Hello.

I had my first lucid dream when I was about six years old. It was very brief, but the memory has stuck with me as if it had happened yesterday. I didn't know that what I had experienced at the time is known as a "lucid dream" until I saw LaBerge's book in the bookstore, twenty years later. As soon as I saw the title I became very excited and just knew that he was writing about the kind of dream I had experienced. I devoured both his books that weekend.

That experience led me to the Lucidity Institute, subscribing to NightLight, and buying a NovaDreamer with the "Course in Lucidity". After alot of hard work in improving Dream Recall, endless RCs, and screwing around with that awful NovaDreamer I had one mother of a LD. I count that as one of the major experiences in my life. I was on a physical high for a week.

During that period I had two excellent LDs, a few low grade lucid dreams, and numerous near misses. However, I eventually lost interest in doing all the work needed to produce LDs (it seems very difficult for me to pull off) so my ability to LD eventually trailed off to zero without all the prep work.

Finally, a few weeks ago (and ten years since my last LD), I tried some Valerian tea and had an astonishing vivid dream which was as real as life but without the lucidity. The experience brought back a desire to take up LDs again, and searching the web brought me to this forum. Hello!

I feel that a forum like this is an order of magnitude better than the old NightLight newsletter based community. There are so many varied ideas with excellent feedback. Not to mention all this new information on supplements that I had no idea existed previously.

My biggest challenge in taking this up again as that I now have two small kids that wake up at 6am on most mornings, and this can make it very difficult to recall my dreams and write them down. It also eats into some prime REM real estate. On the plus side, I think that I am more mature now and have a higher tolerance for failure and frustration, traits that I did not have in my 20's.

Such is my intro. Wish me luck!