Hello, I'm antoia. I'm 17, and I've been practicing lucid dreaming on and off since last September (around 10 months). It took me around a month to have my first LD, and I had some more sporadically after that. A lot of them have been DILDs resulting from FAs, and some (I think) were WILDs (though how I got them, I'm still not sure). They've all been short (<5 min) and not very vivid.

Recall: I have okay recall (I remember at least one dream a night if I get enough sleep), though lately my recall's been decreasing in quality and increasing in quantity (I've been waking up naturally several times a night for the past few nights, but I only remember fragments, and I have trouble falling back asleep again). I've kept a dream journal for 2 years, before I was even interested in LDing, though I only started keeping daily entries last September. The quality of the entries is like a rollercoaster, but I've written down a decent amount of dreams.

Reality checks: I've had an ambivalent history with RCs. On one hand, my ability to remember to do RCs is proportional to my motivation, which means I start out doing them enthusiastically for a few days before stopping altogether. On the other hand, I often catch FAs after RCing and becoming lucid, so... *shrug* Right now I RC when I remember to (nose-plug/looking at hands), but I try to do them critically and not mindlessly. I read a post somewhere about making LaBerge's action/awareness/form/context thing into one mental RC so I'm trying to incorporate that into daily life.

Current status: Since I'm on summer break, I'm trying to fix my sleep schedule and get 9 hours every night (though insomnia is not helping). I've been trying out SSILD for the past few days (not sure if there's a correlation between that and the frequent awakenings). I had a dry spell that lasted from early May to last week, when I finally had a LD (short but fairly stable DILD). Since then I've had one more LD (again, short but stable DILD, though this time I had more control). I'm hoping to increase my lucid dream frequency somehow through DILD, because I've been practicing for a while and it would be nice to have some consistency for a change. I don't think I've been taking the whole dream signs thing seriously enough, and I'm not sure how to go about with DILD, so hopefully joining this course will get me on track

Oh, almost forgot. The reason why I haven't really looked at dream signs and things is that many of my regular dreams either have no main character and I'm just watching things happen like a movie, or I'm this random person acting out a role, and I'm not sure what to do about that... On the other hand, during the school year a lot of people I know show up in my dreams, so maybe I can RC when I see a friend or something.