Don't consider non-lucid dreams as failures

Hey there,

I've been reading people's experiences with trying to induce lucid dreams, and some of their problems. In thinking about it, I noticed a topic that I haven't seen come up too often yet and I wanted to share my experience in the hopes that it may help others who struggle with something similar.

When I'm focused on lucid dreaming, it's very easy for me to find myself in a mindset where I considering nights in which they've had a lucid dream as a success, and other nights as a 'lack of success'. I've come to believe however that this sort of thinking might well become an obstacle to lucid dreaming in itself.

Basically, I believe most things in life follow a simple rule: What we pay attention to, we become better at.

This has been my experience in the case of dreaming, certainly. The more attention I give my dreams, the more rewarding and vivid they become. I start to get more awareness in my dreams and get more lucid dreams (especially if combined with some lucid dreaming techniques). But when I become too focused on only the lucid dreams, I find myself effectively discarding any other dream as a 'non-success'. I start to pay less attention to my regular dreams, or worse, give them negative attention (I'm disappointed that they weren't lucid dreams).

The result, quite often, is a vicious circle where I find myself no longer lucid dreaming, and indeed my dream recall starts to get worse, because I'm no longer giving positive attention to my dreams. I'm hopping from technique to technique, trying various things, but nothing seems to work. This situation would usually last until I take a break (and I stop thinking about my regular dreams as 'failures', though it took me a long time to consciously figure out I was doing this).

So to people starting out and struggling, wondering why they're not seeing more results, ask yourself if your focus isn't too much on lucidity only, and not enough on your regular dreams. Perhaps it may help.

Just some food for thought,

-Redrivertears-

I'm fully behind you with this approach. I actually quite enjoy my non-lucid dreams, sometimes more than my lucid ones!

Good post!

I believe a lucid dreamer's main goal should not be having as many LDs as possible but rather training their awareness.
In fact the Tibetan people have been practising lucid dreaming for ages, they point out that dream yoga (lucid dreaming) is extremely fascinating and fun at first but the main goal is to develop such awareness that you can differentiate your dreams from reality. They believe by mastering this we can access consciousness in its purest form. It is told that life is similar to a dream in the sense of that we're not REALLY aware of the bigger picture. If we start doing this in dreams we can eventually carry it over to life in general and come one step closer to enlightment

:D very interesting :D would recommend any1 researching dream yoga and taking it with a little grain of salt but they are/were true masters of awareness

Yup, it's important to love and treasure all your dreams.

I think there is a period where becoming lucid is physically difficult and unnatural. Your brain might need to tone down the activity of certain areas for some unknown reason.

Becoming lucid is just a means to an end, anyway. There are other ways to dream about what you want and instinctively operate according to the dream-state's rules, if that's what you're after.

Good post! I agree. I rely on my dreams to give me creative inspiration, anyway, and that really helps with making sure that I'm not annoyed that I didn't have a lucid dream.