Well the trouble is, you can't just work on it in your sleep and expect great results, lol.

I'm pretty sure if you work at it and put the time and effort in, you can get to where you have them regularly.

I don't have any advice that's better than stuff you find of the web.

Being able to relax and not get excited is a very important ability to master. I think that keeping your concious mind quiet and relaxed, your body relaxed and your breathing steady, is at the root of success with any of these sorts of things.

I've had many lucid dreams and dreams where I didn't seem to control them but I had special powers if you call flying through the air as in the Matrix movie as something special. If you want to remember your dreams I tend to remember them when I try to sleep in late on the weekend getting more than my normal amount of sleep. Apparently slight noises may disturb my sleep and be the reason I remember them. I'm not sure but I wouldn't be surprised. I try to ignore outside noises and continue sleeping.

Yeah whenever you go outside your sleeping patterns, or you wake up early in the morning and stay awake at least 5 minutes and go back to bed, dreaming and recall is more likely. Going lucid is as well.

Keep a dream journal! I could not have imagined getting such direct results in my dreaming and dream recall as I did when I kept a dream journal for 3-4 months.

Allow your experience with your dreams to always keep a personal touch. You are on a journey in your own mind! Looking back it was way more exciting when I was discovering my dreams through hard work, than it is now when I have the result of dreaming/remembering them practically every day.

Novise is right. Keep a dream journal and write whatever you can remember about your dreams. Over time you will notice that you remember more and more about them.

I have some pretty good experience with lucid dreaming. I don't want to repeast advice you have already been given, or tell you all about something that you already do.

Tell us what techniques you are working with now and then I, and others, can make some suggestions on what to try next.

Let me start off by saying I concider myself an expert lucid dreamer. I have been practicing for many years. This is what I do to get a good dream started.

1: If you have the time, pull an all nighter. Wake up Thursday morning, stay up all night, and all day untill Friday night. Then go to sleep, with earplugs in. This will make sure you get into a really deap sleep.

2: Make sure before you go to sleep that you have the perfect room temperature, and amount of clothing on. You do not want to be sweaty hot, or freezing cold, or both, cold sweat, cus that will make you want to wake up.

3: Take care of all your bathroom business before going to sleep. That will wake you up too, or make you walk to a bathroom in your dream and take a dream dump or piss, which will actually happen in real life. Avoid bathrooms in your dreams!!

4: While dreaming, try not to do things you have never experianced before! But, there is a few exceptions. Videos games count, so if you have flown an aircraft, an exotic car, or casted a magic spell or anything like that in a video game, that will help your mind fill in the blanks.

I have played Grand Theft Auto a lot, and I had certain cheat codes that would allow me to drop any car I wanted out of the sky. Because of seeing this car spawn in air, and land in front of me, I was able to call up any car I wanted in a lucid dream of mine, and have it fall from the sky and land in front of me. Then I was able to drive it. Thank God for GTA.

If you try to do something you have never experianced, or imagined before, then it will be really hard for your brain to draw the picture, and you will end up waking up. Sounds weird but its true. If you can not build a mental picture of something, you wont dream it. Also seeing things in a movie counts as experiance too.

5: This is important. Whatever you THINK, will happen. This is how nightmares are started. If you see a guy with a gun, and you think, "oh no I hope he doesn't shoot me", guess what he is going to shoot you. Then you say "oh no I hope he doesn't just shoot me in the leg and pull out a knife and stab me", then thats whats going to happen. People get stuck in these thoughts, and thats how nightmares are made, because everything bad that you are thinking will happen.

If you want to really control the dream, you need to have a very simple state of mind.

6: The key to initiating a lucid dream, is to say to yourself while dreaming, "I am dreaming", without waking up. From there on out, you are good to go. Now all you have to think is "a sexy woman walks by", and you are good to go.

This is all I can type for now, I will add later tonight...

...to be continued...

Originally posted by SWAT Life

Now all you have to think is "a sexy woman walks by", and you are good to go.

I might try to keep the sexy woman out of the dream unless you want to go there. I tend to think "a sexy woman starts walking by" but then she suddenly notices me or recognizes me and then says "hi, (my name), what are you doing here?" It's good to see you. Then I start thinking things which aren't suitable for posting.

As far as someone possibly shooting at me or something like that, I start thinking I have an invisible shield stopping all weapons, bullets, etc. from hitting me. If someone tries anything, I then place an energy barrier around that person and then initiate a nuclear explosion inside that energy cocoon. The threat is immediatey eliminated. I have thought about other means that weren't so nice to eliminate threats. One time I was playing with someone who was threatening me by sending them to the Arctic circle every time they got somewhat close to me. I dreamed they stopped coming after me after they almost died in the Arctic the second time I put them there in an isolated area in bone chilling cold. I was definitely playing because I gave them shelter to keep them alive the second time.

I think I had one dream where I recreated and destroyed the Earth and everyone on it about 7 or 8 times before finally putting it back close to where it was to start with. Does that mean I already have experience with creating a car?

