Quote Originally Posted by Ctharlhie View Post
Ok, having read all the replies in the thread:
@linkzelda; your singular view of effort just doesn't stick given the example of natural lucid dreamers who expend little to no effort and are have nightly lucidity rates, see also oneironauts such as Hukif and Naiya who trained lucidity and now achieve similar results with very little effort. Also, I just disagree on the matter of affirmation specificity, both practically and efficacy, in fact I doubt the wording matters at all in comparison with the importance of prospective memory, awareness, intent, recall (a result of increased dream awareness, really). There are lucid dreamers who try less hard than you or I who achieve significantly higher results. It's the fundamentals of awareness and memory that ultimately matter. Dismissing people as 'lazy' seems to take a rather dim view of things (I'm massively lazy!)
Oh, and behavioural psychology and conditioning, and hypnosis and the unconscious, isn't the be-all and end-all of human psychology. I'd recommend practising something other than hypnosis, which is a rather inefficient way of training self-awareness (based as it is on inducing a state of liminal awareness, compared to meditation, RCs and ADA that heighten awareness).

People like Kingyoshi don't become lucid from randomly RCing in the dream based on a habit built in waking life, he has trained himself to be intimately aware of the different phenomena of waking and dream and how they feel. Contrary to MILD leading to a 'random' realisation without RCing, it is a testament to the strength of MILD in training awareness and memory. My best DILDs are when I know as soon as the dream begins that it is a dream, because it feels like a dream. At the very highest level of lucid dreaming RCing becomes largely unnecessary because the realisation is that full, stabilisation an afterthought because you are already pouring your attention into the dream. I do not believe that self-hypnosis teaches that kind of self-awareness (at least in my experience, I would be very interested in hearing more about how you use it).
I typed a long reply to this, but my laptop made me press the back button somehow. So I guess it's a sign for me to shorten my response.

Anyway, I understand that people like Hukif and Naiya are talented in accomplishing their lucid dreaming endeavors (though I think the reason behind that is that they got the concepts at a younger age, and they became proficient as the years progressed. If I remember correctly, I remember Hukif stating how he learned about doing the gravity RCs at an early childhood, and I'm sure the state he's in now, everything is ingrained).

And I admit that I was too harsh with the term 'lazy' there, and I find it hypocritical for me to state that as well since of what I'm currently experimenting with Hypnosis (using customized scripts where I literally just have to get in a comfortable position, read and visualize, and bam, lucid dream). I understand that Hypnosis isn't the magical cure-all or the ultimate form for a person building self-awareness. The totality of a person's experience and their knowledge from reading all sorts of dreaming concepts, techniques, mindsets, etc. definitely matter.

For me, Hypnosis becomes easier to comprehend after filtering out its misconceptions, and using it for what it's really for. Hypnosis does have its flaws since it is extremely goal-orientated, and based on the person's experience, they might have to work at one goal at a time instead of multiple to have more efficacy. However, when I saw doing hypnosis sessions with a member on Dream Views, and making a guide for other tasks different from dreaming, people were able to get into the suggestive state much faster. I see self-hypnosis as easing yourself into the suggestive state and temporarily distracting the critical factor in your mind to get what you want.

Like KingYoshi and others, I definitely don't ignore their efforts in becoming the prodigies that they are to this day, in fact, the concepts with his WILD guide and from others are all packaged neatly for me when I use self-hypnosis. Self-hypnosis (all forms of hypnosis are self-hypnosis, at least from personal experience) is what you make of it, just like MILD. It's because I can easily think of many scenarios (and I mean many that it does get concerning at times), and with self-hypnosis, it controls those surge of thoughts and makes me focus on what I want.

And since I lived most of my life being the typical child growing into a young adult that didn't fixate on dreaming as much, I didn't have the "natural" ability like others have had (OctoberWind is another person who can LD really easily). Like you, I'm assuming you started LD around the later years of your current life instead of your childhood, we had to work hard for getting things in our head and making things work for us. After battling through all those mental conflicts I had with myself with dreaming (self-fulfilling prophecies, solipsism, apophenia, and other tendencies that occur when I tried to balance reality and dreaming), hypnosis was the method I found to be effective for me.

Hypnosis doesn't cover everything, I do agree to that, and with how it's interpreted with aspects of Psychology, it usually falls under Pseudoscience since there's a lot of misinterpretations with people thinking the Traditional stage hypnosis from the past transcends to what Hypnosis overall really is. I just figured that if I really wanted to make a decent link to collaborating with my subconscious, I had to use hypnosis to temporarily distract the critical factor, and to get myself into the suggestive state with ease, and with gradual practice, it's practically a no-brainer.

If I want to go into a lucid dream, I can get up right now, sit on my bed or somewhere comfortable, read a script (or use gradual relaxation methods and visualizations I memorized and becomes easy to remember), and I have a lucid dream, or at least a more intense non-lucid dream that I can recall to great detail.

So for me, and what I had to battle with, I realized that there's people that use autosuggestion and subliminal messages to hopefully get them to ease into their mind, there's people who do all sorts of things with affirmations, meditation, etc. and keep at it even if it gets tough (and they end up with what they want, but just a major backlash), and there's people who use self-hypnosis.

Again, my view is narrow-minded, but that's how I really see things in terms of how to work with your mind so that you know when you see how it works, and using a method that makes it crave more suggestions that could be beneficial to your life, the easier and faster it gets. It's something that works for me, and I encourage people that can put in time to describe what they want out of their sessions, but I am aware that other methods can work. But I've tried those methods, even if they refuted my beliefs with religion and life, and this one is as simple as it can get (when you see what it teaches you).