Introducing fellow dreamer

Hello All, I am new to this forum and want to introduce myself.

I have been lucid dreaming since the age of 7 or 8. I fist began by learning to turn and face the monsters that were chasing me in my dreams. That was a long time ago as I'm 57 now. I didn't become truly lucid much as a youngster but in my teens I began reading Carlos Castaneda and followed Don Juan's instructions to "Look at my Hands" in dreaming. That was the first time I truly took a waking intention into my dreams and become lucid, (and the beginning of a relationship with a recurring character in my dreams. But that's a story for another time).

I use to fly a lot in my Ordinary Dreams (ODs) and later I learned to use the flying as a dream sign to trigger lucidity. In the 80's was the hay-day of my lucid dreaming work. I spent a good part of my waking life studying, sharing, thinking about and setting up my lucid dreaming. I got to where I was lucid dreaming 3-4 nights a week and often 3-4 times a night. During that period of my life I discovered much about dreaming techniques and was able to frequently take waking intentions into my lucid dreams and continue my explorations. At the time I was heavily involved with the Lucid Dreaming Forum on CompuServe. We had a core group that shared and discovered and explored a lot together. We also tried to accomplish group dreaming, shared dreaming but were not successful except for one time two members of the group definitely shared a dream together.

In the early 90's I moved to a big city from a relatively quiet country life and began working a fairly stressful job. I kept up my lucid dreaming and contacts online but my dreaming became less and less frequent and became more difficult to even remember my dreams as well. Also as I needed to focus so much more on my waking life I realized it was my waking life where I really needed to focus on building my "lucidity" and my sleep dreaming life faded into the background.

So in the last 20 years to present I still have an occasional lucid dream but they are fleeting and also until recently haven't spent energy trying to induce them either. But now things are changing. I have been experiencing good dream recall and I have a desire to get back into lucid dreaming/OOBE's and pick back up with exploring where I left off. To that end I am introducing myself here with the idea that the more I make lucid dream work a part of my waking life the more it become a part of my dreaming. So any meaningful discussions I can partake of here, prime the pump, so to speak, of my lucid dreaming.

One more thing I'd like to share at this is my outlook on life and dreaming as a whole. In my dreaming work, the more I developed my dreaming attention and the more my lucid experience in my dreams became like my waking life, the more my waking life became to be like dreaming. In other words, the more I came see the dreaming nature of waking life.

Enough said for now, looking forward to sharing experiences and thoughts with people on the forum.

-DreamRealEyes

Wow, so glad you shared that with us. :welcome: to dreamviews!

That's awesome, that you are such a long time lucid dreamer, and that it still holds your interest. Let's be honest, how could it not?

I have found that reading and posting here on the forum is the best way how to learn new things and to get inspiration. So make yourself comfy and enjoy!

We also have a irc chat, which has just been repaired recently, so there is not much activity yet, but it's picking up member by member every day. You can access it from the button "Chat" in the top navigation bar.

If you have any question, please ask here or PM me, I'll be happy to help.

Take care and happy dreams :bow:

Welcome
Induction Methods and Techniques

Hey! Very cool. Old school Castanda. I hope you enjoy our forum. I am 100% into training your awareness in waking life to enhance your dreaming life.

Yes, life starts to look like a dream, just like a dream. I like you so far. I think you will become a valuable member.

Welcome to a Dream Views!!!

Thanks, with those two posts I feel at home already. Now to sleep and perchance to dream...

-DreamRealEyes

Hey! I'm new here aswell and still fairly new to lucid dreaming, only had a couple of them so far. I also used to become lucid during nightmares as a child but only was able to calm down knowing is wasn't real but I guess it just never came to me that i could also manipulate the nightmare all together. Anyways, when I was browsing through the forum here and stumbled across your post-and kept reading cause I could relate to the monsters thing- I couldn't help but be a little sceptical about what you wrote about the shared dreaming. Could you maybe explain how your group tried to share dreams and/or what you did when it actually worked that one time? And were they both lucid during the dream and actually changed the same environment together or simply remembered the same ordinary dream the next morning? I always thought that was merely a Holliwood fantasy, so now I'm really interested!

