I'm sometimes aware that I'm in a dream but I wouldn't really call it lucid dreaming.
It's usually just a brief moment where I'm like "that wouldn't happen" or "What that doesn't make sense!" or "It would be way more interesting if..." and then sometimes my dreams conform to the thought.

One of my favorite dreams is one where I was sort of flying by dragging myself along an invisible piece of fabric that I knew to be red with a bit of gold embroidery and then just coasting along with the resulting inertia. I flew across the earth which had been almost completely reclaimed by the forest and the only reminder of human existence were power masts which seemed to be bigger than skyscrapers.

when i was a kid i had a recurring dream that also looped

i was a super saiyan chasing 3 people around a hockey arena. one guy was short and fat, one guy was tall and skinny, and one guy was in between. they wore evil black uniforms and skated around really fast and i would kamehameha them but they would always escape into the net which was a portal to...another hockey rink where it would happen all over again. i would chase them through the hole my energy blast made. this would loop several dozen times until i woke up

I don't remember most of my dreams. There was a time period where I tried to lucid dream, but it didn't work, or, if it did work, I don't remember it. Lily, if you have any lucid tips, I may or may not appreciate them.

As for the last dream I remember, it was a heavily impressionist dream. I don't really remember the plot, but I remember that everyone was trying to be what they thought other people wanted them to be instead of what they wanted to be..

This. I could remember a lot from my childhood, but the last dream I can remember having was about a week ago, and I don't recall the actual dream, just the feeling of waking up and knowing I had been dreaming.

~SE++

It's very difficult to lucid dream if you don't remember your dreams. I find that remembering your dreams has a lot to do with your sleeping pattern. In my experience, you can only remember a dream if you wake up during it. I don't know of any trick to wake up during dreams on purpose, I just happen to wake up a lot in the middle of the night, so I'm bound to wake up during a dream now and then. I did find I was more likely to wake up during a dream if I allowed myself to sleep as long as I wanted, rather than waking up from an alarm clock. I don't know if it's like that for everyone, but it seems dreams is the point where my body naturally wakes up.

The other important thing to remembering dreams is to focus on them as soon as you wake up. Memories of dreams are very fleeting and if you allow your mind to wander when you wake up, you'll forget the dream almost instantly. That's why I wrote them down, but you can also just retell yourself your dream and it should be enough to remember it.

Once you remember your dreams, the next step is to analyse them for recurring events or for hints that you were in a dream. Here's a few hints that seem to be rather common:

- Breathing under water. The breathing in your dream usually matches your physical breathing, so just because you dream that you are underwater doesn't mean your physical body stops breathing. So you end up in a situation where you are underwater, yet are breathing.

- Mirrors act funny in dreams. I don't know why. Maybe it's too difficult for your brain to produce an exact reflection, or maybe it just doesn't bother. Either way, the mirrors are going to be funky. Maybe there's a delay between you and your reflection. Or maybe you don't have a reflection. Or maybe the reflection is talking to you.

- Reading is also strange in dreams. Some people say you can't read in dreams. That's not true (at least not for everyone), because I read a lot in my dreams. However, it's always a strange experience. Typically, I'll read a line and that line says something. I'll re-read the same line and it says something else. Then I get hung up on that line because every time I read it, it says something different.

- Driving a car from an unusual place. Like driving from the back seat. Or driving from the passenger seat.

There are more, but some will happen to you more often than to other people, so try to find your own hints. As I said in a previous post, a recurring event for me was being unable to find my keys after I left my house, or missing a shoe. If you start identifying those hints and events and thinking to yourself "of course, I should have known I was dreaming when my reflection in the mirror flipped me off!", then you are more likely to become aware of them while you are dreaming, as they happen.

Once you do become aware of them in your dreams, again, the key is focus. If you just go "oh, I'm dreaming!", then move on with the dream, chances are a second later you'll have forgotten you were in a dream. You have to think "ok, I'm in a dream, what do I want to do about it" and continuously remind yourself that you are in a dream.

Once you start to lucid dream, here are a few hints:

- As lily mentioned, if you think of something, chances are it'll happen. Even if you think about not thinking about it or think about it negatively. For instance, if you think "I don't want to see a T-Rex", you'll probably see a T-Rex.

- In a similar vein, if you have doubts about being able to do something, you probably won't be able to do it. For instance, it's really easy (and fun) to fly in a lucid dream... unless you think "I'm not sure I can fly", then it'll be impossible for you to fly.

- While we're talking about flying, I found that the easiest way to fly is to just imagine yourself moving up. When I try to fly by jumping, then it usually fails. I might end up jumping very high, but my mind is conditioned that when I jump, I eventually land, so it has a hard time going against that. However, since I never just lift off the ground in real life, my mind has no expectations on the results of such an event.

- I don't know if it works for everyone, but I find that the best way to wake up from a dream is to fall backwards. I'm not entirely sure why, maybe it's just how I conditioned myself. All I know is that simply telling myself "wake up!" usually doesn't work.

@filo. I find it easiet to fly by not thinking about it. I simply fold my legs Indian style and float around a lot. Jumping to fly is indeed hard but I can do that every once in while by turning my arms into wings . When I dream of being underwater I usually drown and wake up. Probably because I used to have bad asthma. I also tend to dream of mirrors a lot since I tend to avoid them Irl.

@cat: I have no idea how I get lucid dreams. I find for me there's a like levels of dreaming with each one more conscious and more vivid. Think tired blurry day dream...at night, to colorful and magical as the land of oz. Like filo said you need to practice remembering your dreams. Eventually you'll be able to recognize when you are dreaming.

I think another thing that helps is I am extremly aware of everything Irl so I take my consciousness with me when I sleep. Which itself is odd since I have adhd

I once had a dream where I realized I was dreaming, but then forgot about it later on. I was pretty embarrassed for myself after I woke up. There are far more shameful dreams I've had before, but I'm not quite sure I want to share them

I used to dream pretty regularly, but nowadays the only dreams I tend to have are those sort of half-awake "dreams" you get when you're starting to wake up and aware on some level that you're sleeping, but not really aware of anything else.

A number of times I've somehow gotten it into my head that my alarm hasn't gone off and panic about it before waking enough to realize that it's not supposed to go off for another hour or half hour or whatever, then fallen back asleep only to do it again twenty minutes later. Very annoying.

I did this every day for like a whole year. This is why I hate school and work.

I used to wake up an hour before my alarm, go back to sleep, wake up again half an hour later, go back to sleep, wake up 10 minutes later, then 10 minutes later, then 5 minutes and finally give up going back to sleep. Every single day of the week.

I realised it was because my alarm was so irritating, I dreaded the moment it would ring, so I would instinctively wake up before it rang.

When I got my phone and started using songs I liked as my alarm, things got much better.

A couple of years ago I used to write down my dreams. I never manage to remember them after the morning of the dream and they were fairly interesting and going back and reading them now is quite amusing. And sometimes you notice small things about them that were not obvious back then.