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