Rant from a guy who used to post here 14 years ago

Hey all! I'm in a bit of a deep mood and feel like I need to get something written down, so I'm sorry if this is a bit rambly and personal. Me and Dreamviews go way back, so I feel comfortable spilling my guts around here.

I joined this forum years ago when I was young, around 13, and I'm 27 now. I was a studious, healthy, sociable kid. I'd heard about lucid dreaming from someone and I did some research, came across this site, and was obsessed. I managed to become lucid quite a few times, kept detailed dream journals across another account (I think this one got banned until I was 18 XD), and mainly had success with WBTB and DILDs. Something about lucid dreaming felt so pure, inspiring, and profound - I really wanted to dedicate myself more to mastering it, but I was a child at school and didn't really have the confidence to experiment with sleep patterns much.

As I got older I continued to practice lucid dreaming off and on, and when I joined college I met people who smoked weed and quickly became a stoner. This led to some positives such as an interest in meditation, astral projection, and deeper investigation into lucid dreaming. It also led to me taking LSD as an unprepared 17 year old, and man did it shake up my reality for a few months. Ultimately though, I was still fascinated by this alternative world around me, feeling like things such as lucid dreaming were just too damn cool to be real.

After college, I began university, and I would end up loving the course, getting a first class honors, and even teaching on the course. However, I guess the student life started to mess up my routine pretty bad. I no longer lived with my parents and their routines, drinking and smoking weed had become normal, and my sleep schedule and diet became a mess. Over the three years I had many ups and downs, going through healthy periods and destructive periods. However, habits such as consuming junk food, smoking weed every day, and having terrible sleeping patterns continued unfortunately, until I found myself struggling with a complex Masters course. I was always such a chilled guy, but I was getting anxious a lot, not keeping myself healthy, becoming introverted, and consuming too much. Not only was I consuming too much junk food, drinks, cannabis and tobacco, but I was also starting to fall into deep online content holes, from Netflix and Youtube binges to unhealthily long porn binges.

Almost 15 years after finding this forum, I have found myself as a fairly successful musician and writer, yet with a feeling that the magic of life quickly disappeared. I am still a happy person and I'm not sure I would consider myself depressed, but the challenges of life have certainly put me in a more cautious, numb, and unaware state. I consume so much content, I eat fast food almost daily, and I sit on my ass all day smoking weed and wondering why nothing is changing. Financially I'm great, I have close friends and family, I still make music and do creative stuff, but I feel generally unaware in life. Days go by so fast, weeks and months flash before my eyes, and the same old bad habits prevail.

I've found myself today feeling a bit down about all of this, and have considered starting a journey of improvement with minimizing content consumption. I am a creator, and I spend days upon days of my life consuming other peoples content, barely even digesting what I'm consuming. I think that minimizing the amount of time I spend staring at YouTube, TikTok, video games, porn, it will have a profound effect on my life. I will have so much time in my days to make music, create, learn, instead of mindless consuming things.

This also gave me the idea of getting back into lucid dreaming. The spiritual side of life is something that I truly feel I have drifted away from - I honestly think its through the accumulation of societal constructs, negative habits, and growing skepticism. However, it's still something that I very much believe in and get excited about, and I don't think it can ever be too late. I think I will need to start eating properly, doing exercise, getting proper sleep, and maintaining some sort of a schedule. However with that, I think things such as meditation and lucid dreaming will come back into my world, and I'm really excited at the thought of that.

So here I am, 14 years later, rambling to you on Dreamviews. I feel like I need to start a new chapter right now, and I'm going to try to base my online self on Dreamviews. I'll start up a dream journal again, try to get a normal sleeping pattern going, and check-in on here whenever I'm feeling something along this journey.

Thanks for reading!

Good luck to you. I hope you are able to do the things you suggest. I think they would be healthy improvements for anyone. And I feel you. I used to play video games for 10+ hours a day. Every day. It's just a different kind of coping strategy I guess, but it's all the same. I don't do that anymore.

Welcome to Dreamviews. :)

There's lots of advice that itches me to share with you, but it sounds like you understand your personal issues very well, so most of what I have to share, you most likely already know. So let me just say: don't understimate the power of long-held habits; they put up a good fight. But if you understand the path you will take, then your bad habits will be overcome.

Oh, maybe just one thing: get outside, into nature! Nature revives and refreshes like nobody's business. :)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Voldmer

Oh, maybe just one thing: get outside, into nature! Nature revives and refreshes like nobody's business. :)

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Amen Voldmer


Best of luck to you CazmoV

Hey I got into this about 13 years ago. I was active up until about 2018ish then fell of the lucid dreaming wagon and started to feel like getting back into it. Dawneye11, my old "dreaming buddy" seems to have dropped out of this form some years ago. If you want someone who might have some shared experiences or wants to chat, hit me up, and welcome back.

Edit: I forgot I had a link to my info on dream guides. Im going to need to massively update that.

Welcome back, good luck in straightening out. Here's a dump of my motivation notes, maybe something will resonate with you:

Motivation Quotes / Philosophy
* Life Isn’t Fair. No matter what life throws your way, no matter how unfair it may seem, refuse to play the victim. Refuse to be ruled by fear, pessimism, and negativity. Refuse to quit. Be a warrior and work through whatever life throws your way with courage, love, and positivity. And continually push forward. Because you are a survivor of the unfairness of life. You are stronger than you think. And you are capable of achieving far more than you believe. - Zero Dean, TheMinds.Journal
* We need a lot of small small successes that build our encouragement so we can get over the higher humps later on. So we can see progress. "Fly, Run, Walk." Walking is where the hard times come in.
* We need to change "Frustration, Indecision, and Failure" into "Purpose, Confidence, and Endurance."
* There is not always instant gratification in the walk: sometime's there's some work to be done. -- Shawn Creek
* You have to want it like you want to breath - Eric Thomas (#1)
* Don't cry to give up, cry to keep going -- Eric Thomas
* The most important thing is this: to be able, at any moment, to sacrifice what you are for what you will become - Eric Thomas (#2)
* Pain is temporary. It may last for a minute, for an hour, for a day, or even a year. But eventually it WILL subside. And something else will take its place. If I quit, however, it will last forever. - Eric Thomas (#3)
* At the end of pain is success
* "Will the real <your name> please stand up!"
* I gotta breathe it, eat it, sleep it

You can substitute "discomfort" for "pain." But change can be painful, especially when you're trying to claw your way out of long-established bad habits.