First of all I wake up after at least 4 hours of sleep, take a leak and drink some water. I try to find some balance between being awake and asleep but that doesn’t require to much of my time.
So when I’m back to bed first thing I need to do is to become relaxed. I relax my body first because it’s sometimes a big obstacle for lucid dreaming. Like I said I lay on my back to do that and I don’t deprive myself of a good scratch or a yawn or changing position when I feel like to…
Then just going over thoughts in my mind and if they are about job and other stupid things I refocus on my intention to remember dreams. When I get my thoughts in order or at least getting rid off those that I don’t like I start observing, acknowledging and letting go each and every thought that comes on my mind. It’s a type of meditation, the key is acknowledging and letting go every thought not being preoccupied by a specific thought. That will make you extremely aware and usually this process puts me in some kind of trance, even into higher awareness.
From that point when you acknowledging everything that is happening to you at that point sudden changes that would indicate hypnagogia or even dream forming isn’t so strange anymore. The fact that you are still very aware of everything that is happening consciously acknowledging that the point for transition is near and then consciously letting go isn’t that hard or awkward thing to do because you will in that moment realize that there isn’t much you can do.
You will realize that you are at point where you either make a transition or break the whole cycle of becoming lucid.
While in that process of acknowledging thoughts and starting to experience hypnagogia if you choose to interact with HH you can make various ways of transition which I mentioned before.
Sometimes when I’m more tired and when I feel like I can’t go through that process of meditation and all that when I know that I will be very fast gone in the dream world I try to make a hard focus on something like my hand underneath my pillow of anything else. In that state of mind every sudden change will also be easily noticed because your mind will start to create things and questions and images and only thing you have in your mind is how your head is pressing down your hand which is beneath your pillow…
Like you said it yourself, many different ways depending on the dreamer that is telling the story so try to take everything in and change it as you like…
That’s great, you see, sometimes letting go isn’t that bad idea, the same concept works with keeping and letting awareness at the right time.
That’s cool, I bet that you would succeed in that WILD but don’t worry, every night you have a chance and you have a lot of nights before you.
My main focus is just remembering dreams. Remembering dreams is the most important and from that everything falls into right place and then things become much easier…
Well, another failed attempt last night. I woke about 4am and thought, perfect! time to WILD, I needed the toilet but didn’t get up initially as I didn’t want to wake up too much. So I started to relax and BAM, I was in a normal dream
It was very vivid, I remember a lot of it, and i woke near enough in the same position, badly needing the toilet. I was shocked awake by the dream and then went to the toilet.
I went back to bed, and try as I might, I was now too awake. Which is no good because I’ve really at this point only had 6 hours sleep and I have a full days work ahead of me. I’ll have to go to bed early to pay that debt off.
I either, fall into a catatonic normal dream, (which are increasing in vividness which may be a good sign.), where I completely fail to even entertain the fact I might be dreaming, or I am too awake and can’t even get back to sleep when i abandon the WILD.
It’s frustrating because everyone on the forum at least reports some kind of SP or sensations or something. having said that, i think at one point I started to hear a whoosh, like a blast of air going louder then quieter then louder then quieter, but only for a couple of seconds.
My main problem is, when I start to drift off, I SNAP back awake. I try to focus on something but always SNAP back, drifting off, SNAP back… arg!
I think i’ll take a break tomorrow and fall back on DILD, then try again the day after tomorrow. I need more sleep.
Well, another failed attempt last night. I woke about 4am and thought, perfect! time to WILD, I needed the toilet but didn’t get up initially as I didn’t want to wake up too much. So I started to relax and BAM, I was in a normal dream
It was very vivid, I remember a lot of it, and i woke near enough in the same position, badly needing the toilet. I was shocked awake by the dream and then went to the toilet.
I went back to bed, and try as I might, I was now too awake. Which is no good because I’ve really at this point only had 6 hours sleep and I have a full days work ahead of me. I’ll have to go to bed early to pay that debt off.
