Lucid dreaming to help build characters and worlds.

[blowsave]

I know this is a fairly odd topic, and I probably wont explain it very well, but bear with me.

I've started trying lucid dreaming, and after roughly a month of attempting have started being successful, but nothing all that important yet, just some basic starter stuff. Basically, I'm wondering if it would be feasible to use this as an opportunity to meet the characters you have created, or explore locales. If anyone (I'm aware that this will be a very niche thread, and I expect it to get buried in a few days) has experience in lucid dreaming, have you ever tried this and, if so, what were the results like?

 

[AetherX]

I lucid dream a lot, actually, but I've never thought to try this. To be honest, I don't think I would be able to concentrate properly and a bunch of weird stuff would show up. I have a feeling that the characters would just turn into people you know and locales would just turn into a place you know. You'd have to have a very clear image of what the characters and settings are in the first place in order to pull it off.

 

[Sovereign]

Hello, I don't post in the Writer's Workshop often (if at all--I tend to stick with the section I moderate, the RP forum), but I happen to be a fully lucid dreamer. I don't do anything to my body, I don't do it by choice, and it isn't something I have any control over whatsoever in implementing. Each and every time I sleep, it's impossible to distinguish between the real world and my dreams. I think, act, and live as one would in real life; the scenario and story I'm playing out is different, however. I've been to numerous doctors and psychologists, and I'm as lucid as somebody can get.

And I just have to say that it's -amazing- for creating worlds, characters, and other things of the sort. Hell, I don't even know if what I'm typing is the real world or not, I only assume so because it's the only recurring storyline I've played out. I've met not only my characters, but I've met the characters of other RPers who participated in my RPs. I'm actually writing a novel about the experiences of my lucid dreaming; specifically, the most powerful dream I've ever experienced, and what exactly it did to change my perspective on everything.

To sum it up, yes, lucid dreaming is wonderful for creativity. It can be amazing, but also terrifying and heart-wrenching.

 

[LightningTopaz]

I can attest that this works--I have had ideas come to me in dreams before (example-the big Dawn and Meloetta performance scene in episode 20 of Magic of a Melody)

 

[AetherX]

Each and every time I sleep, it's impossible to distinguish between the real world and my dreams.

Doesn't this, by definition, mean that you never actually lucid dream? I've always thought that lucid dreaming is the awareness that one is dreaming. If you can't tell the difference between dreams and real life, how can you be lucid?

I have to admit, though, I'm totally jealous of how vivid your dreams are. I wish I could do all that. I've had several life-changing dreams too, but never had the motivation to write a novel on them (except for one I had when I was ten or eleven, but I've kind of given up on that).

 

[Sovereign]

It is lucid; I mean concerning vividness, thought processes, people. There's no difference in the reality of a dream to me as there is in real life. My dreams are just as realistic as my actual life. I know it's a dream, but the clarity of those dreams sometimes causes major confusion. It's the highest level of lucidity, where the two begin to bleed together. In all actuality, "lucid dreaming" just means "clear dreaming." I know when I'm dreaming, but sometimes I'll patch holes in my memory with memories from my dreams.

 

[Te-em]

There was a time when I would get stuck between dreaming and waking. I haven't done this for a while, but I tried to learn to control it, because then I could, when I came into that state, walk between dream and waking as through a door. But even if I woke, I couldn't move, so I guess I was still sleeping, yet I could see the room round me. The dreams I had looked quite real, passed similar to real-time (so one minute in the dream was approximately one minute in reality), and I had very much control of what I was doing. This is the kind of dream where I can talk to other parts of myself. These other selves can be like different persons when they appear in the dream, but they give very good inspiration to stories.

During that time, some years ago, when I frequently had these dreams, the same person would meet me in the dream. I think I stopped having the dream and the strange dream state, because that other self got integrated with the rest of me and my consciousness. I actually want to have those dreams again, even though they can be uncomfortable when I "wake up" and cannot move, because I always remember them fully and it's more or less like stepping into another world.

I know that if you wake up during your dream, you'll remember it more clearly. I think my frequent return to consciousness, even though I was still sort of sleeping, let the dream come into my conscious memory each time, and thus the dream appeared very clear and real-time. I would really like to know more about why this can happen. It usually occurs when I sleep during the day, because then I am ready to wake up after a while, compared to when I sleep at night when I expect sleeping for many hours.

