Last night was a ‘no-technique’ night. Whenever I’ve had a poor yield of dreams, the next night I just use no techniques at all, let myself fall asleep thinking, ‘I don’t care what dreams I have or whether I sleep well’. This usually helps get things moving again.
So last night I experienced the familiar feeling of waking up into a dream, “Ah, here we are,” but it was poorly formed, dim and shapeless. I became a little more lucid and let myself slip back into another dream. This time I was at least in a formed environment, but it was very flimsy and colourless, as if my vision was blurred. I couldn’t allow myself to become more lucid because I would have just realised how flimsy it was and the dream would have disintegrated. So I was acting in a very unintelligent way with poor results, trying to summon an old friend who came up lumpy and the wrong shape. Does anyone know how to improve the quality of lucid dreams after the initial state of basic lucidity is achieved?
Hmm… see if this helps: While you are in the dream, tell yourself it’s not a dream, that it is reality. And if in reality your vision is blurred, then it can be fixed by rapidly blinking your eyes or any of the other RL techniques. Just keep telling yourself it’s NOT a dream and see how that helps. Good luck
This happens to me all the time. In fact, it happens in almost all of my LD’s. I use a variety of techniques to stabilize the dream. They include:
Mental Focusing: Keeping my mind concentrated on what is in the dream
Visual Focusing: Staring at something until it comes into focus
Spinning/Motion Enhancing: Turning around or moving up and down to get that sensory input of motion
Shouting: Often commands like “increase lucidity”
Hand Rubbing: Rubbing my hands together for tactile sensory input
Tactile Sensing: Instead of hand rubbing, feeling any objects around. Also works well if you rub your cheeks or arms to get tactile sensory input from your hands and skin at the same time
Breath Control: Taking conscious control of my breathing to help calm me down
Verbal Repetition: Repeating phrases over and over
Obviously, you don’t have to do all of these. I usually do a combination of mental and visual focusing, with some tactile sensing. I used to do Spinning more, but sometimes that would de-stabilize the dream since I couldn’t look at anything.
