Thread: How I Used Lucid Dreaming to Cure Anxiety

SuperOhm I very much appreciate this post you have presented as well as the wonderful feedback. I am currently going through social anxiety and some mild depression, some of which I attribute to my fear of social situations, and like others on here I am looking at lucid dream to balance/remove the anxiety I feel during my waking hours. Since I am still new to lucid dreaming but having mild to moderate anxiety sometimes I can't bring myself mentally to practice waking life preparation due to other obstructions happening in my mind. Do you have any tips about coping with anxiety and depression? JonnaB your idea of turning the negative thoughts into positive ones is something I am working on, and I think finding this resource is definitely helping me hurdle the problems I am facing. Would love feedback and thanks again for posting this topic.

Alright, from my first post, you already see the basics. If I can control my dreams because they happen inside my mind, then I can control my experiences because they also happen in my mind.

There's one more principle which goes a long way. It took me a while to realize it was sitting there right in front of me. It goes like this:
If I can use my lucid dreams to learn to overcome anxiety, and I can use the same principles applied to my waking life, then I can use my experiences in waking life to learn how to overcome anxiety. That is, massive changes begin to happen when we stop thinking of stressful situations as things to be avoided, and begin thinking of them as opportunities to learn how to overcome. Does a social situation sound like it could be scary? Awesome, then I'll learn something. Essentially, practice being lucid while awake.

Another thing I did, aside from all of this, was make the conscious decision to invalidate "I'm afraid" as an excuse for not doing something. That is, if I were asked if I wanted to do x, and my immediate answer was "no" then I would ask myself why I didn't want to do x. If the reason why, was that I was afraid, then that's an invalid reason. If I could find no valid reason to say no, then my answer would be, by default, yes. By doing all the decision making before hand, it made the cognitive workload quite a bit smaller. In turn, this made it easier to decide to do what would normally be a very stressful thing.


JoannaB, Doing mass healing in my lucid dreams does seem to have some positive effect on my mood. I think I may try to think of other randomly selfless acts, but this one seems to be doing pretty well. Perhaps if I meditated on loving-kindness, and created a conduit to that just as I have to the various elements, healing energy and venom. That could be interesting.

Oooh, neat. I'm going to be reading that article over next.

In Lucid Dreaming terms, I made "feeling afraid" a dream sign such that when I am afraid, I become lucid whether I'm awake or asleep. From a lucid perspective, I am able to overcome the fear which I arrived upon through autopilot.