drenched with sweat after LD?

[reconsarge1975]

Anyone else have this as a regular occurrence? Every time I awaken from a LD im drenched in sweat. Not a nightmare, or anything traumatic at all... These were actually quite pleasant. Anyone else?

I'm not sure I dare ask what you were doing in your lucid dream

When you dream (lucid or otherwise), your physical body still responds exactly as it would if the events in your dream were happening in physical reality. The only difference is that a chemical produced in your brain suppresses your motor functions, so that you don't actually get out of bed and start doing stuff (it doesn't suppress them completely though, which is why you will still sometimes toss and turn and kick out etc in your sleep).

If in real life you did something exciting, your adrenaline levels would increase, and this would increase your heart rate and respiration, etc, and heat your muscles by supply more blood to them, which in turn makes you sweat because your skin temperature increases. Exactly the same happens when something exciting happens in a dream.

Of course there is another possibility. If you happen to be a shaman, you can physically adjust your core temperature at will, and if you choose not to consciously adjust it, your core temp will increase as external energy flows into you.

[reconsarge1975]

That makes sense and also answers a few other potential questions in my head. I've noticed that if it's an especially tense dream and if I have already exerted myself physically but the situation requires more and lots of anger is involved, that at that moment I lose the ability to speak.. like the air and sound just isnt there when I push the words out.. When they get to that point, if I continue to do so I wake up in the same way. I'm in what you might call an "awakening" of sorts, and actually researching and spending time and thought energy into things that I used to just shrug off.

Yeah, pretty common for me to sweat too, and im not much of a sweater in real life. If you ever get struck in one, and have a weird patch of red skin in the area you get struck with a faint outline of a triangle when you awake, and you figure out why it happens let me know. That one still blows my mind, lol

Originally Posted by reconsarge1975

I've noticed that if it's an especially tense dream and if I have already exerted myself physically but the situation requires more and lots of anger is involved, that at that moment I lose the ability to speak.. like the air and sound just isnt there when I push the words out.. When they get to that point, if I continue to do so I wake up in the same way.

I can explain that bit, its not a spiritual thing that, its purely physiological. Here goes.

All the things that you can do in your dreams, you can because your mind is not limited by your flesh, and your body is effectively 'switched off'. So you can, for example, fly, because your mind is not listening to signals from your body that say you're actually laid in the bed. But, the brain produces a chemical to reduce your motor functions while you're asleep, so that your dream doesn't leak out into the waking world.

When things get intense in a dream, your brain will try to overcome the paralysis chemical that it produces. The increase in adrenaline will make your brain more sensitive to what the actual body is doing (this is a survival thing, and one of the points of adrenaline, if you're under attack or in a fight, your brain needs to know everything about what your body is doing). So in your dream you try to shout, only now your brain is accepting lots of feedback from your body, and that feedback is saying that the words are not coming out (because of the chemical I mentioned that deliberately suppresses motor functions while you sleep). At this point, as is normal, you will try harder and harder to overcome this paralysis, which in the physiological sense means your brain becomes more and more active in the areas control motor functions and will also become increasingly aware of what the body is (or is not) doing, which means you start to wake. But, as you start the transition from asleep to awake, there will be a brief time when your dream becomes super intense. The more you try in vain to shout, the further into the waking process you will go. As you progress further in the waking sequence, your brain will become more aware of input from the body, which will translate into your dream, making you more aware of the paralysis in your dream, making you more frustrated/angry/frightened, making you try harder, pushing you further along into the waking sequence.

Incidentally, this is also why people are more likely to remember only the last bit of their dream (the bit that happens during the transition from asleep to awake), and its also why some people shout out just as they wake. The last bit of the wake up sequence is for the brain to counter the effects of the paralysis chemical that stops you acting out your dream.