Thread: I am always in the same place =/

Oh no, I wouldn't say it's because you don't want to lucid dream bad enough. My first lucid dream, and countless others have all taken place at my parents' house where I grew up. I would say the reason you become lucid more often at home or at work is because it's a place you're more familiar with, so it's much easier to notice when something's off and cue lucidity. I tend to notice that my dreams early in the night are far more abstract than the dreams I have just before waking up. Often my last dream of the night is very vivid, but I'm usually doing something ordinary or something I'm about to do later that day.
I would say enjoy it as a nice familiar place to start off your LDs, but get in the habit of traveling, flying, transforming the dream into something else. I'll bet if you just look down the block from wherever you're at with some curiosity, you will probably find that mountain overlooking the sea or something surprising at least.

Probably at least half of my LDs start in familiar environments. Since I haven't yet mastered enough dream control to change dream scenes at will, I tend to just accept whatever environment I happen to find myself in and find something interesting to do. But that isn't difficult: Being in a lucid dream is like being in a totally different world that, despite superficially looking like the waking life universe, actually operates on completely different “laws of physics”, so to speak. For me, this means that even the most boring places from waking life are interesting to explore, like observing and studying a brand-new universe from scratch. I could do anything from paging through books or looking inside cabinets, drawers, and rooms, etc., to see if anything interesting or surprising shows up, to playing with light switches or electronic devices and compare how they operate to waking life, or I could just go outside and walk/fly around and see if I come across something at least mildly interesting. Sooner or later, I usually do. There's no limit to what to experiment with, because even the most mundane actions could have completely different, unexpected results compared to doing them waking life. Heck, you could even try eating random objects to see what happens, just as another example. I haven't tried that very many times yet. You get the idea: There are infinite possibilities; you just have to remember to think like a child exploring the world for the first time and use a little creativity.

I have a similar problem, I almost always LD at home, a shopping mall or my grandparents appartment. I guess it's just because they are places I'm familiar with. This has bothered me for a while so I decided to focus on learning how to change the dream scene. I did this by summoning a DC that was an expert at changing the scene. I learned how to open up portals to different places with her. It worked on that dream but I have yet to use it in other dreams (it was a pretty recent dream) but I would say you should focus on changing the dream scene somehow. There are many ways to do it, fly somewhere else, open up a portal, enter a mirror, take a cab to somewhere else, you just have to be creative. If you are struggling with it, try summoning up a DC who can help you.

Since you are dreaming, you can choose to leave the location you start out at. So you can travel to a different location. Or explore the current location and find what is new and different about it (it will be different from the work you currently know). Since the dream is your mind, the more limited you feel the scene is, the more limited it will be. If you feel, on the other hand, that there are a lot of possibilities for you to explore and learn interesting things, then your dreams will respond in this way.

I have a modest theory about why this annoying phenomenon, which is quite common among LD'ers, and I've found that understanding the "why" of it makes it much easier to move past the initial mundane scenery:

LD's tend to happen when we are very close to waking, or we come to realize we are dreaming near the end of a dream, and occasionally (though for some this is always) we find ourselves aware during moments when our dreaming minds are "between dreams" and nothing in terms of imagery has been spooled up yet. So our dreaming minds respond by grabbing whatever imagery is most readily available, and this winds up being imagery that is most familiar, like our rooms/homes, school/work, or perhaps a spot that holds a lot of personal meaning like a special place you frequented as a child.

I've found that the simplest way to get past this is to pause for a moment and remember why I'm in a boring familiar place, and then simply close my dream eyes and wait for a new dream scene to form -- with the full confidence, of course, that a new scene will form. I also hold off on trying to change the dream scene "myself" until after my dreaming mind has caught up with me, because attempting to change it right away will catch it just as unprepared as it was when I became lucid.

Finally, if you;re looking for an easy metaphor to work with: After you've paused for a few moments, open you dream eyes. If you're still in your familiar place (and you might not be!), then find a door and walk through it, fully expecting something new to be behind it. The 'fully expecting" bit there is important BTW, because if you don't expect something new, then walking through the door will likely find you in another familiar place.

Originally Posted by Sageous

I've found that the simplest way to get past this is to pause for a moment and remember why I'm in a boring familiar place, and then simply close my dream eyes and wait for a new dream scene to form -- with the full confidence, of course, that a new scene will form. I also hold off on trying to change the dream scene "myself" until after my dreaming mind has caught up with me, because attempting to change it right away will catch it just as unprepared as it was when I became lucid.

That's a cool idea. Before you mentioned it, I was actually considering trying something like this myself sometime to see if I would have any luck changing dream scenes that way. I finally got a chance to try it out this morning. I had a FA in my room, became lucid, closed my dream eyes to simulate hitting a “void”, and then handled it the same way I do actual, unintentional losses of dream imagery. I felt the objects around me with my hands to maintain interaction with the dream through the dark period, briefly visualized a few possible scenes to try to help my dream-generating mind get started, while patiently waiting (and expecting) new dream imagery to form soon. It took a little while, but some new imagery eventually faded in and solidified. At first I thought I had found myself back in my same house, but as I looked around I realized it had changed enough to consider it a successful switch to a new dream scene.

^^ If you try this again, Travis, I would recommend that you skip the part where you "felt the objects around me with my hands to maintain interaction with the dream," as this might cause an unconscious signal that, even with your dream eyes closed, you are still okay with the dream scene as provided. In other words: I think, by feeling objects, you are maintaining the "reality" of the original dream (and your dream body, for that matter), so your dreaming mind obliges by keeping it real... come to think of it, this action sort of negates the eye-closing exercise, in my opinion.

Instead, during that void time you might simply remember that you cannot become unconnected with your dream, and that whether your dream eyes are open or closed really doesn't matter. Since the dream is You, and you are still there, you can be confident that the dream isn't going anywhere.

^ Okay, I'll try that. I think the original idea behind that was to ensure I don't wake up or something by not paying attention to the dream, but that's probably not a problem if I stay focused on my dream and my lucidity, which I would of course want to do anyway.