Some say that lucid dreams are not possible.  I for one was a believer in that theory for a long time.  The sheer thought of being able to control something that was so fake and unreal really did not click with me until a few years ago when I got my wisdom teeth out.  I got very strong painkillers that helped a lot with the pain, but they also had some odd side effects.

One of those effects was that they made you extremely drowsy.  I read this and thought to myself “okay, a lot of things make you drowsy, it can’t be that bad.”  I took the pain medication and had a nice rest the first time around, but the second time I took the medication, I realized something.  I had not actually woken up.  My brain was creating a simulation of what waking up would feel like and synthesizing those feelings.  It went so far as to wake me up in the dream and give me more medication.  I then found out that I could change things in my dream.  I could walk around, people could talk to me and I could carry on entire conversations with fake people.  It was a really weird feeling.

At first it did not occur to me that maybe my body was still back on the recliner that I was laying on when I fell asleep so I went back and checked.  Turns out it was still there, and this is where the dream got really weird.  As soon as I realized that, I remember thinking, man, this is really weird.  Right as that thought crossed my mind, it must have triggered something, because I woke up.  Whether that thought was enough to throw me out of my dream state and back into reality, or if the pain medication had simply worn off, I will never know.  But what happened to me I can only classify as a medical induced lucid dream.

It was odd to be able to control things that I knew did not exist, but at the same time it was really invigorating.  To this day I have not been able to have another dream like that one, which makes me wonder if it really happened at all or if it was just a dream about a lucid dream.

My best friend Alexa has an anxiety disorder. Always panicking, sweating, worrying, and never staying calm when need be. I found out she had an anxiety disorder a couple years ago when we were just hanging out at my house. Her mom was over as well and had to leave my house early. I looked at Alexa and she was nervous about her mom leaving her alone at MY house. Her best friend! She started to beg her mom not to leave, making excuses as to why she needs to stay, and stalling. I was so confused. Was she mad at me? I had no idea. She eventually left with her mom. This was the start of her anxiety disorder.
I asked my mom why she had left, and my mom had no inkling either. It was so unusual. Throughout the years I noticed that she would slowly never want to sleep over, never wanted to go out alone to the movies or the mall, and would never drive alone. She has a fear of being alone. Anxiety disorders are so common in America and its sad that my best friend suffers from one. She always needs to have an escape route of some sort, just in case she needs to leave where she is. For example, when she came to visit me here at Penn State, she would not stay in my dorm. She wanted to stay in a hotel room, where she can leave whenever she wanted, and didn’t have a fear of being trapped. It’s interesting how I have learned to deal with her anxiety disorders. I always need to make sure she feels safe and never has a reason to leave. Whenever she starts to fidget with her fingers I know she is nervous. I have found small quarks and motions she does when she is having an anxiety attack. Over the years, and with maturity, she has gotten much better. She even goes to college on her own now and is able to deal with her anxiety safely. Anxiety disorders are very difficult and it is hard to watch someone you love have one.

The term “social loafing” really stuck out to me when we learned about it in class. Social loafing is whenever an individual in a group to exerts less effort toward attaining a common goal than when tested individually. I experienced social loafing last semester whenever I was assigned a group project for a class with 3 other people. The project was not divided up among the group members, but rather something that we would all have to work together on. The project was to be done outside of class, so I gathered each group member’s contact information so that we could decide on a time to meet up and work on the project. Unfortunately, when it came time to do the project and I contacted all of my group members, only one member responded to me and was willing to meet up and work on the project. The one group member and I met up and ended up finishing the project without the help of the other two group members. When confronted about not helping with the project, the other group members insisted that they had a lot going on and did not have time. However, I also had exams that week and did not want to spend time on the project, but the one group member and I were stuck doing the project by ourselves because the other members knew we would pick up their slack. The two group members chose not to do the project because of social loafing. They knew that the project would get done without their help, so they put forth no contribution. It ended up not working out in their favor whenever the instructor gave us peer evaluations and we were able to say who did and did not contribute to the project. Social loafing is definitely a common thing.

I set four alarms each night before I go to sleep, two on my phone and 2 on my clock. My rationale is that I need to be prepared for the two worst case scenarios; failure of the device and failure to wake up. In case my phone dies, I have a backup device and in case my phone dies AND I sleep through the first alarm, that second alarm is sure to wake me up. One would think that my over-preparedness would be a comfort and allow me to rest easy, but I find myself waking up in the middle of the night and checking my alarms. Sometimes I go as far as to set all the alarms to the current time to make sure they work, reset them to the intended time, and put my phone down only to pick it up seconds later to make sure I changed the time back properly and that it matched the clock. This ritual developed after I failed to wake up on time for a test in high school. It has not happened since, and in my rational mind I know that it probably won’t again, but this does nothing to break my clock habit.

I also have an unfailing routine of jiggling the doorknob after locking due to quite an embarrassing childhood incident involving a bathroom with a betraying door. When confronted with the doorknob that unlocks with a twist, I choose to “hold it” no matter the circumstances because there is no way to assess the integrity of the lock!

