Anyone’s OCD ever follow them into their dreams when they’re sleeping? I had this happen recently.

My OCD diagnosis is still very new, but now that I know what it is, it is clearly something I’ve had for as long as I can remember. Contamination/bugs and health have been a consistent theme since childhood, but religious/existential themes emerged during adolescence. Around that same time, there was also a good deal of trauma, and during middle school I started experiencing hallucinations. Tactile (like bugs crawling on me or biting me, an eyelash being stuck in my eye, but nothing was really there); visual (like moving shadows or things that would dart past in my periphery, and then I would just have intrusive thoughts of scary things around corners or under things); and auditory (an angry male voice that grumbles or yells indistinctly, or a high pitched noise like a microphone/speaker feedback but muffled and less sharp). Because of the religious denomination I grew up in, I initially assumed these were demons and tried to address it that way, but when I was 14 or 15, it occurred to me that those voices/sounds sounded like the way I felt, and the visual/tactile experiences happened during times of stress too — and so all of those experiences could just be seen as an expression of a fragmented part of myself. That acceptance didn’t make them go away — I still experience them now and I’m in my 30s — but it made those experiences less scary and more manageable. I also see now how these all pop up specifically when OCD obsessions are super triggered and when I’m super sleep deprived. Anyway! Since this diagnosis, and talking about the hallucinations at all, are new to me, I am wondering who else has had similar experiences. I don’t really know how much of the hallucination experience is OCD versus trauma, but it seems like this might all make sense under the “quasi-hallucination” label.

I want to know if this an ocd thing because I haven't read about it when I started searching of the disorder to make sure I had it (that before my diagnosis) Does your thoughts get worsened when you are falling sleep or are half awake half sleep? I noticed mines would get intensified when I'm trying very hard to stay awake or when I'm close to falling asleep

I got interested in lucid dreaming several decades ago. I'd often had lucid dreams going back to childhood, long before I even knew the term, but it was in my early 20s that I learned about it as something some people actively pursued as a hobby, with a range of techniques to help make themselves aware of their dreaming while they were dreaming. Among those techniques is to look at a piece of writing, look away, then look back at it. As writing rarely remains stable in dreams, the writing will usually have changed if a person is dreaming, and if it stays the same, the person is probably awake. (The technique is usually described in terms of looking at a watch or clock, but it really can be used for any writing--in fact it's better if it's writing that normally wouldn't change, as clocks and watches do.) This is not the only method of reality-testing, but in my experience it's the one I've found easiest and most reliable. My full-time interest in lucid dreaming only lasted about 6 months. But thereafter I continued to use the looking-at-writing technique whenever the topic of lucid dreaming entered my mind. I began doing this practically everywhere, using whatever writing I found around me: books, food packages, devices, street signs, license plates, storefronts, and more. I even unwisely did it on occasion while driving. I did it so much it made my eyes sore and bloodshot. I even paused to do it while writing this post. Naturally, it looks strange if other people see me doing it, though it's something I try not to do around other people. My mom once saw me doing it, and she told me I had a tic. I don't think it's a tic, but it is a compulsion. My understanding of the difference is that compulsions are always a choice: I can choose to ignore the compulsion. But I guess the back-and-forth motion with my eyes and/or head may resemble a stereotypical tic to outside observers. I'm still unwilling to totally give up the habit. Part of the reason is that it still is effective at helping me become aware of my dream state while I'm dreaming, which is a positive when I'm having an unpleasant dream. But I definitely do it excessively, to a point that's probably unhealthy for my eyes, and it seems like a lot of effort for very little. I have diagnosed OCD as well as autism, but I'm not sure what particular subtype this would fall into--it's hardly the only compulsion I have, but it may be the most unusual one--as I've never heard of this happening to anyone else, not even other people who are interested in lucid dreaming. I guess it derives from a sense of anxiety connected to being uncertain about the reality around me, as well as a sense of loss of control when it comes to sleeping--which relates to my general difficulties in falling and staying asleep (which I'm currently being treated for). I also have chronic sleep paralysis going back to early childhood, and while this has provided me with yet another stepping stone to lucid dreaming, probably the fear of entering this state has further reinforced my sense of anxiety around sleeping and dreaming, and feeling a need to take control of it to the best of my ability. At least that's how I've been able to explain it. I'm open to other suggestions, or any advice others may have.