I see youve probably been a member longer than me since I litarally just signed up but nonetheless this is you introducing yourself so welcome to dreamviews i guess!:D

Quote:

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Originally Posted by icasio

Hey! I'm new here aswell and still fairly new to lucid dreaming, only had a couple of them so far. I also used to become lucid during nightmares as a child but only was able to calm down knowing is wasn't real but I guess it just never came to me that i could also manipulate the nightmare all together. Anyways, when I was browsing through the forum here and stumbled across your post-and kept reading cause I could relate to the monsters thing- I couldn't help but be a little sceptical about what you wrote about the shared dreaming. Could you maybe explain how your group tried to share dreams and/or what you did when it actually worked that one time? And were they both lucid during the dream and actually changed the same environment together or simply remembered the same ordinary dream the next morning? I always thought that was merely a Holliwood fantasy, so now I'm really interested!

I see youve probably been a member longer than me since I litarally just signed up but nonetheless this is you introducing yourself so welcome to dreamviews i guess!:D

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Hi icasio, Welcome to the forum. I've only been here a week now but I'm finding this is a very wonderful place full of resources and talented dreamers. I would be happy to describe the shared dreaming event, and will as soon as I have time, maybe later today or tonight.

Yes definitely a great source of information and motivation. Makes me want to contribute, too.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by icasio

I couldn't help but be a little sceptical about what you wrote about the shared dreaming. Could you maybe explain how your group tried to share dreams and/or what you did when it actually worked that one time? And were they both lucid during the dream and actually changed the same environment together or simply remembered the same ordinary dream the next morning? I always thought that was merely a Holliwood fantasy, so now I'm really interested!

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In the late 80's I co-founded the Lucid Dreaming Forum on Compuserve. Back in those days Compuserve was just about the only widely subscribed public message board on the web. For a number of years our LD Forum was the busiest forum on Compuserve. But as big as that was I'd have to say it didn't have anything like the number and quality of lucid dreamers I find here or the posted resources and lessons available here. It would seem that the phenomena of lucid dreaming has really taken off since those days.

We had a core group of lucid dreamers that held together for a number of years. It's amazing how well you can get to know people on-line. In some ways even better than you may know people face to face as on-line you often may share more deeply than you do with casual friendships. I say this because there is no way I can prove to you that this shared dreaming event happened. I can only tell you that of the two people that shared the dream, one of them was part of our core group. And there is no doubt in my mind that they would not make up or invent this dream to impress us or something. Also it would mean that they would have had to conspire with the other person to fool us. They reported their dreams separately to us and the person we knew well, assured us they had no waking contact with the other person after the dream before reporting.

So here's the story: A group of us had been trying for some time to have a shared dream. We would agree on a setting we would create in a dream world and plan to meet there on certain nights and then share our experiences. We didn't even have much success of even dreaming of the place let alone dreaming together. Then one day a new person came onto the forum. She was a woman, I forget her name now so I'm going to call her Nancy. (My notes on this are buried in journals I don't have easy access to). Nancy impressed us right away. She was a natural lucid dreamer, had been for years but was not aware of any of the lexicon of lucid dreaming. She was completely self taught and had been doing it since childhood. At first she had assumed everybody could dream that way but eventually figured out it wasn't normal and so had no one to share with for years until she found the forum. She claimed she had the ability to find people in their dreams and that she had several people that she would regularly visit and help them in their dreams. Of course we wanted proof and she offered to meet us in our dreams. The process of getting to know her went on for weeks before we got to this point, so we already had a feel for her dreaming abilities with things she had shared.

A woman from the core group, I think her name was Ann, was the first to agree to meet her in dreaming. We had agreed that they would not post results on the forum but would email privately if they had success. Within a couple of days Ann emailed us her lucid dream that included Nancy in it. Later Nancy did the same. The dreams were nearly identical, with even the dialog being the same. Nancy's also included information on steps she went through to find her.

Going from memory now, here is the dream as best I can remember it. I don't remember the dialog. Ann was walking along a beach on the ocean at night. There were lights of a party up ahead at a house on the beach. At some point here Nancy comes into the dream. They recognized each other, Ann was lucid or became lucid at this point and remembered their intent to dream together. They decided to go to the party but Ann was concerned they weren't dressed for it. So Nancy made dresses appear for them. They went up to the party together.

