A couple random thoughts:[br][br]1. Does anyone else ever have OCD in their sleep?  Seriously – since I was about 16 or 17 years old, I’ve been telling friends and parents all about how I have constant violent nightmares, but my brain seems to have worked out its own way of removing the fear factor, by making me extremely lucid and interfering with the dreams.  Example: I remember once I dreamt I was married to some mysterious man and, while it’s all recorded in volume 3 or 4 of my ever-increasing dream journal, I don’t remember all the details, but at the end he acted very strangely and I was walking away from him down a stairway into nothingness when I heard a shot ring out.  I ran back to him and discovered he’d killed himself and the blood was dribbling out…and I just couldn’t take it, I was so distraught. [br][br]Then, the whole scene seemed to rewind, and we were back to the point where I was about to go down the stairs, and the scene happened all over again.  Then it rewound again, and it kept happening, but each time I seemed to be gaining power in the dream, managing to change things a bit, until finally I was able to stop myself from going down the stairs and instead tell him not to kill himself…but by this time, I was so actively involved in the dream, I realised I was actually awake and lying there thinking about some bizarre ‘fantasy’ rather than actually dreaming it anymore. [br][br]So surge forward 9 years, and I start thinking there might be more to it. Then yesterday I was reading this book on OCD and it mentioned one type of compulsion is when the image in your mind is so horrifying, you try to counteract it by replying the image over and over but changing it each time to remove anything negative or horrifying about it.  In reading the description, I thought, ‘That’s what I do in my dreams.’ I don’t think I’m just being paranoid or overly imaginative here: I really do believe this is a case of my OCD somehow even occurring in dreams – where I’m so freaked out by all the violent nightmares I’ve had over the years, and admittedly I suffered from somniphobia a long, long time because I was so scared of having any more nightmares (as well as I had a terror of dying in my sleep), and I think my brain decided to go ahead and develop ways to cope with the fear…by counteracting it, changing it compulsively. [br][br]I’ve also read in books and online, many times, that supposedly it’s impossible to experience lucid dreaming naturally, that you always have to practise techniques to make yourself do it.  Obviously this is total rubbish because I’ve been doing it nightly for almost a decade and I certainly never tried anything on purpose to enable me in this way.  This kind of freaks me out though…because it feels like…well isn’t the implication that my brain has gone and dealt with matters by itself, without any consultation from me??  I know the brain has a way of doing that, we see this in any coping methods, black-outs of bad memories, Dissociative Identity Disorder, things like that…but it’s truly spooky when it just happens to you, while you’re an adult and fully conscious of the changes…it’s like I have no say in what goes on in my own brain.  I don’t mean to sound totally strange here…does anyone relate in any way at all?  I’ve yet to come across anything like this in anything I’ve read. [br][br]

Actually, to add to this: I remember once I had the most useless 'boring' dreams ever, when I was about 17 – I first dreamt I was watching someone, like on TV (all my dreams are very film-esque) and they had a stack of plates on their head and they kept falling and smashing, but the stack never diminished, and it just kept going over and over again until it drove me so crazy, in my dream I interfered with it and changed the scene, and this time it went to a boy compulsively pulling leeches off his feet, and again they never seemed to diminish, and then it went to some other scene with some similar image repeating endlessly, until I finally thought, 'This is so boring, I need to make this stop,' and woke myself up, despite feeling exhausted, and refused to go back to sleep again because I'd been so bored and frustrated, I'd had to wake up. [br][br]2. Itchiness – I know when you scratch an itch you’re deadening the nerve…so does this mean itchiness is a nervous thing?  I really know nothing about it. It’s just that I itch all the time, uncontrollably, and in really awful places, like inside my kneecap or inside the middle of my foot, places you just can’t possibly scratch so it’s unbearable, and every time I try scratching the feeling won’t go away, and sometimes I’ve resorted to taking a brush and scrubbing to try to get rid of the itch…and really, it’s suggestible isn’t it?  Because in writing this, my whole body seems to have broken out in this full-scale itch fest!!  [br][br]My question, then, is: does anyone know if there’s any correlation between neurological disorders and excessive itchiness??  Random, maybe, I realise that, but I’ve wondered about this for a while.