Lucid and Near Lucid?

What is the difference between being lucid and near-lucid (stupid question i know but i’m new at this).
And also how can i maintain the lucidity of my dreams, whenever i try to take control of my dreams (as in change my surroundings or make someone do something) i seem to slip back into a non-lucid dream.
(I’ve only ever had 4 lucid dreams, 2 i just realised i was dreaming for a few seconds and the other two i realised i was dreaming and tried to take over the dream but fell back into a non lucid dream when i tried to, i stay lucid as long as i accept the given surroundings)

near lucid would be when you have a hunch something isn’t right… but don’t quite catch on that your dreaming… and lucid would be realizing that you are.

the only way you can get better at keeping yourself lucid would be implementation of techniques such as rubbing your hands, commands, etc. and practice.

grab onto something in your dream, and think about your dream until you have complete control of it

Near-lucid or prelucid is still non-lucid, and the transition to actual lucidity requires a pretty high level of self-criticism. That’s why prelucidity more often occurs than lucidity. In order to reach this critical level, you really need to practice a lot and learn how to keep a critical state of mind during the day.

There are lots of ways to stabilize and prolong a LD. When you’re just starting on LDing, it’s pretty normal that most LDs don’t last very long. The mind has troubles to adapt itself to the new state of consciousness, thus early awakening occurs very often in those early stages. In time this will certainly improve.
Some things you can do to prolong/stabilize the LD: rub your hands, touch a dream object and stay focused at it, spin around, shout something like “1000x lucidity”,… But since dreams are extremely suggestible to thought, these methods don’t work if you have negative assumptions about them before you use them (that’s why the spinning technique never works for me).
Good luck! :wink:

If you want to maintain your lucidity and prevent yourself from slipping into a normal dream (losing lucidity), I recommend that you actively try to fight that drowsiness that makes you forget that you are dreaming. You could do something radical like shout “I am dreaming! I am dreaming!”, but you could also just try to focus your thoughts and awareness, and act the same way as you would if you were really drowsy in RL and wanted to stay awake.

When it comes to preventing awakenings (which are in a way the opposite of lucidity losses), there are three main techniques. Rubbing hands, spinning and focus awareness. I tried the latter one this night, I found it to work much better than spinning and rubbing hands. Focus awareness involves that you stare at a small object in the dream world and really focus on it. After a while, the object (and in turn, the whole dream) will become clearer and more stabile.

I think you should try at least these three basic techniques and see if one of them works for you.

The question about lucidity/near-lucidity has already been succinctly (sp?) answered by No Poetic Device (nice name, by the way - is it supposed to mean anything?), so I’ll just answer the second one.

The best way to increase lucidity for me is verbal commands. For example, just tell the world to stabilize. Direct your voice towards the world and objects around you. Then they should start to come back into focus. I personally find that asking nicely and politely is best too, but apparently that’s just a thing of mine. Lots of people here love to shout it out - “LUCIDITY INCREASE X1000”. But that makes it sound like something boring, and mathematical. You can’t really count lucidity, or increase it by a factor of 1000.

This command is simply to express your wish in a recognizable form. When you shout it, you mentally generate the idea of highly increased lucidity. The factor x1000 doesn’t need to be taken literally but only serves as a confirmation of the intended idea. The creation of this mental idea then reflects into a sudden increase of awareness, clarity and stability, and this is exactly what you wished :smile:

Ok, I see what you mean. Fair point. But I still prefer my method…