I always felt insane when I would dream I'm back in highschool. Usually at some point I realize it's a dream because I recall I already have a GED and have been to college before. But I've not had a dream like that in a very long time.
Actual nightmares are really rare for me (and if they occur, they are of the kind where I immediately after starting to sleep feel like I'm falling and wake straight up again).
But school has also been a bit, in a way, traumatic for me.
In retrospect I understand that a lot of what seemed terrible at that time to me wasn't actually, but I was extremely shy (hardly dared to talk to classmates up till after graduating highschool) Therefore I, on the one hand, was actually sometimes bullied and socially excluded, and on the other hand, if someone tried to be friendly to me, suspected they'd either were trying to make fun of me or would soon notice anything about me that they could make fun of. And that then led to me acting in a way that made it even more likely that some of them would, and that even the ones who didn't mean me any harm would leave me alone.
It's much better now - still get a burst of social anxiety now and then, but I can cope with it.
Nevertheless I guess I have quite a bit of processing all that to do still, which explains why it's among the more common dreams for me.
Of the dreams I recall that are not about sex, about half of them are spiritual (and then many of the sexual ones can be spiritual too) so I find it maybe a little more odd that you don't but maybe I just don't know you well enough lol.
But we are all different I just thought that LHP folks might be more prone to spiritual like dreams.
Yeah, I find it a tad strange, too, that I dream so rarely about spiritual matters, considering how much of my waking time I spend thinking on it.
Even about linguistics (as you may remember, that's my profession) I dream more often, but that's rare too.
Hm, perhaps it's because I typically tend to dream mostly about people I know in real life? And with people in real life I avoid talking about spiritual matters, and also linguistics isn't the most common topic (well, with my new job that's to be changing soon, though). Doesn't really explain some other things which I talk about with people in dreams that I don't normally talk about with people.
But overall I'd say that dream journals while nice IMO are not the key to lucid dreaming.
I agree. Still intending to keep it up, though. Most times I only recall some details anyways, so writing down more than 2 or perhaps 3 lines is very rare.
It simply will come down to self awareness. There are some tricks I know, simple shit like keep asking yourself if you are dreaming throughout the day a few times then keep asking yourself over and over as you go to bed.
I guess that's the method that should work best for me currently and I really should put more effort in that one if I actually want to get lucid.
Have started that method two or three times and then dropped it again because I somehow found better things to focus on.
Another method I heard of is setting an alarm to the middle of the night because then falling asleep again is said to make it easier to get a lucid dream.
But I already don't get enough sleep (or rather, I get quite enough and still feel tired in the morning), so no sense in also risking my currently pretty stable sleep rhythm and getting even less rest.
Another is to make habits of looking at clocks.
I don't remember having ever seen a clock in a dream, and there aren't that many around in real life either.
My dreamscapes are also constantly morphing as if I'm not in 3D space and spacetime becomes nonlinear. So sometimes I recognize that way too. I also recognize if I know the place I'm visiting in the dreamscape (I've even tried to map out some of it before). So if you find yourself dreaming of the same places and it seems different than the waking world see if you can map out the place. My dreamscape is based loosely off of a mirror world of the real world that's greatly exaggerated although I have extremely rarely went anwhere I've never been IRL.
If I remember enough details to describe the places, there most often wasn't much spatiality to them - I rarely actually walk in dreams, normally I'm just at one place and then at another, and only dimly aware of the surroundings.
If I was aware in the dreams that things like that are strange, then becoming lucid would be easy - they just don't seem strange while dreaming.
Sorry for ramblings sleep deprived but I hope this might of given you some ideas. really again IMO lucid dreaming is more about finding the right things to trigger your awareness and practicing while awake not just asleep. I'd do it more myself but I rarely have vivid enough dreams these days to really get into dreams like I used to (probably as I've been waking up a lot more than I used to.
In that case, good night and nice dreams!

And thanks for the tips.