Hey everybody
I only joined the forum a couple of days ago and last night I had my first lucid dream in about six months. The experience was slight however. I woke up about three seconds after becoming lucid, but this wasn’t through excitement. It started as a very vivid normal dream. I was in my house and knew when I heard a sound from downstairs that we were being burgled. I could see the front door was ajar from upstairs. This scared me to death and I ran into the bathroom, locking the door behind me. I realized I was dreaming when I looked at the wallpaper. It was exactly the same as in waking life but it was so brightly coloured that for some reason I just thought, “hey, this is a dream.” The reason I wasn’t elated was I thought that since everything I now felt was real, if the burglar managed to break in and attack me, the pain would presumably be real too. This thought woke me straight up. Apparently some people have lucid nightmares similar to this.
Despite this, the actual experience of being lucid has inspired me to work harder at developing the skill (before I couldn’t be bothered to even keep a journal). Anyway cheers to everyone who’s information I used to get this far (as a lurker). 
Ta ta!
Ya know, I am intrigued by this phenomenon. I have spent a reasonable amount of work with RC’s, MILD, WILD, and other methods, but still, the only successes I have had have been a similarly random, “wow, I just realized this is a dream” for not particularly clear reasons why I realized it that time but not others.
As far as I can tell, it happens somewhat more often when I am thinking a lot about LD’ing when I’m awake, but not always.
I want to try to pin down why and when this happens more.
Any thoughts?
Peace,
Sruthan
Thats happened to me once too,
I remember I was in my backyard and I went into the garage to get something, when I realised, for no reason (that I know of), that I was dreaming.
But hey, im not complaining! 
-stranger
Yeah, I just had that the other morning. (I describe the dream in my post titled Partial Idiocy.) For no reason, I was running and then bam, was lucid and thought to myself, “You know, I become lucid an awful lot when I’m running.” (Don’t know if this is actually true–a dumb lucid thought.) I find that this usually happens to me when I am doing some sort of physical activity. In one DILD I was doing cartwheels on the grass and suddenly realized it was a dream so I took off for the sky. The spontaneity of it is interesting.
Just had my first in a while this past week as well.
I was in some nice looking health clinic. I was in a mindset I often get pre-lucid: I’m “day-dreaming” while walking in the dream. In this mindset I haven’t yet connected how what I think is affecting the world around me i.e. how often my “day-dreaming” guesses seem to be correct(or humorously wrong). In the back of my mind the coincidences seem to be counted up to a point and then I am lucid.
That is how I usually get DILDs, the weight of coincidences makes me Dream suspicious.