I'm Scooterly,

Hm . . . about me? I'm into writing and reading and art . . . I love Irish culture and language . . . a loyal fan of folk music . . . learning French . . . a fantasy geek . . . have goals of being an author for a living . . .Love wolves and dragonflies . . .I'm not really any relgion, just spiritual-I have my own beleifs . . . my favorite color is Green . . . well, there's a bunch of random facts! If there is anything else you want to know I don't mind questions, totally open for conversation.

Anyway, I searched for and ran across this forum mainly for support purposes. After nosing around a bit, I must say this board is very informative and has been interesting to explore! Is it okay if a throw a question here right off the bat?

To say the least, I have little trouble getting into a lucid dream, I've actually been able to do it before I even knew it had a name. My issue is, that I don't always choose to do it, which has never been a problem up until this point. Recently, its been every night for the past couple weeks when usually its a couple of times a month (not counting those that I purposely go into.) It always starts out the same- I'm walking down the street I live on - and after that I have anywhere from 5 to 10 false awakenings and nothing I do seems to help. So, of course I panic in my dream which just seems to makes it worse. I have tried shaking myself, hitting myself, trying to open my eyes, yelling at myself, yelling at other people to wake me up . . . these have all worked for me before but they seemed to have lost their affectiveness. Usually by the 5th or 6th false awakening, I'm alone and tend to panic more and am becoming desperate to wake up. And when I do finally wake up, I'm so partly groggy that I get the feeling that I'm still dreaming, and so I am slightly anxious and usually have a headache.

I am starting to get to the point where I'm afraid to fall asleep, not to mention I'm lacking energy to function properly during the day. As a side note, a few months ago I've started having panic attacks and just recently my doctor is mentioning something about a disorder and pills. I'm thinking that the two might be somehow related?

But if anyone has any other suggestions for the dreaming aspect, I'm willing to try anything. I can control the panic attacks to a point, but the lucid dreaming has taken a whole new turn and I'd like to figure it out.

And if there are no suggestions, well, then, it is very nice to be here and to meet you. I hope I'll be posting around here and get to know the community!

Thanks for any and all suggestions,
Scoots