Hi there.

I'm still quite a newbie, both on these forums and with LDing in general.

My first LD was short and grainy. This was a couple weeks ago.

My second LD happened a couple nights ago and was a full-on lucid dream. It was excellent. I would like to recount the experience and receive some tips from the community.

I don't remember what was going on before I did the reality check, but something seemed "out of place," so I did a RC and became lucid. I should say though as I've never experienced this, that after I did the RC everything went black and I became more conscious, almost like my experiences on the brink of WILD. I saw a really bright white light off the left of my eye. I tried not to look at it, as I felt myself on the verge of waking up. I rubbed my hands together in my dream body and let the white light pass in front of me without looking. Eventually I was pulled in.

I was in a bedroom with my little brother, I was on the top bunk. It was completely dark. I didn't believe at first I was lucid. I kept trying to breathe through my plugged nose and it was working, so I got out of bed. I stood in the doorway and started to laugh at my brother and tell him I was dreaming. This was a much younger version of my brother. His eyes rolled around like in REM sleep, but he woke up and was scared. We both went to my parents' room. I woke everyone up and no one knew what was going on, so I left. Somehow our house was enormous. I jumped over the bannister and tried to fly. It was a really scared, half-hearted attempt. I sort of glided down to a big bed, from which I tried flapping my arms and it didn't work. I decided I wanted to try swimming and breathing underwater, so suddenly I was right off of a beautiful beach with white sand. I kept swimming underwater and breathing. Eventually I reached the shore. There was a girl there that I didn't know and I looked at her face trying to see how vivid I could make the dream. Eventually I could see extremely vivid colors and skin texture, but I could feel myself slipping out of the dream for what I believed to be because it was "too vivid." I woke up, promptly did another reality check, and was in fact awake.

My question is, was it the belief that making things "too vivid" would wake me up that actually woke me, or is there actually some kind of threshold that anyone here has experienced as far as things becoming "too real?"

After telling my wife about this experience, she has taken an interest in LDing herself