I either, fall into a catatonic normal dream, (which are increasing in vividness which may be a good sign.), where I completely fail to even entertain the fact I might be dreaming, or I am too awake and can’t even get back to sleep when i abandon the WILD.
It’s frustrating because everyone on the forum at least reports some kind of SP or sensations or something. having said that, i think at one point I started to hear a whoosh, like a blast of air going louder then quieter then louder then quieter, but only for a couple of seconds.
My main problem is, when I start to drift off, I SNAP back awake. I try to focus on something but always SNAP back, drifting off, SNAP back… arg!
I think i’ll take a break tonight and fall back on DILD, then try again the day after tomorrow. I need more sleep.
I can say with certainty that it was not fail because you did achieve something, it’s a long road toward lucidity so don’t be definite in judgement when you don’t achieve lucidity in a dream. I don’t know how much did you keep track of your dreams before starting to lucid dream but trust me that lucid ones won’t be always the best ones. Sure they are awesome and unimaginable but I can say that the best dream that I ever had was non lucid one.
One thing I have to talk about now is SP.
So I just wanna say that SP is something that no one should spent their time on. As you know SP is a brains tool to keep us paralyzed while dreaming. The logic behind it is that we need to most of the time enter REM sleep to dream and then is the time for SP to kick in. I would say that it “activates” simultaneously as we get past the point of transitioning.
So your chances of experiencing SP before actually dreaming is very slim almost to none so wasting your time and getting frustrated doesn’t really help you. Most of the times when dreamers do report SP usually isn’t, it’s just numbness of laying a long time in one position. But I don’t say that it doesn’t happen, it does and it’s usually common for people with sleep disorders and then again there is a SP after dreaming and waking up, you may ask.
True and that is most common and that SP you actually can use to your advantage and trust me you will recognize it when it hits you .
Like I said when doing WILD just try to get as relaxed and ready for sleep as possible. Then when you mind and body is ready you will “see” the first signs of falling asleep and from that point just go with the flow and of course maintain awareness until you think it’s time to let go…
If that happens a lot try meditation before going to sleep and clearing your mind from negative and junk thoughts.
Taking a brake is always a good thing to do. Don’t look at it as wasting your time and not getting lucid. Also the best thing would be to not doing WBTB every night. Well if you do naturally wake up or because of the kids then what can you do, right? but if you can’t get more sleep this could make problems…
Thanks again dB as always you are so helpful. I really appreciate you taking the time to reply.
Last night was a similar story. I’m definitely going to take a break for a few days, get some proper rest before trying again. I’ll keep posting my progress, in case people are interested
So i’ve been trying to SSILD or WILD every night with WBTB, and doing enough RC to raise my awareness (although I could do more of these). Last night, I decided to set my alarm for 3 hours after I went to bed, in an effort to find my REM cycle. I woke up and the baby woke up too, so I put him in the bed with me.
Then I started to drift off, while doing my usual WILD technique (focusing on breathing, counting breaths, saying “im dreaming” in my head), and within about 4 or 5 breaths I felt a mighty whoosh and all kinds of mad noises. I rolled out of bed and there I was, in a dream. At least, I think I was lucid. I was in my house, I think it was my house, or a mix of mine and my dads house (i’m often in my dad’s house in dreams, where I grew up). I tried to remember to stay calm, I touched walls, rubbed my hands together. I did the nose RC and I could breathe… it was amazing! I looked at my hands, as expected all weird and bent. The wall would wobble like water as I touched it. Everything I had heard was true. Although, the dream itself did not seem as clear as real life, it was slightly foggy, and kept changing all the time. And I was stuck in this drab house, with no way out. I seemed trapped in the house, I tried to fly out the door but ended up right back in the house. I tried to spin around and change the scene by willing it. Nothing happened. I met my wife in the house and spoke to her briefly to tell her I was dreaming. I tried to will some DC into creation, and some mannequins appeared. As I got close they turned into real people.
