Hi everyone. I just thought I'd introduce myself and give a history of how I came to be here.

Several years ago I suddenly started getting sleep paralysis. I would always feel like something was holding me down and I would have an intense sense of terror. The first 2 times I honestly thought I was being abducted by aliens! But by the 3rd time I remember saying to myself "hold on, this has happened before" and I decided to try to enjoy it. It really gives me goosebumps now just thinking about it!

I looked it up on the web and came across lucid dreaming. Without really making any conscious effort, I was occasionally lucky enough to have lucid dreams but they would never last very long. One that I remember happened after I had walked home from the pub late one night. I dreamed that I was walking home again and this struck me as odd as I had only just done the walk in reality. I decided it must be a dream and managed to take control of it. I flew the rest of the way home like Superman but I think I must have gotten too excited over it and woke up.

Now to the present. I haven't had any interesting dream experiences in a few years (although I have a feeling I've had the paralysis quite a few times and forgotten about it). Out of the blue, I looked up lucid dreaming on the web last week and read quite a bit on this site. Then last night, I had so many amazing dreams that I have a good recollection of. In one of them I think i went into a place I used to work or an old school or something but once I got inside it was actually my parents' house. For some reason I was running around looking for a fire alarm when I thought "why am I doing this? There obviously isn't a fire alarm in my parents' house". That was when I realised that I must be dreaming but before I could do anything, my alarm went off and woke me up. I was really annoyed that I'd been woken up just as I started to take control of the dream. I looked at the time and it was 7:28. I thought that's a funny time to set an alarm as I'd usually set it for 7:30 but tried not to think about it and just went back to sleep. That was when I woke up for real and realised that was just a false awakening! I'd never experienced anything like that before and I'm going to be on the lookout for it from now on!

I hope that someone here finds some of this interesting. I love the intensity of these experiences. I've always kind of enjoyed nightmares just to see how far the terror can go. I'm interested in pushing it as far as it can go wether it's extreme pleasure or terror.

Ollie