So.... you want to lucid dream? Why? So that you can have more conscious time right? What do you think in your personal opinion dreaming is? What do you think about nightmares? Believe it or not there is bad things about lucid dreaming, AND BECAUSE there is bad parts about lucid dreaming, I want to stress them.  I don't want anybody reading this series to this assume lucid dreaming is this magical thing. (it kind of is)

    When you first start lucid dreaming (and this is going to be something that you experience), and just cause you are conscious, and you know you are dreaming, it doesn't necessarily mean you have control over your body or the things around you. This is the more common experience of lucid dreaming. Sometimes you can get stuck and I can be a fairy anxiety inducing or panic inducing experience. It can very easily turn it into a lucid nightmare and lucid nightmares are terrible. You could experience anything in it because you're dreaming. It can be so close to real life that any trauma you might actually face from something like that could actually carry over into the real world.  A big example, one of the worst things to experience on lucid dreaming, is actually dying in the dream. (And i dont think i have to tell you thats a terrible feeling!) You're conscious so you think it's real. You're hoping not, but you think it is.

(Photo proved by Pexels.com)

    Another thing that could happen is you could have a lucid dream right, and you're having a time of your life, but then being too excited actually causes you to wake up.  Well, actually any form of over-excitement can cause you to wake up, and for whatever reason, so can simply closing your eyes. This is why you probably wont die in a dream cause that would cause you to be very eccentric, and also require you to lose your eyes. 

(Sigh of relief provided by Giphy.com)

   it takes a lot of experience to get through a very exciting event in a lucid dream without waking up so if you think you're going to jump into lucid realistic sex.... if you're not ready for that, you're going to wake up before you're satisfied with the dream. It's going to happen every time. (Que the sexually frustrated rage.)

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    Another thing that can happen is, if you wake up from a lucid dream (like being very exciting or say it's a very scary event that wakes you up) you can actually wake up with sleep paralysis. You'll be conscious in bed but you won't be able to move. Thats even scarier right? Now you don't know if are you lucid without control and a dream, or are you awake and someone is by youre bed?

Lucid dreamers can become very iffy people, who because of all these things, these bad side effects right... People who ignorantly explorer lucid dreaming and who take medications for it. The-"I'm going to take this pill and I'm going to lucid dream every time I take this pill"-people. They get all weird because it's a very easy way to be to lose touch with reality. You end up with so many conflicting memories from two completely different worlds.

(You realizing your memories are made up, provided by Pexels.com)

    Lets say you have a lucid dream, and in that dream, you decide you're going to play your fav video-game with your best friend. Then in that lucid dream something important might have come up, (like your best friend admits they are in love with you or some weirdness). THEN a couple days later you remember it. You'll bring it up to them and they will have no idea what you're talking about because it's not real. it was a lucid dream that you had fabricated but because it was so close to something you might actually do in real life (Like playing videogames with your friends.) it's hard to tell the difference.

   Those are some of the bad things about lucid dreaming. Now, obviously there is some great things about lucid dreaming.  That's why people do it.  It's why people go after it and I think the best comparison honestly, to lucid dreaming how it works and how your mindset should be, is to think of it like you're about to take the heaviest dose of acid you could possibly imagine.

   (Actual footage of someone Lucid Dreaming. Provided by Giphy.com)

    if you're going to do that... if you're going to take a very very big dose of acid that you haven't taken before, you have to be ready. AT LEAST mentally. You have got to be mentally prepared and know that you are taking that shit and that your ass WILL be trippin. For this amount of time, whatever you see or experience probably isn't going to be real. You have to KNOW that. Once you have that down you can use this to your advantage to keep yourself from having a bad trip. It's very, the the same exact way, with lucid dreaming. You got to be ready to have that lucid dream. You don't want to become lucid randomly in the middle of the dream and set yourself off in a panic because you have no idea whats going on. Like I said you want to wake up be like "Oh. Im dreaming. Awesome I know what to do now. I know what to do here, let's have awesome, happy dream" and it's really cool.