First LD experiences

Hi, I am new to this forum, I want to say hi and already have a lot of text for you to read ;D

I heard about lucid dreaming not too long ago. When I did, I started harvesting the net for information. I was quite surprised to read that lucid dreaming is something you can actually learn, and I was determined to do so. After my first small successes, I thought I'd write down what happened so far to share it with you and maybe get some insights.

At first, a little prologue. Usually I remember dreams only rarely, and if I do, only a few moments. When I read about the interaction between concious and unconcious mind I remembered one very vivid dream I had once, which was, at least for me, so extraordinary that after waking up, I wrote down a whole page about it, even though I have never kept a dream journal before. In short:

I found myself in my childhood / youth's neighbourhood (I don't live there anymore), but the terrain and houses were all deformed. I was able to recognize them but I realized that this was not as it used to be. It was really weird and eventually I "figured" I had travelled to another dimension or whatnot. Since there was nobody around to ask and I was kind of scared to go into freaky deformed houses, I took my cellphone and dialed my old phone number, which I used to have while I was living there - just to hear myself pick up on the other end. At least I was at that point convinced it was me, my voice at the other end was also kind of "deformed" and hard to understand. I don't really remember what I said but I was no help at all, and then the scene switched. All the time I was looking for an explanation to what was going on. Just before waking up, the dream was even "solved": I discovered a secret room where some friends of mine had just planned and pulled off a giant prank on me.

In retrospective, I think my concious mind was slightly awake there, noticing flaws, still not recognizing that it was a dream. It seems it tried to apply some logic to find things out (can i call myself?), and later (in the "solving") it again tried to somehow make sense of it all. I read that you can remember lucid dreams very well, which also points in that direction, since as I said, usually don't remember much.

Now for the lucid part.

I have had three experiences so far. I guess the first two qualify as dream-induced lucid dreams, yet they both only lasted a few seconds, which is why I tend to call those lucid moments. The funny thing is, I did not even plan to lucid dream at that time. Just reading about it and having it in mind must have triggered it. The first lucid moment happened when I wasn't even lying in my bed, I was dozing off in a very comfortable living room chair at around midnight and slept for approximately one and a half hours. I can remember only the last few seconds of the dream, the few between becoming lucid and waking up and a few seconds before that. So this is how things went:

I was sitting at a table that seemed to belong to some outdoor part of a restaurant, it was a warm summer evening and already dark, the place was slightly lit by candle light. There were many other people sitting at the table, but nobody I know in real life. It was all in third person perspective and I was looking at the scene as if I was floating at some distance behind my dream body. It was quite noisy since everybody was chatting, including myself. I don't know what it was that somebody said to me, but suddenly the noise from all the other people faded and the "camera" zoomed closer to me so I could now only see myself. I turned my head right, facing the people who had just told me something. The noise of the others had completely faded out, it was almost like they had all stopped talking to listen what I had to say now, even though they couldn't possibly all have heard what I was told. I was looking very sceptical and a little distraught when I heard myself say: "But then... I must be dreaming..." (in english, which is by the way and interestingly enough not my native language). There was a short pause in total silence after that... and suddenly, I became lucid.

I have read the sentence "I became lucid" in quite a few forum posts before and I wonder how many "first-timers" mention this just casually. Even though I was not able to explore any of the dream world afterwards, that moment itself was overwhelming and is hard to describe. When I normally wake up, I feel a little dizzy like I think everyone does, until you get up. But when I became lucid, it happened within the fraction of a second. In an instant there was "all information available", I knew that this was a dream and all my memory "I" didn't even realize existed just a second ago, was there. I immediately remembered what I had read and that it just happened. Another thing that intensely changed was perception of time. It was more clear to me than ever before that whenever I thought of dreams before, they were always ("of course") in retrospective. But in that moment, I was actually able to feel the dream in _presence_. I read another post where someone asked the question, how you are supposed to do something in dreams if they are always like something that happened in the past, something you cannot ever do anything about since it always already happened - this goes into the exact same direction. You may not even remember what happened before you became lucid, but then it is as if there is a cut, time stops and you get the possibility to act. If you have seen the butterfly effect, it is a little like when the main character goes back in time by reading his diaries, and he suddenly enters the past at some point, now able to act there. At the same time, my dream character appeared to me like a puppet, that lives a new life everytime you dream, taking each of it for granted, not knowing or questioning anything about what's happening, even not really being "you" for that matter, I really felt kind of separated from it. But on with the story: The moment I became lucid was like an adrenaline rush which instantly made my body start to tingle and my skin felt hot. I immediately thought about having read that exactly this excitement can wake you up - and this made it probably even worse; suddenly I felt a force grasping my dream body. I was watching from the outside, but I could feel it. Everything around me started to turn into some bright, energy like sparkling, fast and constantly moving upwards. The whole scene was suddenly like one big canvas and the force kept pulling me out of it backwards in waves. I didn't want to go and remember trying to grasp something to keep myself in, thinking: "No, no!", but to no avail. I woke up in the chair which I realized was the same sitting position as in the dream.

