Hi all,

So I'm new here. This looks like a very interesting community. I thought I'd introduce myself by giving some history about my experience with dreaming in general.

When I was very young I was utterly convinced that I physically left my body and travelled to different places while I was asleep. I was so sure of this that I was afraid I might get "stuck" in one of my dream worlds and not be able to return to my waking body. I remember confronting my father about this fear at some point (I was probably four or five), and he assured me that I didn't actually go any where when I was dreaming, which he knew since he had watched me sleep before. I remained unconvinced. When my Dad realized that he wasn't going to sway my conviction, he told me that if I ever got lost in a dream world, all I had to do was find and follow a golden thread. This golden thread, my Dad said, bound my heart to his, and would never break or leave me a stray. This calmed me somewhat, although my general anxiety regarding dreams didn't fully disappear.

This was largely due to two factors. The first is that I had frequent OBEs as a child, usually at least one per night. The second was a recuring dream that I had every night for nearly a decade, starting as far back as I can remember into my childhood (around three years old). The dream would start with me walkind down a culdesac, while the sun was setting. I would eventually bump into a young girl, dressed in white, holding a bag of trinkets, like you might get at a child's birthday party. She would remove a gift from the bag and give it to me. I would thank her and keep walking. I would then arrive at my house. Inside the garage was a huge, black machine. Steam powered. All moving parts, gears and pistons and such. I would move into the garage, and suddenly the entire space would expand. The machine was huge, towering above me, stretching below me. My father would be operating it. I would immediately know that this machine was going to destroy the world, and that I had to use the gift I had received to stop it. Sometimes I would succed, and sometimes I would fail. The specific gift and the outcome varied with each recurrence of the dream.

Needless to say, this appocalyptic dream was very disturbing to me as a child, and I had no way at all of making any sense of it. I stopped having the dream at around 13. It had been decreasing in frequency gradually up until that time. At that point my dreams became more or less normal. I had a couple brief experiences with lucidity, long before I knew what the term meant, but they were mostly fleeting. Then in late highschool some strange dreams began occuring. I had the final recurence of the machine dream just before going to college. This time I was standing on a bridge suspended over the machine, which had by now succesfully dominated the entire world- it stretched off in every horizon. Opposite me on the bridge was a king of shadow version of my self. We engaged in battle, and my shadow self won. He then threw me over the edge of the bridge, and I was devoured by the machine.

I had another dream around this time in which I was approaching a book with the word "Worriyd" written on it in golden, flaming letters. It was apparent to me in the dream that it was a book I had written, or was supposed to write. I woke up from the dream relatively perplexed, but wrote down the strange word.

It wasn't until some years later that I actually began writing a book (which I am still writing). It's an ontological text, in somes ways continuing Heidegger's project regarding Being. In any case, during the course of writing this book, I stumbled upon a word from old Germanic, "Wyrd," which was a mystical word designating the manner in which the past breathes through the present to determine the future. I immediately remembered the word from dream. It seems to me now that the "Worriyd" is simply a conflation of the words "Word" and "Wyrd." In any case "Wyrd," comes from the proto-indo-european root *wer-, which means to turn, and is one of the five (linguistic) roots of Being that I am writing about. It has become the center of my entire philosophy.

So that is an instance in which I beleive one of my dreams had a kind of prophetic property. Since then I have been trying to get more serious about dreaming, and at least taking my dreams more seriously, and spending more time interpreting them. I have now come to identify the girl from my machine dream with Freya, the norse godess of love and the earth, and also of battle. The machine seems to obviously be representative of technocracy, industrialization, etc. That the machine is being "driven" by my father is also significant, in that it implies a kind of inheretence, a cultural inheretence perhaps. The machine was, in effect, created by proceeding generations. I have yet to determine what this gift is that I am supposed to use to help stop it. Perhaps it is this book. Perhaps it lies elsewhere.

In anycase, I'm sure all of this sounds a bit looney. I can only say that I'm trying to be as reasonable in my interpretation of these experiences as I can be, given the highly bizzare nature of the experiences themselves.

I have only gotten serious about lucid dreaming in the last few months, but have had a great deal of success so far. When I was actively keeping my dream journal, I was having several lucid dreams each week. Most of them involved me trying out various things like flying, or working on techniques such a spinning etc. My life got very hectic shorly thereafter (bad patch with my girlfriend, gradschool applications, etc), and I became less diligent. I have still been having occasional spontaneous lucid dreams however.

The last lucid dream I had was my first negative experience with lucid dreaming. I think this post has gotten over long already, so I'll try to be quick about it. It was basically a series of twenty or so false awakenings. Towards the begining things were very mundane and I was not lucid. The middle began to get very surreal and in some cases disturbing, with me wavering in and out of lucidity. By the end, I was fully lucid, but unable to wake up. I just kept drifting from dream scene to dream scene, false awakening after false awakening. By the end of it I was panicking, convinced that something was wrong with my waking body; that I was dead or in a comma, etc. I wonder if anyone has any tips for forcing oneself to wake up when things go bad in a lucid state?

Anyhoo, I look forward to talking with all of you and sharing ideas and anecdotes. I apologize about the length of this post; my tendency for the verbose is already showing, I'm afraid.

Slainte!