Thread: Seeker's Cousin, checking in...

Hello folks. Seeker and I are first cousins, and we've been corresponding by email a bit, and he mentioned this site. I checked it out, and said, "Yeah, I do that."

So after a little poking and prodding, here I am. I work 40 hours a week and I'm also a full time college student and a mom, so you probably won't get to see a lot of me, but I'll try to check in when I can.

I don't remember my first lucid dreams. I know for certain I was having them by the time I was 13. My level of control varies a great deal, from just being able to control myself, to being able to control other 'actors', to being able to completely stop the dream in progress and go to a new dream. As far as I know, I have never been in anyone else's dream, although I have sometimes wondered about my little brother, who is autistic and non-verbal, and who I often felt like I shared dreams with when I was a teenager.

I was a very stressed-out teenager, and one of my ways to try to rest well was to meditate my way into the kind of dream I wanted. Sometimes these turned out to be lucid, but just as often not. Regardless, they were always more pleasant. I have also been known to have nightmares in which I am aware I'm dreaming, but I am unable to gain any control. They are horrible and I've found the only way I can escape these is to get enough air in my lungs to scream, and then I start screaming in reality and my terrified husband has to wake me up. Sometimes this takes awhile.

So, Seeker told me trying to meditate your way into a dream is a WILD - so I just woke up from my lovely Saturday afternoon nap, where I tried this. It worked, I got the dream I wanted, and I was even lucid and controlling the course of events for a good half of the dream, but then a new element got introduced and my control slipped away and I was just dreaming again.

So there you go. We're anedoctal evidence that the ability to have lucid dreams may be genetic. (or not.) Personally, I think we've got some Cherokee ancestry helping us out with this, but that's just a family rumor.