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It’s been two years now that I’ve been actively working on LDs, and I wanted to sum up where I’m at, some of what I’ve learnt, and where I hope to go with this. Since last summer I’ve been almost unable to work at my dreaming: exams, moving homes, starting a new job – all of this made it hard to focus. However, I’ll have a lot more free time in the coming months, so my intention is to pick up where I left off.
The first LD I remember having was about twelve years ago, when I was 25, and happened spontaneously. It was a beautiful and memorable dream, in which I was lifted from my bed and shown a landscape and castle of stunning beauty in a desert of incredible colors.
At the time I didn’t follow up on this experience. In fact, it took me ten years to get serious about LDs.
I picked up La Berge’s EWLD in early 2005, and that’s when I got serious. Producing LDs didn’t come easily to me, and it took a lot of very dedicated hard work to get to where I am now. But I was fascinated by the concept, and the effort has more than paid off. I’m not yet where I want to be, but I’m on the right track, I think.
I have written down over 50 LDs since I started working hard at different techniques, and I’ve come to realize which ones work for me, and which don’t.
One mistake I made at the beginning and which held me back was sticking to a single technique for too long that wasn’t the right one for me. Using MILD & DILD, it took me two months to have my first lucid, and gave me a meager total of 8 lucids in my first six months of hard work. (Damn good dreams though – every bit as powerful as WILDs, I find…).
It took me quite a while to figure out that what works best for me is WBTB & WILD. I suppose I was put off WILD by people saying that it’s the hardest. But for me it’s simply the technique that works best.
As I was very busy in these last six months I decided to try having LDs by “not trying”. Doing regular RCs, falling asleep thinking “I’d like to have an LD”, but no effort beyond that. It didn’t work. I maybe had two or three minor LDs during this period. This is not enough for me.
So now I’m going to stick to WBTB & WILD. I might even stop doing dream checks – they don’t seem to work for me. The problem is that this is tiring: waking up after about 4 hours of sleep (if I wake up after more I don’t get back to sleep), staying up for an hour, going back to bed and going through the moves… All this does reduce your sleep time and can make the next day rough (especially when you do this several nights in a row).
WILD works about 50% of the time for me right now. Maybe it depends on various factors: stress, fatigue, what I’ve eaten, how relaxed I can get… But I suppose that I could have about two or three lucids a week this way.
In the last two years I have come to the conclusion that lucid dreaming is an exceptionally powerful tool. It’s like having direct access to my own mental hard drive and being able to change things around at will: let go of anger, resolve conflicts, heal the past. All of this directly carries over to waking life and helps me to be calmer, more serene, more in control of my emotions. There have also been moments of great beauty and exhilaration: gazing at galaxies, flying over snowy mountains, having actual conversations with dream characters. The beauty we have inside is breathtaking.
Ironically, my most powerful dream of the last two years was not a lucid. I describe it in the post “defeating a demon”. It is however closely linked to my lucid work, and would probably not have occurred the way it did had I not been doing this work. It’s effects are still with me today.
I seriously need to work on prolonging my LDs. A few minutes are as long as they get, for the moment. I suspect that they could be much longer than this. Slowly rubbing my hands together, sitting and touching the floor, breathing regularly, repeating to myself that this is a dream, and above all remaining calm - all of this helps keep me aware and in the dream.
At some point on the long and slow path of human evolution we started thinking self-consciously. Somewhere in the distant past was our first ancestor who paused from doing everything on automatic, took a step back, and thought: “hey, wait a minute - I’m me, I can decide!”. He definitely deserves a statue. (The first human to master making fire should get one too, I think).
Who could have guessed, back then, just how far self-conscious thinking would allow us to travel along the paths of reason and science?
Today I suspect that ever-growing lucidity in our dreams could, in the long term, unlock unsuspected levels of creativity and self-understanding, and could perhaps be as important a turning-point in our continuing evolution as were the original first flickers of critical thought. The potential for expanding our minds seems infinite.
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Hi yeah I started in Dec 2005, had 17 LDs since. The problem with me is not the technique but my subconcious in that it rejects whatever technique I use. Or even if I do them only lasts not more than a few days and it fizzles off. As for RCs it's quite a big problem for me because I don't know Y...they give me headaches. The only ones that I have 'cultivated' until very recently was the hand and nose RC and at fixed intervals, less strain. I dropped that few months ago but until yesterday I suddenly or rather my subconcious decided to accept the hand and nose RC method. No headaches so far and it is like part of my daily routine, very smooth. I never forget to do them because I always remember when the previous RC was done. That night alone I had 2 dreams about LDs although I din't do the RC....but it's only a matter of time that it will happen. Maybe it was something that triggered my subconcious to accept the method...:P. I sure hope to have an LD every night...:) Btw I do not have much problem prolonging my LDs I do spinning, last time I prolonged it to 90min straight and I did something rather naughty in that one...LOL. Problem is getting LUCID.... :roll: . Anyway it's very encouraging to hear someone have that many LDs...:)
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Thanks for that post, three and four. I'v been at it for about a year and I feel kind of stalled, everything I try works once or twice--and I'm running out of things to try! I have not been successful at WILD, because once I'm up, I can't go back to sleep. Maybe your technique of getting up after 4 hours would work for me. Worth a try.
Also encouraging is the fact that you think LD is worth it, despite the trouble. I was hoping to eventually get more out of it too, but I have to get better at it first, and that is the hard part. I'm glad to see that your effort paid off.
