Hello DreamViews: My Introduction
Hello, dreamers of the DreamViews community,
I have been lurking on this site for some time now, browsing casually off and on. At the beginning of this year I created my account as part of organizing and establishing my efforts and interests, though I am only now getting around to this introductory post. Consider this the launching point of my participation here on DreamViews.
I believe I shall begin with a bit about myself: I first learned of lucid dreaming just over two years ago while browsing the internet for information related to mental visualization (more on this later). Since then, I have bounced around various LD-related websites, finally landing here a number of months ago. Over these past two years, I have ridden motivational highs and lows, occasionally reaching fairly decent peaks of recall, then gradually dropping off, leaving my dream journal neglected. During all this, I have had a fair number of minor lucid experiences, mundane and short, but enjoyable nonetheless. Finally, as the last year's calendar turned over, I reached a point where I had finally tired of this cycle. I determined to bring lucid dreaming to the top of my stack of interests. So here I am.
My interest in lucid dreaming began as a possible solution to a perceived problem. Childhood recurring nightmares, being the most memorable experiences of my dreaming life from that period, linger, faded, in the deep reaches of my mind. But these memories are all from fairly early on. As far as I can tell, my mind's dream life died at some point in my early teens, something I did not realize until about two-and-a-half years ago due to another, at first consideration, unrelated issue. I seem to be consciously unable to perform mental visualizations. This realization drove me into the flurry of exploration on the internet mentioned above, targeting topics related to the use of visualization for various purposes. At one point in all this, I believe I recalled a small NL-dream, of course with visual experience. I gradually came to two parallel conclusions: 1) my mind is perfectly capable of visualization when it sees fit, even though my waking mind seems to have lost the connection, and 2) this was the first dream I could remember after a span of years. From this came the fairly simple idea that by increasing my proficiency in dreaming, I could find a way to reconnect my waking mind with the process. Add to this the potential of lucidity, and I believed (and still do) that this would be the best possibility of resolving the "issue".
Since then, I've come to appreciate lucid dreaming as a skill in itself, rather than just a means to an end. My motivations have grown accordingly, and although I have yet to solve my visualization problem, it is no longer my driving purpose for lucid dreaming. I will never get over the vast realm of possibility which I can see lucid dreaming opening up to me in the future, and am happy with this feeling. From here on, I am determined to keep improving my recall and awareness in order to build my lucid dreaming abilities as high as I can reach. I hope to become an active member here on DreamViews, for my own sake, and so that I can help others in the future.
And so, I conclude My Introduction. I am happy to be here. Thank you.
