Why I Don’t Chase Lucid Dreams

But I might practice it with more intention

Photo by Almos Bechtold on Unsplash

Lucid dreaming. It’s a currently popular practice (especially among young adults) — along with reality shifting, witchcraft, and erotic fan fiction — that I wish had been accepted and popularized when I was a teen.

I’d have gleefully experimented with all those practices as a younger person. Life would have been so full! I’d have been more self-actualized. I may have been cooler, even, in the kind of way that was considered uncool then in the town where I lived, but would have anyway been cool had I been immersed in a community of curious teens attempting astral travel and alchemy.

But life goes the way it goes, and trends rise and fall as they will, and as a 40-something year old (okay, almost 50 year old) who decided to change her career path at mid-life from content marketing to dreamwork and mysticism, I’m not too disappointed with the increasing popularity of lucid dreaming.

I’ve written before here about some of my own experiences with lucid dreaming, which have been pretty limited and entirely spontaneous.

The Best Thing About My First Lucid Dream Was the Delight

I Lucid Dream, But All I Want to Do Is Wake Up

While I went through a short period about a decade ago of attempting out-of-body adventures and lucid dreaming, this practice came to a halt following a terrifying encounter I still can’t explain.

I had accidentally discovered a type of breathwork during a nap one afternoon that generated an out-of-body experience. When I tell people about this, I use words like ecstatic and erotic. What I mean is: it felt really, really good. Unlike anything else really good I had experienced before.

Unlike an ice cream sundae, unlike winning an award, unlike getting the job I was interviewing for or the boy I was chasing. Unlike…