Lucid dreaming

For whatever reason I've been interested in metaphysical subjects for long time - I remember taking a book out of the library in 5th grade about ESP. This interest is pretty variable, including the afterlife, the occult, alien life forms, UFOs and many other topics like that. I consider myself pretty pragmatic, so this interest is kind of counter to my standard mode of thinking. I guess I would classify it as curiosity and despite looking into these things for many years, I can't say I've ever witnessed or even read anything conclusive about ANYTHING metaphysical. With the lack of evidence, its hard to come to any conclusion other than that there isn't much here beyond the physical.

All that said, in college I read an article, then a book about lucid dreaming, which I guess you can consider a metaphysical thing. The basic idea of lucid dreaming is that you can become conscious that you are dreaming while you are dreaming. Essentially you become "awake" within your dream. Once you are awake and aware, you can control what is going on and do really whatever you want, the physical laws we live by in the real world don't apply. I probably become lucid in dreams a few times a month. Its a cool thing to do and you figure when you're sleeping, you're really not doing anything else anyway. One of my favorite things to do when I'm lucid is fly, once you master that its a pretty good incentive to try it again. Although a lot of times when you become lucid, you get so excited you wake yourself up, which can be frustrating.

The other interesting thing that can happen with lucid dreaming is fake awakening. As I said above often times in a lucid dream you wake yourself up, sometimes when this happens your "awakening" happens inside the dream. So you think you woke up, when in fact you are still in the dream. I'm telling you some weird stuff can happen when you think you're awake, but the dream is still going.

I won't go into the details of any my specific dreams I know other people's dreams are usually not very interesting to hear about.