Within the last 10 years I've had the pleasure, and outright horror of experiencing both a lucid dream and sleep paralysis with a hypnopompic hallucination.

The lucid dream was one of the happiest moments of my life. Not as pathetic as it sounds... let me explain... I was in a forest... but this was more than a dream... it truly felt like I was THERE. I spent the rest of the experience taking in the sights, smells, FEELING the air and I had complete control over what I looked at, touched and experienced.

Waking I felt more refreshed and ALIVE than I ever had in my life. I understood the 'out of body' experience that people have described. This was close to a decade ago and I've never experienced anything like it since... well actually I did but more on that a bit.

I want to point out that at the time I'd never taken any sort of recreational drug, I didn't even drink alcohol at the time either. So this experience was NOT triggered by any sort of recreational drug usage.

Many years later... my eyes opened. Time to get up I thought... but I couldn't move... at all. My breathing also felt... shallow. Immediate fear kicked in. I don't know if you've ever experienced full body paralysis, but when the realization kicks in its a very unpleasant one. At the foot of my bed... a huge... and I mean HUGE fucking spider pulls itself up onto my bed. It climbs on my chest and proceeds to walk back and forth... back and forth.

This whole experience was between 30 seconds to a minute, but it might as well have been an eternity. I regained control of myself and immediately threw my sheets off the bed looking all over my room in horror for this massive terror of a spider mumbling "WHAT THE HELL" to myself over and over.

After calming down I immediately started hunting down an explanation of what the hell had just happened to me. It was so real... but it couldn't have been real... a spider that big doesn't exist... let alone in Arizona... so it had to be in my head. Was I going insane? I have a family member who suffers from Schizophrenia... was it happening to me? Searching for 'not being able to move when waking up' I found "Sleep Paralysis". Something I'd never heard of but perfectly described the experience. I've since modified my pre-sleep routines to avoid a repeat of that, but I'll tell you it was quite the experience.

If you ever experience "Sleep Paralysis", try and remain calm and remind yourself that you aren't seeing... reality. I'd never heard of it before so I had NO idea what the heck was happening to me. Really made me understand a lot of the UFO abduction stories. "I couldn't move, just look, and there was a presence in the room..." Yup... that's the experience. Why I had to get a huge freaking spider though...

Any dreams, of any sort that have been particularly amazing or horrifying for you? I find them to be amazing and generally have 'positive' ones though I've had my share of nightmares as well. They often reflect worries or interests of the time. I remember in my youth having a nightmare about being covered in snakes at a time when my dad had a lot of snakes and a worry of mine was them escaping.

I also remember a very interesting dream during a lightning storm. It was also raining in the dream and I was a spy hunting some other enemy agent. We were firing guns at each other and the guns would fire at the same time a wave of thunder would roll in in the real world. The dream ended with me being ambushed. The enemy spy put a gun to my head and slowly pulled the trigger. In my dream I 'zoomed' in on the gun... watching him slowly... SLOWLY pull the trigger. It felt like an eternity. Then a flash and I sprung awake just as there was a huge thunder crash. While I wouldn't call that dream a GOOD dream I fell back into bed with a huge smile on my face. That my mind had created a gun shoot out in response to a thunder storm? The brain is amazing...

Most of my dreams suck: Brakes work too slowly before hitting something, gun is working too slow during a break-in, trying to walk down a hallway at work but every single object has been left in the way.I have had Night Terrors (Sleep Paralysis) a couple of times.

I do remember one dream that would have made a good TV movie though. And another dream that I thought was the best FPS I had played to date, then I woke up. :(

Interesting you posted this Thread. I have been thinking about dream programming lately.

In retrospect I suppose... at the time though? No idea what was happening and while not arachnaphobic, can't say I'm a fan of spiders. That's... pretty awful. I wonder if Lovecraft experienced night terrors and/or sleep paralysis. Seem to be the basis of many horror stories and creatures.

Ah, no, sorry. I forgot, it's the Internet, we always need to use /s tags. No, as much as I love spiders and let my house spiders do their thing (they pay rent in dead bugs that bother me more, like roaches, ants, flies, and mosquitoes) if someone poured a cup of spiders on me I'd flip my shit. Arachnophobia is deep in the animal brain. No, having a demon spider on you would be terrible.

After this happened to me (and the lucid dream) I've been fascinated by dreams. While the spider certainly sucked, I've heard of far worse 'things' and beings squatting on people's chests so I actually am 'lucky' in that regard. I do think its strange that the most common 'visit' is a being of some sort... often a 'hag' and I got a spider.

