I really sought out lucid dreaming for quite some time... hearing the stories of people who had really captured it, through a variety of tricks, was quite captivating. The one I tried, and stuck with, was to get in the habit of (when awake) checking my watch every 15 minutes and trying to make the hands move with my mind. The idea being, I guess, that once this had become an automatic action while awake, it would carry over into dreams, but there, I *would* be able to make the hands move, which would signify that I was dreaming and could start to play around with it.

It never worked. While it got to the point that I was checking my watch in dreams, either I was never able to make the hands of my watch move, or I never really thought much of it when I could. I just don't think I'm predisposed to that level of awareness. In fact, on more than a few occasions, I've had dreams where I'm driving along a windy road, coming close to falling off over and over again, and I quite clearly tell myself: "Careful! This isn't a dream!"

But enough about me. That's awesome, LT, I'm very jealous. Best of luck with having some continued experiences with it! My understanding is that the quicker you can reach that moment of realization, the quicker you can, say, fly 100 feet in the air and soar through the world Second Life style.

ld4all.com is where I point all burgeoning oneironauts. Great place to get started.

Some of my experiences.

Want a decent shortcut to lucidity? Write "reality check" on a rubber band, then wear it on your wrist. Every time you catch yourself looking at it, ask, "Am I dreaming?" Soon, this becomes a habit, and we have a habit of acting out our habits in dreams. Before you know it, the answer will be "yes." Then the fun begins.

Usually when I realize I am dreaming, I am in a bad situation and I try to force myself to wake up. This NEVER works. Only recently did I try to control the actions and it was a great success. I even had pumpkin pie at the end.

Usually when I realize I am dreaming, I am in a bad situation and I try to force myself to wake up. This NEVER works.

That's funny, because that's precisely how I trained my mind to become lucid. I learned to recognize nightmarish circumstances as actual nightmares I could wake myself from. Before I could exert any kind of conscious control within the dream, I learned to wake myself. It was only after years of training myself that I started to be able to do any meaningful control stuff without waking up.

i like it when you are dreaming of being somewhere up high and begin to fall off . the cool part is when you dont panic and just remind yourself that you can fly away to somewhwere cool and not hit the ground . its very freeing

wait, you're saying you don't always know you're dreaming? I thought that was the default. I frequently "do" things in dreams that I would never do in real life, because I know I can get away with it. I don't know how not to dream this way and I didn't know it was an option.

No, lucid dreaming isn't the default, desjardins! (I'm incredibly jealous, BTW!)

I've been getting better at it over the past few years. Most likely to happen in the early morning hours, and when I'm sleeping on my back. For me, it's all about walking a very fine line. Veer too much on the side of "OMG, I'm dreaming, but I'm also awake, this is so amazing!" and you're probably going to wake up. Veer too much on the side of "I can't let myself get too excited, have to keep going with the flow or otherwise I'll wake up," and you're probably going to drift back into non-lucid dreaming. So a lot of my lucid dreaming experiences are primarily about learning how to extend the experience.

That said, there are a couple of things that almost always happen when I lucid dream. One is a kind of buzzing/drone sound, that's usually rather ominous. The other is a feeling of fleeting numbness/semi-numbess all over my body, like fleeting electric impulses. I sometimes think of it as hundreds of birds' wings beating against me. At the same time, I usually dimly aware of the position of my body on the bed, and a few of the sounds in the room around me. These phenomena almost always occur together, and they're almost always pretty frightening, making me feel like I'm losing control and going somewhere dangerous. But if I can keep myself calm, the more I can "go" with these feelings, the more likely I am to enter into a rather sustainable lucid state. The best experience I had in this regard was that the tingly feeling/sound thing suddenly became like a shirt I was taking off. Literally, in the dream, I somehow "slipped" out of it, and it occurred to me, when this happened, that I was slipping out of whatever sensory input was coming to me from the waking world. As soon as it happened, I was no longer aware, at all, of my sleeping body or the sounds in my environment. I was fully in the dream world, and fully awake, and it was really damn cool. Although I was in this hotel I'd rather not have been in, I did some flying stuff (with the approval of the concierge, who acknowledged that I was dreaming and that it was therefore ok to experiment with flying in the hotel lobby), but the whole experience didn't last terribly long.

Whenever I have lucid dreaming moments, I normally rewind my dreams so that I can experience some parts of them again and either do things differently or try and understand exactly what I did by slowing things down or just going over it again.

Unfortunately, I never remember exactly what I'm rewinding when I wake up, so the dreaming must have not been that lucid.

Wow, it is excellent news, LT. Keep at it! You have just increased your playtime (and your conscious life span by 20% or so. BIG WIN, Golden Lucky Day, etc.

playtime? It's nice to turn a bad dream into a better one, which I do whenever I'm lucky/in control enough to realize it's just a dream, but what that has to do with increasing your conscious life span etc. I have no idea. I mean, I've had some truly great dreams, but not so sure the lucid ones were any better than the non-lucid, why would they be? I'd rather watch/star in a movie made by a master than one I tried to make myself.

The weirdest thing about lucid dreaming is that although you know it's just a dream, you often have no idea or are TOTALLY WRONG about what your REAL life is like.

Either way, you still wake up from them sooner than you would like, and forget 95% of them.