I began to feel uneasy that I had “left the baby alone in bed” lol maybe i was losing lucidity at this point. So I willed myself to wake up. I woke up in the bed and immediately grabbed my DJ to write in. The baby reached up and took the pen out of my hand. I WAS STILL DREAMING. So i lay down and willed myself again, to wake up. I think I partially woke up and couldn’t move my body at all. I heard the baby saying “hiiiiiyyyyaaaaa” over and over, which was quite scary, but I told myself it is only a dream, remained calm, then I decided to pinch myself, and I woke up.
Incredible, I’m sure there is a lot I have forgotten, as I went back to sleep after that and had another really vivid dream, the most vivid ND I’ve ever had, it was clearer than the LD.
I hope this wasn’t a fluke and I hope it was a LD and not a dream where I dream I was lucid, I felt like i knew I was in a dream, I had control of my free will, and rational thought, I think I lost lucidity when I was worried about my son being alone while I was in the dream.
That’s great man! You did awesome. I don’t know if this was yours first LD but it doesn’t matter you did great. I would suggest for further tries maybe to withhold with dream like stuff. It’s good for new dreamers to firstly figure the dream logic and physics before doing all kinds of crazy stuff. I’m saying this because by doing that you will most probably prolong your dream, and most importantly your awareness will become much greater because you will focus on staying lucid and becoming even more lucid before everything, before flying, changing dream scenes and so on and on.
It’s great, isn’t it? Actually having prof on your own hands that you can actually be completely aware in a dream, that fact that was so sure that dreams are nothing more then junk images generated by brain as an outcome of brains sorting things out. But now you know for a fact that’s this is not a case.
yes this is my first LD after nearly 2 months of trying. I do my RC every day but remain blissfully unaware i’m dreaming from within the dream, and so I decided to take matters into my own hands with WILD.
Last night, I did wake up in the middle of the night but was too tired to WILD, I tried to do it but I was just too tired after a busy day with the kids and i’m sure the consumption of 1 beer just zonks me out. Tonight, I will try again. No beer, go to bed about 11 ish same as last time, set my alarm for 3 hours into sleep and then try to WILD. I really hope it wasn’t a fluke because it surprised me how fast the entire thing happened. In the past, I have literally lay in the bed for an hour trying to WILD and just got no where. That night, within a few seconds, I was in the dream.
So, i’m beginning to believe that it is the timing of the WILD that is the crucial part of the cocktail that brings the technique together. Without a REM period to enter, you may as well be up playing Playstation, nothing is going to happen.
Hopefully my first REM period is post 3 hours sleep. 3 hours after that it’s about 6am and I have to get up for the day, so i’m thinking the first REM period might be a good one to aim for to practice with, if indeed that is why I got into the dream. So tonight’s experiment will attempt to reproduce the same effect.
Have you ever entered a dream that quickly from a WBTB?
Finally, you mention, “dream physics” and “dream logic”? How do you go about making the dream more lucid. I would love to get to the state now where the dream feels as real as real life, as this forum purports. In my dream, there was little to no sound, and the imagery seems fuzzy, and wavy, and there was massive gaps between experiences. For example, one minute im in one room, the next im in another, then another, and I don;’ realise how I got there, or the scene changing, im just, there.
Wish me luck, I hope I can make this LD a reoccurring event.
Nice way to figure out when your REM cycle begins and ends is if you let yourself wake up naturally. Of course this might be a problem with child waking up all the time and working all days and so on and on but it’s the most precise way I would think. With alarm you can either be lucky and actually set it to wake up before REM starting or you can be way off. Also waking up with alarm is somewhat shocking for a person because it usually means: get up! you have to go to work, or anything else that requires you immediate attention. But if it works for you then by all means…
Yes. Like you noticed timing is crucial. When everything falls into place transitioning from waking state to dream state is quite fast.
