Hi I am new to site and very interested in others experiences.

I have been having Lucid dreams since I was a small child. I guess since I was about 5-7 years old when I first began realizing it. At first it was just awareness that I was in the dream and the dream just continued to flow on. At first some of these dreams terrified me and I didn't know what to do they were so real and so vivid. So much so I have memories from early in childhood 3-5 that cannot be any more than memories of dreams because some of the memories are physically impossible in real life.

Anyway over the years I learned that I can control almost every aspect of the dream if I so desire. I say almost complete control because I have never tried to determine how a dream would go before going to sleep and some aspects I just cannot change at certain times no matter how hard I try (this irritates me more than anything). I can however if I do not like the way a dream is going change into another dream or destroy the entire dream and if those fail I can wake myself out of a dream. The last is difficult and I always wake up with my heart racing about a million miles an hour and gasping for air for about about 1-2 minutes. I have lucid dreams almost every night of the week. I enjoy them and have a lot of fun in them. If I let a dream progress and interact fully, I sometimes awake and have to distinguish that the dream wasn't real.

I have never kept a journal as I see a lot of people do. I didn't even realize that the way I dream is different from those I know until quite recently at a party where one of the people was into the whole lucid dream thing and the subject came up. I am now 40 and have experienced thousands of lucid dreams over the years.

Any way, the reason I signed up was to learn more and see how others experience this.

Oh wow, that's cool that you lucid dreamed all your life. I know a few people who thought everyone did too, because it came so naturally to them, as it did for you. Your experiences would probably help the newbies around here, if you cared to share.

Anyway, welcome to DreamViews! Let me know if you have any questions about dream control. You mentioned something about certain elements that you have issues with changing within the dream. I have a hypothesis about that which I have been experimenting on lately with a few others.