My first post!

[bgates87]

I'm a new member here and I just wanted to write this post to introduce myself. This will probably be the longest post I'll ever make here. I'm 21 years old, but I think I had my first lucid dream when I was about 11 years old. I didn't know it was a lucid dream then, I just knew that I was aware that I was dreaming and that I was controlling what happened in my dream. My first lucid dream- the dream I remember from when I was 11 years old- actually came as a result of trying to avoid a nightmare. In the dream, I was sitting with my father in a car. That in itself was strange because my parents divorced when I was only a few months old and I've never met my father and have no idea what he looks like (dream analysts should have a field day with this one, especially considering what happens next). Regardless, there was a man in a car with me that I identified as my father, and we were having what I imagined would be a normal father-son conversation when suddenly his skin began turning green and scaly. He turned into some kind of disgusting monster and when I tried to get out of the vehicle the doors were locked. It was in that instant that I realized that I was having a dream. It was a profound feeling, to know that I was dreaming and yet still be dreaming. I remember thinking, "I want to be somewhere else." And I was instantly in another place doing some other completely unrelated thing and I think I lost lucidity again at that point. That's all I remember of that dream now but it is the first time I remember controlling a dream in any way, however minimal the control of the dream was. The reason I've joined this site now is because after not experiencing many lucid dreams or even being able to recall most of my dreams during my teenage years (perhaps because of high levels of stress?) I have suddenly had an explosion of lucid dreams recently. I've had lucid dreams at least 4 nights in a row now, but I feel like I don't have complete control over my dreams. I came to this site to learn how to better control my lucid dreams. Last night for example, I had a dream where (typical male dream) I was in some vehicle, a van I think, flirting with a very beautiful girl. We were both passengers. I was attracted to her, but it was not like the the way a 21-year-old guy is typically attracted to a girl. It felt more like a grade-school crush than a sexual attraction. I was lucid at this point, but I wasn't trying to control the dream or change anything because, well... things were going great. The next thing I knew, I was out of whatever vehicle we were riding in and walking alongside some railroad tracks with a completely different girl who seemed like she was my sister or my cousin or just a good friend or something because she was pretty but I wasn't attracted to her and felt obligated to protect her. Obviously I wanted to go back and flirt with the other girl but when I tried to do that I felt the overwhelming need to keep doing what I was doing instead. This other girl and I ended up coming up on what I can only guess was an abandoned railroad station given that we were walking near a railroad. This is where things got interesting, this is the direction most of my dreams end up going; absurd, life-threatening action. There was a cat guarding this railroad station, only it wasn't an ordinary cat, it was a predatory cat. It was like a cougar or jaguar or something, and it was freakishly large- probably 12 feet tall. Needless to say, it scared the hell out of me and I soon found myself fighting for my life. I don't know what happened to the girl I was with then, I never saw here after the cat thing appeared. At this point I was still thinking, "Ok, let's go back and flirt with that other girl I was flirting with earlier and get out of here," but every time I tried to leave I kept getting the feeling that I couldn't leave until I beat the crap out of this catzilla thing. Eventually I got to a point where it was clear that I was going to be killed by whatever this thing was, and despite my best efforts I couldn't get out of the situation by controlling my dream. I ended up waking up right as I was about to die. It was frustrating to not be able to do what I wanted in a lucid dream, so I decided to see if there were any sites on the internet could help you learn to control your dreams. I did a Google search and ended up here and that's my story. I'd love to hear some suggestions on how to improve my control over lucid dreams and I'll definitely be going around reading some of your stories as well.