Can you change your personality in lucid dreams? (anxiety, therapy, woman)

[Markus86]

I am currently a rather reserved person, and I tend to get a bit stiff and uncomfortable when I talk to people in real life that I don't already know, and I also typically try to keep conversations as short as possible just to get out of them (unless I feel a particularly strong chemistry with the other person).
I was not at all like this during my teens though, so I sometimes have my moments where I get back my former outgoing self for a while.

The thing is, I am also interested in lucid dreaming, and I have had about 50 lucid dreams so far (most of them have only lasted for a couple minutes, but I have done some really fun stuff in them).
And I was wondering, shouldn't it be possible to use lucid dreams as a "training ground" to give yourself a major boost in talking to people?
My most vivid lucid dreams have felt just as vivid as waking life, and people in those dreams can sometimes be surprisingly convincing and interact with me a lot like real people (although they do of course say funny things sometimes, but basically they feel a lot like real-life conversations).
What do you think about this?

Of course, I am not gonna use only lucid dreams when I practise this stuff, I am simply thinking of them as a helpful extra alternative and a "starting point" where I can safely get used to the whole feeling of talking to other people.
I once heard of a woman who got over her fear of flying by boarding airplanes and staying on them after takeoff in her lucid dreams, and that was very interesting from a psychological point of view.

[Tracysherm]

I tend to prefer using lucid dreams to try stuff that actually not possible in the real world (flying, having sex with someone I would never have sex with in real life, asking the other people spiritual or meaning-of-life questions to maybe get answers from my own unconscious).


Yes, it can be effective to rehearse new skills in your imagination before trying them out in real life, as a way of reducing your anxiety about it, and some pretty effective CBT based therapy interventions do involve this. But to me it seems a waste of lucidity, which is often hard to achieve and sustain, to use it to practice something as ordinary as social skills.


I say that as a lucid dreamer and also as someone who helps people develop social skills as part of my professional work. I think that to effectively develop your social skills you need to exercise them with actual people. Use your lucid dreaming, when you achieve it, for self-exploration and stretching your mind.


I treasure my lucid dreaming so much, and I get angry with myself if I waste a lucid dream on something silly like gorging on some kind of delicious food, or stealing something. We can choose to do or not do things like that in real life. But some things can only be done in the dream world, and lucid dream time is so precious (at least to me)!

[Markus86]

Ah yes, I see your point.
My problem is that practising in real life right away has been kind of a rough ride so far, since it feels so darn awkward, haha.
I can carry on a conversation with someone for maybe 2-3 minutes if things go well, but then I will come to that annoying moment when I just cannot think of anything more to say, and sometimes I can also notice the other person start looking a bit insecure for a moment, and if I am unlucky enough then this might possibly even intimidate me from practising any more at all.

I wonder how long it usually takes to be able to hang out with people without feeling that constant stress or anxiety.
I mean, I did use to be very social and hang out with friends all the time when I was in junior high school between 1999-2002 (I was between 13-16 years old then, since that's the ages when you go to "junior high school" in Sweden), and it was totally effortless back then, so that should at least be an advantage.

I do sometimes notice that I kind of fall back into my old early-teen personality in the correct situations - like for example I can really light up and become super-charismatic when I make speeches in front of people and have a chat with some of my teachers and things like that, and I often notice really positive reactions from people then.
In fact, one of the security guards at my school stopped me in a corridor about 9 months ago because he thought I looked "gloomy" or something, and then a few days later he saw me again when I was in a much better mood, and he looked completely amazed, and said that it was like night and day.
So yeah, I suspect that my former social self might possibly "sneak up" on me sometimes, like it lies dormant in me somewhere.