I will lucid dream tonight. Mark my words.

I will lucid dream tonight with you. I will fly in the air and hug a dinosaur. That is my goal.

@ Chris - Yes people can die of sleep deprivation. There's actually a case of an EXTREMELY rare late-onset genetic disorder that kills people by preventing sleep. It's in about two families in the Western World, the more famous one in Italy. I can't remember the name of the disease but it comes on later in life (late 40s early 50s) so even carriers can reproduce. I think they can achieve some sort of sleep, but not full sleep, because it takes them about 6 months to die from onset of symptoms, and I can't imagine someone surviving that long on literally no sleep.

@ kestas - Same here. I can count on my hands the number of dreams I remember from the last few years.

"While no human being is known to have died from staying awake, animal research strongly suggests it could happen."

source: http://www.slate.com/id/2218092

I didn't hallucinate (or if I did, I didn't realise!), but by the end couldn't keep maintaining focus, so I started listening to the radio instead.

@LJ TYLER DURDEN - I saw a documentary about this and I believe the disease is called "Fatal Familial Insomnia".

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32264.The_Family_That_Couldn_t_Sleep_A_Medical_Mystery

I know I had a lucid dream last night. I think I had awoke myself in the middle of the night (several times) to write in my dream journal. Every time I woke up I came up with a jerk and reached for my dream journal. The only emotion I felt was excitement, but I couldn't remember any of my dreams. I know it was a lucid dream, now I just need to refine my practice of remembering dreams. ;)

What did you get Thucydides?

My sister's boyfriend says he had a lucid dream last night. I was there. He was trying to tell me it was a dream, but I didn't believe him. I got a good laugh out of it, had to share it.

Oh, and if you want to fly (which he did last night) you have to focus on the horizon, otherwise you'll fall down.

Hunter, I get recurring dreams, usually nightmares. That's actually a really common start to lucid dreaming for me, when I realize I've had the dream before. I don't get it anymore, but when I was younger, every time I had a fever, I would have the same nightmare and I would wake up sweating like crazy and my fever had broke. It was terrifying but after a while, I would want it to happen so my fever would break (if I can draw any causal link).

I can never remember it completely, but it usually starts off with me running and numbers appearing in the periphery of my vision, starting with 1, 2, 4, 8, 16... etc. They keep doubling. One time I woke up at this point and I ran to the computer to check the last number I could remember, and it was something like 2^28 (at the very least, I was convinced I got it right). While this is happening, I keep looking over my shoulder to see this man running violently fast at me. I can't describe it any other way but his limbs move so fast and so violently. At some other point in the dream I'm a little flower and this huge stone golem comes and steps on me. That's usually the point when I wake up.

Sometimes I get deja vu to the dream. I remember when I was younger, in gym class, we were doing high jump, and I was watching as this one girl ran to clear the bar, and she was running with such intensity and violence that I was overcome with the feeling of dread from my nightmare. I'll admit, my dream doesn't sound that scary, but often with dreams it's not even the content so much as it is the overriding emotion.

My most common nightmare is where I have really bad tunnel vision and there is a monster coming after me. Stick your arms out in front of you and make a circle with your thumbs and index fingers and that's about as much as I could see at a time. I would try and scan back and forth up and down to see the monster but I could never see the whole thing and just new I had to run. Of course I couldn't really tell where I was running because of my limited vision. I hate that dream. Going blind is a big fear of mine. (insert masturbation joke here.)

lol. I don't really get afraid of any nightmares any more except one. It is the end of the semester and I realize that I have completely forgotten about a class for the entire semester. I've had that dream at least 4 times, and it scares the shit out of me every time. :D

> animal research strongly suggests it could happen.
*shudder* this is the kind of animal research I think we can do without, how horrible

In my dreams, I often know the context or some other fact without actually having been told. And things get atributed with wierd emotions. Once I saw a clump of dirt being broken to pieces, and it was so unbearably tragic. No reason, just was. I was woken up by my mom who had heard me crying in bed and was wondering what the heck was wrong.
Nowadays, I sometimes dream about something (I can't remember most of them afterwards), and get used to it, think it is the norm of reality. Then when I wake up, I have an assortment of reactions upon finding out that the waking world is reality but still being used to the dream world, ranging from total relief (my teeth don't have huge holes rotting in them!), to suprise, to disapointment, or to bewilderment (THIS is reality!? But it's so bizzare!).
When I was a kid, I used to get this one type of dream periodically. It usually consisted of a long narrativwase of me wondering around and seeing things and places, but the primary charactaristic was this sort of feeling, a sort of impression, a sort of quality I can't really put into words that would pervade the dream.
But once, I had a dream that actually had a plot! It was like a real story and a logical sequence of events (barring some details about pokemon and the fact that it just ended in the middle of the storyline). Given its very logical (as far as dreams go) nature, it is probably the most strange of all my dreams.
Does anyone find this post remotely interesting? ;)

About 10 years ago I opened my eyes and couldnt move my arm; i just lay on my side trying to move it. I suppose the rest of my body was paralyzed but i was too fixated on my arm to notice. i definately remember being worried, but i dont think i paniced.

Id never heard of anything similar happeneing to other people; i had actually forgotten about it until i read this thread. its interesting to see it happens to lots of other people.

@baum: Yes, that is interesting. I dream weird too, like I usually only have half-control over my own actions in a dream, and if I try to force myself to talk, I wake up. My dreams are also very detailed, and I have never dreamt of myself in the third-person.

"I can never remember it completely, but it usually starts off with me running and numbers appearing in the periphery of my vision, starting with 1, 2, 4, 8, 16... etc. They keep doubling. One time I woke up at this point and I ran to the computer to check the last number I could remember, and it was something like 2^28 (at the very least, I was convinced I got it right)."

Do you sleep with a calculator? I have trouble computing 2^15--when I'm awake!

It's weird how the content and idea of dreams can be so uncorrelated. I also once had a dream with a plot, and the beautiful thing is that at the end of the dream, there was a twist that seemed to link disparate parts of the dream into one logical explanation. I woke up thinking that it would make an excellent movie or story and I started to write down everything I could. Only it turns out that the so-called twist didn't actually make much sense at all, though I was absolutely convinced it did while I was dreaming.

"*shudder* this is the kind of animal research I think we can do without, how horrible "

Not to go off topic, but nobody likes to do cruel animal research, but if anything "justifies" cruelty to animals it would be animal research. Humans don't need to hunt, we don't need furs, hell, we don't even need to eat meat, but we do, and it comes at the cost of tremendous animal suffering in many cases. Animal researchers are bound by extremely tight codes of conduct regarding the humane treatment of animals (a lot of anaesthetic is involved). The work we do with animals cannot be done without them, and in many cases save many, many, human lives. It represents perhaps the single necessary human use of animals. I would consider myself lucky if near the end of my life I was given the opportunity that many lab animals have, to have a professional aid me in a painless death, but that's another topic entirely.

Zaza, it's not too difficult. I've been bored enough in class that I just start doubling in my head until I get to 2^40, or tripling until I get to 3^25. I've done it with other bases as well, and two is by far the easiest. You hardly have to carry over. It becomes less than trivial if you do it on paper. It's more of a short term memory exercise than a mathematic one.

Sorry, I don't write my daydreams on paper.

I don't think this has happened to me