My first lucid dream!!

Hey,
I saw the movie "Waking Life" about a month ago and when I was looking inot the movie on the net I came across a "Lucid Dreaming" site. At first i was skeptical but the more I read the more I wanted to be able to have lucid dreams. I started with the "recording your dreams" step and went from there. I went for a month with no lucid dreams but then last night it finally happened!! I was having a regular dream where I was on a huge ship coming into a harbour and then all of a sudden I was standing in the harbour watching the boat come it and I could actually see myself on it. It was at that point when I realized I was dreaming. At first I was confused because I couldnt remember how I got onto the shore and thats when it hit me that I was dreaming. I wandered around the area in amazement. Just to make sure I walked up to a girl and tried to kiss her (isnt that the first thing most people do??). It worked but I could feel the dream fading quickly. I woke up shortly after that feeling very exited. The whole thing lasted only about 15 seconds but it was incredible. I just have a few questions for more experienced dreamers than me...can you make the dreams last longer? If so, how long can they be? Also, can you get to a point where you can mostly always have a lucid dream or do they only come once in a while? Thanks in advance for the info!

Hey Wes! Welcome to the forums!

wow many questions, ill start at the beginning eh?

First, congrats on your first lucid dream! The method that you used to induce that lucid dream (LD) is called a DILD or Dream Induced Lucid Dream. Thats when you notice something odd in a dream.

There are many other ways of inducing lucid dreams, DILD is one of them, but id advise you hop over to the tutorials section and have a look at the induction methods there, specifically WBTB and MILD induction methods. Theyre way more effective than DILD.

I have not yet seen waking life yet, but plan to, looks pretty good!

Yours came after a month right? thats the 'average' amount of time it usually takes to get your first. use WBTB and MILD (tutorials) and you should be regularly LDing in no time!

A lot of people opt to try flying or dreamscaping on their first LD, i prefer dreamscaping. To find out what these mean you should probably browse through all the tutorials, namely the acronyms and phrases one, and get the general gist of what the community here will be talking about.

There are many ways to make your LDs last longer, i think theyre somewhere in tutorials, so i wont bother mentioning them here, go find them yourself. A few are Dream Spinning when you feel your LD fading, not getting too excited, and keeping your EYES OPEN (you probably closed your eyes when kissing i expect? it makes you wake up)

Some people on this forum claim to have 3-4 LDs per night, that may be too much to hope for, one or two a week is considered a lot. One a night would take a few years work ;)

Dreams can last for about half an hour, but the complication is that since the brain processes information very fast, your dream may happen faster than real-time. Some people claim to have lived in a dream many years while only being asleep a few hours. It depends on how long you can train your mind to perform under these fast-processing REM periods.

But tahts digressing, you will probably have 10 minute long LDs, but that is more than enough time to have some fun!

Also, have a look at the things to do in a lucid dream thread (in tutorials?) ill get the link and post it in a bit. It will give you some ideas of things to do in a lucid dream, some are pretty crazy ;)

Have fun at dreamviews, and relax!

~Damascus

Wooohoo congrats! Well damascus said it all there, I guess. Cant do much but to encourage you to keep practicing and stuff to improve the quantity & quality. Tons of info on how to do that on the site. :)

I've only had a few LDs, but as you found out they're worth all the effort! Damascus was pretty thorough in his response and I agree with him. Tutorials are the primary source, then the search function. If you still don't find what you're looking for feel free to post a new question or PM one of the Dream Guides (DGs), mods, or myself. Thanks for coming and being part of our community!

Hope to hear some (more) success stories! :D

-Amé

Thanks a lot for all the info you guys gave me. I'm going to check out those tutorials everyone seems to be talking about and hopefully that will make lucid dreaming easier. As I said before I've only been reading up on this stuff for a little under a month now and I've got to say that i still find it hard to beleive that it is actually possible to have a lucid dream. It was an totally new experience for me and I'm really exited to work on my LD skills. I can't get over how real it felt though! I know I just had my first one last night but I cant wait to go to bed tonight and try it again. How many dreams do you guys usually have in a month(or week or whatever)?