I've always been fascinated by the idea of lucid dreaming. As somebody who has dealt with frequent, vivid, and jarring nightmares since childhood, the concept of actually being able to control my experience in a dream was incredibly appealing.

Before last summer, I mentioned lucid dreaming to my friends, and I was surprised to find that it was more common that I had thought. Some of my friends had lucid dreams naturally, while some induced them purposely.

One of my friends did warn me that he had experienced sleep paralysis while trying to induce lucid dreaming.

However, I still wanted to try. I did a basic Google search of how to lucid dream and found a variety of suggestions, specifically meditation and performing reality checks throughout the day, among many others.

The only suggestion that stood out to me was to write down all my dreams that I could remember. So I grabbed a notebook and left it by my bedside, like every website said, and went to sleep.

I quickly learned that personally, typing my dreams on my phone was easiest because I could type them out immediately after waking up while still lying in bed.

Every morning when I woke up, I tried to collect my thoughts and wrote bullet points of whatever I remembered onto my phone. Because I was usually still waking up, a lot of my bullet points were incoherent, but legible to the point where I could still understand my thoughts later.

For example, one of the older dream notes on my phone reads something like: "Mac and cheese guy kidnapping child with red shirt." If anybody else saw my phone, they would definitely be very confused. However, when I fully wake up and try to recall my dreams, reading these notes from when I was half-asleep are helpful in evoking the memories and feelings I experienced during the night.

I copied down my dreams with better wording every day or every other day in an actual notebook.

Then, as the weeks went on, I started noticing patterns--patterns in my dreams and the way I thought about my dreams too.

I had recurring themes running through my dreams, and it felt like many of my dreams continued off of each other. For example, I had a dream that I was conducting a musical at a theatre. I didn't remember much from that dream except for what the scene around me looked like, and a few of the characters, who were my friends in real life. A few days later I had a similar dream, and when I woke up, the first thing that came to mind was that I had been there before.

Why do dreams have storylines that continue the next night? I find it fascinating that even though dreams are a natural occurrence that affects so many living beings, we still do not have a complete and solid answer to this question.

Although research on dreams has not led to thorough conclusions, most sources agree that you can learn a lot about your own inner thoughts by analyzing your dreams. This basically means that you think about the different symbols and meanings and interpret them to understand yourself better. I prefer to do my own analysis of what a symbol means rather than look to the web.

For example, I recently had a dream where I was locked in a public bathroom, and the walls kept pressing me in closer and closer and I didn't know what was going on. Meanwhile, people were screaming my name from the outside. I kept trying to find my phone, but I couldn't find it, even though I could feel that it was in one of my pockets. I also smelled a perfume that my best friend wears regularly, which made me panic more.

What does this mean? Some people could interpret this as me being afraid of small spaces or being trapped. I don't think I specifically fear small spaces, but I do fear being incapacitated in public spaces or drawing an embarrassing or overwhelming amount of attention to myself in public spaces.

Further, I regularly lose my phone on my body or in my room - I'll set it down somewhere and then forget where it is the very next second, so it's no wonder that I was unable to find my phone in a time of need in my dream.

What does my friend's perfume represent? I'm not entirely sure, but I think she was likely on the shopping trip with me in my dream before I became trapped in a public bathroom.

This dream is just one of dozens that I had in my first week of recording dreams, and I loved analyzing them and looking back on them.

Unfortunately, in my few months of recording dreams, I had many lucid dreams, but not any that I was able to control what was happening. An example dream that I will never forget was when I was in a house running up and down the stairs while people tried to shoot at me as if I was in a video game.

I kept thinking to myself, "I can't die in my dream because if I die, I won't wake up!" and so although I had this awareness, I was more terrified comparatively.

Recording my dreams has been, in my opinion, one of the best forms of self-discovery. I highly recommend that everybody attempt to remember and analyze their own dreams, even if it's just for amusement.