That's all I can remember. We were impressed and were anxious for more of us to try it. Unfortunately though before any of us had the chance Nancy and Ann found out they lived not to far apart and had agreed to meet in waking life. They did and spent a day together. It went badly. Apparently Nancy was a bit off-her-rocker and something happened that day that put Ann off. We never saw Nancy on the forum again after that. We assumed Nancy was embarrassed by it and too shy come back on the forum. So that was a real loss.

There is an epilogue to this story though... About three years later after I had been off the form myself for some time, Nancy contacted me by email. It seems she wanted my help because she was encountering a being/person in her dreaming that was testing her and could control her dreams. She had never encountered that before, she had always been the one with the power and control. She was nervous about it and thought I could help her. Apparently I did help her but all I did was suggest she should ask the person what they wanted with her. She told me later she had done that and it was OK now. After that she agreed to find me in my dreams. After some effort she did but I was not aware of it. She had some interesting things to say about it though, but I will not be sharing that now. Then she was gone again just as abruptly as before. She was using her husbands email account and I believe he cut her off. I believe her family did not consider this dreaming work conducive of her mental health.

So thats the story. -DreamRealEyes

Oh and also there are threads on this forum concerning shared dreaming. I haven't taken a look at them yet but you might want to check them out.

wow that was detailed! So first of all thank you for taking the time to describe this event. It is...well its huge if this Nancy really had/has the ability to access other people's dreams and even control them. Escpacially the fact that the physical distance doesn't seem to matter is dazzling. Kind of would change everything about what we think dreams are. I mean they couldn't just be happening in everyones own head then, could they? Also I take it this ability of hers took a toll on her mental condition at some point? since you mentioned her family being concerned. I have to say that this is a little hard to get your mind wrapped around, but maybe we'll find out just how it works exactly eventually. If I may pose one last question though: You don't happen to remember those steps Nancy went through that she explained in her e-mail, do you?
Thanks for sharing all this

Well, as I said, before Nancy did the shared dream and then the face to face meeting that led to here leaving the forum she had shared quite alot about her story. She attributed her abilities to the fact that she had been sexually abused as a child and she had learned to escape the ordeals by retreating out of her body. The discussions on the message board lead to realizing this is not an uncommon phenomena. Anyway she had manage to turn that handicap into quite an amazing ability, but also I think she had issues relating to people on a normal level. So she had ongoing waking life issues. I don't know how much her husband/family knew about her dreaming activities but I'm sure they didn't understand them and thought them to be a product of a fractured mind.

So no I wouldn't be thinking that lucid dreaming or OBE's can lead to mental disabilities, quite the opposite in fact. If you share your dreaming abilities or your dreaming world view with some people might they think you're crazy? Quite possibly. :)

She did explain how she did it, but she would say stuff like, "I would go to the place where I know they should be" she would say, "I know that doesn't make sense, but I don't know how to explain it". She said more but I would have to look through the records. The problem with that is that back-in-the-day, you had to use a special program called Compuserve Information Manager to access the message board. All messages were in a propriety format that can not be read by anything else. My backups are on floppy disk. I still have an old computer in the basement that has a floppy drive, if it even still works. But even then I'm not sure the program will run on that old version of windows that is on the computer. I have print outs of some (on dot matrix paper) but I don't know how much is there. That's why I said the records are hard to access. :)

Oh, I wanted to ask... The graphic on your Avatar picture, did you make that? Looks cool. At first I thought it was cave men, but then realized it must be snowboarders. Same thing right? :) just joking, I'm a snowboarder too, or at least use to be....

Just realized you were you (my friend in WL) :oops: :chuckle:
Well icasio we certainly have to start our own little shared dreaming project!

Oh that's terrible to hear. Well I can sort of understand how she would have a hard time explaining what she did once she was dreaming since this is the only way of dreaming she'd experienced and couldn't tell what she had to explain and what was self-explanatory. I can see how that must be complicated to put in words. And yes I've seen that aswell, that some people just won't believe lucid dreaming is an actual thing.
Man I wish that was me in the picture but no that's Travis Rice and his crew...But yes snowboarding is the best thing ever!
Haha considering what you just explained about your records from the 80s it kind of sounds like your the caveman here:chuckle: ;)

yeah we'll try it some day, lucidmats!

Well, just about :P