My first reality check!

I only found this website a week ago and I saw other posters say it can take up to a year to get a lucid dream. So I didn’t really expect anything like this anytime soon. I only have gotten 3 dreams into my dream journal so far. The past few days I haven’t been able to recall any long dreams.

Anyways here is what happened. This dream was actually pretty long leading up to the reality check. Then there were two NBA announcers in my dream and I was talking to them. All of a sudden one of them starts walking backwards and is going around the corner. I was thinking why is he doing that. Then I thought wait a minute… I don’t know these guys in real life this is a dream!

At that point I got really excited. The dream I was having disappeared and everything was completely black. I felt myself kind of losing control so I looked down at my hands because I remembered that what you were suppose to do. I was trying to get a lucid dream, but I don’t know why I couldn’t. I was real excited though, I kept thinking yes this is it I’m in a lucid dream right now. But it was still all black. Then I was wondering whether or not I was really dreaming. Somehow it felt as though I had control over my real body. I was trying to move my arms and I couldn’t. I was thinking to myself, ‘see you can’t move your still sleeping.’ Then I started monitoring my breathing and it seemed like I wasn’t breathing very well. At this point I just lost control and I fell back into a normal dream.

Any comments? I would like to know why I couldn’t exactly get into a lucid dream. I may not have been thinking of a specific scenario. Like what I wanted to do in a lucid dream. I’m thinking thats what may have happened. I think all I was thinking of was that I was in control. Also I was only in control for a very small amount of time compared to the overall length of the dream.

You’re making good progress
Don’t worry if things didn’t work out completely. The best thing to do is just keep practicing.
It’s really common when you have your first lucid dream to get really excited, and that feeling will wake you up. Try to keep yourself calm next time. I find walkig around a lot and touching things helps to keep me in the LD. Looking at one thing for too long doesn’t help, this is why looking at my hands or my reflection doesn’t work for me, but everybody’s different. Experiment.
Sounds like what you did was wake up momentarily and experience some sleep paralysis. When this happens, try to lie still, and remember that you’ll probably go back into a dream. Sometimes when my dream imagery is fading, it helps me to imagine that I’m spinning and that when I stop spinning I’ll end up in some place. There are lots of different techniques… keep reading the posts on this site, especially on stabilizing your dreams. I recommend doing reality checks when you “wake up” because at this point, you’re going in and out of dreams all the time, you might start having false-awakenings.
Anyway, good luck and let us know how it goes,
Peace, Ian

I think I’ll start using reality checks along with trying to WILD. I’ve noticed that most of my lucid dreams have been initiated this way. Good luck in the future.

hi JOsephPataki !
welcome to the ld4all forum.
I would just like to give u a bit of advice(if thats ok with u). Doing RCs(Reality Checks)every hour of the day (or whenever u want to)will help you have another ld. This is because the more you practice doing reality checks…the easier it will be for you to do it in a dream to see if you r dreaming! And that will help you realise if u r realliy dreaming(while u r in a dream). I hope this wil help you !
c ya !