i suddenly had a very strong impression that my friends and i were in the wrong place and needed to leave. Nobody took me seriously and quite suddenly i was not only standing where i was standing and seeing what i was seeing, but i was ALSO looking through the eyes of another entity that seemed to be soaring over the park. It was quite terrifying to be honest, especially when i saw myself from overhead. Suffice to say i didn't wait for my friends to believe me, and ran out of the back of the park as quickly as possible, and never set foot in those back woods again. This is after being back there probably 100 times previously with absolutely no feelings like that.

Years passed without any pressing issues, just dreaming my dreams and enjoying my lucidity. One night i was very relaxed and falling asleep when VERY suddenly my entire body tensed as though all muscles were contracting at the same time. My back arched in my bed, my eyes clenched and i started grunting and clenching my teeth. My fists were clenched so tight that i bruised my palms. The entire time i had the VERY strong impression that there was another presence in the room, and it was Jacqueline, my ex girlfriend from years before who had killed herself. Quite plainly, that scared me.

The last few years of my lucid dreaming experience i began to have difficulty waking up. I considered that to be quite strange since i had never REALLY gone to sleep in the first place, being aware of dreaming and all that. I scared quite a few girlfriends off during those times when i would wake up in the morning unable to open my eyes, move a muscle. All i could do was grind my teeth and quietly grunt. I remember one girlfriend Jennifer crying in the corner saying she wished she knew what she could do to help me. I was awake but couldn't fully wake up, couldn't move, nothing. Terrifying to say the least.

Shortly thereafter i had a breakdown, full hallucination experience where i was back in Wisconsin building a deck with my father. I laid in bed for three days with my eyes closed, only rolling my head back and forth against my pillow and talking to my father who was 1,000 miles away. I'm sure that was terrifying for Jennifer as well. It wasn't terrifying for me at the time, however, because as far as i knew i was back home building a deck with my father. I went home shortly after that.

I continued to have issues with sleep paralysis and strange experiences surrounding my sleep (and sometimes in the middle of the day), and started taking sleeping pills to try and quell those things. Nothing worked.

So today things are quite different. I don't have sleep paralysis, i don't hallucinate, i don't feel suddenly possessed by dead ex girlfriends and i don't feel suddenly possessed by spirits soaring overhead. I also don't remember ANY of my dreams anymore.

I think the reason for this is my drug use to be quite honest. I started to smoke Marijuanna almost every night before i go to sleep or else i am awake until 4am. Sleeping pills don't work, Ambien gives me HORRIBLY emotional nightmares, but marijuanna just makes me sleepy. Sorry Mods, please don't delete my post!

Sometimes i miss my ability to go to sleep and wake up in a dream world where i am totally in control. But when i think about it, there was really only a portion of my journey where i had that control. I think the deeper i got, the more things became involved in my consciousness and the less control i ended up having.

I'm sorry if this is in the wrong area, i'm sorry for bringing up drug use but it is totally relevant to the topic. Has anyone else experienced any lucid dreaming issues like this, or am i totally alone?

It might have been that you were only dreaming you were having a lucid dream - it's happened to me, where even though I could seemingly affect the dream I was having, I was just dreaming my lucidity.

Weird stuff

I never had it to the degree that you are talking about. I was big into Lucid Dreaming for a while and I completely understand what you mean about it spilling over into your waking life. There were small things that I was noticing in my waking life that I had never noticed before. I just felt more "tuned in" if that makes sense.

I too have had sleep issues that are a result of a completely irregular sleep patern and have had to turn to "alternative measures" to avoid the use of sleeping pills. That has caused me to forget all my dreams as well and I haven't had a Lucid Dream in close to two years now.

I have a couple simmiliar experiences. I was in my apartment I had to catch a few minutes of sleep before night school. So I took a nap but my phone was dead or so I thought, so I didn't set my alarm. I kept waking up but not opening my eyes reminding myself I had to get up pretty soon. Eventualy I got paralyzed And I felt like I was suffocating. And I swear I felt like wind swooshing through my ears it was soooo loud. Then I noticed I could barely breath. And I didn't fight it My breathing was going into rhythm. My ears had closed or something to block the noise so I could sleep and my body was not under my control because I falling asleep. I had consciousnly fallen asleep I could create shapes and colors for viewing pleasure and it was the first time that everything was so white with my eyes closed usualy for me it's brown. It felt like some people say an out of body experience, then my cousin called on my cellphone waking me up to tell me about he was having some kind of crazy out of body experience. I didn't even tell him what he woke me from.
Then later on after finishing highschool I went back home and helped my folks with their bussiness. I fell asleep in my mum's car passanger seat. I awoke any time she took a sharp turn. Then I started a dream with the same station playing while I sat in her car. I could hear her talking on the phone And I was in the exact same position in the dream as I was when I fell asleep. Everything in the dream was normal until I noticed the sun was blood red. I could hear her and the classic rock music but I couldn't wake for some time. I tried moving my arms and found I was paralyzed in the dream. Does this relate? There's more experiences like this but I need to hear some feed back I guess. When you were at the park were you high or sleep deprived?