A Fearsome Occurrence and a Bleak Reality

I’ve run into the hardest challenge of my ld career, and I need some help to solve it. It all started a couple of months ago when I went on a road trip to Chicago. I was really bored in the car and I started thinking about lucid dreaming. At this time I was fairly adept in the art and had several lucid dreams under my belt. Usually I had lds twice or three times a week. Anyways I started thinking about all the things I really wanted to do and I decided to try, just to see if it was possible, to make a dream sign. What I mean is to cause something to appear in all my dreams regularily because I intended it to. My imagination went wild, the nights after that I had a hard time remembering my dreams but that was mostly due to the travel so I didn’t pay it much heed. But once I returned home I realized that I had barely any dream recall at all, almost back to how it was before I started LDing. I worked hard to reconstruct my dream recall with my goal of creating a dream sign still in my mind, but what I found is that my dream signs completely changed and the level of consciousness that I had previously experienced in dreams was entirely gone! I was shocked to say the least and I almost gave up my quest then and there but instead I decided to rededicate myself to lucid dreaming. But not before I find out what happened to me. That, dear friends is where you come in. Why did this happen to me? What did I do wrong? Will it happen again? And most importantly how should I proceed from here? Many thanks, The Quasar thanks you for your contribution.
:help:

It’s possible that the change in scenery shook up your dream signs. Try forming them again, is my advice.

I only just went to Chicago for a few days though, Its three months later and I’m still having issues with this.

Relying on dream signs will help you catch SOME dreams, and for people who want to get a taste of LD it may be adequate. However for someone who is serious about LDing it is not a very reliable mean. Let’s face it, our dreams reflect our unconscious, and our unconscious, or subconscious depends on what school you prefer, is nothing but non-volatile. Therefore, when your unconscious mind changes, so does your dream. As a result, your dream sign might start to occur in a different way, gets assigned different meanings so it no longer triggers your conscious mind, or completely disappear! Thus my suggestion to you is to either try to adopt new dream signs, or start using more reliable methods to induce LDs.

Do you mean trying mild and wild, stuff like that?

I suggest MILD or you can take a look at my tutorial on SSILD. As for WILD, I always find it amusing that people categorize it as a “technique”. It should be seen as a term that describes how an LD is initiated and nothing more. You can achieve WILD using MILD, SSILD, or many other techniques including the “techniques” described in many of the so-called WILD tutorials. I wouldn’t advise trying those tutorials though because those techniques are in general very difficult and convoluted. They are largely based on traditional meditation and relaxation methods which, IMHO, are not very effective with LDing.

ill give your suggestions a try, thanks for your help.

One thing that seems very clear to me is that dreams respond very potently to our expectations. Personally in your position I would investigate my own feelings and expectations about the situation. Perhaps you are afraid of losing your ability to LD or remember dreams and that fear is manifesting itself into reality because you are on some level expecting it to happen. It’s hard to be able to suggest a course of action to take, other than spending some time affirming to yourself that you can remember dreams, that its a natural process that you are perfectly capable of doing. We can’t really shut doubt out of our minds, because in trying to shut it out, we give it attention. The only way I’ve found that works to remove it is to focus instead on how natural it is, and imagine yourself doing it and remembering. To sort of forget the doubts and replace them with feelings of confidence.

Well put GreenDragon.

From my perspective you seem a bit shaken by the prospect of ‘losing’ the regularity of experiencing LDing. This seems pretty reasonable. But at the same time it also seems reasonable that your mind might need to use its sleep period for non-lucid experiences from time to time.

Perhaps the battle isn’t about getting back into the regular lucid dreaming routine so much as it is being able to accept when normal dreaming is more beneficial to you. You might even find a different kind of fascination with normal dreams that lucid dreaming just don’t offer.

Maybe the trip to Chicago had a huge impact on you psychologically and your mind needed full reign to organize all the information without the conscious mind trying to fly around, doing the lucid thang, and then because you believed you ‘lost’ your lucid dreaming prowess, you created a lil challenge for yourself. :tongue:

Good luck, whatever the case is. :smile:

^Yup thats what it sounds like.
Yea this happens to me often and I believe I’m either just coming out of this phase or still in it. Dont worry. Kick back, enjoy life, try afew binaural beats and meditate before bed and see where it gets you. :om:

Thank you all for your wonderful suggestions.