Since young, I have always had interesting encounters with dreams, but because recent years I don't get much dreams anymore, I have almost forgotten about it. It's only after watching Inception, I realised maybe I am not "unique",  the guy who came up with the idea for the movie must have had similar experiences as well.

While I'm dreaming in my sleep, I was often aware that I'm dreaming and I always took the opportunity to "test" things out since I knew there is no consequences. I knew I can simply get out of the dream if it became too unbearable, I just need a "kick" to wake up. So I usually try doing things (mostly naughty ones) that I will never dare of doing in real life. This often involved scolding, killing, hurting people … which often ended up as me being chased by someone . As for the "kick", that's this strange fast ticklish feeling running up my spine when I lie face down, that's always what gets me out of my dream state suddenly. 

As I'm writing this, I just remembered another part of my strange dreaming habits … Déjà vu. Often in real life, I have scenes in my dreams being replayed. It's a totally weird experience where in a conversation or event, I will suddenly realised that I have dreamt of the exact scene or conversation before. At that moment, I will then intentionally say exactly what I said in my dream or does the specific action I did in my dream, and everything will unfold accordingly. 

So how's this related to the first part of being "aware" of my dreaming state? Because of the déjà vu experience, I'm convinced that dreams are real, perhaps our life has been planned all along, we are merely going by the timeline and "play" our life. Perhaps my déjà vu experience was caused by a "bug" in the system which unintentionally allowed me to preview some part of my future. Therefore, often at the point when I'm aware that I'm actually dreaming, I will try to see if I can uncover anything significant about future. I can't say I have much success with that yet, but perhaps I already knew the future, but I just need that déjà vu moment to remember it. *complicated* lol