How did YOU learn to LD?

I first discovered lucid dreaming when I was on a dream interpretation website about a year ago. I thought it sounded pretty cool so I decided to try it. In the beginning, I mainly used the MILD technique. I had 2 lucid dreams within a month or two but they were very short. My main problem was that I woke up almost instantly after realizing that I was dreaming. Disappointed with my lack of success, I decided to attempt astral projection instead. That yielded even less success! :sigh: Looking back, I think astral projection is very similar to the WILD method. But I must say, even thought I didn’t have a lucid dream with this method, the sensations and visions that accompany the hypnogogic state are really awesome! So since I wasn’t having much luck with astral projection, I went back to MILD just about a month ago and I just had a lucid dream the other night. Which, I might add, was much longer than the first ones I had. :tongue: So, MILD is definitely the method for me. :smile:

~TTYL, Tigereye440~

Woo! I’m actually getting better at this ^^
I thought i would never make it, but now it feels like i’m pretty good att getting lucid (if i have the time)

I started in Febuary this year (Kinda) and i’ve been trying since then without any luck at all (almost), but then i started to actually try waking up, and then returning to sleep and i started to getting like 3 LD’s a week during the summer.

I have tried every technique i found, but i have only succeeded with MILD

MILD :razz:

I had a lot of troubles falling back to sleep, cause my younger brother wakes up at 8 o’ clock EVERY DAY xD (He’s VERY loud)

I’m using MILD when i have the time, and i just started a new school, so i don’t have very much of it, but i do my best during the weekends

I had my first LD when i had 5 years, now i tried WBTB, MILDand WILD, they dint work, but a month after i stoped trying them i had sevral natural LDs :smile:

I can finally say I learned it right here on this forum :smile:

Anam… you had an LD? Holy crap there is hope.

Yep, officially! :smile:

I learned it after I picked up Godwin’s amazing book “The Lucid Dreamer” from the shelves of our local library. I’m still amazed by the sheer beauty of that book… Even though this was almost a year before I joined here, I can say I’ve learned much more about LDs from this site than from any LD book I’ve read over the years :grin:

I’ve learned it here too :smile:

I’m going to post my experience and then read the topic and comment.

I was at a website called “GameFAQs” reading the message boards there. Someone on a secret board called LUE linked to the paranormal board, I went to the paranormal board and a topic about lucid dreaming was there. I had no idea what it was at the time and became intrigued(sp?).

A link in that topic brought me to ld4all.com, I read the whole entire site. This was April of 04. To be honest I was quite skeptical.

While on the paranormal board I was reading about Alien abductions and cryptozoology and I decided to look at the stars and wonder if extra terestrials were real and what it must be like to get abducted. It was a school night and the time was 2:00AM and I was extremely tired. I took down my telescope and decided to try an LD, I chose the WILD method.

I kept my mind active by thinking about Extra Terrestrials and Alien abductions. A really silly subject, but then something hit me and scared me more then anything in my life. I had SP and I didn’t know it, I expected just to go into a dream, I never counted on SP. I started to FREAK, mainly because I was thinking about aliens and abductions and thought I was being abducted. It sounds really stupid now but think about it. You just did hours worth of research on alien abductions, go to sleep, try to WILD the first night you hear about LD’s and then you hit SP and not know what it is.

To be honest I was scared beyond my wildest imagination, I slept with the light on for a week and never came back to ld4all.com

I have never shared this information with anyone, and it’s been almost a year. I needed to get that off of my chest.

Well, then comes the summer and I decide to clean out my favorites folder and this site was there, I decided to read up again. I found out what SP was and came to this forum, when I found out what SP was I was so happy to find out nothing abnormal happened to me and decided to try to wild. Well, I hit SP again but got kind of freaked because I wasn’t expecting it. So I scratched the plan and bought a notbook for a DJ the next day.

