Hello! It is a true pleasure to be here. I wish to thank the administrator, whoever he/she may be for getting me up and able to post. I don't know you but your timliness and service is much appreciated.

I'm a highschool student and during a particularly long and boring Spanish class today I had noted how many people were yawning so in the next study hall I decided to go to Wiki and try and figure out yawning. Yawning led to stretching, which led to sleeping, which led to the interesting segment on dreaming. It was in a reference section that I discovered your site, I was impressed by the tutorial pages and the interesting and amusing concept of actually being aware in ones own dreams. I'm very interested in trying this, and possibly applying it somehow.

As someone new to the concept though I have a few questions that I would appreciate some answers on. First off, All this talk of being aware that you were dreaming has happened to me before, but it did not give me any abilities to manipulate my environment even though I was full blown aware that what was happening around me couldn't be true. In these situations where I was aware, I knew that I was dreaming but I was powerless to change anything, I could not even control my own actions if I was dreaming about doing laundry, I will continue to do laundry and the moment of knowledge does not enable me to change my course of action, I am compelled to fulfill whatever objective I am attempting to accomplish, whether it be washing clothes or slowly suffocating as I try to escape a caved in ruin (woke up and found that my face was in a pillow, explained the trouble breathing ) Are these dreams lucid? I knew they weren't real but I was utterly powerless to do anything that I wanted to do. Now that I mention it I never really felt like I wanted to do anything else than what I was doing, I recognized that it wasn't real, thought about it for a second, and simply continued on. If I could eventually just actually control myself that would be a mind blowing experience for me. So I'm just wondering here about all this lucidity stuff.

I was also thinking, since I am a highschool student and students always have to study, could I access my memory while in a lucid dreaming state. I mean there are tons of things I know I listened to in my classes that I can't really remember, I was thinking that if I really wanted to in a dream could I think myself to have a folder or a book with all my class information in them so I could review with perfect clarity? Is something like that possible?

I also am wondering how real the dream environment feels? I can remember some of my more vivid dreams but either I forgot or I never did have as much sensory input as I am accostumed to in real life. things always seemed to have...I don't know...a phony quality about them. Like the texture of peoples faces was not right, I don't really know how to describe it ,but very rarely when just dreaming do I feel that I have anything beyond basic visual and auditory sensory perception, like only a small number of the dreams I can remember had tactile sensation, to where I really felt things like cold or hot, rough or soft. I don't think I've ever felt pain and I know of one dream in particular where I was stabbed to death multiple times only to be resurrected and stabbed again. I can't remember any dreams where I've smelled or tasted. Are you able to control these sorts of things while lucid dreaming? or are you just more aware of them than before? Do you think that improving my dream recall will suddenly begin to show that I've had these things all along?

Thank you so much for allowing me to post, any answer or insight you could offer me would be accepted with gratitude.