Highs and Lows of Lucid Dreaming

I wish I could explain to you how to have great lucid dreams every night, but lucid dreams do not work that way.  The brain is a capricious dream-maker.  If you decide to work with your dreams, please be aware that you’ll still have bad dreams or even boring dreams some nights.

You can’t have great dreams every time you sleep, just like you can’t have great days every day of your waking life.  Perhaps this is the brain’s self-defense mechanism to keep you from being addicted to dreaming.  It sure can be tempting to ignore problems in the real world when you have dreams that are better than life.  I’ve tried a few chemical substances in my youth but they’ve never gotten me as high as when I’m dreaming a great lucid dream.

For example, I wish I could dream of Peter every night (even during those dreams when he pisses me off).  Waking up from a Peter visit can leave my brain flooded with endorphins, but the next day I wake up with no Peter and no endorphins.  Bummer!  Now I have to slog though another day.  But I do.

Sometimes my dreams of Peter are so great that I become incredibly depressed while going through my normal Peter-less life.  This may happen to you, too.  This is normal.  Remember being a little kid on Christmas morning and how you felt disappointed days later because it wasn’t Christmas anymore?  You survived that low then and you’ll survive the lows now.

Image of sleeping kitty by Mary K Baird for Morgue File