First off, I'm new to the site and the forums. Hi everybody. :D I'm not new to lucid dreaming, though - I got interested in it after learning about astral projection when I was in seventh grade or so, and though I never could project I did end up having a bunch of lucid dreams. Christmas break boredom (my friend said "when you're bored, learn a skill") brought me back to searching out all the sites I'd gotten rid of since high school started, so now I'm trying to get back into it again, this time focusing on dreaming specifically.

I thought it'd be cool to post a few of the first lucid dreams I ever had, around the time I was about thirteen, maybe as inspiration to anyone who's just starting and frustrated about it. You can fly, but it's almost like Peter Pan without the fairy dust...you have to believe you can do it. (hey, maybe it would help to imagine getting sprinkled with fairy dust?) These were both in one night, after about a month or so of research.

I'd just gone through some weird epic dream where I was a boy in the 1800s and people from the future made me sign something so they could use my body in the 2500s or something, and I was suddenly in the future and running from them and a whole lot of things happened. I ended up in this grocery store by my house - I might have been me again by that point - and I heard this kid I know speaking. Out of absolutely nowhere, in the middle of the aisle, my perceptions of reality shifted and I suddenly knew that "oh my god, I'm dreaming! At that realization and knowledge that I was awake, standing inside my dream at this supermarket, I got this incredible rush of ecstatic joy and ran down the aisle, taking off instantly and flying straight through the ceiling.

The lucidity faded after that, but it came back later that night in a second dream, which is by far my favorite. I don't remember what happened to make me realize it - I think I just randomly awoke to it again since I remembered the feeling from the first dream. I was in my house and my mom called me down from the top floor to meet Renee Zellweger (it wasn't her, and I had never seen her before in my life...so I don't know where that came from.) I hopped over this landing we have above our stairs and floated down to meet her. I asked her "hey, what should we do now that we're lucid?" and she responded "well, we could go to the city." So instantly, out of nowhere, I was flying towards Chicago all lit up at night, and I guess Renee was next to me but I didn't really notice her, and the lights were all dazzling and this U2 song Surrender was playing in my head and as I got closer and went down a little more above this park I kinda faded out and woke up. Those put me in a ridiculously good mood for the next three days or so.

I've also had dreams where I flew out my office window and changed the moon from full to nothing, but I couldn't get it back. In my later ones I had more trouble flying for some reason. I just had one two nights ago, which made me happy, but I couldn't do much...I was standing looking down the road in front of my house and it was kinda faded, but I realized I was dreaming and tried to make a crowd appear down the road, which it slowly did.

I think I should mention, though, that I've had good dream recall throughout my life (I can still remember dreams from being four years old,) and when I'm not woken up suddenly I almost always remember one or two of the dreams I've had that night. So...that probably affects a lot.