I've been lucid dreaming since childhood. It has always come naturally. The doctors used to tell me it was because of my IQ ... back in the sixties a couple of them were most fascinated by my claim that I dreamed in "technicolor" while I was always happiest when I was dreaming that I was flying.

I still do.

As a youngster my flying dreams usually involved swimming through the air as a means of locomotion ... even though I knew Superman only had to jump and extend his arms ... flat hands for speed, fists to slow down. That didn't work one day as I took a header off the roof. That was my first broken collar bone.

As I got older and got into parachuting I tried all of that during freefall and quickly learned why Superman never really flew ... I wish they had wingsuits back then like they have now. We used to have to make our own out of canvas and worn-out silk.

Still, the best flying I do is in my dreams and I am very cognizant of the fact that I am flying in my dreams ... I'm in complete control doing relative work, plus some things I could never do in the sky.

Two nights ago I had snake dreams ... those are the only ones that really bother me - yet the snakes and I always get along in my dreams I suppose because I avoid killing them, if at all possible, in real life. But the one the other night, it involved constrictors rather than vipers and those mean one thing to me ... wake up, I'm not breathing properly. That is sometimes easier said than done if sleep paralysis has set in.

I have a hard time letting myself sleep in total silence. I have this process ... go to sleep with the TV on, or an audio CD playing like Stephen Hawking's Brief History of Time or the audio version of Einstein's Relativity on Librivox/Lecture Kings on RoKu ... but then I set the TV to turn-off automatically around 4AM. This gives me time to work-out issues in my dreams, without me having to wake up two or three times a night trying to decipher what is going-on in my head at midnight, 2AM, etc. As a kid it was always numbers and colors but as an adult it's become more about my health, family, the country, politics, etc.

Anyways, stopping there before I get too long-winded.

Sometimes, if I try, I have a process where I can force myself to dream about certain things that need resolving in my life. It's tricky because I do not always come to the conclusion in my subconscious that I maybe hoped for.

Then there was this one time, in Central America a long time ago, when I accepted the fact that I was going to die ... so I laid down in this hidden place and forced myself to go to sleep and dream .... and something happened, it saved my life ... but when it was over I was left asking myself, was I dreaming or did it really just happen?

And here is where lucid dreaming can scramble your bean.

Did I say I was going to stop? Dammit. frick it. Little bit more.

All of us have dreams that have stuck with us for life for whatever reason. Not necessarily a reoccurring dream - but one that you vividly remember having, and knowing you were having, but it bordered somewhere in the in-between of reality and subconscious.

Recently I was reminded of one such dream ... during a dream I was having. I was dreaming within a dream. But it brought back a memory which, during the dream I realized it was a memory of a dream. Yet, within a micro second, I realized it was actually a repressed memory of something that really happened ... something I had not thought about it years and, when I did, I would immediately repress it again - until the other night.

It made me uncomfortable because it forced me to deal with what happened ... a death and a burial, as if I was there again - which I was - in the dream. And I knew I was dreaming except this time I was an older man, much older than the kid we were burying who was actually older than me when we buried him. And I looked over and saw myself and realized I was looking back at myself .... and then, in my mind I remembered who I was looking at when we buried him - and it was me - except I didn't realize I was there at the time but I was.

Anyways ... rant off/