Among my "ordinary" dreams I have at night, I can have very vivid dreams that I think I real until I wake up. But I don't have the same control as in the dreams I mentioned before, so I cannot usually steer them to something that would give me ideas and inspiration to stories. I try to make sure I write down all my important dreams, in case I need ideas. If I write them down after waking, I can often remember much.

 

[137.RADIO]

I haven't really Lucid dreamt, but used what I saw in dreams to build my worlds and characters, and there have been specific points in those dreams where I would forget I was dreaming. I've actually created characters to control the dreams and have linked separate dreams together to create stories (like a particular trilogy that goes around in a circle, you could pick any point and up there again.) But lucid dreaming where I had control over what happened is something I've never attempted...
Sometimes I can only tell it is a dream (and realizing this can be painful at sorts) when my hometown is configured into something strange, or I meet one of my dream moderators. I can never retell them exactly, they don't make sence in reality, so I have to add or change things to make it seem somewhat coherent.

 

[Gama]

This is an interesting idea. For the way I have always engaged in lucid dreaming, it wouldn't work for me though.

That is, my definition of lucid dreaming, which may not be the "correct" definition but I wonder if it is what you mean. I'm not sure that what I have called lucid dreaming is the same as what Sovereign is describing above.

Essentially, my experience is, during a dream, becoming aware that you are dreaming and therefore knowing that you are completely in control of this reality, meaning you can change anything you want. I've used this to experience many things, including flying and various kinds of magic but I'm not sure that I would really be able to explore a character I had created. Part of the difficulty of maintaining my control over the dream is remembering that it is a dream (which is surprisingly easy to forget) and trying to explore the depths of someone who isn't you is something that is likely to make you lose that control.

Of course, you could potentially use lucid dreaming to set a dream off in the direction that you want to and see where it goes from there. In my experience though, whenever I fuck about with reality too much in my dreams, large groups of people pursue me to try and stop me. (Yes, exactly like in Inception, but I had this experience long before that movie was released. My suspicion is that that film is based on similar experiences of lucid dreaming - there are other elements to it which reflect lucid dreaming that I can't be bothered to get into here.)

 

[Shadow Victini]

Damn, I'd like to lucid dream. There's been only one time I was aware I was dreaming, and that dream was as bizarre as all my dreams.
All my dreams are bizarre. In most of them, I'm running with someone else I know away from a big group of people. And these days a lot of my dreams are video game-related. Actually, thinking about that, most of my dreams these days are Pokémon-related. :0

 

[TheLlama]

Both normal dreams and lucid dreams are a source of inspiration to me. Since both tend to fade quickly from memories, I always keep a notebook next to me (I have a notebook under my pillow even - I guess it is to a writer what a gun under the pillow is to some people P. Same goes for reviews, blog posts and whatnot. I once even found the solution to a difficult Physics problem while sleeping P:

 

[Gama]

Llama, what you've said reminding me of something, and it's a big issue with taking inspiration from dreams.

I always find, even when I have notepad on me and write down the dream immediately, that as I am writing the dream it ceases to make sense.

 

[an illegible mess.]

i find that what i write is influenced A LOT by the dreams i have. i'm a very vivid dreamer, and sometimes i do attempt lucid dreaming. most of the villains i create in my stories are from nightmares i have. take, for example, satan from my story, the devil's gift. the dream taylor had when he saw him was heavily influenced of a dream i once had where this demon creature was sitting in a blood bath, eating corpses of people i knew/didn't know.

plots also change if i dream of something with my story in it. generally i try thinking about my story if i feel like i need to change a plotline before i go to sleep. sometimes i dream of something, other times i don't.

i think it's all a matter of how creative and vivid your dreams can get. if they're just downright random, then they probably won't be a good choice to make a story out of it. still, like i said before, a lot of the characters i write about were in dreams that i've had. i think it's a really good strategy to use in your writing.

 

[TheLlama]

GM, I know the feeling. The important part however, is to get the general gist of it. Everything tend to get jumbled, as to locations ,how things looked and such. But the general feeling, it stays. I once had a dream, of being in a tall tower. I remember loneliness, as if I was the only human left in the universe. I remembered the sensation of height; the tower was tall. There was emptiness. A room without furniture. And then the feeling of someone wise. An old man, surely. I remembered words. We were talking. About deep things, I would assume.

