Since I don't have a dream to share with you today, I thought I'd tell you one of the benefits of becoming lucid in a dream.
(Being aware that you are dreaming, and therefore be able to tweak the events in that dream by choice.)
CONQUERING NIGHTMARES:
Becoming lucid in a nightmare can be a great way to turn the nightmare into an "ordinary" dream, eliminating all your feelings of fear and desperation.
When I was younger I had a tendency to have nightmares about horror movies I watched. (Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Nightmare on Elm Street and Halloween are some of the movies I can remember having nightmares about.)
So did I ever tell you about that time I met the girl from The Grudge who came crawling towards me in the basement of my childhood home?
She was making that famous scratchy voice sound she does in the movie.
At that moment I reasoned to myself that she was plainly a fictional character from a movie, and I became lucid.
So what did I do?
I smacked her over the head and told her to "PISS OFF!"
Her scary horror-movie visage vanished, and all that was left was a harmless little girl with her sobbing face between her knees.
And since then I haven't had nightmares about the scary movies I've watched.
In Dr. Stephen LaBerges book Lucid Dreaming there's a section about coping with nightmares, and how to conquer, especially recurring, nightmares. Although he doesn't recommend becoming "violent" towards your nightmare character (as your own mental anger, can make your nightmare character bigger and stronger), it did work in my case. The best approach is to stop and study your monster. You can also ask simple questions to it, like: "Who are you? What are you doing here? Why are you chasing me?" and you will see that your nightmare is not so scary as it originally was, and instead of waking up with anxiety hanging over your bed and head for the rest of the day, you can wake up with a feeling of achievement and happiness!
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