hsmith wrote: ↑Sun May 12, 2024 11:57 amUnfortunately though quite difficult to try plan for this and experiment!
I sometimes wonder if abstinence is different for other people. I imagine it might be. Maybe that's one reason we see such a large amount of personal variation. So far I've always thought of abstinence as being equal to semen retention, but that experience I had with not caring about it at all (singular though it was), made me consider
mental abstinence a factor too. There are aspects of an ab-streak that I can take pleasure in, and I've had the suspicion that maybe I'm trying to exploit some kind of loop-hole, and ultimately just cheating myself and doing it all wrong.
In some aspects, maybe I've never
truly abstained
at all before. I've thrown will-power at the problem, and allowed the sense of "denial" to become its own thing, that I've twisted into something sexual, because that was easier to deal with.
And maybe other people don't do this. Maybe other people are able to detach more fully, and easily achieve that sense of not caring, not noticing, and not wanting.
I've done several streaks of 30+ days, and my record is 50+ days, and what I find notable is the general lack of sexual dreams. Maybe by week 3, I might get dreams that have small hints, or nudity that goes nowhere. But the dream I had after 1 week of not caring or noticing blew them out of the water. Which annoyed me, because I would have
loved a dream like that when I was 7 weeks out.
I have been reading a bit about lucid dreams, and how people can invoke sexual dreams that make them ejaculate in real life. Not in every case, but in enough of them, to wonder how much our own intentions steer our dreams, lucid or not. I figure if you're not lucid during a dream, then your subconscious is steering the ship. I've woken up from dreams where I remembered finding one of my dream characters very attractive, or noticed they were flirting with me in some subtle way, but my intention didn't follow it, so the dreams never amounted to anything arousing.
I don't know what to do with this information yet, but I thought I'd just put it out there.