This thread inspired me to do a little reading on lucid dreaming ( I lucid dream occasionally) and sure enough the next night something in my dream world that was inconsistant with reality clued me off. Before i could do anything cool i felt the dream fading…like i was waking up, i immediately tried the trick i had read on the internet the night before about spinning around in circles, the dream dizness should keep you alseep…and it surely worked. Only problem is just as i started to float and play around i had a false awakening, and i think it’s real life again and i’m back where i started for the remainder of the dream. Darnit! I’ll get it next time…
I’ve had some lucid dreams but it’s not anything I’ve worked at, it just happened that something tipped me off that I was dreaming and I stayed in the dream and changed it.
The most recent example I can remember was a few months ago. I was having a recurring dream about riding in a car with someone and going off a highway overpass. It happened twice with me waking up when the car would have crashed into the ground, which is always rather disturbing. The first time my mother was driving the second time I can’t remember if I was driving or someone else. About that time I went to a wedding with a couple of friends, a married couple, I rode in the backseat. That night after they dropped me off I had the dream again with them in the car. The husband was driving again and we went off the overpass, we seemed to be falling forever and then I realized something and said to the wife, “You guys already took me home, I’m at home dreaming right now, this isn’t happening!” I kept repeating “this isn’t happening” and then we touched down on the ground light as a feather and the wife looked at me and said “you saved us!”. Then it went off into another dream. I didn’t have the dream about driving off an overpass again.
I’ve noticed that if I take a mega-dose of “B” vitamins less than a few hours before bed, all my dreams are extremely lucid, every time.
Holy crap, I never knew you could control your dreams! I have never done that. When I dream it’s like I’m watching a movie that I can’t stop. I also never have any super human things happen to me. I just have normal dreams. Besides my nightmares, which I get weekly. I sometimes get panic attacks I get so scared. Eek. I’ll try this lucid dreaming tonight.
Heh. Ooookay, now I know we’re in CS and not GQ or anything, but this is still the Straight Dope, so I gotta ask: you’re pulling our legs, right? You’re not seriously suggesting that you met someone you know while dreaming, had sex, then woke up, called this person and confirmed that hey, s/he had sex with you in exactly the same way to … are you?
Or are you saying that all this was in a dream – the visiting another dreamer, the sex-having, the documenting and verifying, etc.? 'Cause if you are, that I can grok. Despite the M.C. Escher-ness of it all.
To everyone: are you guys honestly saying that lucid dreaming is real? I’ve never heard of it before, so I’m very curious about it. Has this been proven or discussed by legit sleep researchers? (If it’s possible to “prove” anything like this, that is.)
Hope I don’t come across as obnoxious or as if I’m distrusting y’all! It’s just that this whole thing sounds like we’re in the realm of remote viewing, dousing, or Uri Geller’s entire existence.
Sorry to double-post, but …
Cancel that question. 'Cause apparently, the answer is here.
Carry on, then. Don’t wanna open a can of worms.
The other questions re: lucid dreaming still stand.
choie,
It’s a perfectly good question, I’ve been a lucid dreamer since my early teens. Back then I was younger and actually believed my experiences were real. It took quite a few years to convince me that it was all just a consruct of the mind.
Imagine this, two people discuss their lucid dreams, decide to see if they can “meet” decide on a code word or some other such nonsense. See where I am heading?
Lucid dreams can feel very real. It takes only a small bit of shared experience to completly freak out a 14 year old. Wow you dreamed that too?
Now that I look back on it, I chuckle, of course we did, we agreed to.
Anyway, flying, diving under the sea and the sexual dreams are well worth it. I am particulary fond of the dreams where I go back to places I loved. Sometimes its a sunny boat trip sometimes a dark and frightening plane ride.
The terror is real too, a spooky lucid dream combined with the fact that you cannot move even your pinky is enough to keep you up for the rest of the night.
I had one this morning. My alarm went off. I stopped it and went straight back to sleep.
Suddenly I’m in my bedroom (It’s nothing like any bedroom I’ve ever owned, but I seem to recognise it). I look out of the window and in doing so realize that I am quite high up. The scene outside is magnificent. Forest on the right. Rock formations in the middle, and… a dog track to the left? I look closely and see that it’s St Johns at Orange Park* This is when I become lucid because I think to myself “That’s in America. I’ve never been to America so I must be dreaming” Bingo, I’m lucid. First I enjoy the clarity and try to stay lucid. I try to float. I float for a bit. I try to get through the window. I get halfway through but then get scared that my real body might be acting out these movements so I get back in and decide to do something safer.
So I try to make a certain attractive celeb materialize on my bed like she is in a real photo of her. I try really really hard but nothing happens. I get a false awakening and the fun is over.
[sub]*I know of that because of my job[/sub]
Yup, I am a very active lucid dreaming. I’ve posted on the topic quite a bit, including an “Ask the Lucid Dreamer” thread from a while back.
There’s a whole world of information regarding lucid dreaming and I don’t really feel like typing everything out - and much of it has been mentioned by others.
choie, yes, lucid dreaming is definitely real. However, be sure you understand what lucid dreaming is.
*Real * lucid dreaming is incredibly cool.
