Please Help!!! (fading dream)

Hello all

I am having major troubles with my lucid dreams going black.

I am a natural LDer and discovered a long time ago that a mantra (know your dreaming) garenteed myself of at least 1 LD a night. I did this for a few weeks but got frustrated that I when I tried to fly I would only get so high before I got scared of falling and did (but with a soft landing), or the fact that I spent the whole time running around looking for stuff to do, or waking when exited etc, so I stopped the mantra and only had very rare accidental LDs.

The other day though I had a thought after a random LD that it was my dream and I really should be able to control it better so did my mantra the next night. I had some success in a very satisfying LD. This got me really excited so I went on the net to see if anyone else was doing this. I found there are thousands of people doing what I thought I was unique in and that they had taken it to levels I never even dreamed of (he he, puns are fun :tongue: ).

So I read all I could for hours upon hours and went to bed the next night determined to control every aspect of my dream. Once I became lucid though the dream started to fade. THIS HAPPENED TO ME BEFORE! I thought thats ok I have read about this happening. Rubbing my hands together didn’t work. Spinning worked but I was in a different scene that started to fade after a few seconds. I looked around trying to saturated my senses but it kept fading. By spinning I went through 5 or 6 scenes but each started fading really rapidly.

So I gave it a break for a week or so and set my intention not to LD so as I could not cement the fact in my mind that dreams would fade. Tonight I thought I was ready to try again so I did my mantra but added it will be very bright and detailed, you are in control. Well I fell asleep and became lucid a couple of minutes into my dream (I only got 4 hours sleep last night so I guess this is why I entered REM straight away). At first all was good although my heart was racing and I felt very anxious but in a good way. I looked out after looking at my hands (my RC) and everything was extremely vivid and beautiful. This lasted for about 2 seconds then puff, everything was black. No fade, just from beautifully bright to nothing. I rubbed my hands together and although I could intensely feel the sensations the black did not lift. I didn’t want to go through the spinning saga I had experienced previously so I decided to go against the book completely and closed my eyes. At first this felt right, but then I started to sense my physical body. I was kind of in the dream and in my bead (I know I was still in the dream because the sensations of rubbing my hands together were much more intense than in RL). I knew I would wake if I opened my eyes but decided to test it and opened one eye and sure enough I woke up about 5mins after falling asleep (yes did several RCs to check for FA). In hindsight I should have told myself I would not wake up and visualised a new dreamscape but I was to eager to test with one eye and didn’t think of it.

Anyway, I can’t sleep now thinking about it so I thought I would come on here and ask for some advice. Please help, as I say I have never experienced dreams fading until I read about it. I know it is due to the fact that I am expecting it to happen now, and I will get past it in my own time, but if anyone could suggest ANYTHING to speed up the process I would be truly grateful.

Thank you all and good dreaming to everyone :smile:

ps I have a similar thread that I started when this first happened (about a week ago) but it was unnecessarily wordy and boring and I think nobody would have read it so it got no replies. Mods feel free to delete the other thread if you wish.

Title edited for clarification.

I had a bit more of a think about this and realised it is definately the fact that I am ‘expecting’ the dream to fade but I think it may run a bit deeper than that also. I realised that as soon as I became lucid I just pushed past the dream character and ignored my SC completely. Obviously my full conscious self can’t create dreams on its own because I would be able to just close my eyes and have LDs without going to sleep if it could. I need to work with my SC I think and engage with my DCs. This is a major thing I want to achieve with LDing anyway, to learn more about myself by interacting with my SC, so I don’t know why I was ignoring my SC and trying to engage my full consciousness in the dream without letting my SC play a major part. Any thought?

I did a kind of accidental WILD yesterday which I will explain in case anyone is interested because I have not read about the method I used. I had a full sleep and awoke but decided to go back to sleep for a while. Maybe it is just me but when I try to go to sleep and I am not really that tired I find a train of thought or internal dialogue can turn vivid and start to become a dream. I will ‘catch’ this happening which will generally pull me back to full consciousness. Yesterday this happened a few times and I came back to full consciousness every time I caught it happening. But the last time it happened and I caught it I started coming back to full consciousness but before I did I realised I should just let it develop into an LD. So I grabbed some streamers and started waving them through the air and ran through my lounge room to go outside and sure enough by the time I got outside I was in a very vivid and beautiful LD. As soon as I realised this though the dream went dark again but this is my problem and shouldn’t happen to anyone else who tries this method. I guess it is not a true WILD as for a few seconds at the start I am not lucid, but it is close enough as there are only a few seconds of non-lucidity so it could potentially be a very long LD. I will experiment more with this in the coming days and let people know if there are any tricks to getting this to work.