I read the forums and hear about the OLD HAG for the first time and nearly wet my pants by listening to the person who started the thread. I had a new fear when I went to sleep at night and that was the hag. I went to sleep to WILD that night and the one thing that was on my mind was the Hag and the thread creators vivd description. Well, sadly I’m a natural at hitting SP because it happened again, and I freaked out and left it but I kept my eyes tightly shut because I expected the hag to be up on my chest. I went back to sleep, hit SP again, and again and again, this process happened 4 times each resulting with the same action of my keeping my eyes closed. I opened them 5 minutes after the last SP and nothing was there but it was light out.

The next day I don’t try to WILD but subconsiously I did. I hit SP and freaked but didn’t let it awake me, I wanted to see how long it would take to pass. I could hear my heart beating and my blood flowing through my body, it sounded like a waterfall. I was scared. Then the SP suddenly stopped and I was all by my self in a black void, I couldn’t feel my legs or arms, all of a sudden I heard a soothing voice say “open your eyes”

[size=150]AND THEN ON MY CHEST WAS!!![/size]

my dad crying, he had thought I had died in my sleep. It was so real. He left my room and I went back to sleep. I woke up at 11:00AM and went to talk to my dad about the night before… little did I know he had no idea of what I was talking about and it turns out that the whole thing was a dream. It just seemed to real to be a dream, it was definatlly a surreal experience.

Ever since that day I’ve had loads of LD’s, I have lost count of how many. I got them all using the WBTB/WILD method. And also I never feared the hag again, but I would like to see her just to see what I was so scared about. I’ve been trying but no success.[/b]

at least until now, not

At first I was only interested in what my dreams meant. I’ve always been able to recall my dream every morning and some signs seemed completely absurd, so that’s why I started looking on the internet for sites about what dreaming is and what my dreams mean.
In my search I read about lucid dreaming. I ended up on pasQuale’s website (the Dutch one) and read all of it. I talked about lucid dreaming with a friend of mine and we both got interested. We shared the normal dreams we had and after some training (especially RC’s) I had my first real LD’s. I’d had some light LD’s before I even knew about lucid dreaming, but I got more of them when I started to get interested.

I had a spontaneous LD when I was 7 and a very emotional one when I was 20. Will post this in the “The bIg “My First LD” collection” later. I had read before about LDing, but the second one got me really interested. However, it would take three years before I seriously started practicing, after reading a little Dutch book about LDs from the library. I had a lot of time because it was after my studies and before my first job. I started with RCs, and it took three weeks to get a short LD. I went to the library searching on internet (didn’t have internet myself), and I found lucidity.com. I discovered an article about WBTB there, a study that proved its amazing effectiveness compared to other methods. I was very happy to see it worked well for me too. I had a lot of LDs then. In 2001 I finally got a job but I suddenly had to wake up very early every morning and kinda gave up on LDing :grin: Then I moved away from my parents, finally got internet, discovered ld4all and started practicing again :cool:

I first heard about LDing in a TV-show, and I thought it sounded interesting, so I checked it out. I came across this site, and many others. The first time I had a LD I realized I was dreaming in the dream, my only “technique” was that I knew one could have LDs.
However, there were many things that didn’t go my way in my first lucid dream. For example, people didn’t look as I remebered them, and they wouldn’t always do what I told them to do. And, also, when I went outside there was a huge thunderstorm, and I couldn’t get it to stop. In the dream I panicked and ran back in.
Despite the problems I was excited that I had succeeded.

After my first LD it took a long time for another one to come along. I had the next LD with the help of a technique from this site; The one where you look at your hands repetedly during the days and ask yourself: “Am I dreaming?” After about three weeks I dreamt I looked at my hands and asked myself if I was dreaming. The answer came to me in a flash:Yes!
I’ve also used the technique where you trace back how you got to where you are. If one does it often enough, chances are you’ll do it in a dream, and then you won’t remeber what you did to get where you are.

So techniques can be a great way to to have an LD, but personally I have actually experienced most of my LDs without techniques. Just the other night I was lucid in all my dreams but one, wich also made me aware to the fact that you can have a huge amount of dreams in one night.

