New here, some of my experiences..

Well, from the time I was 6 through about 15 years of age all of my dreams consisted of what people would consider nightmares.. dreams where I was being hunted by something or someone.. nightly when I went to bed i'd have such dreams, with no break between them. As a result of this, with time I began to control my dreams, not with lucidity, but I just learned to hunt the hunter, so to speak.

Well, as a natural progression of this, when I was in highschool I had my first lucid dream:

I was sitting in my botony class. The teacher was giving one of his incredibly dull lectures, rambling on about something random.. I was thinking how I didnt want to be there, when I realized I wasn't there, it was just a dream. I turned to the girl sitting next to me and said (this was the girl who actually sat next to me in class in the real world) "This is a dream, I don't have to be here." At which point she shocked me by responding "It's YOUR dream, If I have to be here, YOU have to be here." This kind of startled me.. I thought that once I realised it was a dream everything would just become nonresponsive. Anyways, I got up from my chair and left the classroom. I thought that since I knew it was a dream, I could control everything around me, so I amused myself my making random things erupt into flames until I was woke by my alarm.

My second dream was not too long afterwards. I believe the dream itself had only just begun, and started with a group of us finding a corpse. I'm not sure what brought the fact that I was dreaming to my mind, but I realised it pretty much immediately. Asserting my control over the dream, I envisioned the killer in front of me, and using the abilities I learned in the first dream, I burst him into flame. The dream didn't last too long after that.

My third lucid dream happened when I was in basic training. It wasn't really a dream, more of an environment. I believe I either realized it was a dream before anything started, or I was conjuring an environment of my own making.. I've read of doing that, but hadn't at the time known of it. The world I found myself in was amazing, it was a strange blend of an alien environment mixed with a prehistoric.. A humongous murky lake was surrounded by prehistoric flora (ferns, palms), a series of cliffs could be seen from the lake, caves dotted their face. I went wandering around looking at everything I could find.. the caves in fact were not natural and had been carved into the face of the cliff, futuristic technology (monitors, computers) could be found in them. They were abandoned though. I soon realised that since I was in a dream, then I could fly if I wanted to.. my means of flying in dreams is achieved by a feeling of jumping, and then pulling up right before I land.. in doing so I end up gliding around before long.. flying around I found a strange box canyon at the end of the cliffs.. the canyon contained a huge pile of countless unidentifiable bones.. perhaps the residents of the caves.
Well, after having explored the landscape I decided to investigate the lake.. from the air I could see massive shadows moving around beneath the surface.. I entertained myself until the dream ended by skimming the surface and pulling up right before the things under the water snapped up to eat me.

My next lucid dream came about a year and a half later. (apr 2000) This was actually my most impressive attempt at controlling my dreams and seeing just what could be achieved in them. The dream was panning out as a memory of a day I had spent in training in california. Everyone who had been there on that day in the past, was present in the dream. One of the characters in the dream was my roommate in the realworld in the present day. Well, ambitiously I wanted to see if I could get a real response from his dream image.. get some information that I didn't know, but that my roommate would. I attempted to ask the dream image what he got on his dlpt test when leaving the school we were at. I didnt know what travis got, so the answer I try to verify in the morning. Well.. unfortunately this event took place before the dlpt happened so the dream travis kept saying that he hadn't taken the test yet and so he could tell me, and that I was full of crap when I told him what I had gotten.... heh.. I was so hoping to form some sort of connection... I told travis about it in the morning and we had a good laugh.

I had a few less memorable lucid dreams after all this, nothing impressive though. It wasn't until May of 2003 when I picked up a book called "Lucid dreaming in 30 days." I hadn't dreamt lucidly in quite sometime, and thought it might be fun to try. Unfortunately I never did the full 30 days, i only made it through 9 or 10, but during that period I had two. The first was using a technique where you wake up and go back to sleep concentrating on the dream you had been having.. doing this I managed to step back into the dream and control it before too long, but it wasn't really total control or awareness.. it seemed rather forced.

A couple of days later I was in Kuwait, awaiting a flight to Iraq.. our strange sleep schedules kept me from following the book's schedule, but I managed to have a lucid dream again. In this dream I was out in a hilly forested area, I arrived at a house on a hill after dark. The house wasn't familiar, nor was the little old lady inside. I knocked on the door and she invited me in, and said her greatings, followed by "How did YOU get here?" At which point I realized I was in sunny kuwait... Instead of trying to force things in the dream to my will, I decided to see if I couldnt maintain lucidity while allowing the dream to unfold. This didn't work too well, before too long I was losing myself into the dream, and then I lost control.

Those were my lucid dreams.. I've had perfect clarity in them, complete waking awareness, with the exception of the forced one. Lucid dreaming is so addictive.. It's like being in the perfect videogame, heh.

Oh, before I close, I thought I'd tell of one other dream.. it's not lucid.. but does show give some insight into the powr of dreams.

One night, while in Iraq, I had a dream where I was in a strong current of water moving in a figure 8 pattern.. think of it as a river shaped like an 8.. there were no banks to crawl onto, only cliffs going up which I couldnt get a hold of. Oddly, the water was purple that I was being drug along by. I felt the strength being drained from my body, and knew that if I continued being carried along the current, doing laps around the figure 8 I would drown. Well, in the center of the figure 8 was a shallow spot.. a small spot where I could go to regain my energy.. but I also knew that it was watched by a creature that would devour anyone or thing that washed up there.. I had little choice, I could eventually drown, or choose to take the longshot and try to attain safety through risk. I headed for the shallow spot. I made it to the shallow spot and as I stood on solid ground there something serpent-like shot out of the cliff face at me... I woke up.

I had to pee so bad I was in pain! Yet I had been so exhausted from the day's work that I had slept through the pain... I went to take a leak, and while doing so managed to unravel the meaning of the dream. It was only about an hour after I had gone to bed.. to have such a vivid dream so shortly after going to bed showed just how deeply I was gone. That night, after a hot hot day in the 140 degree heat, I had chugged a 1.5 liter bottle of grape coolaid.. The dream had coalesced in order to force me to wake up.. The purple river... instant death, but my only hope... riding the river out would have probably been me losing control of my bladder... heh I thought it was a pretty cool dream. :)