Dream physics and logic are very different from dreamer to dreamer. What I meant initially is to let the dream evolve around you. All you need to do is to maintain lucidity. Because while you will be focused on maintaining lucidity your mind will do everything else and in that manifestation of the dream, the dream logic and physics you can learn a lot about how you will function later on.
Simple things, like dream stabilization, vividness and then more complex things, popping from place to place, hovering or not being able to stand ground, falling and so on and on. When you through all that maintain lucidity you can become aware of those “problems” and begin to solve them, one by one.
When you become lucid and when you rush things and start doing awesome dream things then you have to fight the dream because you don’t know yourself in a dream and plus you are focusing on doing crazy stuff but the most important and that is lucidity false down to a last place of focus and that’s why you loose lucidity or you are having very unstable dreams…
So when you do become lucid try to calm yourself and look around. Acknowledge things and let them “sink” into your mind, let them become your reality. There is nothing wrong when you wanna experience waking life things in a dream. This things are like anchor, they hold you strong to the ground of the experience, if you know what I wanna say. By doing that you will become extremely aware and lucid. Fuzziness, blurriness and similar things will disappear and you will be aware of the fact that you are experiencing waking life in a dream and vice versa. After that kind of experience you will experience the dream in waking life. All the feelings like happiness, extreme feeling of freedom, love will manifest in waking life too because you will learn that there is no difference between waking life and dream life, it’s the same only we are free of the ego in a dream, we don’t care about blunt things life in waking life and that’s where we start to learn from dream for waking life not from waking life for dreams.
After many, many failed attempts at WILD, since my last successful one, I stumbled upon a tutorial on another forum, namely, crazyinsane’s canwild tutorial here
This tech reminded me of a book i once read about OBE’s, in that, the tech in the OBE book tries to get you into the “phase”, that is, the state where you and your body are separate, but you are still in the same position. This is accomplished by setting an alarm, waking up to said alarm, but not moving or opening your eyes.
I have to modify the tech slightly to account for the fact that my son wakes a few times in the night, late into the night, so, last night, I set my alarm for 3 REM periods: 1:30 after sleep, 3 hours after sleep and 4 hours 30 after sleep. My alarm was set to only sound once, and low in order to wake me up but not startle me, and to go off so I don’t have to move and snooze it.
I went to bed around 10. i was planning on going to bed earlier so I could get to the end of my usual sleep schedule earlier, but the kids wouldn’t sleep.
The first alarm went off as planned, I woke, didn’t move, kept my eyes closed and began to count in the usual way, 1, i’m dreaming, 2 i’m dreaming etc. Nothing happened and I went to sleep.
The second alarm sounded and the same thing happened, I woke, kept my eyes closed and didn’t move. This time, I heard a loud ringing in my ears, like tinnitus, and began the usual counting. I couldn’t concentrate on the counting however due to the tinnitus so i focused on that instead. i felt electricity like sensations, just as others have said, and as instructed, waited for them to subside. Then, I simply imagined myself getting out of bed.
I was in the dream. I tried to remember dB_'s advice and stablise. So I looked at my hands, rubbed them together, twirled around and could see i was in a room. What I should have done at this point is STAY IN THE ROOM and just observe, look and try to make the dream come into focus.
Instead, satisfied I had stablised the dream for some reason by twirling round. I left and set about trying to do all the things I had done last time, like flying and conjuration and so forth. This was a mistake and I think for a time I lost lucidity. I do ‘feel’ aware in the dream. At one point, I tried to go to the moon. I ended up on a surface that looked like the moon. But the cityscape I was just in was still there, and there were grey clouds above. Someone was with me the entire time, sort of, guiding me to do things. Although I don’t remember seeing them. They told me to try shouting at the sky, to see if it would change, so I did! Nothing happened.
