Thread: Hello.

Hullo! Greetings, or howeverso one orchestrates introductions here. I suppose I'm Koschei here. I've always "known" what lucid dreaming was, with experiences with it from age six onwards, but only randomly - once I got a name for it I started researching.

About three years ago, however, I started experiencing a psychological toll from nightmares and started avoiding sleep. My sleep schedule is still....really bad, to be honest, and I'm somewhat hoping that some dedication to dream recall (and the 8 hours a night that entails) will help me get back to something more Circadian-normative.

I get panic attacks and really heavy existential angst. Three cheers for hormones, anyone?

I also experience intense visual snow, and perpetually - for those unfamiliar, I see something like the noise on a grainy photograph superimposed over everything, all the time. When I close my eyes, it becomes colorful, geometric. As a kid I would spend up to an hour watching the patterns become evermore intricate, almost Mayan.

I'm a skeptic in terms of the "supernatural", etc, but most of my friends...aren't so I promise not to be judgmental or derogatory. I try to be as open-minded as possible (and if you ever feel I've been too narrow-minded on something, feel free to tell me, I shan't take it personally).

My earliest memory, however, of sleep-related strangeness is of one night around age ten when I could not sleep. I saw what seemed to be brightly colored stars, like when I close my eyes, dancing across the ceiling like they were windblown. Eventually they faded and then two giant Asiatic characters hovered above me, glowing red. I chalk it up to hallucinations, but no one I've ever talked to has experienced anything like it. Anyways, that's probably the first thing that got me interested in sleep and dreams and hallucinations. *g*

Much love and respect.
-Koschei