Thread: Why don't lucid dreams last long?

Not necessarily. Your total dreaming time is limited by your sleep cycles and the amount of REM sleep you get. At their max, your sleep cycle will have about 80-90 minutes of REM, so technically this is the most amount of time you can possibly be lucid at a time.

However, there are techniques called Time Dilation that can make your time lucid feel longer than just 80-90 minutes, to possibly a few hours or more. I would recommend reading this thread: My Tutorial for extending Lucid Dream Time. Hours of LD. - Lucid Dreaming - Dream Views

Spellbee2, do not forget that you can learn to lucid in nREM. It is perhaps more advanced, but do not limit yourself to thinking of dreams as only REM. However, a 90 minute LD is pretty stellar and should be something to make any dreamer very happy.

EarthToKepler, It takes years to learn how to stabilize the dreams. At first you should be happy with even two minutes. You will still be pretty excited even then. Maybe 10-15 minutes with a couple years experience. They do not need to be longer if you are doing great things, like flying. A roller coaster only lasts a couple minutes, but people still ride them.

The whole sleep cycle is typically 90 minutes, but the REM portion is usually only short - a few minutes early on in the night to maybe 20 minutes at the end of the nights sleep. As Sivason says, you can push this, but it's quite difficult for ordinary mortals to extend an LD outside REM. Time dilation is real and can be huge. I experienced this once where a non-lucid of only a few seconds seem to last at least ten minutes, so I have no doubt that a time dilation multiplier of at least 10x is possible, maybe 100x or even 1000x.