What am I doing wrong?

Good evening fellow dreamchasers,
I have practised lucid dreaming techniques (both [WILD] and [DILD]) for over two or three years (possibly even 4) and I could count the amount of lucid dreams I had during those years with the fingers on one hand.
As you could imagine, it slowly starts to get on my nerves that I have no goddamn results while others have lucid dreams once a month without doing anything.

Now more details to the techniques I do:
[DILD] (or reality checks): at least five times a day, each time containing four or five sub-checks. Somehow, I never do reality checks in my dream, the last one I remember is about three months ago and it did not work.
[WILD]: Simply does not work since about a year. Mostly I don´t even get to the “tingling” part, and even if I do, I somehow start to become more awake again after roughly 45 minutes.

I consider achieving lucid dreams one of the most important goals in my life and thus would be very grateful for any hints that help me move towards that goal.

Greetings, mampfer

I understand your frustration, but stressing too much about it won’t help. Everyone can improve their ability to lucid dream. Becoming lucid and dreaming in general is something that happens 100% in your mind. The way you think, how your mind works and how you approach dreams are things that will decide if you become lucid or not. I like to simplify it and say that our minds are wired differently and for that reason lucid dreaming is effortless for some lucky people. Rest of us need to learn and do some re-wiring.

So why you shouldn’t stress about it? Because it creates a mental block. If you don’t believe you can achieve lucidity, your SC will try to support that disbelief and you won’t make the effort to become lucid in the dream. You need to keep a positive attitude.

I used to do a lot of reality checks, but the number of RCs doesn’t matter if you are not questioning the realness of the world around you. When I did it wrong, I believed to be awake before I even did the RC. So what is the point of the RC if you “know” the result? You will do the same in the dream and just dismiss the result. “I have 6 fingers in one hand? Probably just miscounted.” You need to tell yourself “I could be dreaming right now.” and look around you as you RC in waking life.

Awareness is important as well. Pay more attention to things happening around you and search for weirdness. Connect weirdness with “I could be dreaming” in your mind. Try to improve your dream recall, because that will make you eventually pay more attention to details in dreams as well.

I recommend trying out autosuggestion/mantras to achieve a MILD. I use autosuggestion to wake myself up for WBTB so I recall more dreams and have more chances to become lucid. I also autosuggest to myself just before going to bed that I will become lucid in the following hours of sleep. Remember to clear your mind from worries when you try to fall asleep. You don’t have to be thinking anything in the last minutes.

Thanks for the advice, I guess I’ll try both the mantra and WTBT tonight.
As for the RC, I remember one dream where I closed one eye to see if it impairs with my vision. And in this dream, it actually did O.o I guess my brain is too clever to fool itself.
Another weird thing about my dream habits these days is that I tend to wake up once every night, about one to two hours before my alarm clock rings. I have huge problems remembering my dreams once I wake up as well, perhaps those two things are connected?
Well, anyway, good night :content:

Almost everyone wakes up several times during the night. It happens between sleep cycles and often you just continue sleeping after changing your position a bit. When I started actively trying to lucid dream, I noticed these wake ups and became more awake during them. The time you wake up might be an end of a cycle. It could also be an autosuggestion you did without noticing, if you told yourself “I really need to get up early tomorrow…” or something similar.

Waking up without an alarm is the best chance to recall a dream. Alarm will distract you and in those few seconds the dreams become harder to recall. I use autosuggestion for dream recall as well. I tell myself that I need to remember my dreams and write them down immediately when I wake up.

I agree with Letaali here.
Auto-suggestion works amazing for my recall. Seems to be the only thing that works really… And waking up to an alarm kills my recall to the point of absolute oblivion. Using auto-suggestion will train your brain to realize these micro-awakenings and you can use them to A) remember more dreams in the night. B) Realize what time those dreams happened throughout the night. The latter can be helpful if your attempting to map your REM cycles to have a better understanding of exactly when in the night your dreaming.

I like to keep my auto-suggestion short and simple because I find that I have a certain knack for convincing my mind of something but you may want to elongate the process so that it really sinks in. What I normally do about 5 minutes after Iv’e lain down to go to bed is recite a dream recall mantra more attuned to waking up in the middle of the night. Something like : I will wake up at 2:00 and be still and remember my dreams. I visualize it as really large text at first, scrolling along as I am saying it in my mind. encompassing as much of my “vision” as possible but still able to read the letters and words. Then once Iv’e gone through once or twice I back my vision out so that I can read the entire sentence. Then read it a few more times. As I am doing this I start to try and visualize myself actually waking up and laying still and thinking back on my dreams, maybe getting a few of the " Ahah! " moments in the process. Then I visualize checking the time to see if I woke up when intended [com] Doesn’t happen as often as I would like [/com] and writing my thoughts in my dream journal. After that I let those thoughts make their way to the back of my mind as I try and let my mind drift and make stories of it’s own.

