I HAVE to be doing something wrong…
What do YOU do when you want an ld?
what EXACTLY?
what EXACTLY did you do when you had your first one?
When I had my first one? Just reading about them triggered it. Then it was a few months before I had another one. But I wasn’t really doing anything to foster them besides keeping my dream journal and thinking about them all the time. Now I get them about once a month and besides Lucid Living I’m really not employing any practices. I should be but I’m not. mrgreen: Been reading a lot of books though… and talking about my dreams with a friend at work who is also into lucid dreaming.
How long have you been trying? And what have you been trying?
what sorts of techniques are you using?
Since you ask, here I go:
I had my first LD Today. It was the weak kind, where you just realize you’re dreaming, but I mean I’m so happy this finally happened! Well as everyone here, I started out with keeping a Dream Journal. I think I have around 30 entries roughly, and they are detailed enough so I can revisit the dream, and to cover what I did in the dream, along with anything of importance. Dream Journals helped me remember ~2 dream ‘sequences’ a night, something I was unable to do before. I read a few things on LD to become familiar with the topic, and now I’m about to start reading ‘Exploring the World of LD’ by Stephen LaBerge. I’ve been keeping a regular workout schedule, and that helps overcome insomnia and I have deeper sleep. I’ve been trying LL to the best of my knowledge, and I try and do RC during the day anytime I see something strange, or anytime that it will be a surprise to me (and I do take RC seriously, even if thats hard to do sometimes). The past few days I’ve been keeping up with these forums, reading them just before going to sleep, and I’ve been trying to have Lucid Dreaming and remembering the dreams as the last thing on my mind before I fall asleep.
The one method that induced a LD is having a good night’s sleep, then waking up at ~5am and freshening up (I just watched TV for 5 min) and then go back to bed and attempt a WILD. I don’t know if it was a MILD or DILD that made it happen, but I looked at my hands (something I didn’t use as a RC surprisingly) and they looked perfectly normal. Then I realized there was this string hanging from either hands and that’s when I just realized its a dream. Before that I tried looking around (the furniture was messed and I had nowhere to sit) but everything looked more real than reality and I said there’s no way this isn’t real.
Well anyways good luck and keep at it. If it gets frustrating take your mind off it a week or so and try again later.
I think if you’re not already, you should start keeping a dream journal. If nothing else I find it keeps me excited about dreams… writing them down every day and being able to look at them, go over them and think about them.
I guess the more you think about it each day, the more likely you are to dream about it. That’s what usually works for me, as I spend quite a bit of each day wondering what I want to do if I became lucid that night, or just performing RC’s with Lucid Dreaming in in mind.
You will probably find yourself dreaming about Lucid Dreams sooner or later. You might not become Lucid, but at least you know that the concept has made it’s way into your subconscious.
For example, last night I drempt that a few friends and I stumbled across a whole bunch of Lucid Dreaming Books. We were in some strange coloured caves, but the books still had price tags on them, and I couldn’t afford any (Depite the lack of shopkeeper or anything).
Just keep it on your mind, I guess would be good advice.
You may also want to consider some form of external induction method. I find most of my LD’s have been triggered by something happening nearby which partially wakes me up, but not completely. For instance my cat used to jump on me while I was asleep. Often I woke up for about a second, then went straight into a Lucid Dream. Other times I didn’t actually wake-up at all, and just became lucid.
You might not be able to afford a NovaDreamer, but you can get any number of home-made programs to run on your PC, or create a CD/Tape which plays sounds well after you have gone to sleep.
Good luck 
yeah i’ll have to agree. if you read up on it, i guess it was easy for me because i could do it naturally, but if you fill your brain with stuff about LD’s it will become alomst a habit, and i’ve found habits carry over into dreams. so just keep reading and think about ld’s all the time and oyu should have one soon
I had my first LD years ago, before I even heard of LDs. It just happened. Then it happened every once in a while and now I got them quite often.
