My First Lucid Dream

By: Jerry A. Greene

Nothing helps others understand what a lucid dream is than by telling a story of one. Let me share my first experience with you...

Whoops! Wrong Door...
Imagine this...

You're walking down the hall of a building you spend a great deal of your life in...your home

Everything seems normal...

You are walking towards the closed door of your bedroom and go to open it...

It opens like normal, but wait...It's the bathroom!

"Whoops!", you think to yourself and close the door.

"Wow, that's weird, I must have not been thinking", you ponder to yourself, and forgot that it's the next door over.

You open the door just to the right, and it's the bathroom again...

Although this seems kind of strange, it's somewhat familiar...Are you going crazy? No...just dreaming!

If you were like most people, you would feel a little dazed, but would go on your way through this world like nothing weird ever really happened, until you woke up and realized...ah, that was a dream!

But what would happen if you questioned it while it was happening?

If you had the waking-state mind to know that this couldn't possibly be right....well

you would most likely enter the Lucid Dreaming Experience...

My First Lucid Dream
The story I just told you, is of my first pre-lucid dreaming experience. I was living and going to school at Montclair State University (in New Jersey, USA) and the building I was walking in was that of my dorm, Stone hall.

We had a long hallway, that resembled that of a hotel with doors that went into the each of the dorm rooms and community bathrooms.

Everything that was happening in the dream seemed normal to me, until I opened the second door.

I had been reading a book called "Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming" By Dr. Stephen LaBerge & Howard Rheingold and had been trying for the past 3 nights to have a lucid dream, as explained in the book, but without any luck. But this time, things were different...

It suddenly "hit" me. All of a sudden I felt this woosh. If you have never had a lucid dream before, it is hard to describe in words, but most of us have had a sensation of falling in the infamous "falling dream". Well, it's sort of like that. It can be scary at first, but once it stops, you look around in utter amazement, knowing that everything that you are seeing is being created BY YOUR MIND!

I was standing there, in my dream, fully aware that it was a dream. I looked around at the walls, the floor, the people in the hallway. I couldn't believe it! Everything was more real than real life.

It then started to dawn on me that maybe I was awake... that this couldn't possibly be a dream. I remembered that the book had said that your mind does an exceptional job of tricking us into thinking that dreams are real, and that I would need to test myself. Pinching yourself doesn't work because believe it, or not, your mind creates a pretty good "pinch feeling" that syncs up with the action of doing so. If you don't believe me, just think of the falling dream again..

I then remembered that the book had said to try to fly as this would be something that would be impossible to do in the real world. Now I was in a long hallway, with I would say about 12 foot ceilings. There wasn't much room, plus people were in the hallway and I would look really funny trying to do this if it was in fact real life. I had this feeling that I really was dreaming so I had to try it. I started to run down the hallway and jumped into the air...sure enough, I flew!

I started screaming to everyone..."I did it! I did it! I'm having a lucid dream and I'm Flying!!!"

From what I remember, everyone was congratulating me and I had this surge of energy rush through me once again.

I simply couldn't believe it!

I ran downstairs (in the dorm hall) and outside screaming at the top of my lungs that this was a dream! I decided that I wanted to go for a ride.

I found a car that was waiting for me. It was a taxi cab, and for some reason I had been expecting a limo. I said, "ON NO, I am supposed to have a limo!" I snapped my fingers and like magic, the taxi turned into a black limousine! Again, simply amazed, I got in and was ecstatic with the detail of my dream world and how REAL it felt. I got in and realized that I did not have a CD player and wanted one so that I could put on music...so again, with all the confidence in the world, snapped my fingers and there it appeared!

Then, from all the excitement, I woke up. Not only did I wake up, but it had appeared as if I had been awake all along with absolutely no grogginess, or time needed to actually "wake up". This would be really strange to someone if they were watching!

My room-mate was sleeping. I wanted to wake him so badly to tell him what had just happened, but figured I had better wait since he had had a long night.

Again it is so hard to describe how this feels in words. Once you have your first lucid dream, You'll definitely want to tell the world as did I. This is the reason I put this web site together.

If At First You Don't Succeed...
If you don't have one at first, keep trying. Even for myself, as an experienced lucid dreamer with at least 100 of them so far, I can go a month of trying and nothing happens. Sometimes I can have multiple ones a night. So don't be discouraged. It will be well worth the effort to learn how to have them, as I am sure you will agree once it does.