Finally I became Lucid! This was at my first afternoon nap since last Friday (this is Wednesday), when I went to the Lucidity Institute but didn’t realise that I was dreaming. Now I became properly lucid.
I had been asleep, and perhaps I had an earlier dream. I don’t remember that. I was awake in my bed, and I noticed that on my cupboard door and on the wall beside it was some writing in black letters. It was a poem. Now I had the realisation. I knew I must be dreaming. This was extremely exciting, and I rose up out of my bed. I could levitate and fly! However everything apart from that one earlier discrepancy was indistinguishable from my waking room. Therefore I started to do reality checks. I looked at my hands but they didn’t elongate or melt. I pushed a finger at my right hand but it wouldn’t go through. This was quite worrying, as the “hands test” is the one that I always do. Therefore, was I dreaming and because of that able to levitate or was I awake but, through perhaps magical abilities became able to levitate? It really wasn’t easy to decide.
Then I had a false awakening where people came into my room because they thought I had got lost (the time was later than it should have been for me to be still in bed). After this I woke properly, which was a relief.
It was amazing when it was happening though. To induce this, I relaxed myself and tried to get into a dream through the imagery WILD method (visualizing strongly a scene and entering). Now all the times I’ve tried to concentrate like this I’ve never managed to fall asleep. Therefore I gave it up and just rested in bed. Some time later I was asleep, dreaming and lucid.
This could be considered a mid-lucidity dream. The false awakening wasn’t technically lucid but it was still extremely vivid.
Hopefully this should set the stage for a proficient dreaming career. A problem this afternoon was that the environment had solidified too much and I couldn’t change it easily (nor would it change itself). Did others find this during their first few lucid dreams?