Thread: How were you introduced to lucid dreaming?

I first read about lucid dreaming in a book, a science facts compilation.

Lucid dreaming is not mainstream, so the chances of actually winding up here are quite low. Are we the unlikely few who know.

So how were you introduced to the concept of lucid dreaming?

I remember after watching Inception, a thought came to me once on my laptop to find out if people actually do this 'Inception'
Thats when I came across lucid dreaming, and realised i'd done it once, maybe twice as a kid.
I then wanted to find a community of dreamers to conversate with, so typed something like lucid dream forum and found dreamviews

Originally Posted by ShadowOfSelf

I remember after watching Inception, a thought came to me once on my laptop to find out if people actually do this 'Inception'
Thats when I came across lucid dreaming, and realised i'd done it once, maybe twice as a kid.
I then wanted to find a community of dreamers to conversate with, so typed something like lucid dream forum and found dreamviews

I don't exactly remember but its pretty similar to the way I found out about lucid dreaming.

I've heard of lucid dreaming before. I'm not sure where or when, but I knew the term. Last September, I was going through a really rough transition into graduate school far away from home. I missed my girlfriend and family so much. I needed something to work on, some skill to develop and put my focus into. The ability to control and direct my dreams really appealed to me. So I started recording a dream journal. I did not have my first LD until December 2011. Now I've had two. What keeps me coming back is how real those two dreams were. I didn't change anything specific, but I still remember how real the sensations I experienced in those dreams were.

I love the way I found out lucid dreaming, it really made me think about destiny!

So I go every year to the annual book fair: old books for a cheap price. I took one or two, and since I had some cash left, I grabbed a random one about dream interpretation. Since at that time I already considered those "a dog means you're worried about your school" kind of interpretation garbage, I thought that book was the same, so I gave it a quick look. The last thing I've read about was "lucid dream" but I didn't care to see what it meant. Here's the book:


A few years later (in 2011) I was researching random psychology themes as usual and I eventually typed dreams in google. Well one of the links led me to a Portuguese forum of lucid dreaming. At first I was very skeptical, but what the author said made perfect sense for someone so deeply interested by psychology. As I read a bit more, I had a memory going through of myself reading the word "lucid dream" in the book several years ago. As you can imagine, it was a very special day

Well it was a couple of years ago in class someone was talking about asking everyone if they had, had a lucid dream before. Obviously most people didn't know what he was going on about but it triggered a memory of my own lucid dreams in my child hood where I was flying etc. for the next few weeks I studied it immensely and when I was confident in my ability to gain a lucid dream I started keeping a dream diary and blah blah for like 3 months before I gave up partly because it started getting weird (like every other night I would be in sleep paralysis and have really disturbing lucid dreams) and partly through exhaustion and preparation for my final year of high school. Now that I'm an atheist I'm not afraid of the night terrors half as much and I'm going to have a lot of free time going to uni and such so I'm getting back into it again... a little off topic but its my first post in a year or so cut me some slack will ya

Hmmm.... I think I was looking up about dreaming in general and I somehow came across Lucid dreaming. Lucid dreaming interested pretty much instantly. This interest was vastly increased when I watched Inception.

Short version:
I had one.

Long version:
I had one. It was followed by SP, which was freaky because I had no idea what it was. I experienced SP sporadically afterwards, and eventually I found out what it was after someone else mentioned it somewhere. I read a bit about SP, and about LD because it's a closely related topc, but I didn't really do anything with this information other than think "Oh, cool, so I'm not going crazy, and there isn't something physically wrong with me." Later, I decided that dreams were important, and it bothered me to forget them, so I started keeping a dream journal. Then I remembered I'd read that a dream journal was a good first step to lucid dreaming, so I decided, hey, why not take that second step since I'm already taking the first? And that's how I ended up here.

I used to get spontaneous sleep paralysis frequently. It was frightening, but fascinated me. It happened most often during naps, or days when I would stay home from school, sick in bed. This led to some out of body experiences and general hypnagogic weirdness. I didn't know about lucid dreaming at the time, but I read tons of books about OBE, meditation, and AP. When I started training in deep meditation, I found that I could meditate into and out of sleep paralysis, hypnagogic states, and dreams. I had friends and yogis who were interested in all sorts of altered states of mind. Everything from OBE, to entheogens, to shamanism and dream yoga. I eventually heard the specific term "lucid dreaming," and read everything I could get my hands on. It seemed to resonate with my first-hand experiences much better than any of the religious or new-age-shamanic explanations.

I had a random lucid dream a little over 2 years ago, searched "knowing that you're dreaming while still in the dream" and came across the concept... Along with this site.