Quote Originally Posted by Burke View Post
Leaving behind techniques and using purely experience will only be as successful as you were with the techniques. In addition, once you start actively trying to improve and have more lucid dreams, you will only have less lucid dreams. Your success may remain fairly constant, but over time, you're ability to lucid dream will fade just as with anything else.

The primary way I've heard of people being successful while 'stopping' any and all techniques is to not actually stop at all. They make the techniques become second nature with almost no effort. The most common example of this being reality checks. The main point of a reality check is to question your reality and check if you are dreaming. You can make it practically effortless to be constantly questioning whether you are awake or not (I believe the gravity RC is popular for this) and having become part of your daily life. You're not taking time out of your day to actively RC, per se, but instead you're basically subconsciously performing RCs.

There may be some naturally skilled lucid dreamers who can have immense success with no outside effort, but they likely put a lot of effort into it originally and I doubt they'd be improving without actively trying.
Thanks for your response

That does make sense. I guess many people have internalized some type of practice(s) which allows them to confidently lucid dream. Personally I've began working on using reality checking in response to common dream AND reality elements, as a means of induction...but given the inconvenience it sometimes causes in waking-life I had wondered if I could ever give it up. I will continue with it however, in the hope that it does become a subconscious activity that doesn't interfere quite so much with waking-life.