Lucid dream or is my brain messing with me?

Hi everyone. I've only recently started delving in to the idea of lucid dreaming. When I was a kid I always used to think sleep is a waste of time and so much could be accomplished if we just scrapped it altogether. Obviously, as I've grown older I've learned to love precious sleep but I still feel like those few hours every night could be more productive.

About a year ago I also had a couple of guys break in to my property, I ended up fighting both of them off and and while I "won" I ended up sustaining a few injuries. I'm also not a fighter so the whole experience stuck with me and resulted in pretty severe nightmares most nights (all focused on me having to defend myself from attackers). I ended up looking in to the possibility of taking control of these nightmares and that led me to lucid dreaming.

I am very new to the concept however just doing light research and being aware of/thinking about lucid dreaming has already improved dream recall massively. As well as this, I believe I have had my first "lucid" dream. I say "lucid" because it was all a bit underwhelming. I have read peoples first experiences of being lucid within a dream and it usually consists of incredible detail and how they went on to explore amazing things. My "lucid" dream went a bit like this...

I was competing in an off-road motorcycle race. I ride motorbikes off-road in my real life but I do trials and not racing. Everything appeared normal and I can recall very specific details about the race. The time my brain started thinking "Something isn't right here" was when I won. This was for 2 reasons. Firstly, My skill level wouldn't have been anywhere near enough to win and secondly, the motorcycle I was riding was very expensive and I'm absolutely skint!

After evaluating these facts I realised "Hang on. This HAS to be a dream". At this moment, there was no sudden amazement. It was just me recognising that I was in a dream, fairly calmly. I remember thinking about my real life and I knew all the specific details, as well as how I'd been looking in to lucid dreaming. I then said to myself "If I am dreaming, I should be able to jump really high" so I tried. I jumped about 5 stories high in a pub car park (promptly scaring the crap out of myself upon the realisation that I have to LAND). I landed fairly messily and that was about it.

Now my dream recall has become a bit hazy here. I remember being back on the road I grew up on, trying a few of these jumps. After succeeding a few times I decided to try and fly, and while I did get off the ground, It was like I was trying really, really hard (arms outstretched and the lot!) but not getting much higher than a house.

After this point, I can't remember anything. I'm trying to figure out if what I had was an actual lucid dream or whether my brain was just playing tricks on me and making me dream about having a lucid dream due to the research that I had been doing. Another possibility was that I became lucid and became so preoccupied in jumping/flying that I simply slipped back in to a dream where the focus was me trying to jump/fly?

Regardless of what it was that I had. My dreams recently have been a lot more pleasant and also much more memorable. Hopefully this is the start of something really cool.

Thanks for reading, all the best.

Tom

First of all, no wonder you had nightmares... I can only imagine how traumatic such a terrible event can be! Glad to hear you were lucky enough to go through the encounter with just a few injuries.

Second, congratulations on the improvement on dream recall and also on having your first lucid dream. From what you describe, it looks to me like a regular LD where you gained a bit of control for some time until you dived back into regular dreaming. Don't let yourself be fooled by an underwhelming feeling... we sometimes get so hyped on the subject that we idealize how our first LD's will be... most of the time they are just simple short events with nothing that special, until you learn to control them better.

So keep it up, you are definitely on the right track!

Sorry you had to go through such a horrible experience. It's good that you turned out ok despite your injuries.Looks like pontozero answered your question already so I just wanted to say congrats on getting lucid. Sounds like you had a fun/exciting lucid too.:D

Thanks for the replies =] I'm really chuffed with the progress so far. It doesn't feel very well deserved either as all I've done so far is read about lucid dreaming and listened to an audiobook to and from work. I've not sat down and implemented any method whatsoever and my dreams are much clearer and a lot more pleasant. I became lucid for the second time today also, unfortunately seconds after becoming lucid I had a sharp jab in my back and an angry Mrs telling me I was snoring. I tried to keep the dream in my head and focus on it as I fell back to sleep but to no avail. Ahhhh well, on to the next!

No problem. : ) Some things just come easier to some than others so don't feel bad about it.lol ouch, that must have been some wake up call but yeah, things are looking good for you so keep looking forward to the next and many more to come.