Ona side note: the greatest dream I iver had involved Nazis, Van Halen (minus a lead singer), vampire bats, laser guns, ice hockey involving people in business suits, and a game of basketball played for charity in my neighbor’s driveway using three small potatoes as the ball and a milk crate as the hoop. It was just me against Van Halen…and yes, I won.
i often remember my dreams, and sometimes have the same or a very similar dream years apart.
I put them away in my mind but then sometimes a few years down the track will wake up and instantly remember this dream and when i had it last. There are about 2 or 3 that i have on rotation.
Sometimes i know i am dreaming and in several dreams i have had a conversation with the person in my dream. last time i was arguing with my other half in my dream, and i just said, whatever its just a dream, then laughed for ages in my dream, and had more control over my dream, but it only lasted a short while and the knowledge I am dreaming usually is enough for me to shake myself out of sleep because it is such a profound and amazing experience.
My ex-grilfriend use to always be able to know when she was dreaming and at the time would then try to do things like fly in her dream because she could basically do whatever she wanted.
We never and i never have used a mind altering drug like acid, so its not that.
I never have problems remembering my dreams in fairly good detail, but i always had a good imagination and would often write stories and thoughts down from as long as i can remember so maybe that trained me to remember them.
Zaphod
Congratulations. You have successfully experience what sounds to me like high level lucidity. There are many techniques that can be used to prolong the experience. It just takes practice and some self-control.
Sounds like she’s got the hang of it! 
Of course not. Its called lucid dreaming and its perfectly natural and utterly fascinating.
My dreams are rarely vague and disjointed. Or that is to say–every single morning I wake up with a memory of some sort of epic dream. They ahve storylines and plot. Multiple POVS. (I can switch back and forth from first to third) and usually semi-pornographic. I usually consciously choose to remember a dream or not. (Last night’s didn’t do much for me, though I still have flashes. A few nights ago I had an extremly interesting dream involving Spike, and I still remember it quite vividly). Sometimes I have memories that I can’t tell if they really happened or just something I dreamed…
Something weird is that sometimes i’ll be in the middle of a dream, and a song will start playing. Sometimes its part of the dream, sometimes just in the background, but when i wake up i’ll realize that it is a song from the cd that is playing on my stereo that i fall asleep to.
Also, sometimes my body will be in a position in a dream, like my arms sticking out or something, and when i wake up, for a few seconds i will be paralyzed in that position, unable to move at all.
I also get after images, people standing in my doorway, dark figures and stuff that look very real.
I have slight insomnia though, and get terrible sleep, so that might explain some of that.
also, for those of you who have ‘epic dreams’ how long are they usually? A couple of times i’ll have a dream like that that seems to last for weeks. When i awaken it feel s like i have actually been gone that long. weird.
Y’all should see the movie Waking Life. The entire movie is basically someone trying to decide whether they are dreaming or not.
One character said that a good technique for deciding if you’re in a dream it to flick a light switch. In a dream, they won’t work–you can’t turn the lights on and off.
Another method is to try reading something. From a distance, books look like they have printing on them, but when you pick them up, the words turn to gibberish.
Anyways…these are the writer’s theories. My own personal dream experieces disproves both of them…YMMV…
Our dreams don’t last because we’re not in the Matrix when we’re dreaming and the aliens don’t want us to find out.
Mr. Frink
Those techniques you mention are known in the lucid dreaming world as “reality checks”. Different methods work for different people. The lightswitch method does not work for me, the reading method does (for many, many people reading in dreams is impossible). My preferred technique is to look at my digital watch and see how the seconds are counting up. In a dream they’ll be all jumbled up and random.