• chemical_cutthroat@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Back during Covid I was temporarily laid off for several months because I work a restaurant that was closing until the end of the pandemic. It was the first time that I truly had nothing to do for as long as I could remember, so I did what I thought I should do, and turned off my alarm clock. I’ve always been a wild dreamer, and I dream vividly every night all the way through until I wake. Sometimes they are vignettes, sometimes its a whole-ass life in my dreams, but they are always there, every night.

    At first I would pop up at 9am like I did for work, but eventually I got used to it, and I stopped waking up early. Soon it was 10:30, noon, 1pm. All the while I was dreaming more and more. With no hard cut off from my alarm clock, my dreams would come to their natural conclusions, which was steadily becoming my death in my dreams. Sometimes violently, sometimes of old age, but it got to where every time I went to sleep, I knew I would die that night, somehow. This isn’t some creepy-pasta or anything, it’s a true story, and I genuinely started getting panic attacks before bed because I didn’t want to dream my own death, again.

    Of course, eventually I did the smart thing and turned my alarm back on, but for a while I was locked in my version of Groundhog Day. My already natural nihilism played into all of this, and sometimes I slip into a dark thought about death, and I have a nihilistic version of my inner monologue telling me, “You’ve done it before, and when it happens, just let it happen.” It’s kinda fucked up, and it’s been years now and I still have some issues about it.

    • boogetyboo@aussie.zone
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      2 months ago

      I’ve never tried lucid dreaming. I’m an insomniac so I’m just chuffed if I manage to get any sleep, let alone control my own universe.

      But often when I do dream, I die in my dreams. Usually violently - gunshot or blunt instrument sort of deaths that I’m cowering from prior to. So I’m in genuine terror and horror before my death…And I swear, the millisecond before it happens (and I always wake up at the time of death) I feel the pain of it.

      It’s pretty fucked, tbh. I’ve lived a peaceful life with very little violence in it, and guns certainly aren’t a thing here. So I don’t know my brain can’t just chill out.

      Anyway - it’s why I’m a little frightened to try lucid dreaming. At least in spite of the fear there’s a sense of inevitability about my deaths in these dreams (i.e. my murderer has found me in my hiding place), somehow I feel like it’d be worse if I was trying and failing to fight back, or if I prolonged the inevitable death by trying to outsmart the person? Or could I just shut down that plot completely?

      Thanks for the session, do I just pay the receptionist on the way out or will you just invoice me?

      • Rentlar@lemmy.ca
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        2 months ago

        I’ve found that I dream about what’s on my mind or what I worry about a lot, like my bicycle getting stolen or that I missed an important deadline.

        My vivid dreams end in death only occasionally (falling from heights most commonly, suffocation, gunshots and blunt weapons less commonly), but those fade to black or red like a game over condition and force me up, I take a moment to think of how I would avoid being in such a situation to begin with. Take it as your brain is going through scenario planning/drills so that you don’t end up there.

        I don’t know if it counts as lucid dreaming but a number of times I “get up” from a dream but I’m still in a dream. Once I even looked up on the internet within my dream to confirm if the dream I woke up from was real. The inner dream was about Twitch streamers playing a game with graphics reminiscent of Rayman but with 6 people simultaneously. When I searched it up in the outer dream NES looking cartridges with art from that game appeared as results, which supposedly confirmed the game’s existence… it’s just weird stuff, bud.

      • isolatedscotch@discuss.tchncs.de
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        2 months ago

        When I dream i usually somehow always end up in my house’s stairwell, in some sort of situation that requires me to jump down instead of taking the stairs, to then realize midflight I’m not gonna survive, and then wake up while still feeling like I’m falling from a height, and after a couple seconds of being awake I can finally stop the falling sensation