I also tried to conjure a specific person, which I managed to do straight away, but even though the face was correct, the body was foggy and faded. The entire dream was foggy and faded, not like real life at all.
Does anyone else have a similar experience of this when they first started to LD? This is my second LD to date and much like the first, it was very vague and foggy.
Observations:
I always wake up and try to remember as much of the dream as possible, as I do this the dream memory transitions in real time from a very real experience, to a faded dream memory, I try to write as much down as I can, but I have trouble recalling details.
This may be because i’m entering a LD in an early REM period, rather than a later one. This is all I can manage to do at the moment due to RL restrictions, as my kids get older I imagine I could one day have a lie in
I always seem to have an amazing ND following my LD, when I return to sleep. The ND seems a lot more vivid than my LD. FOr example, in my ND I was on a beach and could see the crystal clear waves of the ocean rolling in.
I never hear sounds in my dreams, only voices in my head. The only time i’ve heard a sound in my dream is when I woke from the first LD I had in SP and could hear my son talking (even though he wasn’t).
So, my question to you all is, how do I make my LD as real as my vivid ND’s? My next plan is to stay in the room I “materialise” in and simply observe until the foggyness goes away. Do you think that is a good plan?
I’ve read that tutorial some time ago, good stuff.
I’m really glad that you achieve another lucid dream. Everything you did was by my opinion good and right, your observation that you should have stayed in room is again by my opinion right. This prevents you from raging on with all the crazy stuff and letting you to really become aware of the dream as I said before.
My thought on this is that when we are not lucid mind does the work for us, bringing the awareness and consciousness into the dream you actually consciously need to do that, not everything but quite a lot, or mostly the things that you put your focus on so technically your experience that you gain in lucid dreams is actually what will in the future make dreams more vivid.
Last night I slept through my alarm, and then the baby woke, so no more LD for me for another week i guess. I can only attempt this at the weekend, when I have time.
I’d like to hear a little bit more about your story, if you have time maybe? To explain how it was for you in the beginning and if you experiences were similar to mine?
Well my fascination about dreams goes to very young age. The very first dreams that I do remember were about flying in general. This flying dreams manifested in various ways. Also one of the most memorable from when I was a kid was that what you could call AP or OBE. I remember that as a kid I got fins for swimming and you know the feeling when you are almost the whole day in water when you lay in your bed at night you got the feeling like you are floating?! That’s the feeling I had the first day when I got the fins because I was almost the whole day in water swimming and that night I had a dream, in a dream I was in blind street in which my cousin lives and I remember completely black sky, it was night but there was a big moon that was lighting the street and of course in a dream I had my fins on and I started to run as fast as I could and then I flew up and I was using fins to fly easily.
The dream which I categorized as AP/OBE was some what shorter then the dream with fins but it was cool and scary at the same time. I was typical ghost like creature. I had no solid body. It was also night and I was going through my house. through walls to my parents bedroom and my brothers but my brother wasn’t in bed yet so I decided to go downstairs to see if he was watching TV and as I was gliding down the stairs I heard TV but I didn’t saw brother… Then I woke up…
Those 2 dreams kept my fascination alive all this years later when I started to research more and more, I didn’t knew about lucid dreams nor that they were possible. I was researching more about death and out of body experiences and then I stumble upon the therm lucid dreaming and as I was thinking more and more about it I found more and more things that were common for lucid dreams and things that were happening in my dreams when I was a kid.
Few weeks after that I had my first lucid dream in newer time and that was a breaking point so to say for today’s knowledge and practice of lucid dreaming.
When I “officially” started to work on lucid dreams I had problems as any new dreamer has and what I found later on is that my biggest mistake was not in doing something wrong when it comes to techniques, or not doing everything I could, or not trying enough, my biggest mistake was not appreciating the progress I made. The biggest mistake was to blindly focus on lucid dreams and lucid dreams only. Later on I figured out that without appreciating non lucid dreams and everything they bring to a dreamer one can’t have satisfaction and wanted progress.
