So I first heard about lucid dreaming yesterday. Well I’d heard about it before but only just got really serious about achieving it last night. Last night, I had a very fuzzy dream in which I was in school. I suddenly realized that I shouldn’t be, and decided I must be dreaming. In my excitement, I tried to do a reality check and ended up waking myself. Does this mean I am close to achieving a lucid dream? What should I do in the future to stop myself from waking up? I did know to do a reality check in the dream.
Although disappointingly short I would say this was a lucid dream. The fact that you wanted to verify your lucidity with a RC tells me 2 things. 1 is that you knew this was more than just a dream, and 2 that the level of detail of your environment was as realistic as waking reality.
The thrill of discovering you’re lucid is enough to ruin the mind state for maintaining it. Especially if this is a new experience for you. My advice is to keep it up and become more familiar with the different states of awareness in your dreams.
If you can keep a level of calm and keep your emotion steady so will the dream. I literally try to take hold of my dream and become tactile, meaning I might feel the earth below me or the walls around me. I try not to think “wow I’m dreaming!” and I keep moving in the dream realm. I might try to find a door to enter a new surrounding and keep my mind actively engaging this dream realm while trying to “forget” that I’m lucid. It’s a very fine line to walk and very difficult to stabilize for a great length. You can sometimes lose yourself again into the dream consciousness and off into deep sleep, and therefore ruining any chance of recall. As I often do. It’s disappointing but actually good to wake up after a LD because your recall is at its best.
Yep, you’re doing well. Just relax, keep doing what you’ve been doing and you’ll get longer and hopefully more interesting lucid experiences.