im getting close i know it

last night waz crzy i had a dream and i waz in i wondered if i waz dreaming and counted my fingers i had 7 i dit it like 5 times then i couldnt beleive it and asked someone else to count 4 me he said ya u got 5 fingures dude then i counted again and i had 5, i continued w/the dream then woke up

if i keep up the finger counting think it will work eventualy?

MAN! So close. How frustrating. Yeah if you ever question whether you are in a dream or not, don’t trust the people around you. They most often lie to you about it. At least thats what most of us have discovered. Rarely will someone in your dreams admit that you are dreaming for some reason.

Yeah, even my Dad lied to me in my dream once. He told me that it was normal for my cat to be walking around on its back legs, carrying its collar in its front paws!!! and I believed him :eh: . Trust no-one!

Aawh, so close! That’s really annoying, knowing your getting closer, but you just can’t do it… It’s so frustrating.

Last night I dreamt that I was in a study. I checked my watch, because I had an appointment or something. It was 9:00 . I panicked, because I was late, and I looked again. Now it was 3:20. This was of course, perfectly normal. Then I suddenly felt the urge to look at my hands. I saw that they were tanned. Of course, THIS could never happen in real life, I thought :bored:, so I became lucid for a few seconds, but then I woke up :sad:

:sleeping: sweet dreams! :sleeping:

Wietske

It sure is frustrating when you actually perform a RC while dreaming and it’s outcome dosn’t trigger lucidity :wink:

Still, you have to understand that when dreaming, your mind isn’t usually sitting there waiting for something to prove that you’re dreaming so it can become lucid. Your mind already knows it’s dreaming :smile:

You have to train it like you would a dog. When a chosen event occurs (like a RC), it should react by making you think you might be dreaming, which will hopefully lead to you becoming aware that you are.

This is why performing RCs properly involves more than simply looking at the time, looking away and looking back. You have to then try to convince yourself that you are dreaming.

It’s just a thought :smile:

That’s exactly right. You really have to involve your critical faculty, not just perform reality checks automatically. It really doesn’t work otherwise.

Example of failure: I dreamed that I was on a strange playground where there were weird drawings on the equipment. At some point in the dream, I did a reality check out of habit. I pushed the button on my watch that makes it turn blue. It looked like my watch was filling up with blue liquid. I thought, “Oh, that’s weird,” and continued dreaming nonlucidly.

Example of failure: I dreamed that I was outside of Price Chopper. (I think I posted this example somewhere else.) I did a reality check out of habit. I asked myself, “How did I get here?” I thought about it and came to the conclusion that I didn’t know. I shrugged it off and walked into the store.

Example of success: I was in this apple orchard carrying some math books. I noticed that I had been carrying a calculus book and a trig book, but now there was a statistics book and an algebra book. I thought it was weird and wondered if I was dreaming. I pushed the button on my watch that turns it blue, and it turned orange, then purple. I became lucid.

Example of success: I was using my computer and the background wouldn’t change when I tried to change it. (I know I talked briefly about this one somewhere else.) I wondered if I was dreaming. I looked around and saw a weird string of pink, green, and orange Christmas lights. I thought, “That’s weird. That might be a dreamsign right there.” I looked at it and tried to change the sequence of the lights. It changed and I became lucid.

As you see, reality checks tend not to make you lucid (actually, nothing can make you lucid; it’s ultimately a question of whether you, your conscious self, are aware enough at the moment) unless you do them sincerely. Reality checks might even indicate you’re awake when you’re not sometimes. It’s all in whether or not you are critical - and I’m the worst offender you can talk to for not being critical. :smile:

Heres my most recent failure.

I was on a boat, a ship on the sea, and on this boat there was an office. You know the sort… cubicles, coffee table, printing stations yadda yadda. Looking around I noticed that the room was filled with water up to about three inches from the ceiling. I could see the line where the water ended and the surface of the water above me.
A woman, an executive, came walking past and I stopped her and asked why, if the room was filled with water, were we able to talk, breathe and move at our normal rate. She looked at me strangely and said “Well, we are on a boat…” She obviously didn’t understand so I tried again, demonstrating how slowly we should be moving underwater. her explanation was that there was air at the top of the room. I told her I didn’t think she understood what I was trying to say and she looked at me really confused.

I woke up and kicked myself for not realizing it was a dream.

“I woke up and kicked myself for not realizing it was a dream.”

Giving the old PILD method a go, eh? :grin:

Everyone has their fair share of so called ‘failed’ LDs. Personally though, I don’t think becoming lucid has a lot to do with whats happening in a dream.

In fact, when I first started out practising Lucid Dreaming, I used to think it was due to waking up a little, but not completely. The reason for this is because it usually only happened when I was partially worken up by something in RL. Primarily, when my father used to get up at 5am to go to work, he would always make some noise that didn’t quite wake me up, but was enough to allow me to become lucid.

It’s still something I think about, given the nature of WILD, and it would also explain why it seems to be very easy to accidentally wake up while lucid.

Think about all that LD headgear you can buy. It gives an EXTERNAL signal to the subconscious, which if all goes well, you are supposed to think is not part of the dream.

Has anyone ever thought about this?

PILD LOL!
Hey if those worked I’ll be writing books on lucid dreaming.

Yea I agree. I do think that for a LD to happen the right uhm circumstances in a dream must happen. There are normal dreams that are clear and the mind’s moving real quick (like my nightmares), and others that feel like you’re watching a movie but not paying attention.

I was once close too… in my dream i had a baby. first i thought that it’s normal, and so did my parents and friends in the dream. it really couldn’t be reality, 'cos i’m 15, and in some point i realized it too. i was SO close, but then i woke up… nice… :grrr:

Last night I dreamt I was in my mothers bathroom. (adding water in a soap container???) I kept avoiding looking in the mirror although that was the main reason I was in the bathroom in the first place. Well the dream switched to another before I could watch in the mirror, so goodbye reality check for me then. :neutral:

oh, too bad. :neutral: …i’ve noticed that in my dreams, all the characters are saying that everything is normal. it’s not making this any easier… like the baby thing… :cool:

…and btw, the RC, what Joker told, counting your fingers, it works. i mean, in my dream, i got somehow very shoked so i watched my hands to calm myself down. then i noticed, that i had only 4 fingers in my hand. i count them again, and still 4. for the third time, there was 5. i was confused. then i realized, that i’m really dreaming. i had a thought about it before, but now i was sure about it. nice. :wiske: