Tell us your success story.

[JayTabes91]

Hello everyone, So many people (myself included) set out on their journey to attain lucidity with optimism and hope. But after weeks/months of trying, many of these people quit because they feel they won't get better and it just isn't worth the time and effort. Sure there are naturals who find it easy to go from beginner to expert, but I believe that this is a rarity. I think it would be beneficial to any beginner to hear a success story from a non-natural lucid dreamer who started from humble beginnings but kept with it and finally became relatively sufficient at attaining lucidity. Anyone who has a story like this, please feel welcome to post! These anecdotes could spur on individuals who are losing hope. It may be helpful to include the state of your progress when you first began (in terms of dream recall, etc.), your current state, and what method(s) you used to become more experienced. Thanks, and happy dreaming!

[GoatHammer]

Here is my story. About 5 years ago i started to practise lucid dreaming techniques, as well as writing a dream journal. I was 15 at the time. I forgot about it after not having any success. 5 years later a came across the subject and started to practise again. On the second day i tried the MILD method for maybe 5 hours straight in the night ( Not ideal, but i was excited and couldn´t fall asleep so i thought i should continue). Then i fell asleep and woke up to see that the room was filled with light. "Fuck, i was up all night trying to induce a dream" i thought. But then i realised something was wrong and did a reality check and relised it was a dream. I had only practised for two days when i got the dream, but it was because of the insane amount of time i put into the technique that i got it. I recalled maybe one dream per night at the time. Nowadays i recall around 1-2 dreams per night. And i also stopped using the MILD technique after that because it didn´t do anything for me. Nowadays i almost exclusively practise WILD´s.

[MasterMind]

To share the light and hopefully enlighten the day and the minds of some people, here's my story. As most kids I had very vivid dreams. I remember being at the age of 7 believing that if I put my hand under my pillow and imagined a place I would end up there in my nightly dreams. I did that for a while until my childlike personality, glowing world view was replaced with the stress and responsibility of growing up to an adult. My interest in my dreams and awareness faded as my consciousness developed an ego which put both my daily self and nightly self to sleep. When I was around 16 years old I saw the movie "The Matrix" I was amazed by the philosophical ideas and worldviews that was shared in the movie like: "If you weren't able to wake up from a dream, how would you know the difference between the real world and the dream world?" - "What is real? How do you define real? If real is what you can see, what you can smell and what you can taste, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain." I started to question my own reality and became quite paranoid because these were facts that just couldn't be ignored. And as a result of that I soon had my first spontaneous lucid dream. I googled "matrix and dreams" and found Tim posts Lucidipedia videos on Youtube and was introduced to the basics of lucid dreaming. I started my first Dream Journal and ordered Stephen LaBerge's book about lucid dreaming. I was motivated and I practised the methods diligently. I had a few more lucid dreams but as my beginner excitement slowly turned into frustration because of lack of consistency my practise went from on to off over and over. Then I found this forum and I started to share my ideas in posts, one of my first threads was about a dream recall method that I had come up with on my own but then I heard that nothing is new under the sun and it had already been invented and used by Dream Yogis thousands of years ago. For a few years I kept on learning about the brain, "new" methods, and I enjoyed the theory more than the practise, but I still had a few lucid dreams here and there, but still not the quality that I had imagined when I first started. They were usually just me realizing that I was dreaming and then either quickly losing lucidity or waking up. I did all kind of things, one the most extreme things I did was to wake myself up over and over just a few minutes apart in order to trigger REM-Rebound in the brain and tip the balance between the different chemical systems within the brain in order to make the critical thinking higher and to induce an false awakening by tricking the brain. It wasn't healthy at all though and it leaved me extremely tired the rest of the day. I then became a Dream Guide on this forum and I helped beginners by writing in their threads. But after some time I was writing more than I was actually practising and I instinctively quit being a dream guide to focus on myself again. I learned alot of theory but the actual change did not happen. This was a short summary of around 6 years of dabbling. The turning point came when I started meditating and learning about eastern philosophy and mysticism. When I read Eckhart Tolle's book "The Power of Now" I realized that I had been asleep or rather emprisoned by a wall of thoughts all my life and when I meditated I saw the beauty of complete silence for the first time. It was like an awakening, my first thought was "Where the hell have I been?". The voice in my head had been so loud and so active that I had barely been right where I was. I also remember thinking "I feel like a happy kid again!". After this day I started to have vivid dreams and good dream recall without even keeping a dream journal and even spontaneous lucid dreams without reality checks. I realized that the language we use to communicate creates the illusion of separation, we have different words for the same thing. Consciousness is the same as happiness and unconsciousness is the same as anger and suffering. So learning to truly be happy is the same as increasing your consciousness. I read books about happiness and meditation and learned more theory but this time it was more practical. I learned that the expectation that we put on ourselves and that other people puts on us, our thoughts, emotions is all blocking us from seeing the reality that is right in front of us, our consciousness are basically asleep and dreaming. In our dreams our egos project this by creating scenarios that we believe is super important to follow but we do this at expense of losing our consciousness. We do the same in reality! It's done through the thoughts and the stories that we tell ourselves. Imagine sitting in a conversation with a group of people and they start to gossip about how much they hate Donald Trump or some story about themselves. They are no longer there, they are in the emotion and the scenario that their ego expresses, what about actually paying attention to the room they are in, the sensations that they feel or the eyes of the one that they are talking too? As I learned to become aware of my own insanity and addiction of thinking, lucidity wasn't just a practise, it became my first purpose in life! So my advice to the people who truly wants to wake up is: Become like a child again, let go of theory and focus on the very thing that matters. The NOW. The world of today is actually unconscious, we write our thoughts and opinions on a website made to express our false self-image, we photograph our life without actually paying attention to our life, we sleep without ever truly waking up, we live without knowing who we really are. But here is a little dream theory for you to make the point clear: Our dreams according to Freud is a chance for our ego to express desires that were surpressed during the day. However, if you work on eliminating your ego, what remains in the dream then? Just consciousness. Now I have atleast 1 vivid lucid dream/ week. But the goal is no longer to dream consciously, it's to live consciously. Why? Because the dream is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work... when you go to church... when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth. What truth? That you are a slave, like everyone else you were born into bondage. Into a prison that you cannot taste or see or touch. A prison for your mind. Your ego. Peace!

