Hello. I decided to join after not being able to stop reading these forums for three days. (I found this site when reading about dreams and lucid dreaming on wikipedia.org.) I was finding it hard to sleep, which kind of defeats the purpose of attempting to have lucid dreams so I can try the new techniques I've learned about here. Now that my excitement's a little more under control now, I'm sure I will be fine (I've had temporary insomnia a couple of times before--every time I decide not to worry about it, the problem sorts itself out after a couple of days).

Anyway, I thought it would be appropriate to give a little bit of background. I've had occasional lucid dreams for a long time (even before I knew there was a name for them) without trying, and I always assumed it was normal to have those kind of dreams every once in a while. I'm somewhat surprised to learn how many people struggle with having them at all, even accidentally.

I remember reading a book several years ago about lucid dreams, and I think I managed to get them for a few days in a row. Afterwards I sort of lost interest a little bit and only had the occasional "accidental" LD. Nonetheless, I always enjoyed experimenting in a LD, trying different things to see what would happen.

My only problem was that I never had dream control, which seemed ironic to me (if you know you're dreaming, you'd think you could do absolutely anything you wanted since it's your own brain making the dream up), but it was something I just accepted. So I was startled to discover sites like this and find out it apparently IS possible to have more control over LDs. So that's my new goal now (that, and learning how to make them last a little longer--my LDs only last about 2-5 minutes average).

I don't know what the consequences of all this will be, but I guess I'll soon find out!