Thread: Why do I always feel "drowsy" in my lucid dreams?

You need more lucidity It's normal for some "drowsiness" especially when you're not used to a high degree of lucidity, but it's easily solvable. Reserve some seconds to increase lucidity when you stabilize the dream, and that should give you a clearer mind. Engaging with your memory can help, so try to remember your goals and intent when you get lucid ^^

Originally Posted by Laurelindo

Whenever I have a lucid dream I have a weird feeling of floating between the dreamworld and real life.
You know that feeling when you are extremely drowsy in real life and can swear that you will fall asleep if you so much as close your eyes?
Well that's basically how I feel, except I don't actually feel tired; I just feel that if I don't keep my eyes open and my senses extremely active I will instantly pop back to reality again, and sometimes I am so close to waking up that I can actually feel my body lying in bed while I'm still in the dream.

Could you please help me deal with this problem?

Its exactly as you have said. You still have a slight connection to your actual body. This can cause several different problems with stability including mobility problems, drowsiness, etc. The greater the connection you have to your actual body, the less stability you are going to have in the dream world. No worries, this is a very common occurrence and can be corrected. To further break the connection to your actual body, you need to immerse yourself in the dream state. Try not to think about your actual body and engage in dream activity. Here is whee you can perform some stabilization techniques or just interact with your dream environment in some way. I like to take a second and look around at my environment and feel some of the objects in my general vicinity. Perform a reality check or two to firmly plant the idea that you are within the dream state as well. Sometimes, you just need to start exploring the dream, which gets your mind as far away from your actual body as possible.

If you're tired, go to sleep!

When that was happening to me, I'd just lay down in the street and go to sleep in the dream. I enter into another dream (inception!) and I was no longer tired. Of course I had to wake up twice to get back to reality,

There are several reasons. One reason can be that you fear that the dream will be unstable or a fear that you will wake up and lose your precious lucid dream.
And since a dream is experienced at the being level, in other words you experience what you are fully, you will most likely experience something representing that fear and in this case it's the feeling of not having your senses active enough. It can also just be the expectation of the dreams being unstable which in turn makes your experience become exactly what you expect.

Or as it most likely is, a combination of both expectation of an drowsy unstable experience and the fear of waking up.

How do you solve this? By doing the opposite, stop fearing the awakening and change your expectations by stopping to perceive the dream world as an unstable environment. To change your belief and expectations is not something you can do just to by deciding to do so, and even if you fully believed that it was so just because of a strong belief or a convincing theory it wouldn't be enough, because belief is never full knowledge. Knowledge doesn't come from intellectual reasoning it comes from experience. Just like you can't fully believe in lucid dreaming without experiencing it's truth, you can't magically expect the dream world to be as stable as physical reality.

So there is no simple answer than to just get more experience of the dream world, go through the pain of having unstable experiences of lucid dreams and waking up until you just have had enough and intend an experience to show you that the dream world is stable and when you get one you can slowly start to internalise this fact.

There are a few tricks to do that and that is by for example use a tool for that particular belief and expectation such as dream stabilization by rubbing your hands or by screaming "Stabilize now!". But these are not necessary they are just tools that you may need in the beggining. But later on when you got more experience and have changed your belief and expectations, you can drop these tools and have the experience stable already from the start. The important thing for these tools to work is that you believe them will work, so feel free to come up with your own tool, I for example liked to wake up in my dreamroom in my dreambed because I had the belief that this would trick my brain or mind or whatever to think that I was awake so there was no need to wake up.

Another way is to just accept your fear and think to yourself, what is the worst thing that can happen?
Fearing to wake up - Ok the worst thing that can happen is that I wake up from my dream, what do I do then? Well you can learn about dreaming chaining (DEILD) and then you can just think "It's ok if I wake up because then I can just go back to the dream. And when you know this just can stop fearing the awakening and therefore stop it from occuring and even if it does you are prepared for it.

Another tip, but this is just optional, calling the dream experience a DREAM creates some trouble for your mind, since the word dream already have some attached meanings to itself, such as hazy, random, weird, strange. So try to already now start to percieve the dream world just as stable as the physical waking world, by calling it a different reality or what ever that helps you percieve it the way you want your expeirence to be like. Or atleast try to redefine the meaning of dream to you.

Good luck!

Originally Posted by MasterMind

There are several reasons. One reason can be that you fear that the dream will be unstable or a fear that you will wake up and lose your precious lucid dream.

THAT! I think I’ve finally found the reason why my lucids are always dark and unstable. I always have this fear of waking up even if I don't consciously think about it, It's in my subconscious. I can't deny that. I think this is due to the fact that I am still a beginner and lucid dreams rarely occur for me. So when they do, I Fear waking up without getting anything out of the experience. I have never looked to that as a problem but now I understand. Also I think that because all of my 4 lucids were hazy, this leads my mind to thinking that the dream world is a gloomy and unstable one. I also like the solutions that you suggested and I’ll definitely try them out. However, there is one reason why I can’t calm down during a lucid dream, and that's due to a thought that originated about 2 years ago when I first started learning about lucid dreaming. The article I read said that if you do nothing in a dream for a while, that will wake you up. This leads me to becoming in a panic-like state during the whole period of the lucid dream, and I don’t know what to do about that.