Reminds me of one of my earliest nightmares... being on a pier and having it fall away and sway side to side... always moving but always having the planks falling. I'm hoping that others who have never heard of 'sleep paralysis' might stumble upon it and it might help them if it ever happens to them. I'm in my mid 30s and I just had this sleep paralysis a few years ago having never heard of it. With luck it will never happen again.

On the other hand, I very much enjoy lucid dreaming and would love if I could somehow purposefully enter those states during sleep.

Dreams are still not understood. One interesting theory I've read is they are a way for the brain to 'digest' the events of the day and form new memories. I wouldn't be surprised if that were true as many of my dreams, that I remember anyway, have been influenced by something on my mind that particular day.

Do you fall asleep in any sort of contorted position? Are there any new light sources present (like a night-light or crack in a window)?

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/56/John_Henry_Fuseli_-_The_Nightmare.JPG/660px-John_Henry_Fuseli_-_The_Nightmare.JPG I hear about how people want to control their dreams while in it, but you'd think that would cause you to wake up. I'd like to know how to plant an idea into your head and let the mind take over.

They don't really know (those who study it) what causes Sleep Paralysis. Sleep Paralysis seems to most frequently occur if you sleep on your back... but sleeping doesn't seem to be a factor. I don't particularly recall if I had done anything different the night that it happened to me a few years ago...

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/56/John_Henry_Fuseli_-_The_Nightmare.JPG/660px-John_Henry_Fuseli_-_The_Nightmare.JPG

^ Nightmare fuel for humanity... I've read some of the events of the Salem Witch Trials may have been because of Sleep Paralysis. That's the thing... lucid dreaming seems to happen much later in the sleep cycle... long after you've drifted off. It has to be possible though, as I believe tribesman from various cultures would have these 'visions'... though possibly brought on by some form(s) of drug(s).

Many "nofappers" report more lucid dreaming after a certain number of days not fapping. Seems to be a common side effect if you want more of the good stuff.

Price too steep...

Dreaming sucks, don't do it if you can avoid it.

Contrary to popular superstition, dreaming is not something that everybody does and it isn't the same thing as REM. You can dream at any point during the night or not at all. You can dream while awake, hence the term day dream.

But, in general, I wouldn't personally do anything that is believed to increase the likelihood of dreaming as dreams themselves seem to be bad for memory. Or at least the times when I dream are times when my memory isn't doing very well.

Fapping > happiest moment ever. :D

I've had a lucid dreaming experience once, ie. figuring out in a middle of a dream that hey this must be a dream. I think I've told it before here, the dream was first about me keeping a housewarming party at my home, but suddenly realizing it can't be true because my apartment in the dream was much bigger with more rooms than the apartment I had in reality (back then I was living alone in a single-room apartment, while in the dream there were many doors to other big rooms etc.). That's where I realized it is a dream.

The lucid dreaming experience was kinda cool (realizing something like that in a dream), but rest of the lucid dream was a bit meh, as if I didn't really take advantage of it fully that I was "conscious in a dream world".

I've heard a couple of my friends (both female for some reason) telling about those sleep paralysis experiences. They always seem to include the image of something attacking you, you said you had a spider while those had some dark ghostly man approaching the bed. It sure sounded scary, I'm happy I haven't experienced the same. I recall sometime reading what is the medical reason for those sleep paralysis experiences...

I personally had experience with lucid dreaming and it was ton of fun haha You can even practice lucid dreaming.

Haven't had any experience with sleep paralysis thankfully.

I also had experience with precognitive dreams. I was dreaming about reading Alan Ford comic book I haven't read before, and I remember couple of pages from that dream. And maybe 2-3 weeks ago I've bought Alan Ford comic book and it was literally that one I've dreamed about few weeks back.

For sleep paralysis, it occurs because you wake up before your brain finishes REM phase of sleep. You basically have two kind of sleeping. One is NREM/SWS sleep. You can call it slow wave sleep if you want. You dream during that stage too but most of the time you do not even remember those dreams since they are not so "lively" so to say. Second kind of sleep is REM sleep. During that sleep most of your dreams you remember occur and your dreams are more lively during that sleep. Because your brain needs to stop your from 'acting' your dreams, it basically paralyses your muscles. And I guess you know can conclude all by yourself why sleep paralysis happens. You wake up before REM phase is finished and you muscles are still paralyzed.