Thread: Trying to leave a scene, but cannot

Sometimes it seems that my subconscious does not want me to do certain things. It seems that the dream is trying to annoy me.
Has this happened to you? You want to leave from where you are and you can not, because you end up at the same place or at several places like a labyrinth without end?
For example, on today's dream: i am in a store and i want to leave. I open a door to go to the street. But I'm not on the street. I'm in a small cubicle, kinda like like a balcony but covered by a roof with a gap that shows the sunlight. I decide to jump to the ceiling and break it... but there is another roof with a gap. I break this too. I do it about 8 times. I'm frustrated. Why the hell can't I get out? I try again and see what looks like the cloudly sky and falling rain. Glad to think that is the street, i try to leave the balcony and notice it is, after all, a huge grey cathedral ceiling and a fountain that sprinkles water drops. Very frustrated, i awake.
Even being in a lucid dream and concentrating to leave, the dream did not wanted me to.

Yeah, happened to me a couple of times. I think that the desperate thought of leaving prevents you from leaving the scene. I think it works contra productive. The moment that you think that you might be stuck or can't leave, your subconscious creates that situation. I'm no expert but this is what I think of it.

In my last lucid this night, I really wanted to get out of my dark room, so I closed my eyes and tried to picture me standing on this snowy mountain. As I was thinking that this was my first time doing this, I thought that maybe it wouldn't work and guess what, I was still just standing there in my scary dark room...Maybe you just can't have any doubts and really really have to believe in what you want to archieve.

greetz

Originally Posted by dreamstudent123

The moment that you think that you might be stuck or can't leave, your subconscious creates that situation. I'm no expert but this is what I think of it.

Ok, but i just had that thought after i broke about 3 roofs. In the beginning i had not that thought. I guess i needed to calm myself to get through this.

Originally Posted by DreamHighlander

Ok, but i just had that thought after i broke about 3 roofs. In the beginning i had not that thought. I guess i needed to calm myself to get through this.

You may have always harbored the thought, DreamHighlander; you simply weren't aware it was lurking somewhere in your unconscious.

I've been doing this LD'ing thing for quite some time now, and I still have situations very similar to yours (I get stuck in attics, myself, and have a recurrent shopping bazaar loop that drives me nuts). This often happens in states of high lucidity, so I both couldn't blame my state and could mull it over while I was stuck in an attic.

Though I still occasionally try to blame someone else, like my unconscious or perhaps some outside source looking to impede my progress, in the end I think these kind of jambs rest primarily in the condition of my memory, of all things. In order to escape from these loops, you must remember that there really are no loops (and yes Zoth, your avatar image once again inspired those particular words!).

This is very important, as is memory itself in LD's. Memory naturally rests in the "off" position during dreaming and, even if you are highly self-aware, it can be very difficult to impossible to turn it back "on." But you must do so. Why? Because these loops occur not because some external "force" is repeating them, but because you are failing to remember that there are no roofs, and that all these impediments are being manufactured by your own mind.

If you can remember that the roofs are just so much schematic hiccuping, you will find it very easy to leave them behind you. During the dream this is very difficult for two reasons:

First, and obviously, you don't remember that you can do this. You may be self-aware, and be sure this is just a dream image cycling repeatedly, but because your memory is switched off, you cannot escape believing, minimally at unconscious levels, that those roofs are real.

Second, that belief cannot be easily overcome by lucid reason or escape attempts, because it is based on memory -- with memory switched off during the dream, you can talk all you want about how the roofs are not real, but your dreaming mind will beg to differ every time.

Happily, once memory is switched back on, you'll be able to just walk away. There are many ways to do this, but the one I've found most effective is my sitting quietly and focusing on waking life "facts," like where my sleeping body really is, the correct date and time, and maybe my planned LD'ing goals for that dream. This is more difficult than it sounds, for good reason: your memory must be switched back "on" in order to retrieve these thoughts. So make the extra effort, and remember all of it -- if you can't remember the day, for instance, don't just dismiss it and move on; pull up that date.

tl;dr: There are no outside forces at work here, and you're not going crazy or failing at your dreaming efforts. Rather, nature has provided that memory must be shut off during a dream, but a LD'er needs his memory intact and accessible to easily navigate his dreaming world.

I hope that made sense, because this is a very complicated subject that I've tried to compress into one tiny post.

Originally Posted by Sageous

sitting quietly and focusing on waking life "facts," like where my sleeping body really is, the correct date and time, and maybe my planned LD'ing goals for that dream.

Yes. This makes perfectly sense. You are right. I must try this. Thanks.

This happened to me in my first lucids quite a while. Not so much the labyrint, but more the dream not letting me leaving my room. I tried teleporting, breaking the wall, imagining myself at another place, and walking through the wall/door. No results.

Until finally I got this LD which I finally left the scene and never had problems leaving my room again. But it sure was weird.

Moving this to Dream Control.