Excited to explore the world of dreams!

Hello I’m a 23 year old man who has been fascinated with my dreams since I was a boy. I had reoccurring nightmares as a kid and credit a lot of my vivid imagination to dreams and ideas I had as a child. As an adult I’ve explored many avenues of consciousness and have had a couple mystical experiences. I’m mostly here to grapple with my own dreams and unwind my subconscious. My goal is to learn how to read or start to understand my naturally occurring dreams before making conscious efforts to go lucid. I have done that in the past with some mild success but I was never able to bend physics or manifest exactly what I wanted so I wouldn’t say I ever felt like I had any control there.

I’m a very passionate person who owns a business doing what I love, wrapping everything I do with good selfless intent whenever I can be conscious enough. Mindfulness and non-duality are very large corner stones to how I try to live my daily life. I’ve had two unprovoked obe’s now a couple years ago but I was more confused and terrified than observant. Thank you for having me on your board and I’m excited to learn!

Welcome to Dream Views. :okbyenow:

One thing to remember, you can always explore natural dreams while lucid. In fact, going lucid increases your chances of getting to a dream's deeper meaning, as well as understanding what symbols or people may represent. How is this possible? Simply ask the dream characters (or objects!) what they represent, or if they have a message for you, while lucidly engaging the natural dream setting. Also, if you're lucid, your memory of the dream's contents is likely to be stronger. It's only up to you whether you want to do your own thing in a lucid dream. Most of the time, if i'm not working on a Task (see tasks of the month/year thread), I choose to follow the dream so as to achieve deeper understanding.

Good luck, happy to have you here! :sunflower:

Welcome to the forum, seems like there's been quite a few new members lately. :)

One thing I would say off the bat to your introduction is that control is neither required nor necessarily always desirable in a lucid context, as MoonageDaydream put quite well with exploring a "natural" dream lucidly.

Although my own lucid dreaming is very infrequent, if I didn't get to do something in a lucid dream, I simply just look forward to being able to do it at some later point; maybe I never will, but I guess that's just life too, as I have learned more than a few times. I do already have plenty of situations of dream control while non-lucid (as does my dad, weirdly) anyway and while I don't get the same experience while non-lucid, I find that there's always something of value to me in all dreams, regardless of the level of control. In my early lucids I did admittedly get a bit frustrated by lack of control over some things, but personally, this frustration was probably a hindrance to simply enjoying dreaming as a whole.

Welcome to the forum! :)