Lucid dreaming

I’ve always been fascinated with the idea of lucid dreaming. Mostly, I just have very strange dreams, but some pretty terrifying nightmares too. I actually have a collection of writings about my recurring dreams over the years that I thought to publish one day…. dreams for another time, I suppose. Anyway, the thought of being able to realize that I’m dreaming and exert some measure of control over the scenes playing out in my mind is just – wow. That would be phenomenal.

I’ve had dreams where I realize that I’m dreaming, but once that thought is fully formed in my mind, I wake up and the experience is over. But not last night….

I began dreaming shortly after falling asleep (I think). I was home in the dream, and Sandy was running around doing dog things. She barked once or twice, and I look over and see this spider, and feel an immediate sense of horror. I’m not a fan of spiders by any means, but as long as they are away from me or the dogs, I generally don’t care much. This one was different. I could almost feel evil emanating from it, or malintent. I don’t know how to explain it.

Either way, the spider was shaped in such a way that its legs spread in front and behind it, and you could overlay a perfect figure 8 on top of it with the center of its body being where the figure 8 crosses itself. It wasn’t like any spider I’ve ever seen, and yes, I have since done an internet search and it looked like an elongated version of a St. Andrew’s Cross spider, but with a smaller abdomen, and thicker legs with a little more distance between the legs in each pair. It was probably 3 or 4 inches long, maybe? The odd thing was that its body was weird… it almost looked like it had two abdomens, one at the top and one at the bottom, no head or anything.

In the dream, I thought, I hope the spider leaves the dogs alone; we don’t have benadryl handy and I don’t want to have to rush anyone to the vet for a spider bite. Right then, the spider jumped onto Sandy, and somehow I knew that it intended to bite her. It was then that I realized I was dreaming. The spider was crawling up to her neck, and I was trying to get to her to knock the spider off and kill it, but suddenly my legs were sinking into the floor. I could barely move. Time felt like it slowed down and I was watching things in slow motion. I could feel my heart rate and sense of fear increasing, and I just said to myself, “it’s ok, this is just a dream, Sandy’s not actually in danger, I just need to get to her and kill the spider. I wish I could just float instead of being trapped in the floor.” And voila, I was floating! I imagined a rope, and then used that to pull myself closer to Sandy. As soon as I touched Sandy and went to knock the spider to the floor, I woke up.

What an intense freaking experience!! I knew I was dreaming, I held on to that knowledge and was able to influence the events of the dream with my thoughts!

I need to research this a bit and see if there are ways to induce lucid dreaming, because I absolutely loved that feeling and am so curious as to what kinds of things I could co-create with my subconscious!