I guess one weird dream from a long time ago would involve something in another plane of existence. I know it came from an imaginary game my brother and I used to play. In this game my brothers role playing character and mine went into the astral plane or some other dimension and fought an army of skeletal creatures (I forgot their name) and stole some magical sword they worshipped. Then these creatures would forever keep popping in our dimension to fight him for it. Nothing like traveling into another dimension to fight an army of skeletal creatures in a castle in the clouds.

This is the third time i've tried to write this post. I'm having difficulty because there is so much I want to say regarding this particular topic. Here goes my third attempt.

I began dreaming consciously in middle school. I won't go into the details of how, as I may post that separately at a later time, but the methods I researched and eventually used did help me attain my lucid dreaming ability. Keeping a dream journal is of paramount importance, as it teaches your brain to remember the dreams it had. The next steps are difficult only because you really need to keep the distractions down. A great meditation session can be ruined by something as insignificant as a creak, an itch, the need to cough, etc. It can be frustrating, but patience will get you where you need to be.

Once I was able to block out ALL distractions, it was very simple to be aware of my dreaming while in the midst of it. The jump from awareness to involvement, however, did take nearly one full year before I was able to confidently influence my dreams. I had a good time with all of this for a number of years, and some very starnge things came about. Following are some of the strange situations that ensued after this new-found talent was put into use.

1. In highschool, i had a dream "starring" this girl i had a crush on. In my dream i asked her to mention the weather the next day if she liked me like i liked her. The next day she failed to mention the weather in the respect that i thought she would. Instead she mentioned this dream she had where i was asking her what the weather was going to be like tomorrow.

2. The first dream of my girlfriend Jacqueline after she killed herself, in which we were holding hands and walking, but i was unable to look at her face. In every single dream from this point forth, I was able to do ANYTHING except see her face, no matter how hard i tried.

3. Also involving Jacqueline was a dream where i was living in a house my mom thought was haunted, a trivial sort of haunting that only served to lend some character to the house. I saw an apparition glide across the hallway floor, past my bedroom door. The last time i was able to catch her at the end of the hall at the top of the stairs. Normal looking girl, beautiful dress. I was able to find out that she was waiting for her date to pick her up for the winter festival dance. Then, quite suddenly, i felt like the girl i was looking at was no longer an element of my consciousness, but a separate entity. She had been looking down the stairs before this, and when this occured she looked at me. I was standing inside my bedroom door looking down the hall at her. She told me she loved me, called me by name, then walked down the stairs where she dissapated. I had such a strong impression that this was my ex girlfriend that i was unable to get to sleep for the rest of the night.

4. Several experiences after #3 where I was in the middle of my sleep meditation, and suddenly felt absolutely filled with this raw energy, and my brain went from a total blank slate to everything Jacqueline. Every muscle tense, back arched off the bed, eyes clenched shut, fists clenched, Jacqueline Jacqueline Jaqueline filling my mind, then nothing. I also felt like the room was bright white, even though it was in total darkness.

After some of these experiences, things started to change. I found that i was unable to wake up in the morning, and sometimes would lay in bed for up to thirty minutes in a state that i can only describe as paralysis. My brain was wide awake, i could hear everything, i could feel the breeze, just couldn't get my body to obey me. That was a very scary sort of thing, and caused me to stop consciously dreaming.

I probably only remember about half of my dreams at this point, and while I am unable to control them anymore, I am always aware that i am dreaming while i am dreaming. I would very much like to get into it again.

Cyfre, I am thinking that you just weren't mentally prepared for that sort of dream control and the quantity of it. You were young.

Whether dreaming is harmful or not, we all have our limits. Everybody has to stop somewhere or they are going to have to start giving up something. Sometimes I feel like dreamland and real land are fighting over my attention, lol.

Just this morning I was a little fed up with how little I was lucid dreaming lately (because I often realize I am dreaming, but the lucid thing doesn't happen), and I decided to get one going. I went back to sleep and was dreaming... there was a lake and people around it. I realized I was dreaming, quite conciously, but nothing changed. It remained quite normal, and I didn't have any lucid sort of control. So I stuck my mouth in the water and breathed in really hard, to make it more clear to myself that I was dreaming. And when I didn't drown lol, something kicked in and I finally felt truly lucid. The dream faded quickly, but not before I got a few seconds of flying in...

Point is the base ability of realizing I am dreaming is there, the energy, will, and attitude to excersize it is not, so I haven't been trying to force it. What I did this morning, I haven't done in a while, and I learned from it.

About the elements of your dreams that were not created by your own mind... I love this sort of stuff, always looking for stuff like this in my dream recalls.

And to touch on some other things in the thread: I'm not sure either way if you need to have experienced something in order to feel it in a dream. I think that in most cases you do. Creating and feeling/experiencing are two different things. Like if I get shot in a dream, I don't feel anything. I don't know what it feels like. It doesn't surprise me that you could create anything. The mind (on it's own) creates things we have NEVER seen, every night!