LDs, 4 years after giving up

Hi everyone

Some years ago I registered to this forum and tried really hard on having LDs.
Over at least a year I was reading everything, tried all the techniques, reality checks, dream journal, some pauses… nothing worked.

Then I just gave up for like maybe 4 years.

Recently within the last month I got 3 dreams in which I realised I was dreaming.
But I have some issues, for exemple I am not sure they were fully lucid because of the stupid things I did in the dreams. (Or maybe my lucid-me is stupid haha)

In the first dream I was in a train station and I realised it was a dream. The dream was suddenly more vivid, I thought I could do anything I wanted but actually I had no idea what to do, so I asked a guy to give me coffee and then I kissed two random persons (not logic at all, don’t juge me please haha).

When I woke I thought amongst all the things I could do in a dream, I did stupid actions. So maybe I wasn’t that much lucid.

Second dream was about vacations I had with my partner weeks ago.

• Everything was detailed but I was sure something was wrong because we already dropped the keys of that hotel and took this flight, which made me realised it was a dream.
• Stupid-semi-lucid me was convinced that my boyfriend was not a dream character, so I tried to make him realise that it was a dream, which didn’t work of course.
• I was confused about the date at which we travelled, I was convinced it was in February (actually completely wrong it was in July). I told my boyfriend that it was normal because in a dream date and time can be confused but he told me “no, it’s just because my watch is broken”, which made me realised he was a dream character.
• Again I didn’t know what to do so I tried to teleport the suitcases outside, it didn’t work and I lost “lucidity”…

When I woke up I thought “you need a real plan for next time”. Something to focus on during the next dream, instead of kissing random people of teleporting suitcases… I decided that the plan would be to train at sword fighting (which I do in real life) with my favourite anime character.

Bingo, third dream in which I realise that I’m dreaming: I tell the dream character who are with me that it’s a dream, and I think of my plan. My sword appears in my hand and I just need to have a partner to train. Instead of my favourite anime character, comes an old lady omg so frustrating she was bad at sword fighting, it was so frustrating couldn’t reproduce real-life sword movements and finally lost control…

Is my plan too complicated? Should I aim for something easier? Was I lucid or was I just remembering my “plan”? I cannot tell for sure. I just hope I get more of those dreams to train my stupid-lucid-me to actually being me and control everything.

I’m back with LD experiments haha I hope this time I will actually improve.

Thanks in advance for any advice or support

I hope it’s okay but this really made me laugh

I think this really depends on you and your own philosophy about dreaming and so on.

I don’t think your goal is unrealistic—if you keep trying it’ll probably work out eventually. You already got pretty close after all. It can be hard to totally get the dream to bend to your desires but if you get creative with the strategies you use to make things happen it’ll probably work out. A common trick is to decide that something you want to encounter is behind a door, so you could say to yourself that you’ll find your favorite anime character standing behind the door to a building or something like that and see how that goes.

At the same time, you could also take a more “as things come” kind of approach and try to play off whatever the dream gives you instead of trying to radically change it. Some people prefer that kind of approach because it’s not as likely for there to be trouble with things not working and it can be fun to see what the dream leads to. Of course, in this case you have to keep your goals a little more vague or open-ended. Like, you could keep challenging random DCs like that old lady to swordfights—who knows what will happen, someone might really surprise you.

It’s all kind of up to you and what you think seems like the most fun and so on. Of course you can experiment with both approaches, or switch back and forth depending on the dream and your own feelings.

I’d say if you knew you were dreaming on any level you were lucid in some sense. A lot of people have trouble thinking straight when they’re lucid though, I know I do. A lot of people think of lucidity as a kind of spectrum from “a bit lucid” to “very lucid”; you can see a little more conversation about that in this topic for instance. From my perspective, I’d say being able to remember a complex plan you came up with while awake seems pretty good actually. It’s all pretty subjective though, just kind of depends on your own feelings about what your experience of lucidity is like.

Thanks a lot for your answer!
It’s okay to laugh haha

I think I will go for the passive approach, or opening a door and try to find behind what I want. Because indeed trying to force things to appear apparently doesn’t work for me yet.

Also I am wondering… Why after so many years I’m having 3 dreams like this, I’m trying to think if something changed in the last 2 months in my daily life but I don’t think so. Now I’m a bit scared if I focus too much again on LDs I will get frustrated of not succeeding and it will get worse. I’ll see

That sounds like you were lucid.

There’s a difference between being lucid (realising its a dream) and being able to remember your plan for what you were going to do. Memory and thonking can be messed up in dreams, so its common to have difficulty remembering, and to do dumb things. With more practise, you should get better at remembering your plan in dreams.

On the old lady: sometimes the unconcious objects to what the concious mind is trying to do, and puts obstacles in the way. E.g. Stopping a sword fight by presenting you with someone who is clearly not a suitable opponent. Theres an rlement of violence in martial arts, which is one reason for the unconcious to object to it.