Questions about lucid dreaming?

hi! obviously, I'm new at lucid dreaming, and I just have a few questions regarding the skill.

1) I've read to do a reality check in your dream, but if you're not yet lucid, then how can you make yourself do a reality check when you're not yet in control of your dream? can doing them so often in the day make you do it in your dream?

2) in the WBTB method, it says to let your mind stay awake while your body goes to sleep. I don't understand how this is done. if you keep yourself awake, then you aren't going to sleep, therefore can't dream. PLEASE help with this one!

maybe I'm looking too deep into this, but this is all so confusing for me! :uhm:
are there any other things that might help me lucid dream? please tell me as much as possible :thanks:

Hello NirvanaBlue, welcome to DV :)

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1) I've read to do a reality check in your dream, but if you're not yet lucid, then how can you make yourself do a reality check when you're not yet in control of your dream? can doing them so often in the day make you do it in your dream?

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Did you ever notice how things that are common in your life tend to show up in your dreams? You barely dream with that teacher from the 4th grade that you never met again, but probably friends and family make regular appearances in your nightly adventures. That is because dreams are influenced by recent experiences, along with emotional ones, and even habits!

The way people lucid dream is by practicing several exercises/techniques to the point where they become second nature: a special habit if you may! At the same time, they keep the intention/desire of experiencing a dream in which they apply those exercises and realize they are lucid. Now comes the important part: by doing this consistently over periods of days/weeks/months, these exercises will start showing up in your dreams, especially when combined by your desire of becoming lucid...maybe your dream will make you suspicious about something and by that time you will remind yourself that MAYBE you are dreaming....so you will do a reality check and bang: lucid dream!

There are many ways to trigger this "suspicion" that you might be dreaming: maybe it's the fact that you keep seeing this yellow cat in your dreams, or you had a nightmare that you thought just couldn't be real....getting to know your dreams is a big part of it, because you'll get used to these patterns and more aware that they might indicate something important: like you're dreaming! On the other hand, some techniques can be used to fall asleep consciously in the middle of the night, which make you way more alert than usual as you fall asleep, and might just give you the chance of entering in a dream while still being half awake...the famous WILD method :)

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2) in the WBTB method, it says to let your mind stay awake while your body goes to sleep. I don't understand how this is done. if you keep yourself awake, then you aren't going to sleep, therefore can't dream. PLEASE help with this one!

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The WBTB (wake back to bed) is an exercise that many lucid dreamers do, and it basically consists on waking up during the night, do something to get your mind on lucid dreaming (like repeating a sentence "Am I dreaming? Am I dreaming?"), writing down your last dream, or even do some reality checks: what matters is getting focused on your intent! After that, you go back to bed, and may use the occasion to go to sleep and hope to have a lucid dreaming normally, or you can...

WILD (click on the word to read the guide ^^)

WILD is a type of lucid dream which starts with you already being aware it's a dream (instead of realizing that you're dreaming in the middle of the dream). How do you achieve this? By putting yourself in a situation where you're almost about to fall asleep, then gently reminding yourself of your intention to become lucid and letting your body fall asleep while you keep a tiny bit of focus and/or awareness....like if you were floating on a pool!
In some ways, it's very like meditation: you empty your head, relax your body, and just stand there, falling asleep....but not quite :D You still need to keep yourself barely awake recalling that you're waiting for a dream to start....many people tend to be stressed and rigid waiting for something to happen, but WILD is just that: falling asleep...consciously. You do this all the time when for example you fall asleep in front of the television, but in a WILD the main difference is that you're aware that you're falling asleep...at some point, you'll realize that you'll get more and more drowsy and sleepy, and you'll actually start entering in a sleep state: you'll start hearing sounds and voices, kinda like you were right about to...sleep. The trick is maintaining yourself in the line between sleep and awakening, and just relax as your body shuts off and eventually a dream starts to form, like you were experiencing the beginning of a movie. It's more simple than it seems, so give that guide a read ;)

Keep the questions coming, and remember to read the several guides around the starting zone :)

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Originally Posted by NirvanaBlue

hi! obviously, I'm new at lucid dreaming, and I just have a few questions regarding the skill.

[CENTER]1) I've read to do a reality check in your dream, but if you're not yet lucid, then how can you make yourself do a reality check when you're not yet in control of your dream? can doing them so often in the day make you do it in your dream?

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1.) First off--you are generally "in control" of a dream at all times--we just tend to dream on "auto-pilot": moving from one task to the next without actually thinking about why we are doing any of it. Most people live this way which is why they do not lucid dream.

Once you begin questioning whether or not something is a dream while you are awake, like Zoth said, this habit will transfer to your dream life. From there, you can then realize you are dreaming, which allows you to make a different decision than you might otherwise make. Imagine that at school/work, you suddenly realize you are dreaming. Are you going to just sit in your chair and listen to the lecture from your teacher or boss? Of course not. None of it's real, so you are going to do something awesome. It's not a matter of control so much as it is realizing the options you already have.

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it says to let your mind stay awake while your body goes to sleep. I don't understand how this is done. if you keep yourself awake, then you aren't going to sleep, therefore can't dream. PLEASE help with this one!

