# Lucid Dreaming > General Lucid Discussion >  >  Feeling pain in dreams

## Nexi

To start this off, I'd like to tell you a story. All my life I've naturally been a lucid dreamer. In about the second or third grade, I specifically remember this one dream.

 I had just became lucid. I was out on the playground when a big scorpion man comes out and starts attacking people! I'm standing beside my friends and I tell them something along the lines of "Hey, this is a dream. I can't get hurt by him." So I walk casually up to the big creature, trying to look brave. It hits me and pain is inflicted. I don't remember what happens after that.

So the question is, have you felt pain in dreams? Is it common for you?

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## Burke

Yes, pain can be perceived in dreams but it is entirely based on your expectations. Pain is all in the mind, a reaction to physical occurrences on nerve endings. In dreams since you have no true physical element it is entirely in your head, which means whatever you expect to happen will happen. Even if you aren't lucid, if you expect something to hurt, it will; If you don't expect it to hurt, it won't.

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## kevojy

I'm not sure if you could really feel a truly horrible pain in a dream, but it's pretty common to feel numbness or an odd (sometimes pretty unpleasant) tingling feeling. Often a lot of people say they can still feel the 'pain' long after waking up. I think I've only ever felt pain once in a dream, and this was years ago (nightmares are really rare now for some reason). I was shot right in my gut. It didn't hurt like I thought it would, just felt like there was a big numb hole carved out of me. It was weird.. When I woke up the area just felt numb and tingly, like I was expecting something to be missing. In hindsight I think it's pretty cool that my brain could make me actually feel all of that, but at the time it was mighty uncomfortable!

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## Sivason

I feel pain in some LDs. I have had a couple where the pain is still there for a minute or two after waking. In one LD some lame DC kept poking me with a tiny pocket knife and it really did hurt.

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## Puffin

I've felt pain in dreams before, yes. I once dreamed that I was getting ready for school and that I was very, very tired - so tired, in fact, that my body was sore all over. It was exactly like I'd be in real life. Other dreams involving pain are usually lucid nightmares; I've been stabbed, had things sewn into my neck, and blades dragged along me; these ones hurt like CRAZY. The pain was intense and very realistic. 

Since I daydream a lot, I can easily imagine tactile sensations and such, which is helpful in my LDs when I want to do something but very unhelpful when I'm pinned down and am being cut up or something. I haven't actually felt a knife being pressed into me or anything, but the sensations are so realistic. I have been cut by a few knives before, so I suppose my subconscious takes that, slows it down and amps up the pain level.

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## fOrceez

I feel pain in my dreams when I'm non-lucid. Usually when I'm lucid, I choose not to feel pain.. I mean.. who likes getting hurt? Heh.

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## Robot_Butler

I always think I can feel pain in dreams.  It hurts at the time.  Then, anytime I feel real pain in real life, I remember what an idiot I am.  Dream pain is just an annoyance.  Real life pain is absolutely unbearably horrible.

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## lily

I have felt very intense pain from my dreams before. One time I got stabbed in the eye and I woke up with that eye watering and it hurt so much I kept it closed for a bit. I was even scared it was really damaged but it was fine once the pain subsided there was of course nothing really wrong. And there have been other times I've been hit or stabbed where the pain was really intense. It wakes me up and usually takes awhile to go away so that's pretty annoying. Good thing is it doesn't really happen very often.

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## kevojy

I think what often happens (or could happen - this is just a theory), is that you experience a real physical pain. Say a sudden cramp, or in the case above, something flying into your eye. Your mind interprets the pain and weaves it into the dream somehow. I'm not saying that's always what's happening when you feel pain in your dream (and wake up with it). But it could happen I suppose. It'd be interesting to research..

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## Toozul

I feel pain in dreams very well actually, which isn't fun because if you have cardiac arrhytmia, it may carry in to the dream as pain, not as slight as it should be! (If it is painful, of course)

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## lily

I know I always do try and see if there is some external source for the pain, but there need not be. We are capable of experiencing the entire range of sensations. Like, I can remember eating some delicious dessert in a dream. I woke up with my pillow in my mouth.. most certainly the pillow was not delicious but in my dream the dessert was. It's the same as in the dream. I can't prove something didn't just fly into my eye, although I would have expected my eye to stay irritated longer if that had happened. Even if it did that doesn't quite explain the deep and realistic pain I felt as though someone really had shoved something sharp into my eye. In all of my dreams when I felt pain, I tended not to have a way to explain that pain from the outside world.. afterall if it is realistic enough then it's not very common for me to actually be under assault and getting stabbed and hit in my bed.

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## lily

> I feel pain in dreams very well actually, which isn't fun because if you have cardiac arrhytmia, it may carry in to the dream as pain, not as slight as it should be! (If it is painful, of course)



Could you explain what cardiac arrthymia is? I have never heard of that.

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## Robot_Butler

Next time you get stabbed in the eye, try to compare the pain to your dream.  For science!

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## melanieb

I used to feel pain in my dreams until I had a particularly bad dream in which I was shot through the chest at point blank range, which I felt in the most horrific of ways.

Since then, I don't really feel pain in dreams, and have even died again without concern, because I tell myself in my dreams that I'll be alright "because it's just a dream" or that I "have died before."

I still feel the need to pee in dreams. I might trade that for pain, considering some of the situations in which that manifests.

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## RacyBiscuit

I don't feel real pain in my dreams, but I do feel something when I am shot/stabbed/killed. It feels just like a pinch, and that is all that I feel. It usually goes away after a second or so.

