vonklammo here, newbie to the forums and intermittent lucid dreamer.

It's more than 10 years since I had my first lucid dream, which I remember being hugely vivid and rather disconcerting - I was thinking completely rationally and was very confused about why people were acting so weirdly. I then discovered I could change the color of the apples on the apple tree in my yard at will, discovered that I was dreaming and instantly flew far up into the blue sky, leaving the ground behind me. I then woke up with the distinct feeling that I had scratched the surface of what was an amazing state of consciousness.

Since then, I have become lucid something like once every three months without really trying, but most of the time I get too excited and have a tremendously hard time holding on to the dream (it fades to black and I wake up).

Anyway, I have decided to treat becoming lucid as a skill that I wish to learn. Instead of stumbling into it, I want to be able to become lucid regularly and consistently.

I started a dream journal about two weeks ago and have identified a few "dream markers" in my dreams (in my case, speaking to people I don't know as if I do, and very large and distorted scenery - often recognized in the dream as real places I have visited, like an airport, but with the ceiling 10 times higher, for instance). I have recalled one dream every night except the last two nights where I have slept very badly (for external reasons, my two-year old son kept waking up).

Anyway, here I am, and I ain't leaving until I get a helluva lot better at LDing :-) Anybody want to adopt me? I have candy.