And from that, I pieced together a prologue to a story - I remembered nothing of how it looked, so of course I took liberties with the descriptions, but the feelings, the general sensations, they were left.

And that is kind of the central point here: Dreams almost always are about something different than what's playing out in your mind. That's why it often doesn't make sense - the way I perceive it, anyway. But since the general feeling is there, you can, at least after a few tries, piece together the notions and feelings, and from there deduce what it was most likely about and containing, in a way that makes some sense.

 

[unrepentantAuthor]

This sounds absolutely fascinating. I wasn't aware of the extent to which you can benefit from lucid dreaming - I've only achieved awareness within dreams a paltry number of times and with little control or later recollection.

I am enormously enthusiastic about using lucid dreaming to develop fictional worlds or characters but the process of learning seems daunting. I've found some online information which was of some help but it wasn't clear about exactly how difficult the learning process is or the degree of control one can have.

Are you merely able to influence the dreamed world or can you craft a new one from scratch, do any of you know? Have any of you experienced a lucid dream and retained perfect mental acuity to the effect that you can play out scenes or summon characters at will? Lastly, how much does your subconscious brain fill in things for you when doing so that you don't influence knowingly?

I'm just rather excited about the possibilities of such a potentially powerful creative tool, and find myself wondering how much richer my writing mighht be if I could benefit from this.

 

[TheLlama]

unrepentantAuthor , the possibilities are very much endless. It's hard to create a world like you want it designed, but you can give your mind general clues. Music also works; one example:
It's only the Fairy Tale-Lyrics - YouTube
See the lyrics, you don't need to listen to the song (lulz, horrible japanese-english)

The mention of "dark castle" and "dark side of moon" made me imagine moonlit night, in a, surprise, surprise, dark castle.
When it came to "dancing in the shadow", due to the variations in music, I suddenly found myself flying above it all.

And so forth, the possibilities for inspiration are endless; and which lyrics/types of music triggers what experiences is probably personal (often it's based more on associations and metaphors, as dreams usually are). Watching a movie before going to sleep often makes elements of that movie appear in your dreams, convoluted or no.

As for how to trigger it? It may vary from person to person. I discovered it all by myself a few years ago, long before I knew of the concept lucid dreaming at all. I did it after going to bed once, and that is the first requirement, you need to be somewhere you can relax, both your body and your mind. The trick is to get your body to "fall asleep" (almost or entirely), and let your mind only almost fall asleep (leaving it rather blank and open to interpretations. You've probably experienced that when you go to bed, you start getting really creative or find easy solutions to problems you've had before, right? This is because when you try to sleep, you automatically start to "blank out" your mind, mentally relax through not really thinking about anything.

Trying to replicate this blanking out, but going a step further, is the first step. I'll describe how I felt the first time I did it: I started by, of course, relaxing, blanking my mind; I tried to imagine that I "shut off my brain" (by imagining some sort of block being placed in my neck, on whatever connections the brain has to the rest of my body. I closed my eyes during this, and the harder I tried to shut off my brain, the more I started noticing that my eyes started moving by themselves, back and forth. Don't resist this, try and let your eye muscles relax, continue trying to relax; also try to imagine your brain and head as a "muscle" that can be relaxed, to let everything happen on its own. Try to remove your awareness (but not so much that you risk falling a sleep; you must have at least miniscule awareness of being awake). If done "correctly", you may start seeing images appear before you. Try to relax still, and don't focus on what's happening; that ruins the process. Try and let your consciousness "float", let it be like a continuous stream that you're flowing with, not resisting in the slightest. Then before long you might find yourself dreaming. It always requires practice; at first you will have to concentrate too much on the various tasks to be able to relax enough, but get used to it, and it'll come more automatically.

I find it most effective right before sleep, or after having just awoke - in the first condition it is important that you slept well the night before, and in the last one it is important that you still have that feeling of being "half awake", also, if you wake up while in the middle of a dream, it's much easier.

Of course it's all subjective how you enter, or more specifically, how you feel while entering, but it might be of help