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hi lainons, first time posting here so bear with me. i suffer from ptsd- and as a result constant nightmares. anytime I sleep, it is a nightmare. I've been suggested to take Prazosin- but the idea of not dreaming at all sounds crazy to me. anybody here know how to lucid dreams? and do you have tips?

PTSD from combat or from some other traumatic event?

Its important to note that most lucid dreaming techniques involving increasing your dream recall ability as a first step so that you can more easily train your brain into becoming aware it is dreaming. This may make your situation significantly worse if you're already struggling with constant nightmares.

>>4140 other traumatic event(s) >>4141 yeah that makes sense, I could end up fuarrrking myself over by delving into this but I imagine if I make things worse I /could/ just get the script for prazosin

I also have non combat related PTSD. I Lucid Dream but not as an intentional thing, I did it a lot naturally as a kid and as a teen I went through a huge phase of intentionally lucid dreaming for a year or so. Nowadays I'm just pretty much vaguely aware of the fact that I'm dreaming whenever I am, which is nice in reducing some anxiety. The method I used to trigger lucid dreaming is looking at my hands constantly throughout the day. In my dreams, my hands are blurry and theres too many fingers so it's a dead giveaway, and once you get used to the habit of looking at your hands you do it naturally in your dreams. After that you're kinda just aware of dreaming, I don't really willfully change stuff but any stress melts off when you realize your dreaming. I never did any kind of dream recall or journaling but my recollection definitely got better when I was focusing on lucid dreaming. When I was really struggling and having nightmares right after The Big Trauma I kind of stopped lucid dreaming. My nightmares weren't flashbacks, but they were very stressful and scary and got better as I worked through my stuff. Becoming lucid in those dreams always meant waking up, rather than staying asleep like in normal dreams, so if you can get the hang of it it can be a bit of a ripcord to pull you out but it won't help your sleep quality much. The real way to ease up the nightmares is to work through it. I'm not a therapy guy and I didn't like going to the doctor so it probably took me longer than it needed, but a few years later I never have flashbacks and rarely have my everyday life impacted now. I kinda just thought about it obsessively until it lost all meaning (awful strat, don't do that.) and then I started poking at some underlying problems. Everyone's process is different, but the one constant seems to be it gets better the more you work on it. Good Luck bro!

>>4133 What kind of nightmares? I started practicing so-called compassion meditation for 30 minutes a day (https://mettarefuge.wordpress.com/basic-metta/), and I would include my nightmare entities in this meditation. Then at one point, when I got nightmares, instead of being terrified and running away, I would calmly walk towards whoever was terrorizing me, and hugging them or just sending compassionate vibes. The nightmares went quickly away after that. Not saying this is the catch-all cure for trauma, but it helped me.

>>4133 You have probably heard cbd a hundred times but try out hemp flower is possible. I recommend the Charlotte’s Sauce Hemp Strain. Its alot better than cbd oils and such.

Supressing dreams probably wouldnt help you unless just temporarily done till you go through exposure therapy and work up to it. I'm not sure lucid dreaming would be better though because lucid dreams can be more realistic and you don't always have full control. Instead maybe you're just better off having a more rigid sleep schedule so if you have to get up a certain time you can make sure you wake up in a sleep phase you arent dreaming in because you mainly just remember dreams when waking up during them not hours after.

>>4133 I don't (knowingly) have PTSD, but doing tension/trauma release exercises helped me get my dream quality to a higher plateau.