The easiest way to get them is to go to sleep early. I always need a lot of sleep if I want to be lucid. The best time is sometime after 8 or 9am (I often sleep till 11, so I have enough time for dreaming)
I’ve been trying since the start of august and keeping a dream diary since then.
here it is:
Dream Diary.
DATE:22nd September 2002
- They were rebuilding the World Trade Center and I was in New York looking at the towers being built. For some reason the towers weren’t next to each other.
They were like this:
|tower| |tower|
| |Other Buildings | |
||____________________||
and they seemed to be twisted. I think at the start of the dream they were only half built but it wasn’t long before I could see people at the top making the bit that looks like this:
| | | | |
| | | | |
|||||
| |
| |
There was also some kind of thing like a party going on in it that night. I asked my mam could I go but she said I couldn’t.
- I had a dream where I got to 26 undead wins on battle.net in Warcraft III but I still didn’t get a ghoul icon. Then I think I got to 27 and I think I didn’t get it then either.
On Battle.net, your level is displayed next to your name like this: NAME 6
But for some reason my number of wins was next to my name in the dream.
3…
Date:29th September 2002
-
Me, my brother and my sister are in the aran islands. We’re walking down a road, a road that doesn’t exist in real life. We have bows and arrows for some reason and I think we might have been shooting at stuff. Then we see a can of Lynx Atlantis, but its really big, about the size of an oil tank. It’s beside a wall in front of us. my brother shoots it with an arrow and it explodes. Then a woman is wondering what that was and I say something like, “my brother shot the lynx can that we put there” or something like that, I think in what was said, I implied that we put it there before. Then there’s a really weird bit where she points to some peas groing at the side of the road, but the don’t look like peas. She says something like “they’ll be your dinner” or “they could be your dinner”, I think what was implied, was that, if you were stuck or something, like living in the jungle, then that’d do for your dinner.
Later on, we’re in a field which also doesn’t exist in real life. There are these little patches of browny grass on the ground. We want to climb over the wall into the next field and we find a place to climb over, but there was a patch of browney grass under it and it was on fire, I don’t think it was on fire at the start but when we went over to it, it was. Then we turn to the left and somehow loads more fires have sprung up. Anway, we decide to wait for them to stop. -
I think this might have been a seperate dream, but it might have been part of the first one, it was either a seperate dream or I went over the wall and this is what happened.
There was a woman in a car (it looked like a Toyota Yaris or something loke that, which is the car my brother happens to drive). She was on rocky ground, the kind in fields in the aran islands. I was a good bit away from her.
There was a mouse and it went over to the car door and it opened, then he went onto the steering wheel. Strangely enough, it was a right hand drive car now, but later on it wasn’t, and I think the woman might have been on the left side. Maybe she moved over but anyway the car was driving.
And then I remember I was down the pier near where I live with my Dad in a car, now the mouse was right in front of the woman in the car. My Dad said something like “she must be weird if she has a mouse on her steering wheel” meaning that she must be weird if she let it stay on the steering wheel.
Then we stopped her and the car was left hand drive. She tells us she couldn’t see the mouse in the light.
I can also, link all of these to a recent event…
btw, those trade center diagrams don’t show up right in the forum…
One of the easiest ways is to get lots and lots of sleep - so you don’t really require it. Then, take naps in the afternoon with daylight creeping in. It seems to keep me in a very light sleep - which generally helps 
no ld last night but at least I had some good recall… 
Does this ever happen to you? You wake up and can’t remember a thing, and go like, damn…
then a while later you remember it perfectly?
today I couldn’t remember a thing, then my brother said something about the old pc and I remembered this perfectly 
.
