Hi I'm JaS.. I came across lucid dreaming a couple of months ago while I was doing some research on sleeping to try and sort out my insomnia (I have trouble falling asleep and then I have trouble staying asleep.) I've been debating whether or not to post here, because all the other people that have seem to be teenagers (I'm in my thirties.. suddenly I feel old!)

I'll say right now that I'm a bit obsessive - I have the good fortune of owning a sleep monitoring device that tracks when I'm in light, REM and deep sleep with fairly good accuracy. I've been putting all this information into a spreadsheet and tracking it along with my dream journal entries and lucid dream counts. I've been doing this since early December 2012 and I'm up to 62 recalled dreams, 11 of them being lucid to some degree (ie: became aware that I was dreaming, but not necessarily able to control them.)

I've toyed with a few of the methods mentioned on DV and I think I've decided that I'm going to stick with DILD as it's been the only one that I've actually achieved any LDs with. I'm fairly inconsistent with my RCs - I try and do them every hour or so which is easy when I'm at work, but at home I have a small child which means I very rarely get the time to do them. A couple of days ago I discovered RDAT and so I'm trying to incorporate that with my RCs whenever I cam. I'm also trying to perfect a mantra at the moment - my current one is "I will recognise my dream signs" and then I go through a couple that have appeared quite frequently in my dreams. I'm not sure how successful this is going to be though - most of the time I encounter a dream sign in a dream it just passes me by.

Anyway, I'm here because there's no one else that I can talk to about this without being thought of as quite mad

My goals are to increase my LD count, make them a little bit more reliable and also to increase my stability and control (I've had one beautifully long and controlled LD, but the rest seem to last for less than a minute and I have very little say in how they go.)

Advice, suggestions and feedback is welcomed... and I'll post my updates as I go.

JaS