Well, after browsing many lucid dreaming websites and visiting a bunch of their forums, I came upon a really stunning fact: Nicotine patches enhance and solidify dreams. Many a discussion was brought up concerning whether or not this would make it easier to have a lucid dream, but in the end the consensus was that if you have more intense, vivid dreams (like the patch does cause), then that should make it all the more easier.

Person after person reported the intense dreams they had, and how they ended up having not just one, but a couple if not many LDs a night while wearing those patches. This perked up my analytical, scientific mind... and I had to experiment. You see, I've been trying to have LDs for awhile now, but I've suffered from my dreams not being vivid enough to even attempt to do reality checks or anything like that.

I concluded that I would have to be the guinea pig (seeing as how I'm a smoker anyways), and came up with a test: I would wear one, and my brother would wear one, and when we became lucid we'd try to find each other (to also attempt to prove shared dreaming to ourselves).

Well, I can attest for a fact that it brings about very, very vivid dreams. I would equate the vividness to real-life. I had about 5 dreams that night, and all of them seemed extremely real. And, as I had surmised, it did indeed give me the chance to do reality checks (unlike those vague, semi-coherent dreams).

In one of them the dreamscape was so odd, that I immediately knew it to be a dream. I was in a futuristic society, with tall, roundish skyscrapers and catwalks with moving people like The Jetsons. I jumped up and flew to the nearest person, and this is what happened:

Me: "Hey, how are you doing?"
Her: "Pretty good, how about you?"
Me: "Umm... awesome actually... I just found out this is a dream."
Her: "What!? You have to be joking..."
Me: "Nope... I'll show you..."

At that second I jumped and hovered in the air, amused by her amazement.

Me: "Believe me now?"
Her: "Yeah, I guess I do."
A short pause, while she looks in bewilderment at her surroundings.
Me: "So, what's your name?"
Her: "Amber"
Me: "Well, I'm Nick and we should go try and find my brother so he could join us..."
Her: "Alright... sounds great..."

So I told her to follow me and went to the nearest door. Thinking before I opened it that my brother's dream was on the other side, I opened it wide... and to my dismay it was just a plain hallway. I got a little irritated, so I decided to try something a little bit different.

I walked to a plain wall and told Amber to watch closely. I pointed, and with my index finger I drew a new door that I was certain led to my brother's dream. I almost forgot the doorknob, but with a tiny gesture of my hand it popped into existence.

Opening the door I wasn't ready for what I saw... it was a small, dimly lit dungeon-like room with a cracked porcelain sink, a toilet with no running water, and a bed (all torn and misshapen) with my brother lying on it. I looked at him and saw that he was utterly frustrated, mad, and a little sad... and I wondered why. I told him, "Hey man, we can leave this place and go somewhere better man... this is a dream!"

He promptly disappeared, vanishing in front of my eyes. I thought, "Damn..." and turned and left.

Amber was still there, so I told her that I guess I couldn't find my brother so we should just go explore without him. She was like, "Well, where do we go?"

Me: "We can go anywhere we want... anywhere we can imagine. Let's start with something easy and go fly over a field of endless pure-green grass."
Amber: "Sure, let's go."

Then I jumped into the air and took off for that world, and found myself instantly there, flying with the wind. I look over though, and I guess she couldn't make it... she was gone.

And then I woke up. At least I thought I did... but it was another dream in which I thought I just woke up, so I went and told my brother what happened... and then I actually woke up.


When I told my brother what I saw the next day when I actually woke up, he laughed and said he was restless all night and at the time I was asleep he was sitting up in bed completely pissed off and sad that he couldn't have an LD that night. Any correlation do you think?