DATE:12th October 2002
1.Me and my brother are outside the house and the door’s open. For some reason, I
know that my mother is gone (to the shop or something). Me and my brother wonder if
we left the door open. I think I thought we might have been robbed. We go
upstairs and into our room. Instead of our black pc, our old grey one is on the
table and I think it was more square than in real life (I think it was actually
as if the monitor+tower were joined… in one big rectangle). So then I go into
my mother’s room and it’s all messed up and the mattress is on the floor. I
think about my ps2 which is under the bed (it’s only ever there when we go on
holiday, it’s not there IRL now). I look under, and it’s not there. I panic,
kind of and start praying and hoping it wasn’t stolen (I found this part the
most vivid, I think I had my elbows on the bed, I think it really felt
real…).
Then I remember it was down stairs (like IRL) and not under the bed.
Computer games, TV, manual labour, daydreaming and boredom make me a sleepwalker IRL, and one in my dreams.
Computer games work against LD, well to my own experiences anyways. They have cost me so much dreamtime in which I could think about RCs. I end up having a dream, and I know I’m playing this stupid game, so I end up sleepwalking through it all. Besides that, they are the worst thing when it comes to LL. Instead of being aware of yourself/location/environment/actions/time/purposes etc. you become lost and confused, almost as if disconnected from RL.
LL must hold the answer to a better life and more LDs. I need to know more about it…
Hello (first post)! I have been keeping a DJ since July, and finally had my first LD last night. I’ve never done an RC during a dream, and last nigt was no different. Somehow I realized I was dreaming. I was surprised that I didnt immedately wake up. I did several experiments I’ve always wanted to, like flying (only worked with a verbal commands), looking at hands, looked in mirror. I had a false awakening, but somehow knew what it was, so I maintained my lucidity. I tried “TV experiments” and flew some more until I really woke up. The first thing I did was look at my hands to see if I really was awake, then I wrote down notes because I wanted to remember my first LD.
The lesson is, it takes some of us a long time, so keep trying. All last week, I would read and re-read parts of “Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming” by Stephen LaBerge (the part about flying and the TV experiments) before going to bed. You might want to try that for a while.
How long have you been keeping this DJ, don’t you think his family might wonder why he’s missing???
(sorry, couldn’t resist )
I wish I had that book…
but anyways…
I’ve noticed that on school days ( when I get about… 5 or 6 hours sleep) I can’t ever remember a dream…
so tonight I’m going to bed at 11.
Getting 5 or 6 hours sleep dosn’t allow for many dreams. Considering it takes 3 or so to even start the REM cycle.
I’d suggest getting at least 7 hours sleep, or you may only become lucid moments before your alarm goes off
Word. Its also important to get plenty of sleep every night. Doesn’t help matters if your brain is too tired to focus on what you want to do.
If you keep a dream journal… start looking at things that seem to happen often (dream signs… whenever I see that phrase I think of “worm sign” from Dune) and then try to keep those things in mind. tell yourself that you will watch for dream signs and know you are dreaming when they happen. Or if they are more realistic things, like seeing an old friend, then you can do RCs whenever they happen. Listing your dream signs and keeping them in mind will increase the chance that you will recognize them in your dreams.
“(dream signs… whenever I see that phrase I think of “worm sign” from Dune)”
hehe, I remember that,
it’d be like, “WORM sign”
then you’d see it on the radar, you go over to it and then you’d hear the electricy noise .
what exactly is REM? I’ve heard it loads of times but I’ve never really found out what it meant…
REM stands for ‘Rapid Eye Movement’, which is the name of one of the 4 (Or 5, I can’t remember) sleep cycles you go through each night.
It takes around 3 hours to reach this cycle of sleep, and it only lasts about 1/12 hours the first time. The second time it comes around (hence ‘cycle’) it lasts a lot longer.
Now for the important part, it’s during this sleep cycle that you dream. This is why you might find that only getting 5 or 6 hours of sleep results in very few dreams, because you have only had a little over an hour of REM sleep.
There are numerous other resources online that give a better description than that, but you probably know why it’s so often talked about now
Cosmic Charlie:
You read my mind! That was my idea for a while too, except now I just read that book during the day and I go through the LD4ALL forums before going off to sleep. I’ve also had a first LD not long ago, so I’m sticking to this.