Hi, I was introduced to this site last night by a friend and found it very interesting to read, very informative. I already had a little knowledge on what Lucid Dreaming was from reading topics on it in the past, seeing and reading this site is the first time however I've read so much on it.

I'm 27 years old now and I haven't recalled a dream in what I estimate to be around 16 years, because I stopped them myself. When I tell people I know I did this they never usually beleive me, but upon reading the information on this site it made me smile to read that a way of inducing dream recall is to verbally assert your intentions before you go to bed. I smiled because this is what I did, around 16 years ago I stopped my dreams by doing the opposite, verbally asserting my intentions to stop them. I havent had a dream since (or rather, I haven't recalled one) I can't remember if someone told me to do this or I just thought to do it myself, as I don't remember much of my childhood apart from some of the dreams I used to have.

I used to dream very often, some dreams were recurring dreams and some dreams were single one offs. None of them were nice (or at least not the ones I remember) From what I understand so far about the subject, the dreams I used to have were lucid.

For fear of making this post too long, Ill try to just summarise the kind of dreams I had. I was nearly always being chased by something and experienced lots of the common things (unable to run etc) however I was always aware that I was dreaming (from what I remember) I knew it was a dream and fake but I STILL didn't want to be caught and torn up into little bits, so my desire in my dreams was always to wake up. I deffinately gave myself the ability to fly when I needed too and it got me out of a lot of trouble. Though to be honest I never actually thought of wishing the monster away, or creating a gun to shoot it with.

To wake up I needed to find a place within my dream, close my eyes and count to 10. Worked everytime and I knew if I got to 10 before I was discovered I would wake up. So for example if I was being chased I would fly (sometimes took me a couple of jumps) to a high safe location I knew I would be safe and got out of my dream.

So it seems I have previous experience of sorts of Lucid Dreaming that I wasn't aware of at the time. My questions as such are these:

I stopped these once for a reason. Im worried if I open the gates to dreams again that ill have some awful experiences again and then what If I can't shut the gates again?

Is it possible I have some sort of natural tendency to lucid dream?

Is it worth exploring my dreams again, would if benefit me? or is it jsut unecessary risk for nothing?

Thanks for reading and any help you might be able to give, sorry it turned into such a long post.