Thanks for saving me the trouble 
Of course I am. You can choose to believe it was astral projection, shared dreaming, incredible coincidence or shared hallucination, whatever you can believe without losing any sleep…
I frequently have these very stupid, yet oddy petrifying nightmares where I am in a vehicle which is moving veerrrrry slowly, and it is going to crash into something without me being able to do anything about it. A few nights ago, I suddenly was able to be ‘lucid’ because I was getting so fed up with freaking out about “wrecking” my car for the zillionth time in a dream :rolleyes: So I turned the steering wheel, HARD, and suddenly time shifted. I realized that all those past dreams didn’t involve the car going slow, but time going slow. When I was lucid I was somehow able to make the dream run in ‘normal’ time, which incidentally involved my car going 250 mph or something 
The dream had me on a freeway onramp. I was about to crash into another car when I became lucid and swerved. Suddenly things went from going 2 mph to 250 mph, everything was blurring past me. Another car approached but I was ready and avoided it easily. Suddenly I could ‘hear’ my subconcious, it was saying stuff like “I won’t let you get away, I won’t let you survive!” and the more it said this, the more determined I was to get away, and the more control over the dream I had. It is as if part of me wanted to die horribly in an accident, and part of me wanted so desperately to live, the dream got warped and distorted by two opposing forces creating ‘obstacles’ against each other. Suddenly the road creates a huge speedbump that I hit, and my car goes flying, but I am able to land it back on the road. All of the sudden I am being chased by Martha Stewart riding a velociraptor. I pull out my vehicle registration and throw it at her, she screams and bursts into flames. Then the highway became a maze of ‘severe tire damage’ spike strips, so I went home and wrote a letter to the city council about the overabundance of tire strips…I guess I started to get bored in the dream or something, the whole thing ends with me in this City Council meeting getting all sweaty and exhasperated over the dangers of sever tire damage strips 
My memory is of popular magazine articles quoting sleep studies that I can’t verify. But evidently sleep clinics studying lucid dreaming trained dreamers to move their eyes in a pattern at the moment that they became aware that they were dreaming. Sensors would track both brain waves and eye movements and at some point in the dream, after the eye movement pattern had been noted, the sleepers would be awakened and asked about the dreams.
The dreamers confirmed deliberately giving the signal.
Dr. Stephen LaBerge, founder of The Lucidity Institute, has done quite a bit of research. You can find links to several papers on their home page.
Update: I recently had a driving-the-car dream again (see post #15.) This time I was driving from the backseat passenger-side of the car, and I realized that I couldn’t possibly stop the car from where I was. But this time instead of panicking or forcing the dream to change, I actually crawled over the seat, looked down and carefully contemplated the foot pedals on the floor (there were four of them???) and chose the brake, placed my foot on it very carefully, AND STOPPED THE CAR! I am convinced I did this because of discussing my “car dream” problems in this thread. Thank you, fellow dopers!!
Now, onto flying through the universe…
I THINK this qualifies as a very rudimentary lucid dreaming experience …
I often dream that I’m reading a REALLY fascinating book … but then I realize that I’m dreaming and I want to know more about the story. But then I start to forget what it’s about, so I flip back a page or two but the words start getting mixed up and unraveling, and then I wake up, hugely disappointed.
I should practice awareness techniques … maybe I’ll get a GREAT idea for an amazing novel … 
I see CurlyD has mentioned Dr. Stephen LaBerge (he has some great books, btw). I have never seen anything to suggest that lucid dreaming is NOT accepted by the scientific community. It is important that lucid dreaming - the act of recognizing one’s being in a state of dreaming - not be confused with any other metaphysical definition or phenomenon. Mutual dreaming*, astral projection*, etc. have nothing to do with lucid dreaming proper.
(*having said that, it’s quite possible hallucinations that are interpreted as being these phenomenon are in fact lucid dreams, occuring in people not familiar with lucid dreaming.)
You assume too much, TP. Lucid dreaming you have described correctly. It is important to avoid confusing it with other real or imagined phenomenon; lucid dreaming stands on its own.
However, if you are going to state that mutual dreaming or astral projection have nothing to do with lucid dreaming, you are going to have to offer up some proof. As of yet we have not enough evidence to demonstrate one way or the other.
We are embarking upon an exploration of “the great unknown.”
We don’t have lots of EEG records from lucid dreamers. Nor from those of us who use our conscious dreams to “travel” to other locations. It’s easy and “prudent” to assume that there’s a “logical” explanation for all of this; but doing so cuts us off from the very exploratory nature that makes us human.
Like the explorers who insisted that “the world might be round,” some of us experience the ability to experience things that go beyond the laws of physics. If we discount them, we stay in Europe forever. If we explore them, we may drop off the edge of the world, and into the void, or we may find Terra Incognita.
Along the way we need markers, to keep our place, to prevent us from becoming lost. I dream lucidly. I contact others while I dream lucidly. They recall (or imagine they recall) those contacts. When information is compared, it exceeds that which is explicable by chance, or coincidence.
We need to recognize that such information is excperiential, and subject to interpretation. Certainly to “prove” such allegations testing would be required that would eliminate subjective bias and allow for independent verification.
In the meantime, we need markers. We don’t have objective markers, just subjective ones: astral projection, shared dreaming, hallucination, imagination.
Let’s recognize, at least, that subjectivity is a two-edged sword.