When I’m LDing I hardly ever do anything useful. I fly sometimes, and sometimes I walk around talking to the people created by my mind. Once I tried to contact a guide, or “fylgia” as I call them, but none of my guides felt like appearing, instead they showed me a swedish (I’m swedish) instrument called “nyckelharpa”, translated it means “key harp”. I don’t know what they were trying to tell me, but I suppose I’ll figure it out sooner or later.

I hope I’ve been of help. Good luck with your dreaming!

/Tove, Sweden

I found out about Lucid Dreams, after I became interested in self-hypnosis, and one of the books that i bought had a chapter on dreams. So I did a google search about five months ago and found Lucid Bird Mans Lucid site then I found this one.

I’m not entirely sure where i first learned about Lucid Dreaming. The dutch version of ld4all inspired me to start keeping a dream journal, so i did for about a month. Then i suddenly had a spontaneous DILD, probably because i was focussing on my dreamsigns a lot more than normal now i was keeping a DJ. My first LD was a rather long and very vivid one, with all the fireworks they talk about on here (senses feel more real than in real life, total control over everything, full lucidity). I haven’t had a LD like that since… but it’s on it’s way :wink:

I was learning how to whistle with your hands on wannalearn.com and I saw something about lucid dreaming so I looked into the website(not this one but cant remember the name) and I at first thought it was impossible but then I remebered that me and one of my coworkers had talked about controlling your dreams some weeks earlier.because he can do it and made it sound great . so I decided that if other people could do it I want to give it a try as well so I started doing RC ALOT and i and reading the forums ALOT and three days later BAM! LD 4 ME! now I mainly use MILD and WBTB which gets me a LD about every 4 days or so and this is great but now i am want to learn WILD because I think that sounds like a way that I can get an LD atleast every other day. My hardest problem though has been writing down my dreams in my dream journal but I talk about them alot and I can still remember dreams from 3 days ago that I still havent written down. Lucid dreaming has opened my eyes to many other things that in my earlier years would have dismissed as “Impossible” but now I know that before you judge anything, try it.

Well said! :smile:

My father has lucid dreamt (or, what he calls Astral projection) for years, and has always told me about his experiences. I developed a growing interest, bought books on the topic, and actually had my own experience when I was around seventeen or eighteen.
I finally stumbled across the lucidity institute website about a year ago. I then discovered LD4All, Stephen LaBerge, etc and ordered ETWOLD through my local esoteric bookstore (I had to get it ordered in from overseas!) and started applying techniques for inducing lucid dreams.

Haven’t looked back since :content:

I’ve been lucid dreaming since I was 5 years old. I’d be having nightmares and think to myself, wait a minute vampires aren’t real and then I developed this technique to wake myself up by crouching down then jumping as high as i could and i’d bolt right up in the bed.

I kept getting lucid when having nightmares but eventually lost the ability to wake myself up.

After I stopped getting nightmares I only had lucid dreams very rarely, probably around 3 or 4 a year.

Then when i started using drugs I had around 1 a month.

Then this summer i googled “lucid dream” and found out there were ways to induce this. I tried RCs for awhile but now I basically just smile to myself as I’m going to sleep and think “here it comes”.

I now get LDs about every 4th night. And they almost always come in groups.

I just got lucky as far as Lucid dreaming genetics I guess. Some sort of serotonin imbalance I’d assume.

I think the most effective way to induce lucid dreams is just to know about them and believe rather than hope that you will lucid dream every night before you go to sleep.

Well, I know this website had something to do with it, but to this day I’m not sure what. I had three lucid dreams in one week (maybe a fortnight, but a very short time frame nevertheless), shortly after I first started my dream journal on this site, but I have no idea what happened in order for me to have them. They were the first LDs I’d ever had, though, and after that one week I haven’t had any others, so I’m still in the dark about it.

Learning how to control those dreams was something different, however. The main problem I faced was a tendency for my vision to black out (and in doing so ‘wake up’) when I focused on something too closely, but I figured out how to solve this during the third lucid dream by thinking back on the patterns I’d noticed from the previous two. Everything else worked with simple persistence - if it didn’t work the first time, I tried again and it did. :smile: