Anyone have any info on lucid dreaming disorders?
Hey guys, I've been lucid dreaming for as long as I can remember, and I can't NOT lucid dream now. This would be a great boon to me if every night wasn't a hellish nightmare.
To give some context, when I was very young ~6 I used to have some pretty heavy issues with hallucinations (AIWS) and accompanying sleep paralysis both in and out of nightmares; The content of the nightmares was super specific and I had them every night without fail for the next 3 years. Needless to say learnt to lucid dream pretty quick as soon as I got into these nightmares which helped me get over their content so I could spend my time playing Halo in my dreams (lame use of lucid dreaming😭).
However, over time while nightmares don't occur EVERY night, the content has gotten significantly more disturbing. Most recently I've been getting r***d by my father and other family members despite this never happening in real life, over and over again, getting false awakening loops I (can't?) (refuse to?) control, and feeling like I'm being injected with pure fear and adrenaline experiencing things I can't even fully describe.
Why am I always lucid? In every dream, I slowly become lucid because I consistently recognise this feeling of being drugged when I am in one, good or bad. Why do I say "refuse to control"? Well my original solution to those nightmares as a child to overcome my fear when lucid was to "spawn in" the scariest thing I could think of and kms with it, and for whatever reason, when I'm in this altered dream "drugged" state I choose to do this when in a nightmare without fail. I don't know why.
This would all be fine, but later in life I found out my AIWS was due to epilepsy caused by lack of sleep. I can somewhat handle being cognitively impaired to some extent 24/7 because I've adapted to a lack of sleep, but this diagnosis, the hallucinations, sleep paralysis, hellish nightmares have all combined to create this deep subconscious fear of sleep. The nightmares only get worse, and often I wake up every 1-2 hours after a nightmare after trying to fall asleep for 3. It's just too much, recently I even had 3 consecutive days of zero sleep, hallucinating that bugs were crawling on me constantly and being genuinely scared for my life considering my ironic epilepsy trigger, only reinforcing this loop of anxiety.
So, what could be causing this? Thanks for any help or reply it's appreciated when some of this is just me wanting to talk about my experience with sleep