It’s like wanting to get somewhere without traveling. It just doesn’t work. Embrace the non lucid dreams as you would lucid ones and then in your mind the balance will be restored. Good example of that was your own example:
If you don’t find satisfaction in this experience that non lucid dream provided you will become unsatisfied with whole lucid dreaming experience. Being lucid is so called “end game” achievement. Logically you need to work for it and by learning to enjoy in the process the end game will be much more rewarding.
By learning to appreciate non lucid dreams you will find that some those same dreams can be much more valuable then some of lucid dreams that you had or will have. It’s again about finding the balance between the 2 kinds of dreams and 2 kinds of experiences.
To this day I can say that I can’t say that I had better non lucid dreams then lucid ones but I can’t either say that I had better lucid dreams then non lucid ones.
My experience is in balance, at least in balance that I see as balance.
My best lucid dream that I had was the best because I believe I experienced the highest lucidity ever. In that dream I brought lucidity, awareness, consciousness or call it how ever you want so strong as in no dream before. There weren’t are crazy dreams stuff happening or anything special but the awareness was present and that what this lucid dream the best one.
When it comes to best non lucid dream the key was in experiencing so huge amount of feelings and emotions that I didn’t knew that I could experience. There were 2 dreams on similar topic. The first one was happening in my bedroom. I was on computer searching something and my dad came in and we started to talk about something. As I turned back to look at him as I was talking to him I noticed that the weather started to change outside because as I turned I was looking to a window and I noticed weather changing outside. Suddenly grey clouds started to form and I stated to my father that something odd is happening outside but he wasn’t interesting in that. I couldn’t let that go so I came closer to a window. Clouds were really close to my house and really big and grey. Suddenly from behind of one cloud round shaped object appeared.
At first I got scared but it didn’t look dangerous so I stayed still as this object was changing the direction left, right, up, down, it couldn’t be still, not even for a second. Then my father came to a window and sometime in between when I was occupied with this object apparently my brother also came in. As I turned my head over to father and back to object somewhere in between that the object started to releasing some kind of streams of energy I guess. We got scared and my father started to yell to close the window and I did so but the object started to releasing even stronger streams which could easily go through the window and walls and those streams were changing color.
What happened next was what made this dream a special dream. As those streams passed through my body as it did pass through window and walls I started to feel so strong feelings and emotions that I just couldn’t believe. It overwhelmed me and I lay on my bed and I was just enjoying in this feelings. Those were feeling of joy, happiness, feeling of belonging somewhere, love, understanding and so on and on.
This was lasting maybe one or 2 bursts of this streams from the object. Just a few seconds.
Later on, few days maybe I had another dream. In that dream I was with few people, maybe 5 of us on the beach. We could see the sunfall but the sun was black as if the solar eclipse was happening at the moment. In just a few seconds of beginning of the dream the sun started to pulsate, emitting those same stream of energy as the round shaped object from the previous dream. Then I noticed chairs, typical chairs that you can find on the beach but they weren’t plastic, they were wooden so we sit in them, and we were just enjoying in those streams of energy. This time the feelings and emotions were 10x stronger.
It was something I never experienced before.
So this 2 dreams really different yet they both left unimaginable impact on me. So I thing that in this non lucid dreams I fulfilled my need to feel, I satisfied my waking ego, that thing that makes me who I am but more importantly in lucid dream I was not having need to do that. I knew there that this isn’t important as it is to realize that when we let go of ego of wanting and needing that we can become much more.
I things that dreams and lucid dreams are to good to be neglected, by having this kind of experienced we grow and that knowledge we can pass on to people around us and generally make this place a better place to exist…
EDIT:
When I had this dream with pulsating sun I recreated the scene in photoshop, I posted it in my garden of creations, here’s the pic:
Thanks very much for sharing your story, it’s a great help to me to hear other people experiences in their quest for lucidity. Thanks especially for the point you made about appreciating progress that you are making. This is a big fault of mine, that I carry over into everything that I do. It usually causes me to give up on things but with this I am determined to succeed and I am making progress.
