Connection between Lucid Dreaming and Aspergers?

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I hardly ever have dreams. Once a month if I'm lucky. Otherwise it's just sleep->5 seconds worth of blackness->wake up 13 hours later.

In the few times I do dream, I've had everything from full blown out lucid dreams, to false awakenings, etc. I'd love to dream more but sleep seems to hate me.

I've had dreams where I was buying things and had to return them because I was "going to wake up".

Old thread, but an intriguing one.

On a nightly basis I have extremely vivid dreams and quite frequently lucid ones. Most of them are very unpleasant but I can turn the tables on an antagonist. For example, I get tired of running in terror from the ax murderer, turn around and chop off his head instead.

Those rare, precious few dreams that are actually wonderful... well, I do everything in my power not to wake up from them for as long as it's possible to hold out. I remember dreams for months, sometimes years.

This is not, however, conducive to restorative sleep. I always wake up exhausted and never feel truly rested. I also have sleep paralysis that lasts anywhere from 30 seconds to several minutes.

I have them occasionally. Fascinating things. I've rarely managed to control the dream though. Sometimes when the dream gets unpleasant I decide to bail out and wake myself up, but it's not that easy. I usually try to speak but find I can't. Apparently when we're dreaming our bodies paralyse themselves so we can't come to harm by acting out our dreams, and I reckon my inability to speak is because of that. So what I do is to focus on my breathing, which obviously isn't paralysed or we'd all suffocate, and take control of that (breathing has both involuntary and voluntary control), and every time I exhale I try to speak, and once I make a bit of sound, the noise wakes me up.

I've also had other strange things happen. When I've woken myself up I've sometimes experienced a brief but vivid visual hypnopompic hallucination, but only if I've kept my eyes closed. There are theories out there about how these happen but I think it's just that the mental apparatus that produces the visual dream itself simply takes a little while to shut down, and so when I wake up that suddenly then the "picture generator" is still running.

Rarely I've had a lucid dream where I thought I'd woken myself up but was only dreaming that I had, and the dreaming then continued without lucidity, which suggests that in those cases I didn't know I was dreaming, I just dreamed that I knew.

Anyway, I find it all great fun. Judging by the poll result and comparing it with the reported rarity of lucid dreams in the general population, it looks like we're getting them more often, though obviously it's not a rigorous scientific test.

I've never had a lucid dream in my life.

I am a lucid dreamer. It came naturally to me. I'm also diagnosed in the Spectrum.
This is the first time I ever hear there's a correlation between ASD and LD, anyway.
I'll have to check this.

Everything's a correlation to ASD, it seems.

But there was actually once a thread here saying lucid dreaming is very uncommon in ASDs.

You can't believe anything you read.

I have vivid dreams but by the definition used here most are not lucid dreams because I do not control the direction the dreams take. There is an interesting quality to these dreams because I have no control and I have no idea where the dreams will take me. It is like solving a mystery. When I was young, I had dreams all the time but now at 70, they are rare occurrences. But I did have a vivid dream last night:

I was an old man walking along the sidewalk in a large city carrying a tall fold up chair. Why was I carrying a chair? I do not know. But I had the feeling that I could use it if I had to step down like using a ladder. As I was walking along I passed a young women, an adolescent. She was holding a small cardboard box and had just removed the lid. I had the impression she had just lifted it from an expensive department store. In the box was a beautiful silver salt and pepper shaker. It had an intricate decorative design. I think the color was teal. She was trying to remove the shakers from the box but the shakers were held in place by a thin plastic attachment. A thought briefly passed through my mind that perhaps I should alert the authorities in the department store of the potential theft. But I was an old man and it would take a lot of effort to do this and by the time the stores security would get to that spot she would be long gone. So I kept on walking. I came to a large intersection. It wasn’t a 4 way stop but more like a 5 way stop, where multiple roads joined. But the intersection was below me. I went to where I thought a concrete stairway would allow me to get to the street level. But there were no stairs. Instead there was a tall stool. I thought maybe that was why I was carrying a tall fold up chair. Anyways I peered over the edge and decided that I could probably use the tall stool to get down to the street level without killing myself, so I slide down and made it. At the street level the traffic was fierce. There was a stop light but the light never went red. It was always on green. But the cars would stop as if it were a red light and then go as if it were a green light anyways. Needless to say, there were no pedestrian lights. Someone yelled at me but I didn’t hear what they had to say. I figured they were calling me an idiot for trying to pass through this busy intersection on foot. So after watching the traffic stop and then several minutes later go, I made a mad dash to reach the other side of the road. I am 70 years old and my mad dash is like that of a turtle. But I made it. I noticed a door on the other side that lead underground. So I opened the door and went inside. It was the entrance to a large underground shopping center. I thought, “I could kick myself, this was a much safer way to travel through the intersection, just to travel underground.” But then it hit me. I was no longer holding my fold up chair that I had been carrying. The individual that yelled at me was probably trying to tell me that I left my chair behind when I went down the tall stool. So I had to go back and retrieve my chair and that meant two more life threatening trips across the intersection. Sometimes when a florescent light dies, it makes a loud pop. So as I turned to leave the door from the underground, and I heard that type of pop and turned around and the underground pathway had taken on the appearance of a dark uninviting cave because the light had burned out.

And then I awoke. I check the time. It was 7:30 AM. I took my Fitbit watch and placed it next to my wife iPad to let the watch sync up. Most times when you have dreams by the time you wake up they have dissolved away and you cannot remember them. Maybe a bit or a piece of them but that is all. The vivid details of the dream are long gone. But there it was. I was in a short sliver of REM sleep that transitioned directly to the AWAKE state.

Anytime I've actually realized I was dreaming I got "Flushed" out of the dream.

I've had dreams that are vivid to a point that I wasn't able to comprehend weather they were real or not and that involved real life scenarios and events that'd happened in real life. They were like puzzles to put together in the waking hours. However i've never managed to fully take control over a dream.

The reason why I felt this was a vivid dream rather than a lucid dream is that
even though decisions were made in the dream, they were not my decisions. I would have done things differently. I was just a spectator along for the ride.

There might have been a Jimmy M. in a parallel universe, maybe an NT Jimmy M. and maybe he would have done this. But it was not me. I had no control of the dream. I was just a spectator.

I used to be an active Lucid Dreamer when I was in my twenty-somethings. Meaning, I used to practice it daily. That started because I have a lot of trouble sleeping anyway and lucid dreaming sometimes would happen spontaneously, so I went after books and one thing leads to another.

These days, I'm not practising but the LDs will still happen from time to time. If I want to consciously have a lucid dream though, all I have to do is to go in front of a mirror and say a handful of times "I will have a lucid dream tonight". If I don't want a lucid dream but I want to remember my dreams, I will say "I will remember my dreams by the time I wake up in the morning". That came after some practice, though.

There are many techniques but from what I can see, you already know a lot about that.

EDIT: I don't think there's a connection between AS and Lucid Dreaming, though.

There was once a thread here saying about most Aspies cannot lucid dream but NTs do.

Oh the contradictions hurt my head.