Hi,

I'm Kelly, and I'm very interested in getting back to a place where I can have lucid dreams. When I was a kid, and into my 20's, I had a reoccurring dream every single night. It was very real feeling, but I had absolutely no control in it and every night I would go through the motions of this dream knowing how it would end but not being able to do anything about it. This led me to become interested in lucid dreaming, and I found a book at a garage sale called Creative Dreaming that had some insight into how to approach beginning a lucid dream state while awake. I tried it, and it worked the very first time and I found that I could do this and have success every single time I tried, and have complete control of my surroundings and "plot" if you will every single time as well. I notice also that I started becoming lucid while asleep and dreaming quite often as well, but without the same degree of control as I found that things were more muddled coming from a dream I was already in the middle of and I'd just sort of have to follow it through with a lesser degree of being able to manipulate my surroundings. After a while, when I'd lay down to take a nap...or even when I'd lay down and just close my eyes for a minute, I'd enter a lucid dream without going through the steps I'd take to do it on purpose. It got the the point where all of my muscles would tense up and I'd go stiff as a board without being able to stop it, and then I'd shift right into a lucid dream. This would happen most every single time I'd lay down and close my eyes. When I'd wake up, my muscles would be sore as hell from being so tense in a lucid dream state. This was completely different than what I was doing to achieve this state on my own. In the beginning, when I'd lay down for the purpose of achieving a lucid dream state, I'd wake up relaxed and without the muscle strain that I noticed when it would happen on it's own without my intending to lucid dream. When I began to lose the control of starting a lucid dream, I also began to lose control within my lucid dream whereas before I could control everything. Like a lot of other people, I started feeling the outside presence and it was pretty horrible, actually. It got so bad that within a dream, I stated "no more" and crushed the object I used to attain the dreams in the first place. Since then, I haven't been able to lucid dream at all, not even through sleeping dreams. Help! I'd love to get the lucid dreams back, but try as I might it isn't working.

Here is what I would do to enter a lucid dream state:

I would lay down and put a pillow over my eyes, because for some reason the pressure and the complete darkness really helped. I'd imagine myself breathing out bad energy and breathing in a bright light. Then I'd relax all of my muscles starting with my toes and continuing up through the top of my head. I'd then imagine a ball spinning, right behind my eyes. To gain the perspective of the ball spinning, I'd imagine a pinprick hole in the ball, with light coming out. As the ball came back around, I'd watch the light. While I was doing this, I'd imagine a sound spinning with it. It would be loud in one ear as the ball came around, and then in the other in correlation with the spinning. The sound would be much like a ringing in my ears as well as a buzzing. This sound would become real to the point where I could actually hear it without trying to imagine it. At that point I'd concentrate on just sort of slipping deeper. When I did that the sound would be loud and instead of rotating it would be right in front of me and then a static would sort of fill in from my peripheral vision and become central as well until I could only see this static and hear the loud buzzing. Then I'd just sort of push through into a lucid dream that would be pretty much completely in my control. This worked for me every single time I'd try to do it, and it led to lucid dreams while I was sleeping as well, through triggers that I used.

When I would not intend to have a lucid dream but would lay down, in less than a minute I'd involuntarily tense all of my muscles to the point where I literally couldn't move, and the static would be in front of me and I'd just go. No preparation. I'd literally just lay down and zip, off I'd go. Honestly this really started to freak me out. The dreams started to freak me out. Then there was a time when I was having an unusually horrible experience in my dream and I visualized breaking the spinning ball that I'd always visualized to get into the dream state when I first started out. Since then it hasn't worked. I've tried other techniques and they haven't worked either. I have total dreamer's block and after having so many amazing experiences (along with the uncontrollable and the bad) I miss it terribly. Help! How do I get over whatever it is that I need to figure out so that I can lucid dream again?