Thread: breaking things while lucid

so i just had my 5th lucid dream. to be honest i have kinda been slackin on the whole dream world and not really thinkin about it much, but this morning i just seemed to get lucky. i was having a pretty vivid dream that i was walking through the grocery store shopping and i saw a display with some bottles of vodka. i thought, "wait a sec, they don't sell liquor in grocery stores here.." and bam. lucid time.

so a little bit of background info: i work at a liquor store. it's actually the largest liquor store in our state so it's a pretty big store. i'd say its about the size of a pretty large dollar general. in my state you can ONLY sell liquor and wine in a "liquor store" so its pretty much a big store FULL of nothing but glass bottles. i've always thought it would be so much fun to be lucid in my store and just go wild and start throwing and breaking all the bottles. in my dream i was in walmart and there just happened to be a bunch of liquor bottles so i figured it would work just fine.

when i first became lucid the first bottle i picked up and dropped and it shattered just fine. AWESOME. time to get wild. the second bottle i picked up and chucked it down the isle. this was the first time i've actually seen how physics works a little different in dreams because it kinda floated further than it normally would've. it hit the ground and shattered. after that though, the 3rd bottle i threw as hard as i could and it just hit the ground and bounced off. i did this a few more times and the glass bottles kept bouncing. i couldn't seem to get them to break for some reason. no fun. lol

anyone else ever had trouble breaking things (especially glass) in their dreams? after i woke up i was thinking about how complicated it looks and sounds when we accidentally break a bottle up at our store. there's hundreds of pieces of glass that fly everywhere and then the liquid from the bottle splashing. was it just hard for my brain to imagine this or is it just my lack of dream control? insight anyone?

I think, that at some point you tought of the bottle don't breaking. For example, you could have imagine that that was real and breaking the bottles would be a mess or bad, or something like this.
Go to youtube, and look at some slow-motions of glass breaking. Could help you in your next dream, with more details.

Originally Posted by findmucked

anyone else ever had trouble breaking things (especially glass) in their dreams? after i woke up i was thinking about how complicated it looks and sounds when we accidentally break a bottle up at our store. there's hundreds of pieces of glass that fly everywhere and then the liquid from the bottle splashing. was it just hard for my brain to imagine this or is it just my lack of dream control? insight anyone?

I just knife glass to break it, a la MW2. Archetypal control is the way to go, IMO.

I second what Brunor2 mentioned, you may have had some ambivalence toward the glass breaking due to the nature of it, subconsciously, i.e., 'breaking glass=bad do not want!', even if only a hairsworth of you felt this way, I think the doubt/disbelief may have altered your other tries. The subconscious is so open to suggestion, and receptive to so many of the underlying thoughts/feelings you're having, that uncertainty was probably communicated that way. In a recent lucid I was going to smash through a glass window with my fist, and the opposite happened; the first time my fist just bounced back off of it and the glass refused to break, like safety glass! I think this was the manifestation of me being paranoid that it wouldn't work, or that it would hurt, or that I didn't really have control. When I went for it harder the second time, ('this is a dream, damnit, do what I tell you!') SMASH, no problem!

I once had a temper tantrum in a lucid dream because dreams do not follow reality. One thing I did was try to break a tv screen with a baseball bat, but I really had to get mad about the lack of realism in order to do it. A little further on in the dream it was demonstrated how real things could appear to be.

The lack of realism is deliberate.

In short, you had the idea in your mind that the bottles would not break properly so they did not.

As you said, the first one smashed perfectly, and the subsequent ones were less and less realistic. Each time you smashed a bottle and it did not work properly, it instilled more doubt into your mind until they would just bounce off the wall harmlessly.

Dreams follow your emotional expectations. Assume and know that the bottles will smash realistically and they will.


Oh, and on a side not: try smashing something, and then slowing down time so you an see the glass fly around in slow motion. Very cool effect