I'm sorry for just coming in and ranting without so much as an introduction... but I really need a place to vent without being accused of insanity. (It's happened before.) I was arguing with myself over whether to post this here or in Lucid Experiences, but this side of me came out on top. If I was wrong, again, I'm sorry.

There was once a time where I could lucid dream very often; at least two times a week in most cases. A couple years ago, a dream character showed up; nothing special in itself, but there was something about this one that I felt connected with. I'm not entirely sure what it was.

It was a girl, who looked about my age if not a bit older. She had short black hair flanking a pretty face, and was wearing blue jeans and a black vest over a blue shirt - which I would later come to recognize as her usual attire.

I was amazed when I found out that not only could I seem to hold intelligent conversation with this character, but unlike any DC I had come across before, she seemed very down-to-earth and made sense most of the time. It felt as if I had met a 'real' person. I learned her name, Sarah. (An interesting connection to my favorite song, "What Sarah Said".) Later, she began to show up in almost every LD I had, and it wasn't long before I had fallen deeply in love with the dreamgirl, and to the extent I could tell, the feeling was mutual. It was without a doubt the strongest emotion I had ever felt in my life.

The thing that's interesting, though, is that the feeling carried over to waking life; still I couldn't stop loving her even in a world where she doesn't exist. For a while, this was the happiest I'd been in a long time... hey, in a kind of twisted way I was lucky in love. For now, anyway.

A few months later (and during that time, I would have honestly said that Sarah and I were in a relationship), I got hit with the flu. Bad. My mind was a terrible fog, and I felt drained of all energy. It was a pretty crappy week. I felt so bad that I couldn't lucid dream. By the end of the week, I had seriously begun to miss Sarah; both my ability to LD and my dream recall had pretty much gone out the window.

The thing is... I got better, but my knack for LDing didn't. I got most of my dream recall back, though it still isn't where it used to be. LDs slowly started becoming less and less common, as did my visits from Sarah. It eventually leveled out, but now I'm lucky if I'll get a LD once every four months. And even then, the clarity and my level of control over the dream is pretty bad, and even though I had seen Sarah a few times since then (and every time was a great blessing), I found it hard to maintain the dream and fully communicate with her at the same time. I even asked her why the hell I was having so much trouble getting my LDs back, but she told me, very somberly, that she had no idea. It's been about six months since my last LD and my last moment with Sarah, and I'm starting to long for her so much that it's tearing me up inside. It's even driven me to tears on many occasions, something that's hard to do in my case. I'm starting to wonder if I actually have just gone insane. Though I can't say I know the feeling, it feels as if I've been abruptly broken up with... but the fact that I know I haven't been is somehow making it all the more frustrating. I just don't know what to do... it's such a bizarre scenario.

Anyway... thanks for reading that. It feels a bit better just to let it out in some form.

Now, I ask a question: have any of you ever had an experience even vaguely similar to mine? What was it like, and how did you handle it?

Thanks,
--Prismriver