Apropos of nothing, non-lucid (i.e. regular) dreaming has become a great aid to my songwriting and story-writing over the past few years. I have really long and vivid dreams where I'm other people in other parts of the world - sometimes other worlds altogether. I've been gay, straight, woman, man. I've been an otter and a pelican. I've spent weeks holding off an army of zombies. I've fought in post-nuclear wars. Each dream can last days or weeks of dream-time. The high level of detail of the situations - and their total lack of relation to my quotidian life - makes me think I may have actually lived those lives in some other versions of the universe. But wherever they come from, I find they tell me things about my own life and help me answer questions, sometimes really practical questions about code, other times emotional questions about what I want to do. And they're a great source of novel creative material.<p>I've never tried to lucid dream, but I'm afraid that if I could control them my dreams would lose the thing that makes them so valuable to me, which is that from their strangeness and randomness, I get to interpret what my other selves are trying to tell me. If my conscious mind controlled them, I think I would lose insight into that; I even wonder whether losing those voices and other lives in my sleep would be a step toward going insane in waking life.