Lucid or regular dream?

Hi,

This is my first post to the board, I'm glad I managed to find a forum which is dedicated to this subject!

I started keeping a dream journal a few months back after reading into lucid dreaming (by chance) and was really shocked to see how many dreams I was having per night. Some nights i'd log upto 5 or 6 dreams. Considering I thought I was having no dreams this was surprising!

I have been under a lot of stress at work and working abroad a lot and actually gave up on the dream journal quite quickly. However I'd still try and remember the dreams when I woke and would always be testing myself during the day. For example when i go to the toilet asking myself If I'm awake, checking my hands, if I can read small print and the main one was asking myself if what Im doing right now makes sense and is a normal thing.

I have had problems sleeping for a long time. Relying heavily on a mix of sleeping tablets, alcohol and such like to help send me to sleep. As I said above, I've been working abroad a lot (about 6 months in the last year) and after spending a month back home, coming back here to work abroad has left me a little unhappy. Not wanting to talk or hang out with people, finding it much harder to sleep etc.

I have woken with sleep paralysis many times before and never found it scarey or worrying which seems the opposite of many people.

Anyway, I went to bed at about 5am with the help of some gin and doxylamine (slightly sedative sleeping aid) and woke up at about 3pm which is the longest I have slept since being here. For the last weeks I've only manage a couple of hours a night. After waking up I decided to go back to sleep and that's when it happened...

I believe my experience was more than a regular dream because I'm certain I had control over it but some of the things don't add up with what people say is and isn't possible in a lucid dream.dream. If I'm honest, it had slightly sexual parts so please be aware of that before proceeding.

It started in a house that I was staying in with my boss while working over here. There was a lot of people from our work and one of them had arranged a girl for me to have "fun" with. I was laying in bed half asleep in and she got into the bed and turned me onto my back and got ontop and started to grind, I pushed her off and got out of bed. Although in real life I don't know the house that was in my head, in the dream I knew the layout and was confident walking between rooms.

Things started to get a little strange when I was entering rooms that I didn't recognise and I realised that I no longer knew my way around the house. I was running around and it just didn't make sense to me, at this point I was already wondering to myself if it was a dream and then suddenly one of the rooms I was in was a bowling alley, this is the point where I realised that the answer to "is this a normal situation, does this make sense?" was No and that I realised it was a dream.

The next thign I know, I was in a shopping centre and I remember walking around and I think at some point i realised again I was lucid dreaming and decided to try a really high jump/fly and it actually worked and everyone was amazed. However when I did it, someone tried to grab me to stop me and their arm stretched all the way to the top of the cielign until I pretty much swiped my hand through theirs and cut it away. At this point I think I got a little worried because of the negativeness of having someone grab me. I knew (or thought) i was lucid dreaming but I decided i wanted to wake up so i started shouting in the dream "WAKE UP, JUST WAKE UP" and most of the time it was just in the dream but a couple of times I could actually hear it coming back to me as if it was a tanoy in a shop or something, I could tell that it was my waking self trying to tell my sleeping self to wake up. I couldn't understand why I knew I was in a dream and I could recognise my waking self trying to wake me but yet I still couldn't get out of it.The more I shouted, the more sore my throat because and I found it near impossible to shout and hard to even talk. At one point i went into the carpark of the shopping centre and I was on some stairs and it suddenly went from completely bright to pitch black and I started to get scared, I saw a group of people at the bottom of the stairs in the darkness and remember shouting out "are you all lucid dreamers?" or something similar then suddenly i was back in a lit area of the carpark and saw some security personel around. I couldn't shout so I hit a mirror on a truck to get their attention. Somehow I knew they would understand me and not get angry about this. Then over came a security man and two women. The man said that he recognised me and hoped I wasn't going to cause trouble like I did earlier (I felt like he was aware of what was going on and that I had caused some fuss in the shopping mall jumping/flying in my lucid dream). I looked at one of the girls and thought she looked really attractive and I have to be honest, I was thinking to myself that since it was a lucid dream I could craft it so we ended up having sex. I started trying to explain to the girl that I wasn't crazy and telling her to give me a chance to explain what was going on and that it was all part of a dream but when I looked at her face I just couldn't focus on it. The hair and outter parts of her face looked fine but the main features such as eyes, nose, smile were out of focus. Just as i was saying about lucid dreaming to her and I thought her face had come into focus I suddenly woke up.

I remembered worrying that I was going to be stuck in the lucid dream forever. Which now awake is unrealistic since the body should wake up at some point. But a minute asleep could seem like eternity in a dream.

Everytime I think about lucid dreaming in my head, I find it really hard to process the idea. I'm finding it hard to understand or beleive this is a lucid dream because some of the things that happened don't appear to go in line with what others say. For example part of the dream was in near pitch black but most people say a lucid dream can only be in bright daylight. Secondly I knew I was dreaming and I'm certain I could hear my waking self telling me to wake up but still I didn't.

Any comments or advice would be greatly appreciated because I really don't know what to think of it all.