Thread: My dream control started when I was a child

I had nightmares every night. I told myself one night that I was going to take control of them. It didn't happen right away, but in one dream, I was being chased by some ogre or something and as I was hopping over this puddle of magma or whatever it was, I realized I was dreaming. I stopped and turned and the ogre stopped. I started chasing him and he dissappeared.

Since then, I have had an intermittent ability to go into lucid dreaming. I dream in full color, can smell perfumes and taste foods, feel sexual stimulation and pain.

A few years after my first lucid dreams, I started experimenting in my dreams with flight. It started off as high jumps and from there to weightlessness or slow decents. From there it went to the ability to fly slowly, even though I wanted to fly faster. Now I can fly as fast as I want to, and I am just having a hard time keeping that ability as the dream wears on. It seems that, as I get closer to being awake, my abilities are slowly taken from me and reality sets in. The same happens with flight as with a sexual encounter. I will see some strange woman I have never met, and I can just start having sex with her, no problem. Then, as it gets closer to a possible orgasm, I start losing the ability to control the situation. Next thing you know I am somewhere else doing something else, and I might not have control of it.

What I learned over time is that it's not the ability to DO something, but the ability to allow yourself to believe you are doing something, to overcome the physical limitations that your conscience mind knows exist in the real world. If you ever have a doubt, you will fail. As I get closer to the end of REM sleep, reality shatters my little world. Sometimes it's a good thing, sometimes it's not.

Sometimes, if I am in a deep sleep and the dream is getting uncomfortably weird (generally I am far away from home and cannot find my truck or move my legs, as if I have a heavy weight on them, or I cannot focus well, because I have something hazy in my eyes) then I will try to wake up. Sometimes I go through several "ok I am awake now" stages of sleep where new dreams start and before long I realize again that I am still asleep. When I finally hit that last layer, and I am actually awake, sometimes it takes a few seconds to realize it, because the previous dream might be exactly like reality except for a few minute details.