Thread: Hi I am new to site and very interested in others experiences.

I have been having Lucid dreams since I was a small child. I guess since I was about 5-7 years old when I first began realizing it. At first it was just awareness that I was in the dream and the dream just continued to flow on. At first some of these dreams terrified me and I didn't know what to do they were so real and so vivid. So much so I have memories from early in childhood 3-5 that cannot be any more than memories of dreams because some of the memories are physically impossible in real life.

Anyway over the years I learned that I can control almost every aspect of the dream if I so desire. I say almost complete control because I have never tried to determine how a dream would go before going to sleep and some aspects I just cannot change at certain times no matter how hard I try (this irritates me more than anything). I can however if I do not like the way a dream is going change into another dream or destroy the entire dream and if those fail I can wake myself out of a dream. The last is difficult and I always wake up with my heart racing about a million miles an hour and gasping for air for about about 1-2 minutes. I have lucid dreams almost every night of the week. I enjoy them and have a lot of fun in them. If I let a dream progress and interact fully, I sometimes awake and have to distinguish that the dream wasn't real.

I have never kept a journal as I see a lot of people do. I didn't even realize that the way I dream is different from those I know until quite recently at a party where one of the people was into the whole lucid dream thing and the subject came up. I am now 40 and have experienced thousands of lucid dreams over the years.

Any way, the reason I signed up was to learn more and see how others experience this.