Fancy new avatar by the way Letaali :smile:

Happy Dreaming :bounce:

Good morning pals!

So I tried WTBT and a mantra. Mostly without any effect, but you can´t expect that after the first night anyway. At least I managed to remember three dreams, and for a change they were actually not too bad!
If I recall correctly, I also woke up EXACTLY one hour before my WTBT alarm clock rung :eek:

By then I was actually so drowsy I had problems at properly repeating my mantra…

As for the mantra visualization suggested by Aalexx: I just tried it and I´m having problems, visualizing one word is fine but once the second one appears in my “field of vision”, the first one is blurred or simply flies out of the text line :eh:

Hi !

I fully understand your frustration. i won’t give you advice, others are trained for this :content:

But what i can notice from my little experience is that ; i think that RCs are not the same for everyone. When I do RCs in my dreams it does’nt work. THen, i noticed my dream sights. I used to see friends from the school, so I told myself repeatdly “when i see friends from school, i am dreaming…” but then I dreamt every night of my mother…so i told myself “when i see my mother, i should be dreaming…”

Till that, i’m not dreaming of my mother anymore ! :eh: As if my mind was playing me tricks :tongue:

Maybe there’s time in life when we are “ready” for LD and others not…but it’s only what i think.

Keep trying, but without stressing…we will succed :wink:

Thanks :colgate:

You don’t have to visualize text. Make the visualization unique for yourself, but keep the focus on the action you want to do; waking up and writing down your dreams. It’s also a good idea to visualize becoming lucid in the dream. Add weirdness to the visualizations to make them stick better to your memory. Then visualize the same scene several times. This is also something you can improve and is helpful for dream incubation. I make my dream incubations as detailed as I can. For example: “I’m standing in front of the hollow mountain with barely any clothing. It’s freezing and I feel the snow melting under my feet. I look up and see the purple moon and stars. I recall being here two years ago and perform a reality check by counting my fingers. I have twelve of them and two fingers slowly grow in length. I become lucid, stabilize the dream and explore the town inside the mountain.”

The second attempt shall be made soon.
I dream about zombies quite frequently, about every second or third night.
Now you may say “It´s simple then, you tell yourself that you are asleep every time you see a zombie!”
But nu-uh,I tried that and I can´t outsmart my own brain :angry: I started to dream about playing a game with zombies, which is not too uncommon in these days.
Yesterday, I actually dreamt about killing the process of the game when it got too scary :gni:
So, does anyone have a piece of advice for that problem?

P.S.:

That sounds quite epic :eek:

To improve dream recall, make sure you write in your dream journal right away before you forgot your dream.

If coming out of the sleep state fast makes you forget, lay in bed and ground the dream into your mind before you get up to write it down. (Suggestion - keep the pencil and paper right by the bed).

Explain your reality checks more as there may be something you arent doing the best there… Some people do them in not so good ways. What did you do exactly with the one which failed?

I always start by closing each eye one at a time and afterwards pinch my nose to see wether this affects the airflow. Then I check dimensions and colour of my hands, followed by checking their materiality (as in, can I poke a finger through a palm?).
The next step is checking the content of my pockets for the three things I conciously stuffed in there in my dreams: A cheap (but working) gun, an old mobile phone with buttons and a rubbery, brown mushroom. Usually I also look around me for any irregularities or inconsistences in my surroundings.
:rc:
In one of my dreams, the RC failed right at the start. I closed one eye, and that part of my vision actually went dark. And somehow I didn´t continue with the other checks, so that was it.

Anyway, the different methods I use don´t seem to be the main problem, actually doing the RC currently is my main concern. I simply don´t do RCs in my dreams and I have no idea why. :wallhit:

What are your thoughts as you do that? Are you checking to see if they are normal? if you are, you shouldnt be doing that, you rather should be checking to see if they are strange. (You need to be seeking strangeness and not normalness, the thoughts you hold while doing a check is important).

I was just about to say to you that one probably isnt the best but I see you’ve seen that for yourself. You shouldnt still be doing this if its failed as its more likely to again.

One of the reasons why this isnt being successful is that you arent linking the actual reality check to anything in your dreams to trigger you doing it in a dream eg you just relying purely on yourself randomly doing one.

I suggest you link your reality checks to a dream sign of some kind… eg something you can do them to in real life which also appears commonly in your dreams. Make sure you do it then EVERY TIME you encounter that thing or situation in real life so that you will then do it then too in your dreams at that time.

The problem is that there simply is nothing common in my dreams that also constantly appears in my every-day life.

I see my father quite often in my dreams. In reality he lives about 500km away from me and I only see him four or five times each year.

Next up are zombies. As you could imagine, not an usual sight around here :gni:

Aside from those two things, everything seems to be random.

Random people, some of which I may know, random places I may or may not have visited once or multiple times in my life, random activities…

The only consistent part is that I am doing something, somewhere :neutral:
Anyway, I´ll try doing a RC whenever I see my father or a zombie. Let´s see if that works…