4. Similarly, I frequently hear about dreams that are scary or disorienting, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard of someone recalling having experienced severe pain from a dream, even when they remember dreaming that they were being physically damaged.
In my childhood I used to have a reoccuring nightmare about a shapeshifting monster that killed me in a really unpleasant way. The best way I can describe this feeling is as being pushed through something very narrow, like a syringe needle. I used to describe this as severe pain and I did my best to evade it. This actually lead me to reinventing all kind of lucid dreaming practises, starting from learning how to voluntary wake up, so that I didn’t experience being killed by the monster.
What is interesting, that on a reflection, this feeling of “being pushed through a syringe needle” is closer to claustrophobic fear than pain. It was based on my experience of discomfort due to been tightly squeezed, which wasn’t painfull de facto. It’s like my brain created a pain-resembling-substitute from fear.
In my childhood I used to have a reoccuring nightmare about a shapeshifting monster that killed me in a really unpleasant way. The best way I can describe this feeling is as being pushed through something very narrow, like a syringe needle. I used to describe this as severe pain and I did my best to evade it. This actually lead me to reinventing all kind of lucid dreaming practises, starting from learning how to voluntary wake up, so that I didn’t experience being killed by the monster.
What is interesting, that on a reflection, this feeling of “being pushed through a syringe needle” is closer to claustrophobic fear than pain. It was based on my experience of discomfort due to been tightly squeezed, which wasn’t painfull de facto. It’s like my brain created a pain-resembling-substitute from fear.