Hello little dreamers,

STATS
Name: Phil
Nationality: Australian
Sex: Yes please! (male)
Age: 32
Star sign: Pisces, although I don't really believe in astrology (unless I get a good horoscope for the day)
Belief system: Agnostic/Atheist/Buddhist/Nihilist depending on the time of day
First lucid dream: 20/5/05

BIOG
I was raised catholic but feel like I've managed to struggle out of that guilt ridden strait-jacket. Always felt out of place in this world - overly sensitive, hyper-alert, never really felt at ease with people etc. Explored a lot of the eastern religions and liked the whole emptiness/illusion thing. I've been doing meditation for a while but I'm not really sure its getting me anywhere (I think maybe its an escapist flight from reality for me).

Anyway, the last few months I'd really been thinking a lot about how there is NO reality in a sense. Everything, including us, a just a temporary gathering of particles that will one day be ripped apart and formed into some other grouping, as the universe has been doing for billion of years. And anyway, about every six years, every single cell in your body will have been replaced. Quantum mechanics shows how 'phantom like' is matter and energy at the very small level (which makes up the bigger whole that we percieve).

The idea that life and the universe is like a dream - apparently 'real' from our viewpoint, yet just as illusionary for nothing really 'exists' in any sense, its all just a constant 'flow' - seems so intuitively correct to me. This may sound a little bonkers but about a month ago I began to say to myself: "There is no reality. Its all a dream. Nothing really exists" like a mantra, regularly through the day to drive this home.

FIRST LUCID DREAM
Two days ago I had a dream where I was in a car and I was naked or almost naked. I often have dreams like this (something to do with feeling vunerable or exposed deep in my pysche i think). So I twigged that it was really strange to find myself naked in a car like this, and then I thought - "hang on I must be dreaming." Suddenly I was walking down a street and saw these strange people with some sort of covering pulled over their head in a really weird way and I realised I was indeed dreaming.

But the weird thing was it seemed so like real life, not anything dream-like. I just kind of walked along watching everything, knowing it was a dream, but I didn't feel any sense of power or ability to do anything really out of the ordinary like flying or making a hundred naked girls suddenly appear. Then something really scary happened.

I was pretending to be some sort of gangster (because I knew I could be what ever I wanted in a dream). Then someone who was sort of like a policeman, but not really, got up in my face, literaly. He put his nose right upto mine and then his face kind of splogged onto mine (for lack of a better word) and began suffocating me. It was horrible. I struck out wildly and I tried to punch him in the groin. Somehow I wriggled free but I was terrified. I thought I should never have pretended to be a gangster even if it was dream.

It was a really frightening experience but now I'm fascinated by lucid dreaming. Hence I came across this site. I'm still not sure that I'm not just dreaming that I'm dreaming lucidly (if you get what I mean). But I'm looking forward to exploring more on lucid dreaming here.

I'd be really interested if anyone else has had freaky or upsetting lucid dreaming experiences.

Cheers,
Phil