Hi, everyone. This is my first time posting, and to introduce myself, I can think of nothing better than to share how I first became aquainted with Lucid dreaming.
It began when I was quite young, with my first remembered experience of a flying dream. I was already quite good at remembering dreams after they happened. I don't know how flying usually occurs for you all, but it was a rather odd thing for me. I was in a hallway, I think it was at school, and I suddenly realized that if I hopped into the air, and then made a sort of bicycle-kicking motion with my legs into thin air, I could gradually increase my altitude, and then, if I stopped kicking, I could sort of glide back down at a slight angle to the ground. I particularly enjoyed gliding in a sort of downward spiral until I reached good old terra firma.
I did not realize I was dreaming, but thought I had accidentally discovered how to fly, and all of the other kids in school (at least i think it was school) were quite impressed by this. When I woke up, I was dissapointed to find that it had been a dream, but it gave me a great litmus test for future dreams.
I had a similar experince discovering that I could breath underwater, which I have also used since as a test, but I think that had much more to do with the fact that my body wasn't really underwater than with the psychology of dreams. Like before, I thought at first that I had discovered the trick to breathing underwater. (I was convinced, until i woke up, that the trick was keeping your face down and taking shallow breaths. I definitely DO NOT recommend trying that out at the community center pool! ;) )
Much later in life, just a few years ago, it was a flying lucid dream that really brought home for me the depth of reality in the dream world. I don't recall how this paricular dream became lucid, but I decided to leave where I was and fly, not so much for the raw fun of flying, as for the fact that it's a great way to change the scenery in a dream. As I was first taking off, I looked down at the trees, gently swaying in the breeze, and I could see every leaf moving independantly and see each blade of grass and feel the cold wind on my arms. ( I was wearing a short-sleeved shirt in this dream.) I could see ahead of me the skyline of a city that I had willed to be there, (it was where I intended to go) and the detail, and depth of sensory experience, it took my breath away. I really don't remember what happened after that, as I have had many lucid experinces before and since, any more than I can remember everything that happened in any particular waking day, but just that brief moment of really experinceing the reality of it all was very profound.
Does anyone have a similar story?