My family members and roommates don’t understand my fears and have often labeled me as overly-cautious and anxious. When we discussed anxiety disorders in class, we learned that they include all disorders in which the most dominant symptom is excessive or unrealistic anxiety. Aside from isolated incidents, I do not have a habit of oversleeping or reoccurrences of the certain bathroom disaster I remain so terrified of. My almost ridiculous routines might be seen as excessive measures against unrealistic possibilities. Although my practices seem to fit into the definition of an anxiety disorder, it is important to remember that my slightly abnormal behavior does not become a disorder until it causes me distress, harm to myself or others, or harms my ability to function in everyday life. Everyone has similar quirks to mine in varying degrees in their lives. Apart from the inconvenience of managing four alarm clocks and the hatred radiating from my roommates every morning, my habits do not indicate that I have an anxiety disorder.

What is it like to just uncontrollably have urges, urges that are unrelenting and never ending? That is what Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is like. OCD is able to be identified as obsessive thoughts that create anxiety and compulsions such as number counting, the famous hand washing, and organizing things whichas rituals to help relieve the anxiety. There are two different types of OCD which are primarily obsessive and and normal OCD. Normal OCD is described like it was previously while primarily-O is mostly pure obsessive thoughts creating anxiety about doing something very unlike the person, even violent. OCD is also associated a lot with Tourette’s Syndrome, ADD, as well as Autism. Usually if you have one of these disorders, you will have one of the others. This is a disorder that I personally have myself and deal with as well as many other people.

A look into my life with OCD is interesting. Due to this class and researching more, i realized that i primarily have a case of Prime-O case of OCD. Before in my life i went through therapy in order to try to train myself not to let my obsessive thoughts have such a great effect on me. For me, I have a combination of Tourettes and OCD. These two feed off of each other. The anxiety that my OCD creates sets of my Tourettes and causes my tics to come out more. My Tourettes would not be as bad due to when concentrated, the tics subside. However, with the recurring thoughts also becoming an obsession and creating anxiety for me, it is hard to focus. I still do have compulsions but not many. My biggest compulsion is checking  doors to make sure they are locked. I also organize objects in certain patterns that I see fit. I also tend to place certain objects in certain places and constantly check to make sure they are in their right place. It is rough but the only way to stop this is trying to preoccupy yourself in some way.

It is astonishing that the simple presence of other people can influence someones behavior. In our society, if you go against the social norms you might be considered abnormal and being different is almost frowned upon; therefore, it makes sense that people would want to go with the flow rather than standing out and representing themselves as an individual especially in a psychological aspect. When in the presence of a group it is known that people will act in certain way: either having improved performance (social facilitation) or decreased performance (social impairment). The presence of others can increase arousal in our fight or flight system causing us to react to things in different ways depending on who may or may not be around.

In class we looked at the example where the young man, in a group setting, decided to go along with the group by saying the wrong answer rather than choosing to stand out even when he knew the answer was wrong. Also the more comedic example we looked at was with the people in the elevator where the same social influence occurred. Learning about social influence in psychology reminded me of the show “What Would You Do?” that almost tests ones ability to actually stand out and be different rather than going with the flow of society and staying quiet. Each episode of the show puts people in a situation where they might feel uncomfortable to test how they will react. Although the show does not specifically put the participant in a room with other people, they do test their reactions more efficiently in everyday life where they are surrounded by people in natural settings. Some of these particular situations include witnessing teens drink then prepare to get in the car and drive, hearing an insulting conversation where a mother ridicules her daughter for not looking a certain way, lost kids, and different bullying experiences. One that I found extremely intriguing is as follows:

In this example there is an actor that has down syndrome and is working at a grocery store to bag groceries. He pretends to be working very slowly and having problems bagging the groceries; they have another actor causing trouble by making rude comments about the actor with down syndrome. The reactions of the people witnessing this situation are inspiring; almost all of the people stand up for the actor. In this example there aren’t many circumstances when someone did not stand up for the actor with down syndrome, but social influences can definitely play a role in whether or not the people chose to actually speak up. One woman said she did not want to cause anymore of a ruckus by involving herself, which made me wonder if she was afraid of being ridiculed herself or looked at differently by sticking up for the actor.

Everyday we face situations where group influence and the presence of other people influence the way we behave in certain situations. Sometimes standing out makes you seem different to others in society, but other times it may mean all the difference in someone else’s life if you do stand up and speak your mind even if you think you might be ridiculed.

While we were going over the effect of group influence in class, I couldn’t help but connect back to my past experiences. In one of the courses I’ve taken earlier in college, the class had a choice to do a project alone or in a group with a maximum of three people. I was taking the class with a friend of mine, so we chose to work together along with another student who sat near us.

I found out pretty quickly that I would’ve been better off doing the project by myself. The social loafing phenomenon made it so that no one in the group did much work until two weeks before the project was due. We coordinated the work and even met up twice, but we were still scrambling at the end to have our project completed.

Social loafing is the tendency for an individual in a group to exert less effort toward attaining a common goal, like completing a project, than when tested individually. I know that if I had chosen to do the project myself, I would have felt much more pressure to get my work done well ahead of time. The fact that I was in a group made it so that I did not feel the pressure to have the project completed alone. I thought that because he work could be divided evenly between all members of the group, I really did not have to do much. We could all get it done in less time if we all focused on it. In the end, I realized that I was very wrong about this assumption.

I took that experience with me, especially for classes that require a group project. I make sure to get as much work done as early in possible in a group, even if it ends up being just myself doing the work early on. That lightens the workload and allows for a much better project overall. When possible, I choose to do the project by myself, just because I know I can spread out the project over time to get it completed to my standards.