Your dreams sound really amazing, my dreams are all fairly mundane representations of real life. I hope with time, my dreams will become more spiritual experiences, like yours. Maybe this is due to me not setting my intention to dream anything other than a real life experience.
In the week, I try using MILD to induce a lucid dream, setting my intention and going to sleep, I usually wake a few times a night, due to the baby waking, and try to WILD or meditate. Last night, there was so much background noise, coughing, snoring etc, I just set my intention, and went to sleep. I’m a gamer (when I have the time) so I tend to imagine the words “loading dream” or “Entering Dream” as I imagine an old dream scene where I should have done a reality check.
I was having a normal dream last night, it was a bit weird, my sister was in a hotel room introducing me to her friend, we were going somewhere and getting ready. Then, I turned around and back again and they had gone and a man in a suit was there. I was startled and asked the man how he got here, I cant remember what he said…
But a feeling waved over me that this was not right, suddenly, I just knew I was dreaming, everything stopped and slowed down into slow motion and a wave of energy flew over me and rippled the entire scene. Then I walked outside and started to shout, “focus, stablise, focus focus”, and everything began coming into focus, more so than before, but the scene was already quite sharp due to the fact I was in a normal dream to begin with, rather than enter through a WILD to a foggy mess. I forgot to use my other senses, like rubbing my hands and listening and touching things, which I wish I could remember to do.
Satisfied this time that I had stablised the dream, it was more vivid than before, I began to do the things I had done in my previous dreams. Why do I do this! i have no self control. There is always this mystery person with me, who I accept as normal, I don’t realise he is a dream character, asking me things, telling me i’m not dreaming. I say I am and I try to fly but I cant, and everyone is laughing at me. Undeterred, I fly through a window smashing it to smithereens, but the environment beyond the window is just empty green space, like in the game, The Stanley Parable.
I fly back through the window and am in a room, I come across a mannequin and just as last time, decide this is a good time to conjure a DC. I face away from the mannequin, and reach my hand out behind me. Someone reaches in and takes my hand. I turn around and there is a beautiful woman standing there, quite startled.
Obviously emotions take over and I find myself back in my bed in short order!
Now here comes the part where I am a little sad. The moment I wake up, try as I might, the dream memory, and the tangible fabric, the “real time memory” of the dream, begins to fade into obscurity. The dream doesn’t feel real anymore, it feels like I watched the entire thing from the third person, it becomes, a figment of my imagination, and not a real experience.
So, I will take your advice and relish the fact that I had my first MILD as progress! The dream was more vivid! Progress! But, did you find that it took a while for your dreams to become real in terms of engaging all your senses and emotions? Do your lucid dreams carry over as real memories when you wake? Or do they feel false, like they never happened at all?
Thanks again for all your replies and for taking the time to read my posts.
That’s quite normal so to say. I had the same issue and I had decided that from that point on in my every lucid dream that I would have in future I will firstly stop. Just stop and quite doing anything I was doing. Only what I would do would be a RC of course…
Then funny things started to happen. I would find myself in a dream and I would decide to stop but I couldn’t, I was pulled forward against my will. Whatever I would do I couldn’t stop for some reason. Then I give it a thought and I came to the conclusion that I was fighting myself when I was making this decision. Conscious part of me was fighting the unconscious part, at least I see it that way.
I see my dream self like in the movie Avatar. It’s like when you become lucid you are becoming a pilot in this body that is in a dream and this body has it’s own story, way of doing things and most certainly mind of it’s own. That is actually unconscious part of us and once when you become lucid you are going against it. What matters is how much lucid you are. If you understand the concept of yourself being in a dream, what that actually means for you at that moment then this helps a lot in controlling your further actions. You have to understand that being in a dream lucid that is aware that you are going against many factors and the most resistant one is the dream story and what your avatar so to say was doing before you took control over it.
