Lucid Dreaming Explained: From T-Rex Encounters to Reality Checks

So a lucid dream is any dream in which you realize within the dream that you're dreaming. You literally know, hey, this is a dream. And the first time it happened to me, I was probably 10 or 11 years old. I was in my public library looking at books and suddenly I see a Tyrannosaurus Rex walking through the book stacks. And I think, wait a second, aren't dinosaurs extinct? How can this be? And and at that moment I realized, oh, the only explanation is this is a dream. I'm dreaming this. And so I became lucidly aware and then I told myself, well, if this is a dream, I can wake up. And I told myself to wake up and I woke up. So, so that was my very early introduction as a 10-year-old to lucid dreaming. That is really cool to hear, but you something is critical about what you just mentioned there. You realized that because you saw a Tyrannosaurus Rex that you must have been dreaming. And yet, very often when people attempt lucid dreaming, they discover that their brains will justify the strangeness that they witness. They will say, no, I'm not dreaming, ...