I have had 3 lucid dreams in the past year (and two last night, which is why i bring this up now) where once i go lucid, i decide to spend my time in the dream world indulging on foods that i have eliminated from my diet in the waking world. The first of these dreams i was in a Trader Joe's and whatever it is that clicks clicked and i realized i was dreaming. so the first thing i do is walk over to the pastries and just start gobbling up scones and muffins w/ butter and mascarpone. they were really quite delicious and i experienced no guilt.
last night i had dream where i was walking around the house i'm living at now, and i went lucid, so i decided to go downstairs and eat ice cream out of the freezer. now this is interesting, considering the previous dream: the ice cream looked and smelled delicious, but the taste was totally blah, not sweet, almost sour. i only had a couple spoonfuls before waking up very disappointed.
then i went back to sleep and started dreaming again. i was outside my house and went lucid, so i decided to fly down to the pizza shop down the road. however there were too many distractions, too many people walking around that i kept having to avoid in my flight (when i fly, i can only manage to stay up for so long before i come down and have to 'jump' up again) and i made it to right in front of the shop before i woke up.
i have had an intention for a while that if i find myself lucid, i will stop where i am in the dream and begin meditating. but i have yet to realize this intention, because i always get very excited as soon as i realize i'm lucid and my frequency is a very active one. this particular aspect of my dreaming is a different discussion, however, as i am more interested in what anyone thinks about eating in dreams, particularly eating foods that were once a comfort but are now being avoided, and what sort of effect it may have on my waking life to spend my dreaming life eating muffins and ice cream etc. and what's up with that ice cream being spoilt? no fun...
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Just had a lucid dream where, because of talking to y'all on this forum, I decided not to eat animal products that were offered me! This was a very interesting dream I thought-
When it starts, I am not lucid. I am on vacation with my mom+sister and we are checking out this cave. Somehow it's very well-lit at the bottom and there is like whole farm underground. I go back up quickly because I really just went down to use the bathroom. Upstairs, I wait around for my family to gather themselves before we can go. While waiting, I find some girls I went to college with who were sort of like peripheral friends and I hang out and wait with them. It's a little awkward but I don't mind. Once we get in the car, I am in the backseat and I sneakily start popping pills recreationally, oxycontin or something. [maybe because in waking life my mom just had surgery and she has been walking around drugged and popping percoset for some days] We go to some place in california, i don't know where, but I have been wanting to go there [and intending to move there in waking life]. i get out of the car and there is another girlfriend there and we start rollerblading down a hill. i start going super fast and it's really dangerous but i don't mind. i actually end up running into a fence and flipping over the fence into some old lady's garden. she is sitting in a lawn chair and just smiles at me. anyways i end up at a big pyramid. I walk to the top of the pyramid and there is a chinese guy there who is a good friend of mine. At this point my family is gone from the dream. This chinese friend turns out to be really rich, he owns the pyramid, which is a real historic pyramid, and he has it set up so that you can sit on the sides and look down at an opera going on below. His father gets into a sort of feud with another really wealthy man sitting a few rows down. They decide to put on some sort of gameshow for the guests, I guess to prove to each other how rich they each are. At this point, things start getting really interesting.
Attendants start passing out ping pong balls with numbers on them. all the instructions to the game were given in chinese, so i don't understand at all. so when i get a ping pong ball, i just pass it down to my neighbor, another girl (so many girls in this dream!) my age with dark skin and nappy hair. she takes it, and when i pass her another, she looks at me funny, shrugs and take it too. i begin to understand that i am meant to hold on to those. so i get one last ping pong ball, after giving my first two to my neighbor. they spin a wheel and... my ping pong ball number comes up. I win $30,000! I am pretty psyched, and feel very happy that I gave away my first two ping pong balls. I take the money and go outside of the theatre. I am in Santa barbara [where I specifically intend to move to in waking life]. i am just walking around outside, at a yacht club, just looking into the sky, feeling the breeze, feeling so happy. I realize that this is a dream.
Now I am lucid. I walk to a big lawn where there are old guys with no shirts, among other people just recreating. the guys are in good shape and approachable. one starts telling me about who lives in which yacht, who lives in which cottage on the beach, etc. but i interrupt him to ask 'am i dreaming?' and he says 'yes.' by then there is a crowd of 4 or 5 35-60 y/o shirtless men around me, all in pretty good shape, all caucasian, some with white hair and some still with their youthful brown hair [perhaps because I am reading this book in waking life, 'younger next year: a guide to living like 50 until you're 80 and beyond' which describes all types of men in their mid-years]. They are all chattering to me, so much that i can't understand what any of them are saying. I say loudly, to get attention, "excuse me! could any of you tell me something?" i ask because i want them to teach me something, because it is a lucid dream and i'm interested what these men have to say to me. the original old man responds, he says "no... just pose, and compose." I ponder that for a second, then jokingly begin doing like fitness model poses. They are amused by that and actually one of the younger ones takes out a camera and starts snapping photos. By now the whole lawn of people at the yacht club/public beach area are all just watching me get my pictures taken. He just keeps snapping photos, so I keep posing. Since the guy mentioned 'compose' I pretend to conduct an orchestra with my hands [worth noting that i have conducted bands in school and my mom went to music school in waking life]. i turn around so he can take a picture of my back but he's not interested in that. NOW (and this is the whole reason i am posting this dream at all on here) the original old guy asks "would you like to eat some meat?" as in, would you like to get your picture taken eating meat. I consider it for a second, thinking that it might be an interesting dream experience, and something that I never get to do in waking life, but then I think back about what has been said on this forum about how in lucid dreams, decisions you make reflect on what is going on in waking life, and i decide no, I would rather not eat meat.
at this point in the dream, i really, really have to poop. i think to myself that it is probably because my physical body has to poop, but i decide that since i am having so much fun in the dream, i will try to just find a toilet in the dream world before i wake up. so i go toilet hunting. eventually i find a public restroom in a movie theatre. when i'm in there, a bully comes in and beats me up and takes my money. somehow i get the last laugh by destroying the money he takes, but it's unclear how.
the dream is over... i don't have to poop at all :)
Wow Dylan! That's an amazing dream! It reads like a modern parable. How interesting. It sounds like you made some great choices in the dream...asking the men if they had something to say, refusing the meat, even toilet hunting...it seems as if everything unfolded in a very intelligent, predetermined way. Do you see that way as well?
