Hey everybody. I’m a musician and programmer from the northeastern United States, and I am a long-time lurker who just recently decided to make an account. I have always had a bit of a fascination with LDing, and during the past week I’ve finally made the decision to put that eight hours I spend dead to the world every night to good use. 
Some history: When I was younger (<10 years old) I would have frequent recurring nightmares, often times multiple per night, due to allergy-related respiratory issues. After a while, I began to remember these nightmares well enough to realize that they weren’t real. It was not so much that I realized they were dreams, but I had such an intense sense of deja vu that I knew that, for whatever reason, the things I was experiencing were not harmful and I was not startled by them because I knew how my nightmares would play out.
Because of that, ever since I understood what lucid dreaming was I have had (relatively infrequent) lucid dreams. It has been a while since I experienced one, but when they have occurred I found them very exciting and extremely enjoyable. Every time I have achieved lucidity, it was because I thought about whether or not I was dreaming. I don’t know if this is common, but I find that it is very easy to identify whether or not I’m dreaming. I find that dreams feel different than reality somehow.
I guess the most noticeable departure from reality is a feeling of effortless, fluid movement. During the day I notice little aches and pains. Bundled up muscles from sleeping in an odd position, or my back bothering me from sitting for too long. In dreams none of this is present. I guess I would compare the feeling to being very pleasantly drunk, minus the disorientation.
Anyway, I have started keeping a dream journal and managed to remember two dreams on my first night, so I am feeling pretty pumped. I have installed an RC reminder on my phone, and it has been quite effective in raising my awareness and fostering LL. Whenever it goes off, and often times when it doesn’t and I just happen to think about it, I count how many fingers I have, if my claddagh ring is facing in the correct direction, do a nose RC, and ask myself how I got to where I was and if anything seems out of the ordinary. I probably do this 20-40 times a day, and have been doing so for almost a week.
I am also gathering sleep data using an app on my HTC Rezound and will begin attempting to use it to initiate DEILDs soon. I have tried inducing a WILD a few times, but with little luck. Same with DIELDS, though the problem with those is that I sleep right through whatever audio notification I set for myself. I think I probably need to put a bit more effort into the WILDs, though. I am an extremely deep sleeper, which makes things interesting.
I would be interested to hear what techniques other people would suggest for a very deep sleeper who is naturally prone to lucid dreams. I know the first thing I need to do is improve my dream recall, since I may be having lucid dreams and not remembering them at all. (I used to remember most of my dreams, but I haven’t been recalling any up until very recently which is probably related to a variety of habits.)
I hypothesize that once I start actively and regularly working on improving my dream recall that I will have at least a few spontaneous LDs, but I really want to be able to LD consistently one way or another. I may build my own dream mask.
Once I have that down, I plan to really work on dream awareness. I have good dream control, and once I am lucid I find that rubbing my hands together will reliably bring me further into the dream, so I am not too concerned with getting ejected. However, I wish to have more vivid LDs and I want to have the self-control to passively observe my environment and sustain a continuous LD for as long as possible.
I tend to jump into doing crazy stuff as soon as I realize that I am lucid, but I would rather focus on the dream and see just how much detail my mind can conjure up on its own instead of going full throttle into telekinesis or flying, where I am more focussed on the feeling of what I am doing than the minutia of my dreams.
Anyway, that’s about all I can think of to say about myself. However, I would like to end my post by saying that if there is any way that I can contribute to this community in terms of technical expertise, I would be quite willing to lend a hand. I have noticed that there really isn’t much out there in terms of LD-related software, and much of the hardware is quite expensive or requires a whole lot of DIY-ing. I work in a robotics lab at my local University, so hardware/software design are not foreign to me. I am fairly proficient with a soldering iron and I am fluent in C/C++/JavaScript/PHP/LUA/etc…
