Lucid Dreaming

[Dragon Master Mike]

"A lucid dream is any dream in which one is aware that one is dreaming." -Wikipedia

Many people have lucid dreams without knowing that what they were doing even had a name. Have you ever had a lucid dream? Did you have to put special effort into having one, or do you just have them spontaneously? What is the most interesting thing you have ever seen/done/made happen in a dream?

For me, I had to work hard to have any lucid dreams, and even then I had minimal success. The most interesting lucid dream I ever had was when I created my own dream location. Before I went to bed, I created it in my head. It was a floating island with trees on the edges. I went to bed that night and I actually had a lucid dream in that location.

[PTGigi]

I lucid dream 100% of the time. I didn't realize this wasn't normal until a few years ago XD

It's a curse and a blessing though. It's really fun to craft stories every night and I can also develop my own stories, but there are times I just want to go to sleep and my brain just wants to keep thinking DX

[VeloJello]

Ohhh man I've been trying to lucid dream for the longest time. :O Someone told me that the key is to have what you want to dream about in your head as you fall asleep, and I've been met with no success whatsoever. My "failures", though, are always vivid and usually amusing. For instance...

• Trying to dream about my story's environment (a big city with ghost like figures in it) - actually dreaming about my grandmother framing me for a murder that she committed.
• Trying to dream about the aforementioned story environment again - actually dreaming about having wings that were really hard to use and flying too high.
• Trying to dream about a waterfalls-and-cliffs environment last night - actually dreaming about being an ambassador in a Mass Effect like world and trying to handle the security surrounding Vladimir Putin (yes) visiting Michigan.

This kind of stuff is why I keep trying. :D

[Dragon Master Mike]

Ohhh man I've been trying to lucid dream for the longest time. :O Someone told me that the key is to have what you want to dream about in your head as you fall asleep, and I've been met with no success whatsoever. My "failures", though, are always vivid and usually amusing. For instance...

The part about knowing what you want to dream about is so true (for me at least). I know from my experiences that if I haven't gone out of my way to plan what I want to do in the dream, If I do have a lucid dream, I don't really do much of anything. I kinda just do whatever, which is usually nothing very interesting.

Something interesting I tried to do once was called WILD (Wake Induced Lucid Dreaming) where you basically just slip from a waking state into a sleeping state and go directly from conscious to dreaming, resulting in a lucid dream. It didn't work, but I think I came close, and some weird stuff started happening. I started hearing people saying my name, and I started hearing cars driving by and seeing lights from the cars, but I know there wasn't a car. I don't think I was sleeping at that point, just very close to it, but either way it was weird.

[Bulbasaur]

I thought a lucid dream was just a dream that you could remember really well. :O Well in that case, I've only had a few lucid dreams. One of them was getting scary, so I just woke myself up. :P I think other was me getting pizza with some friends, and a lake was involved somehow? Twas a while ago.

[The Nonexistent Tazz]

I wish I could do that. Or at least consistently do that, as I have some limited ability. I dream kind of like I'm half-blind all the time despite having perfectly good vision IRL-I had exactly ONE instant of a vivid dream when I was much younger, then went 'Whoa!' and exited out of that mode. I'm not sure this is inhibiting my ability to Lucidly dream, despite the obvious disadvantage; among the few times I've hijacked a dream plot gave me flight in the middle of a race, and I usually can corral the direction of the 'plot,' but I'm not able to really Lucidly dream and I can't really control the setting as much as I'd like. I've got to try that for real, though.

[PTGigi]

I can't say for certain @Velocity, but a technique a friend of mine told me about is to draw something on the back of your hand. Eventually you'll either take note of the drawing in your dream or notice the lack of the drawing in your dream and realize you're dreaming. Might be worth a try if you don't mind drawing on your hand X3

[Bulbasaur]

^ Double ninja'd. XDD

[PTGigi]

Completely XD

On a related note I have homework asking me to write about a dream but they're expecting ~1 page when I have dreams that span several days which is going to be way more than a few pages D:

[Elecii]

Although I don't have much control over my dreams I always know when I'm dreaming. Every single one of my dreams are 'third person' as a way to put it, as opposed to first person, which is how I can tell. I never see my dreams through my eyes, but I see myself in my dreams. Although, I don't actually picture people very vividly in my dreams, so I just know who's who even if they don't really have their actual features. I've never heard of anyone else who has dreams similar to mine, actually.