Thanks so much for sharing!
intelligent and predetermined... it seems karmic, but it is unclear from whence the karma originates. that's how i feel about all the incredible things happening in my life. it doesn't seem fair how well everything turns out
That's a good point Harriet...maybe it is something more when you're lucid.
I don't think it matters when it's a regular dream. Actually I do think most dreams affect us in our real life but not in ways directly related to how we perceive the dream necessarily. But when you're lucid what you choose to do, can tell you a lot about yourself and where you are.
Thank you for the input! Very valuable. I think I did learn about ice cream through this dream, which means the dream was truly a gift, a lesson that i learned without having to face any consequences. thank you dream world awareness!
and you know, i have been getting more and more signals lately i am not eating enough. even 2500+ calories is not enough for this body's metabolism! well it just means even more juicy goodness for me then :) i'll be interested to see if my dreams change as i go to 3500+ calories a day, which i am more and more intending to do.
i have heard of a lot of people getting 'food nightmares' (both from raw vegans as well as more 'weight watchers' SAD dieter types) where the person dreams about eating a forbidden food and they wake up and are genuinely afraid that they had just eaten that food, but then they realize that it was just a dream, and thus it's all ok. I have had similar experiences but it's not scary like that when i lucid dream, because i am totally aware of my decision as it happens.
i value my body too highly to eat a lot of foods that will cause it excessive damage, but i can't forget the narcotic pleasure associated with some of the things i was raised on, pizza, pastries, ice cream etc. For some reason i feel the need to 'get high' on these forbidden foods and lucid dreaming presents an opportunity to do so without suffering the physical consequences. but perhaps it's even not a great idea to indulge in these things while dreaming?
i have a question, and i think it may be answered already, but i'd like to ask more directly: should i be vegan in waking life AND in my lucid dreams? i'm open to that, but it would be a really new and unexpected level of consciousness to be sure.
Hey...here's an interesting thing. I just had a few food dreams too and I realize how different they are than my dreams in the past. For the past ohhh 2 years, I'd been having a lot of food court dreams, where I had to find something vegan and at the very last minute I'd finally find something I could eat.
It'd take a serious decision and a constant, "should I just get something" and then I'd finally be sooo happy when i figured out something vegan at the restaurants. This was huge to me because it did make me feel like I was finally a vegan in the dreamworld. I would say it was definitely an "unexpected level of consciousness", but I don't think it should be forced.
Now this past week or so, I've been helping other people to stay vegan in the dream! I'd be in a school lunch room and have all these crazy foods donuts and fish and who knows what else and I'd easily pick the veg dish, but a friend with me would be almost picking the other foods, and I'd help. So it feels like I've finally become a vegan advocate in the dreamworld!
So while I think it's not that big of a deal to eat something non-vegan in the dreamtime, it is nice when your dreams take into account your beliefs and in some ways I think maybe it does hardwire your spirit body. So even if I did eat something non-vegan it would only happen at a ceremony and I would know that I was still vegan and that eating "it" was doing no harm.
Because this was "icecream" rather than a random piece of undefined meat made by an elder(or something like that) it seems there could've been an emotional connection to your past with this one. Time in dreams is obviously very different, and so when we dream about someone we were once in a relationship with, it may not take into account the fact that we can't stand to think about that person now, just the same as food. But it does seem to take into account these things once we work them out better in our essential body...
So sometimes facing these things we don't want, are the dreams way of helping us to cleanse them out of our essential body. I'm so glad you experienced this gift-dream! :)
I think eating in dreams is very different than in real life. We eat in dreams for spiritual sustenance or spiritual distraction...unless it's totally relevant to the ongoing nature of a dream already in progress. What we're eating doesn't matter, unless we make it matter. I find that food in dreams is often a psychological thing and the only thing I really feel the dream can teach us about eating in dreams is that we can't control everything and we can't judge everything the way we think we should. The dream world is very different and you will do things you wouldn't normally do in the dream, just because it is a sort of initiation into deeper levels of dreaming. When you let go, really experience, attach no projections, you often see how the dream is testing you to actually relax and accept...it's not the same as real life. There should be no guilt for anything you experience in a dream.
That said...I definitely remember having dreams like that in my early vegan days. My additional thoughts would be to just address in the dream, that eating these things are a part of your being who you are today, and that you can never forget where you came from and also that maybe you're hungry! ;)
my speculation is that perhaps because you experienced the ice cream being sour, it shows that somewhere in your consciousness you desire it but realize it has a negative effect on you, or perhaps that somewhere unconsciously you would like to have some or are at least curious enough that you would sorta wanna try but if you did the dream is showing you that you would have a negative (or sour) reaction physiologically because you are more sensitive now. but what do i know...
i occasionally eat meat in my dreams, don't exactly know why. i've had cravings for it before, but it's been a couple months. but when i do eat it, i feel somewhat disappointed in myself for doing so because i consider myself to be a vegan.
i seriously love dreaming though. i partly love sleeping for so long just because of the fact that i spend more time dreaming that way. it becomes like a real hobby or leisurely pastime.