Hello all. This is certainly a wonderful forum! I have been lurking for a few months now, and decided to finally register and join in on the discussions.

I've had an interest in lucid dreaming for 12 years, but haven't seriously picked it up again until 4 months ago. I bought the book Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming and it has been a fantastic read. I wish that I had read it all those years ago. I probably wouldn't have lost interest (but you know how the teen years can be- you get distracted with a lot of other things). In 4 months I'm averaging about an LD about every 10-14 days. It's a far cry for me, from having only had 3 or 4 in the past decade.

There are a few things I need to work on in my LDs and I hope that the forum will help me as I continue my journey. One thing I cannot do is fly. The first time when I tried in one my early LDs, I simply jumped up, like in real life, and simply landed. I repeated and had the same result. Later on, after reading some posts on this forum and I noticed one person saying that you had to put energy into the act- it simply won't happen if you imagine it. The next LD I had, I tried imagining the energy projecting out through my legs and feet. I could feel it happening in my dream, but the moment I "took off" I woke up. The next LD it was the same thing. Since, I haven't tried flying for fear of waking up. Go figure, just a few days ago in a non-lucid dream, I was flying a bit.

This morning I had an LD, and in it I was outside my house. I tried to enter the house by phasing through the door like a ghost. I put my hand out- bang- hit the door. No matter what I tried doing in my dream, I couldn't go through the door. I just turned the knob and entered. LOL

In reading Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming, I'm wondering if my dream world is holding very closely to the "schema" of the real one, and I'm trying to think of ways to "free my mind" as it were. I'm sure many others here have had this problem. Any comments on this matter would be appreciated.

Sorry for the rambling first post. 8)