Hi folks,

I just wanted to post a hello and introduce myself. I am sorry for the length of the post, it will likely be the longest thing I ever write here though. I just thought it was important to state where I'm coming from if I happen to post about anything topics. Thanks for your time reading.

I'm a 35 year old Database Administrator for a group of West coast Hospitals. I've been struggling with Depersonalization and Derealization episodes for many years now and recently decided to try to address this problem. During the therapy to help with these challenges we've done a bunch of dream analysis and excercises. During those excercises and my descriptions of my dream experiences with her, she talked to me about lucid dreaming and directed me here to read up and maybe share some information.

I've also had bouts of insomnia and difficulty falling asleep since a very young age and spent some time in a few of the CA Sleep Centers to work on it but mostly they drugged me up too much for me to function well on a day to day basis. Tired was preferable to loopy.

All through my sleep challenges, I've been able to shape and guide what I dream since I can remember. I'm not sure where I fall in the context of this board but after reading over some of the posts, I think I chose the right experience level. I don't know most of the terms here yet so I'm not sure if I do any of these things specifically.

[list]1. I am able to plant a themed suggestion before falling asleep with a high success rate and a decent specificity if I actually concentrate on it.
2. I have an apparently high recall rate as well according to the therapist and I've never given any thought to not being able to remember my dreams. I can get far too much detail if I actually right anything down.
3. I rarely find myself unable to alter details and when that does happen, it just takes a different approach to effect change in that dream.
4. I'm able to return to a dream that I was woken from by mistake somehow relatively quickly.
5. I often incorporate sound stimulation into my dreams with a fair success rate and to help guide a theme for example.[list]

Being a long time web user (like from the start, how sad!) I can't believe that it never occured to me look for other dreamers. I'm looking forward to reading people's dream journals to see how you are all spending your dreamtime and the experiences you are exploring. I'm affraid most of mine are (embarrassingly) the typical male stuff you'd imagine so I'm not sure how much help that would be to post. I'm hoping to springboard into new ideas and experiences from some of yours.

I'm also of course very interested in interpretation of Lucid Dreams and how that interpretation filters through people's dream conciousness.

If you made it this far, I thank you for your time and patience with my rambling. I hope that my future posts can be short and concise as well as helpful in some way. Thanks for providing and building this great resource for all of us.

Jerod

EDIT: p.s. A special thanks to Barbizzle for the nice welcome message!