An Example of an Anxiety-Reducing Lucid Dream

Robert Waggoner, a worldwide expert in lucid dreaming and author of the bestseller, Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self, describes a case in which a woman approached him with a question. She asked if she could stop experiencing the anxiety from which she had been suffering for over a decade with the help of lucid dreams.

Robert describes how lucid dreams allow us access to “behind-the-dream awareness” or an additional level of awareness of the self. According to him, this state of consciousness can be accessed directly. Waggoner suggested that, after she manages to achieve lucidity in a dream, she can try to shout into the dream space (the “big awareness”), “I want to be free of anxiety for a week”. After the woman managed to do this, she reported that she woke up without any feelings of anxiety. She described how this experience reminded her of her childhood, the last time she remembered not feeling anxious. Robert explains that he only asked her to request a week of freedom from anxiety to verify the effectiveness of his proposal and after a week instructed her on how to proceed.

After this experience, the woman went to her regular psychiatrist which immediately asked what happened to her because he noticed the change. Her dosage of psychiatric pills was lowered and later stopped completely. (Waggoner R., 2014).