Since I'm getting really into lucid dreaming I thought I'd sign up here and start to participate.

I'm a robotics engineer, I recently finished a master's degree in mechanical engineering and I live in Milwaukee. I work on electronic and artistic projects, most of my projects are somewhere in the middle, I am PaulMakesThings on instructables.com and several other places. I've always focused on creativity, which I believe ties into math, science and engineering just as much as it does into art.

I've always been able to control some of my dreams and occasionally became conscious in a dream but this was rare and almost instantly ended when I realized it. I only recently learned that this was a skill that could be honed.

About 2 months ago I started recording dreams almost nightly to build up dream recall. I've started doing regular reality checks and about 8 days ago I became fully lucid in a dream and had the presence of mind of focus on staying calm and conscious, to improve clarity and to do some things. I hope to improve at it and do this more often. I had one last night, but I had sleep paralyses when I realized I was dreaming and was unable to maneuver it into a lucid dream without just waking up.

In that dream last week, my clearest and most conscious thus far. I was in a grove of trees, and there were beehives covering so many of them that I felt it was closing in around me, I realized I was dreaming and willed them to turn into something less frightful, they turned into clouds of butterflies. It was a sunny clear day in a place like the rolling hills of Ireland, in the distance there was some ancient structure buried into a hill (on hindsight I should have gone to explored it). I got the hang of flying right away, I was continually reminding myself that it was a dream and to stay conscious. I flew up above the clouds and came back down in a city, I saw a car with three sexy women in it, I was very conscious and reminded myself that trying to turn it into a sex fantasy is what always halted my lucid dreams in the past. I wanted to try the mirror trick, I first saw my reflection in a window, it was just my legs because I was a giant, then I pulled out my phone and looked at my reflection in it, I was old, fat and disgusting (im actually 28 and very good looking ). I had read that the image reflects your self image so I focused on how I feel after a good work out, like im young and healthy, the image only improved slightly, from a very fat 80 year old to a kinda fat 50 year old. I gave up on mirrors and decided to try to build something, I decided to build a floating house in the sky, saw the same car of sexy women again and again mindfully ignored them, and was just starting to fly up to build my castle when my alarm went off and woke me up. I did a reality check to be sure it was a real awakening and it was.

I am continuing to learn about MILD (and WILD, though I will do that more later) and read methods of remembering, becoming conscious in, clarifying and stabilizing dreams. I keep reading whatever I can find and I belive that lucid dreaming can have many benefits for me; I can work on my creativity, maybe even design things. I can have fun. I can learn about myself. And I seem to feel more rested with less sleep when I do it. Plus it seems to tie in with meditation and other concentration and focus exercises.

Looking forward to getting to know people here.

Thanks for reading.