[Saizaphod]

In my case it always culminated to my deep desire and passion towards lucid dreaming. I had had only like 5 to 6 spontaneous lucid dreams before I learned that you could actually induce them with practice. Lucid dreaming was always a thing between me and a friend of mine. Even though we had only had so few of them, we still used to make hand gestures suddenly to imitate the realization of being inside a dream and then pretended to fly away, which we found hilarious. It was an inside thing. So when I learned that it's possible to have more of those experiences, I was instantly hooked. I knew it was possible and amazing, so I wrote my DJ with the utmost desire. It took me a week to finally realize I was in a dream, but I woke up immediately. "It's working!" Another week and I had my first decent lucid dream in which I summoned my first ( fake ) dream guide. Out of the 100 first entries I wrote, 45 were lucid, due to my extreme excitement to the fact that I now knew how to lucid dream. I was 16 then by the way. I'm 19 now and my 4th anniversary with the practice is next month and I'm near 500 LDs. Something that I think is essential ( was in my case ) is that you never quit writing a dream journal. I sometimes had three weeks of full, long notes unwritten to the actual journal, but I always brought myself to do it. I knew I had to do it. Took many hours sometimes. Lding became a lifestyle and a part of me. It was always present and every day , at some point, I remembered what I was trying to do, even if I didn't put effort into it. Ofc the days when I didn't put effort into it, the results were the worst. My LDs have come and gone like a rollercoaster in a way. Up and down. The longest dry spell that Iv had has been close to a month probably. I kept my mind on the practice with the dream journaling when I didn't put any effort into reaching lucidity besides desiring it to happen spontaneously. I don't really know what to say anymore besides that what has probably affected me only personally. But I might as well write something I guess; I finally had something to do for real. 45/100 lucid entries, I was devoting myself to something for the first time since forever. I think my standards for the amount of lucids I wished to have were extremely high for most of the time, without me even realizing it back then as a beginner. If I had "only" 10 lucids a month I was frustrated. That's about it. Genuinely want to have lucid dreams, write a DJ consistently and don't forget your day time practices. I never quit those either, but the low-points were when I did only like 5 RCs a day and nothing else along with them. Oh, and do WBTB everytime you can. Probably 80-90% of my lucids have been after I did WBTB. WBTB is King. When I was around 16 years old I saw the movie "The Matrix" I was amazed by the philosophical ideas and worldviews that was shared in the movie like: Tim posts Lucidipedia videos on Youtube I then became a Dream Guide on this forum and I helped beginners by writing in their threads. But after some time I was writing more than I was actually practising and I instinctively quit being a dream guide to focus on myself again. I think that personality affects one's lucid success to some degree. It helps if someone is generally interested in subjects like dreaming, reality, psychology, and movies related to dreaming ( like matrix ) for an example, because it makes pursuing something similar ( in this case lucid dreaming ) more fulfilling. I always liked to think about stuff like matrix myself too. I strongly recommend watching Tim's video-tutorials to everyone! They're the most lively lucid dream video tutorials that Iv seen. I mean when teaching WILD for an example, he shows himself "transitioning" into the dream and then walking around the "dream" that is his apartment building's staircase. I don't want to spoil it, it's great. . I used to watch them too when I had under 100 LDs under my belt. I'm having this problem a little bit too. It takes quite a bit of mental concentration which distracts from the "NOW" as you put it.