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Comment by joslin01 | Hacker News Reader

These have happened intermittently through my life when my stress is high. This is only personal clue I can give to you "why" otherwise maybe you're just getting good at it.

In my last episode, I was floating toward a wall and all these thoughts were firing, "you're in a dream", "you'll go through the wall", "don't be afraid" but the rational side that felt like I was going to slam into a wall freaked out just at the wall & I woke. I still wish I just let myself slip through the wall..

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Generally in a dream state like that, I find that what you believe & intend will happen will happen whether it makes sense or not. You knew you were dreaming and that the wall was immaterial, but you didn’t accept it in time. That’s one of the basic skills involved in lucid dreaming, really, influencing the dream by thinking “Oh, of course this is what will happen next” without pushing it too hard and waking yourself up (or getting stuck in sleep paralysis, in my case).

If you have nightmares, lucid dreaming techniques can be helpful for overcoming them. People often make stressful dreams worse on themselves by worrying “What if the monster catches up to me?” or “What if my weapon doesn’t do anything to it?”—you’ve got to follow it up with “Nah, I think it’s friendly and I can ride it” or “Of course my attack will work”.

I reliably have dreams that involve flooding when I am stressed or frustrated. I'm not particularly good at remembering dreams, don't try, but after one dream that seemed particularly 'symbolic,' I read some Jung and now I recognize that, in almost every dream I do remember, there are archetypes and symbols that he mentions. Jung wasn't really 'systematic,' but there are on order of 10-100 sub/objects in dreams that he emphasizes quite a bit and I see these in mine. Also, I tend to only remember a dream at times when my 'subconscious is [probably] trying to tell me something'

Yep, I see dreams same way and enjoyed reading Jung a lot in college. It makes sense that stress would induce more dreams if you saw dreams as mechanisms to heal your own mind, or at very least, point out the problem. I have read in other texts that we live out our ego fantasies in dreams (both scary & exhilarating) because otherwise it's a "pain" we can't handle until we get a taste for it.

You might find the dream dictionary[1] interesting.

[1] - http://www.dreammoods.com/dreamdictionary/

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