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## hermine_hesse

I agree that the pain need not always have an external source.  I had a non-lucid dream recently where a very sharp object stabbed me through the bottom of my foot.  I had to take a deep breath and pull it out of my foot myself.  When I woke up, I could still feel the pain of where the object went in up through the inside of my foot.  This has happened to me in WR before and my mind reproduced the exact pain sensations.  There is nothing external that could have produced that.

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## silver2k

I broke a window by punching it, I did infact feel the pain on my hands.

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## saltyseedog

I've felt so much pain in so many dreams. I've even woke up still feeling the pain. You should do whatever you hate so you aren't afraid of it.

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## Robot_Butler

I have felt horrific pain during hypnagogia, sleep paralysis, and WILD transitions.  Sometimes my body is ripped, twisted, folded, and electrocuted.  The physical sensations can be really intense and painful.   I don't know if that counts as a dream.

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## WeirdoDreamer13

Only on about 2 separate occurrences (that I can remember, anyways) I've felt pain in my dreams. The first time, I was in this hospital having some kind of tests and one of them involved a needle in my back and I remember feeling it poking me and hurting pretty bad, and in the same dream a felt a pretty intense shock. The next one is actually pretty recent. I dreamed that I got shot, and it was the worst pain I'd ever felt in my life, I remember wondering in my dream when I was gonna die.

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## snoop

I've never experienced pain in a dream.  To give an extreme example of how little sense it makes not to be able to, in one dream some how my member got uh... sliced off.  I don't even remember how, but in the dream I was in my old high school's cafeteria.  If I couldn't even feel pain from that, I can't imagine feeling it in any other dreams (and as I said, I don't)

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## PaschaR

*Dreams about getting shot feels really weird,i wouldn't really call it pain,but i do feel it*

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## Ewan

I've never had a lucid dream but I've fealt "pain" in normal dreams before. It's not really pain. It's more like imagining pain in real life, not very intense or harming but enough feeling to know what type of pain it is.

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## The Cusp

Everything requires your attention to exist.  Especially pain.

You will only feel pain if you take the time to focus on your wounds or injuries.  In the majority of my dreams, I don't feel pain because I'm too focused on getting away from whatever is hurting me.  It's only when I stop to look at my wounds or otherwise become aware of them that I feel pain.  I've had flesh hanging off me in strips, and I didn't feel a thing because I was too busy trying to get away from the tigers who were mauling me.

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## snoop

The above does not hold true for me. The same dream I talked about before... where my tool somehow got sliced off, I looked down and not only saw it was sliced off but held the severed pen0r in my hands.  I still felt no pain, and then somehow I put the cut off end on top of the other cut off end and skin grew and manifested over the wound for a few seconds and then it was reattached like nothing even happened.  This dream was non-lucid, thankfully. <_<

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## Runeword

> The above does not hold true for me. The same dream I talked about before... where my tool somehow got sliced off, I looked down and not only saw it was sliced off but held the severed pen0r in my hands.  I still felt no pain, and then somehow I put the cut off end on top of the other cut off end and skin grew and manifested over the wound for a few seconds and then it was reattached like nothing even happened.  This dream was non-lucid, thankfully. <_<



omg snoop? haha.  i realize this is an old thread i am resurrecting but i was just about to make a post on the subject and this one had the most recent reply.  i was just trying to describe this to my wife today about how i will feel actual physical pain in lucid dreams sometimes. i'm never worried about it carrying over into waking life but i am surprised sometimes if i get a rare lucid nightmare and being attacked and that hey, that actually hurt when some claws sunk into me or a blade slashed me.  the mind is so powerful.

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## duke396

I hope we don't get in trouble for posting in an old thread, but I was thinking about this the other day and wondering if other people felt pain in dreams because I don't think I do.  When I fight hand to hand I usually don't feel anything but the contact (like touching or being touched by anything else in the dream world) even if it knocks me down.  I have felt the tingling sensation that some describe when there is a blade or gun involved, but "fatal" wounds usually cause me to wake up.  I can't think of a time I've been physically injured while lucid though.  I guess I pretty much assume I'm invincible in an LD which...makes it true?  Never put much thought into it.

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## Gattaca

^
Well I had a disturbing dream just this morning.
Some medics came and immobilized me.Then one of them gets a big needle and shoves it directly in the middle of my chest.It was horrible, I felt it going right in my thorax.I couldn't breath because it hurt me so much and I think I even held my breath IRL.I felt my insides punctured by it for horrible seconds.
I woke up shortly glad it was only a dream

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## Davidjcg1995

I have had dreams where I have been stabbed and it would be at different situations and I feel it going into me and it's like a sharp numbing pain, recently I had a dream of getting sliced under my arm then getting my back sliced open and feeling the same thing I am starting to not want to sleep because of the chance of having the dreams I have had this happen so many times I have lost count

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## SinisterDezz

As Mal from Inception would tell you, "Pain is in the mind." *Shoots Arthur in Foot*

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## sramsay12

I have had occasional superman moments of invincibility through sheer willpower, but I've also been tortured, and eaten alive a few times.. And it hurt. A lot.

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## Conscience

yes, I have felt pain in one of my dreams... but I never feel pain in deep sleep dreams (actually I don't feel anything unless it's vivid)
in the dream I had I was falling down a balcony and when I hit the ground I woke up and my whole body hurt for a few seconds

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## Gunpo

Ive fealt pain in dreams back when i was a kid. I was stabbed and shot and it fealt real, but i would always wake up shortly after and the pain would slowly fade

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## Shinice

For me, I have never experienced pain in dreams before (thank goodness), be it shot by gun, stabbed by whatever, falling regardless of height. Only a a numb feel in the area that's all.  ::D:  I'll get back up right after that as though nothing happened.

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