Lucid Dreams: Rant And Rave

I wont link any of the sites, you can google "sleep paralysis" or "lucid dreaming" etc if you want to find the ones I'm talking about, but why, oh why, oh why? There are "support groups" out there for people who suffer this condition! These are, I assume, perfectly normal, reasonable, intelligent people who experience lucid dreams and their related phenomena, yet somehow think this is a problem that must be solved. Welcome to the dark ages... if we don't understand it, it must be evil and abolished!

Their message forums are repleat with youngsters, still children or young teenagers trying to comprehend what is happening to them when they go to bed at night. Their families think them strange for not sharing (or more accurately perhaps, not remembering...) their experiences and, well, as if the between of childhood and adulthood is not confusing enough as it is!

During the Easter break from work today I had the opportunity for some recreational sleep, and recreational sleep permits recreational dreaming. The 'presence' that grabs your ankles and tries to drag you off the bed in sleep paralysis visited. It lay upon me, pressing me to the mattress, trying to oppress me with its weight. We grappled, it clawed at me, as for me it so often does. I applied 'Aikido' - "the compliant way"... I know I am dreaming, who are you and what are you trying to achieve? What harm can come to me, this is a dream! The entity had no answer but to cower foetally - "I don't know why I'm here".

It is a creation of my own imagination, demonstrably perhaps an effect of a particular part of the brain receiving stimulation - but still a dream, not real. The lucid dream and it's associated phenomena are tackled with the intellect and not medieval superstition. To know the boundaries in the betweens, to recognise their transitions, to embrace them.

My beautiful niece Lucy, 6 years old, has reported to her mother, my sister, that she can do whatever she chooses in her dreams. My sister is deeply experienced in the practice of dream control and so I am certain that my niece will have an ideal guide through her nocturnal adventures. But where does one turn when their family has shunned this experience for fear of phantoms?