When I was in middle school (~1998) I found a message board about lucid dreaming. I was an active participant in the community and learned quickly that lucid dreaming was an actual skill with real results. The idea is that there are different layers of awareness during your dream state. IF you can achieve a high enough state of consciousness while dreaming, all of the sudden you can control many aspects of your dreamstate. Without lucidity you're essentially along for the ride, a character in someone's play, but when you become lucid, you can create/summon dream characters, change the narrative of the dream , fly around, even stop the dream etc. One of the most interesting things about lucid dreaming is that sometimes the dream is so vivid that I sometimes doubt whether its a dream or real life. An example of this occurred last night. I didnt have full lucidity, but the dream was incredibly realistic and I remember wondering whether or not I was dreaming for an extended period of time. Here's what I remember: I was riding along in a big rig 18 wheeler cruising down a North Carolina highway and I noticed a few buildings off to the side. They didnt look right. They were wobbling back and forth. All of the sudden things became incredibly detailed, and the buildings were now falling. I looked back at the other people on the big rig and they were mostly going about their dream life. More buildings were falling but we were safely driving on the road. A traffic jam was ahead and we just kept going through stalled cars etc.
Next part of the dream Im getting my passport and ID looked over by some attendant. Now she's lost my ID and im starting to feel annoyed. Next thing I know Im awake in my bed, ready to start the day.
