What does it mean to be awake?

My college blogging project on lucid dreaming is coming to a close. However, I fully intend for the blog to live on. I owe it to this project to have pulled me out out of a very long dry dream spell. There are reasons that I chose to forget about these wonderful past experiences and focus on waking life, mainly lack of time and stress of daily obligations, but I felt that it was time to start dreaming again.

Classmates of mine were curious to how I am effected in waking life by these experiences. Overall the side effects of dreaming are more positive than negative, though it's not that black and white.

Having these intense non-physical experiences do take up a lot of my physical time and mind during waking life. I take time to write down snippets of dreams in the middle of the night so I can hold onto the memory. Upon awakening, or whenever I get the chance, I write detailed versions down in my dream journal. This might now seem like a tremendous amount of time but it is in my situation when I'm headed out the door at 4:30 in the morning.

My nightly experiences are usually on my mind through out the day, but I am often very engaged with work that this does not distract me and take away attention when attention is crucial. I have been known to dwell on dream characters just like many others do, and people who have fallen fond of characters in fictional books or movies to have it come to an end know the heartbreak that comes with it. So yes, sometimes these dreams can put me in a very reminiscent state, because it's more than just a book.

There is also the typical feeling lucid dreamers have of questioning reality. What is reality? When I start intending to remember my dreams again the veil of waking and dream life become a lot thinner and life seems a lot more subjective. This feeling can sometimes be a curse. We train our self to question reality every day in order to have lucid dreams so it makes sense that dreamers sometimes have a hard time distinguishing in between both worlds.  

I believe there can be a balance in between these two lives. It's not always easy to separate or label our experiences real or not real but as long as we remind ourselves to live in the moment and enjoy life as it comes I think we'll be okay. (I know, a lot easier said than done). I have come across other dream travelers who don't want anything to do with waking life. That's really a shame. I enjoy my time in waking life and wouldn't change it for the world. It's all connected somehow, that much I believe. We can learn things and grow in ways unimaginable from both worlds.