Hello,

I'm interested in the area of lucid dreaming, but I'm not sure if it's a good idea for me to learn it.
My dreams are often very interesting and exiting. I often remeber them, though I usually forget them after sometime ( from seconds to several days from awakening). Many of my dreams are like action movies. For example I can be a spy in a James Bond style plot. Sometimes it's fantasy tales, sometimes romance, and sometimes it is tottaly wild and undescribable. Sometimes I fly or float, and sometimes I wake up, go back to sleep and return to the same dream. Sometimes there are nightmare but thats quite rare.
Once in a while when I wake up I say to myself: My god, that must have been the greatest experience of my life. Sometimes I am like semi lucid: I sit in a movie theater and watch an interesting movie. I am aware that the movie is not reality, but I am not aware that the theater is part of a dream.
But during the best of my experiences I am not lucid at all, and here is my concern: I don't want to lose these experiences because of lucidity. For example, if I'm inside an action movie, it will ruin the suspense if I know that it's a dream. The whole power of the dream comes from thinking that it's real. If i am in a forest in fantasy quest, and I realize that I dream, why should I bother to continue with the quest, which loses all it's importance? What I will probably do is forget about the quest, and just content myself with self indulgence: I'll fly around, walk in the forest, have sex with the elves or whatever. The whole meaningful dream will degrade to empty entertainment... Another example: Suppose I am flying in the dream, well when this happans to me I am filled with wonder and delight that I can fly, and much of the delight comes from beleiving that it's real. What will bring you more delight: if you suddendly rise up and fly in the air like a bird for real, or if you'll enter some virtual-reality system that makes you feel like you are flying? In essesnce I fear that this is what lucid dreaming does: turn an experience which is as powerful as a real one, into virtual reality.
One more example: sometimes during the dream I interact with people, sometimes I actually fall in love, sometimes I talk with them or cooporate with them on various things. If I knew that they aren't real, why should I bother to interact with them? As I become lucid they will turn from real human beings into phantoms.
To sum it all up, I ask you this: What is more interesting, to be the first man to land on the moon, or to land on the moon in a virtual reality ( such as the Star-Trek 'holodeck'? )

Oded.