Hi there! I'm FryingMan (pun on Heroes, how I like flying in dreams, and I like food/cooking too!), I think I'm older than most of the people I see posting here -- I'm a parent to teenagers. I'm new to lucid dreaming, someone I know was doing it and I was making fun of him, but I got very interested in doing it and am now totally obsessed with it! I've been reading LaBerge's Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming and A Course in Lucid Dreaming and am following along with the exercises in ACILD. I started a dream journal and remembered and recorded some dreams the very first night! That was a big confidence boost. Now setting intention to awakening multiple times during the night to record multiple dreams, and it works! I haven't missed a single night since I started on 2013-08-22 (a few nights had much less recall though). I switched from writing to using a voice recording app last night and last I recorded 4 awakenings with 17 dreams / scenes / fragments (mostly with at least a short paragraph of detail, only a few one-liners)! I've played around with WILD for the "instant gratification" hope but basically just lost a lot of sleep, I kept snapping awake and alert once anything interesting happened (saw a ton (about 20) brief HH dreamlets, experienced the "full body buzz", etc.). DILD / MILD in particular seems to be the way to go for me since I like falling asleep when I'm tired . I have gained a lot of confidence in setting my intentions since I've had so much success with waking up after dreams to record them just from suggestion alone (I don't use the alarm any more, I used it once or twice but it really jarred me awake so I don't use it any more since I don't seem to need it). My friend did WILD and got good success with them but he had a really scary experience with it and took a break form it so I decided to mostly avoid it for now.

I've been working on waking awareness, reflection/intention technique (seriously checking the state of reality, doing RCs, visualizing reality as if a dream, visualizing becoming lucid), and prospective memory exercises (my results for prospective memory exercises are so far just so-so: either I can't get the target sign out of my head so it's always in the front of my mind which feels like I'm not quite doing the exercise correctly [or is this ok? a highly activated goal center?], or I forget the targets sometimes. Sometimes I do hit the target, but this is an obvious area for improvement, sometimes I realized I missed it a few minutes past when it occured) . Also, reading about LDing on any forum / place I can find. Dreamviews seems to be the best / most active forum with great support (I actually got downvoted on reddit for my intro post excited about dream recall, so I don't go there any more, seems to be a bunch of unpleasant poeple there moslty).

I had a huge breakthrough two nights ago, I had one of the most amazing flying dreams that I remember. I dream only very rarely about flying but they're my favorite dreams. I always visualize flying as the dream action I take in the reflection/intention exercise now. I also visualize myself blasting my way through power lines without getting stuck as that was always a big block for my flying dreams as a young person: I'd try to take off but couldn't get far because the sky was filled with power lines blocking me so I couldn't continue. Well, this time, after take-off I saw them approaching, and I *knew* I could get through them, grinned to myself with anticipation of "beating" my old nemesis, and I flew right up to them, through them, and beyond! I was filled with elation. Everything was very vivid, I think it was like a lucid dream could be like but just without knowing I was in a dream. I would *love* to get that again with lucidity! I had total confidence and was ecstatic the entire time.

I had a realization once I started my LD training: I've been for many years just sailing through WL on auto-pilot, zombie-like, tuning out the world when I'm bored or annoyed. So I may have a ways to go to tune things back in to get to lucidity, but I'm psyched with my first successes of recall, so I know I'll get there! The flying dream "felt" like lucidity should, I think, so I hope I'm close!

My long term goal is to I'd like to get to LD on demand and run LD experiments with others and help others learn this amazing skill. Medium-term goal is to get to a few LDs per week (by the end of 2013), short term goal is to get my first lucid by the end of September. Other short term goals is to recording at least 2-3 dreams per night, but I seem to be blowing by that one so I should probably up the number now.

LD goal activities: fly and perfect flying and gliding at will, both maneuverability and speed; play with a lightsaber!; be a Son of Amber/Chaos and travel to Amber and walk the Pattern, be a buddy of Merlin of Chaos (equally powerful) and go on adventures with other Amber/Chaos buddies. Be a mage on a quest!

I would love any advice / guidance you can give me in this course.