Are you a natural? - Part I

Am I a natural? Heck, no! :tongue: It’s taken me so long just to have two LDs. I figure it’s all about the time and effort invested, though, so I’ve got a long ways to go.

As a kid, I never had any lucid dreams. I did come close in one dream about flying, where I sort of realized there was nothing holding me up and started sinking… I managed to pull myself up by realizing it wasn’t real life. But that was only pre-lucidity, if anything.

I was always interested in dreams, though. I took inspiration from them, and dabbled in dream interpretation on-and-off from the time I was nine. I first met my DG when I was ten… I suppose that’s what kept me going. Always curious, wanting to see more.

I think the only lucid dream i had was luck because i just thought about dreaming in my dream and boom i was flying away from people haha so wouldnt that make me a natural or is that just a radom occurence

I have been aware of that I am dreaming many times, but I have not taken any control, I simply followed the dream, sometimes I got myself away from the trouble I was in simply by just knowing that I was in a dream and that nothing could harm me or so etc.

Once I even got an option screen, almost like in the movie “Click” with Adam Sandler, but this was many years before that movie even came out.

So I don’t know in what cathegory I should be in xD

I have had lucid dreams bout lucid dreams often, but when I realise I am dreaming , I wake up and don’t want to hang around, heard about lucid dreaming about 4 days ago, and now trying to practice it, the tecniques on here worked, though the spinning around to remain lucid, will take some work, but i find not opening my eyes, even when i think i am awake helps me fall back in.

A cut and paste from my first post but as you can see its a big yes for me!

"As a child I constantly experienced lucid dreams although I thought it was normal and didn’t talk to people about it. I don’t remember controlling my dream environment except in one respect that was always the same. I every lucid dream I had I would quickly realise I was dreaming and tell people in my dream that “we” were dreaming (never “I” am dreaming). As the dream progressed if I wanted to wake up (and this is the weird bit) all I had to do was find a vintage car (Chitty Chitty Bang Bang era) lie down underneath it and bang! wide awake. The car was always there if I needed to wake up but the lucid dreams stopped as I got older. It’s a shame I didn’t realise what was happening.

Anyway as an adult I still naturally have lucid dreams but very infrequently maybe only once a year at least they are the only ones I can remember, the last one I had I managed to fly which I have never done before.

I also suffer from sleep paralysis or to be more accurate waking paralysis where I want to wake up when I’m dreaming but cant. Its hard to describe but I know I’m lying in bed and if I “struggle” I cant wake but I can fool myself into thinking I’m awake and even standing up out of bed or walking around the house when I suddenly realise I’m dreaming, panic and start shallow breathing and twitching at which point my wife has to shake me to snap me awake. I can wake myself up if I relax and jerk myself awake. As I write this I’ve never spotted the fact that I know I’m asleep and maybe I should stop trying to wake myself up but the feeling of paralysis is very scary. Now I think about it I’ve suffered the paralysis as long as I can remember (I’m 38 now) but its worse when I’m stressed."

My dream recall is nauturally pretty good too, I can still remember lying under that old car which I guess last happened about 30 years ago. My long term memory is good anyway so I guess that helps. I can still rememebr stuff from the age of 3 and occasionally freak my parents out by asking “do you rememeber…” to which they answer “you were only 3 how the hell can you remember that!?”.

I’ve not managed an induced LD yet but I’m being a bit lazy about it at the moment. I guess because I know I can LD I’m not in such a rush to see if I can induce a LD. But I’ll get there! :grin:

Man! I wish I was a natural… It would be so much easier!

You don’t need to be a natural to be a lucid dreamer ! You can achieve the performance of having a LD every night even if you aren’t a natural - however, it takes years of practice, but it’s worth it… I guess…

True. I remember one LD from when i was perhaps 10 years old and i don’t believe it has helped me in achieving LDs in the last 1.5 years that i have trained. I now get 1-2 per week by will.

Like others have said I dont expect it will be any easier for me as a natural LDer to LD at will than anyone else. I think the only advantage is that a natural LDer may be more relaxed about eventually having an induced LD as they know thay have had them before and that when they do manage to induce a LD it wont be as wierd as never having had one before.

Time will tell…

It’s like a natural talent. If you are good at something, then in a year (if you study intense) you are a professional. If you haven’t got a really natural talent, then it would take about a couple more years, but you still reach profy. Even as a natural, you can’t a achieve level professional in just one single day :wink:

Just think that it’s not impossible.

I’m not sure if I’m natural, but my first LD was very vivid and long(5min) for starter.
I remember a lot of dreams when I got out of them at will.
I guess I’m a natural but dreams were less important then.

i remember this one dream i had long time back, where I had lost my laptop n was quite afraid that my parents would find out…so i was looking all over n i could sense deep anxiety that time…n somehow i came to realize that i was dreaming so i dint worry much later or something…

But yeah…this is definitely the only memory i have about realization of a dream from my childhood…not quite close to lucid dreaming but still, i guess, it counts…

I’d call myself a natural, but I don’t really know if it counts if you can’t control the dream. Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve been pretty aware of when I’m dreaming or when I’m not. I mostly couldn’t control the dream, though, unless it’s a nightmare. Even then, though, I was scared of what would happen if I died in a dream (this was before I knew that I’d wake up if I died in a dream: back then I thought that if I died in a dream, I’d be stuck in some kind of a limbo… lol, Inception dejavu, anyone?).

So I had this way of forcing myself to wake up by squinting my eyes shut so hard that colored spots would dance before my eyes, and if I succeeded, the spots would grow bigger into a large vortex that’d send me spinning back to real life. The only problem was, sometimes I’d ‘wake up’ and still be stuck in the dream. I once had a dream where I had to redo the vortex thing at least ten times before I woke up in my real bed. It took me about twenty minutes before I stopped expecting some random dream-like thing to happen, like monkeys jumping out of a corner in my room to shoot me down with bananas.

I first became lucid after having read the guide of this forum!.. about a year and a half ago, already! I come from meditation and tibetan buddhism. So I am not a natural lucid dreamer.

A question I was wondering just before our french LD4All forum “closed”:

Are all the experimented and well known lucid dreamers (> several hundreds of LD) natural?

I guess i Say i am a Natural, because a friend told me of this Forum, and i have had plenty of Lucid dreams. Some end before they get amazing. I get Too exited Maybe?
and Some just carry on for ages and i can remember every little detail, Iv’e even lucid imagination whilst walking somewhere when suddenly i can see a whole nother world.

I’m not a natural but I can remember that I had a few LD’s when I was a kid :smile: I can even remember most of the dreams I’ve had, ever.

I guess not having any, means I’m not a natural :tongue:

for me i really dont know what qualifies…
if only being aware that you are dreaming counts then many many times. and i have controlled dreams a couple times too, i think. but the one time i can really think of right now, i didn’t know i was dreaming. i just wanted to fly soooooo bad and i did. and it was awesome.

usually i dont know im dreaming, and i see different people or i am a different person. and like when awake u can see your arms and nose and body? well i cant when i dream. i could reach out a grab something but i don’t see my arm. and my vision is weird… its not like movies where its exactly the same as being awake.

although one time i guess i did. i could see my arms and everything was normal. i had a FA and it sucked cause when i woke up the second time i was like what the H**l!?!

I’m really surprised there is so many natural lucid dreamers here. How can I not know anyone of them? :content:
or maybe they’re just proud of it and vote more than the others…

I voted yes because the question is “do you remember having some kind of LD as a child?” and yes I remember having some LD’s when I was a child (maybe 5). :content:
Yet I don’t consider myself a natural because 5 LD’s is few and I have to induce them now.