Sadly for us from biological side of the story dream memory doesn’t form in the same way as waking memory so it’s not common to leave the same impact on us although when practicing more and more we learn to implement those dream memories into waking life and from that point on we can have the feeling that they do mean as much as any waking memory.
The most blunt case where you can see the power of dreams and dream memory is when you wake up either very happy or very sad and edgy. It all goes back to the dream you had. You don’t even need to remember a bad dream and your whole day can be in the shadow of that bad dream, same goes for good dreams. It’s all related.
The problem of dreams is that we are trying to experience them as waking life experiences. We need to and want to use waking senses in dreams and by the intensity of those experiences in the dream we determine whether the dream was “real” or not. There’s nothing wrong with that. The most real reality we know is this waking reality and when we can relive this same reality in the dream, aware of the fact that we are in a dream then this dream is filled with lucidity and awareness but and this is a big BUT we need to exceed that. We need to go past this feelings and emotions from waking life and let ourselves to experience dream reality as it is. For every dreamer this could be something different so I can’t tell you what it is for you.
There is and will be a big gap, a difference between experiencing the dream and waking life. Again biologically looking they need to be like that because then we wouldn’t even discuss lucidity because we couldn’t tell the difference and as we are thought that this waking life is “the reality” then it’s normal that every other kind of reality we experience, dreams for example feel a little bit false.
Thanks everyone for your replies and support. Very insightful post there db, I agree with your assessment, especially with your thoughts on exceeding the boundaries of the dream reality, imposed on us by our waking life. And to you SG, how is your quest going? I’d love to hear your progress.
Since then, I really have not been able to devote time to my WILD’ing, my RL responsibilities have not allowed me to get much sleep at all. Some nights with my son I get four hours broken sleep, if that.
So, I switched up my methods, so much so that I believe this thread is evolving into an account of my Quest for Lucidity and beyond and I shall rename the title of the thread to reflect this. I have been trying SSILD for over a week now and last night I experienced success with this method. Although, I ‘think’ I did. It’s difficult to assess whether I was dreaming about lucid dreaming, or I was actually Lucid in a dream, if that makes sense.
I seem to be stuck, trapped if you will, in a reality of my own construction. Every time I have a lucid dream, I appear in a fairly drab reconstruction of my childhood home, or my own home. I seem to spend the entire dream attempting to wrestle with myself in my attempts to stablise it. The dream itself is not very stable at all, and I am unable to make out detail.
I seem to stare at my hands of a great deal of time, my hands at least, seem detailed, they morph and change shape and fingers disappear and what not. Last night I spent a long time looking at my hands, then looking up to see if the dream had stablised, it had not. It was not vivid, there are no dream characters and I am unable to escape this scenario. As I try to stablise the dream, it degrades and degrades until eventually, I wake up.
Again, I seem to have hit another roadblock. I am not deterred though, I will stick with SSILD as I unable to commit to WILD in the short term. I plan on re-reading La Berge’s chapters on stablisation to see if I can garner any advice.
Thanks and good luck to you hope to hear from you soon.
That’s how dream control works. When you focus on something you are able to influence that aspect of the dream. Baby steps. Take satisfaction in what you achieved. There is no need to rush things.
Also getting the same dream scenario over and over again is positive from the aspect of the dream control and realizing that you are in a dream, some may even say that recurring dream scenes have to do with something much more deeper then “just” recurring dream scene…
I’m also trying to take your advice with regards to embracing my normal dreams. I’ve stopped actively trying to lucid dream for a while, because i cant get enough sleep with the kids. But instead, I look forward to my normal dreams. I’ve found that they have increased tenfold in their vividness and I enjoy them very much, even though im not lucid.
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