It seemed clear to me that I was kicked out of the dream because of the overexcitement and I told myself in case this happens again, 1. try to stay calm as if it was nothing and 2. try some stabilization techniques.

In the dream of the second lucid moment, which happened again unintentionally a few days later, I was again in third person perspective, this time watching myself and somebody else I again did not know, from behind from quite a distance, doing inline skating on a long, wide road. It was a warm day, with blue sky and the sun was shining. I have done some inline skating in waking life, not much though, so I am not sure whether this itself counts as a dream sign. I can't really remember any feeling reporting anything strange, in opposite to the first lucid moment, where something somebody said must have been suspicious to me. Another theory of mine is that somehow the dreamed, swinging movements while skating have some kind of influence on my conciousness, since I had another very vivid (non lucid) dream once where I was also inline skating, jumping and speeding like crazy, all the time wondering why I could actually do this (I didn't inline skate at the time). So this time somehow lucidity "just happened". It was not as intense as the first time; I was excited, but did not feel the adrenaline rush-like feeling from before. The camera now (again) started to quickly zoom towards my dream body. I remembered that I wanted to do some stabilization technique, and the first thing that came into my mind was: turn! I don't know if it was the best choice given the situation. When I started turning I could not see what was behind me. At roughly 180°, I was suddenly again grasped by some force and I remember having the image in mind that on the same wide road I was skating, a plane had silently begun to take off (or land?) and one of its wings just hit me full frontal in the moment I turned around, pushing me backwards and once again kicking me out of the dream very forcibly. I woke up.

The third experience was when I was trying a WILD for the first time. It was a short night and since I read that an afternoon nap has a good chance of a working WILD, I gave it a try. I was really positive about it and said to myself: This is the perfect situation, it just has to work! I set my alarm clock countdown to exactly one hour, since I didn't want to oversleep. Later when I woke up, 55 minutes had passed. I don't know how long exactly I was lying there until things started to happen, but it seemed quite long to me. I laid down on the side, relaxing, not moving, staying aware, you know it. I cannot really say if I had fallen asleep for a short period of time (not sure how to define "asleep" in that context anyway), but I suddenly again switched to third person perspective, seeing myself lying on the bed. I don't know if this was actually already inside a dream or if what happened belongs into the "noise" category of the transitional state. But just a moment later, my body started to buzz and it felt like I was, without actually doing anything, turning from lying on my side to lying on my stomach. Then, once again, I felt an invisible force grasping my body. This time it was first dragging me forward, towards the head of the bed. I could feel sliding over the bed and my head pushing against the wall. At the time I was unable to move, or maybe I just didn't get the chance to, because the force that had just grabbed me, was basically hurling me around. It let go for a second, just to grab me again, this time more forcibly pulling me to the right. I felt, saw and heard the sound of myself bumping against my bed stand, doing the exact same noises it would in waking life. The interesting thing here is that the bed stand is in reality at the left side, not the right. I was almost falling out of the bed, but was grabbed a third and last time and dragged back towards the foot of the bed. At that point I started hearing a noise that gradually increased in volume and sounded much like a jet flying over you, just more hissing. I don't know if I was really aware of what was going on to that point, but hearing the sound instantly made me aware/think that I had to be in the transitional stage and that it had worked. I started to intentionally listen to the sound I was hearing and it became clearer by doing so. I was expecting to enter the dream now, but to my disappointment, all that happened was the sound slowly faded out and I was lying there, but nothing happened. Somehow I then transitioned back and slowly woke up, first keeping my eyes closed, for a short moment not really knowing if I was still in the "dream" or not, but then opened my eyes and was out of it. I estimate the time from switching to third person to transitioning back took roughly 10 seconds.

Something I was since thinking about is: Is there the possibility that I did not actually wake up because I became lucid, but just became lucid because something woke me up? Even though I doubt it, I cannot rule out that at the time, a plane or car flew/drove by, making the sound I heard for a few seconds, that in the end woke me up. But in the meantime, the subconciousness made a story out of it. At some point you have transitioned into wakefulness far enough that for a few moments both your concious and subconcious mind are active, which one could perceive as becoming lucid. It would also be an explanation for the short time until waking up.

What actually (positively) surprises me, given I usually rarely remember normal dreams, is that the first two lucid moments happened already a short time after just conciously dealing with the topic and without any directed intent. I started a dream journal, but up to then, I only wrote down a few short notes about three (non-ld) dreams. I did not make a habit of doing reality checks or the like.

I'd love to hear any thoughts about this.