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2. You are actually describing WILD, which is a type of lucid dream entry. It is entirely possible for the mind to remain conscious while the body sleeps. In fact, your mind comes back "online" every night while you dream, so it isn't so much doing something different as remaining aware of what happens every single night. And you are right--if you don't fall asleep, you won't dream. You want to remain aware while falling asleep.

Check out the link Zoth posted :)

1. first, reality checks must become a habit, and yes you dream of your habits do you not? then you will dream of doing a reality check, then the conscious mind will be slightly fired up, but its up for you to take hold of the realization its a dream.
2. is usually done after 5 or 6 hours of sleep, and you stay up.. for a certain amount of time, personally i perfer to stay right in bed and go for it.
and then go back to bed, and attempt to fall asleep while keeping your mind conscious, as a dream forms in your mind...lol thats why i perfer to stay in bed, im already relaxed enough to slip right back in :) good luck and i hope i helped

Zoth... :)

Acillis
I don't think habits show up in dreams for me ever. Habits are things that you do unconsciously. Normally dreams seem to be taken from things that you consciously think throughout the day. For instance, I don't pop my fingers in dreams, but I do have a lot of dreams based on movies and television shows, which I think about throughout the day when bored. Or things that I study.

3cat.
Not everyone is in control in their dreams. Some people are just watchers in their dreams instead of an active participant. These are what i call conscious and unconscious dreams. If I am in the dream making decisions, conscious (99% of my dreams). If I don't make the decisions, unconscious.

Blue.
Check out the threads that Zoth posted as well as the welcome threads, and the things sent to you in the welcome PM. We choose these things to put in there carefully so that we can get people started on the right foot from the start.

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Not everyone is in control in their dreams. Some people are just watchers in their dreams instead of an active participant. These are what i call conscious and unconscious dreams. If I am in the dream making decisions, conscious (99% of my dreams). If I don't make the decisions, unconscious.

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That's a good point, Sensei, but the third-person view does not lack control because it lacks a body (which is what I assume you mean by being a "watcher") or any point of reference in the dream. If there was no control at all, lucidity would not be an option, as that person would have no control over their own thoughts and arguably would never be able to take advantage of their daytime training. One can train themselves (via imagined scenarios) to recognize the bodiless state and therefore make a different choice--to be lucid, to make a body, or remain bodiless. Semi-lucid and even non-lucid third-person dreams also often contain a scripting element as well--being able to direct the dream plot and create a new one, even when the participant is not aware they are dreaming.

My experience with this is from DEILDing into dreams where I possessed no body. The first few times this happened, it was a bit frustrating because--as you mention--it seemed as though I had no control to explore. However, I realized it was very easy to make a new body, once I understood that I was in control: just act as though I already had a body. From that point on the dream became first person.

I'm not sure the OP lacks a dream body, however, as I feel they would have made this explicit in their question.

I do not mean a watcher as in 3rd person, :P I should be more clear. I have been lucid in 3rd person before.

As a frame of reference, how many non lucid dreams do you have at night? What length are they?

As a watcher, I mean simply that you are not making any decisions. There is a plot, you follow it. Words come out that are not yours. Reasoning comes out that you didn't think of.

In almost all of my dreams, I am there. There may be a plot and other things, but I choose what i am doing based on the universe around me (until I get lucid). If I start questioning logic, fake memories come in. I have often stopped in a dream and pondered what to do next without being lucid. It is a matter of what I call "general dream awareness". Without any general dream awareness, even if you realize that you are dreaming, it will feel like you are "having a dream of a lucid dream".

It took me a long time to have a dream without any semblance of control, but I was able to understand people a little better after. You probably thought as soon as you learned about LDing that it makes perfect sense because when you realize that it is a dream, you will be able to make awesome decisions. People who have never been "present" in a dream generally remember dreams mostly as memories of the past, rather than as a present event. They often question if LDing is even possible before they have an LD. The only.way that i have found for me to raise my "presentness" in a dream, is to raise my recall, because generally it goes up with recall.

Hope this makes sense. If it doesn't, I shall draw you a diagram. :D not joking.

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Originally Posted by Sensei

I do not mean a watcher as in 3rd person, :P I should be more clear. I have been lucid in 3rd person before.

As a frame of reference, how many non lucid dreams do you have at night? What length are they?

As a watcher, I mean simply that you are not making any decisions. There is a plot, you follow it. Words come out that are not yours. Reasoning comes out that you didn't think of.

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To answer your first question, I feel I am average: I have about 5-7 dreams per night. The first dream is roughly 5-10 minutes long and occurs about 20 minutes after falling asleep. The next dream is a bit longer. The dreams of the morning are about 50 minutes to an hour long. I usually consider a dream to be interchangeable with a REM cycle.

I don't always recall everything that happens in these, and I feel it is rare that I remember a "whole" dream, in the sense of an entire block of REM sleep. Even when lucid I tend to forget parts of them.

I think I understand the conscious/unconscious bit, though I am a bit skeptical :P I once had an NLD where I was a serial killer. It was very vivid, and while I did not kill anyone in the dream, I was constantly calculating how I could dispose of evidence so as not to be caught by the police. I was amazingly cold about the whole process. This was an earlier dream so lasted about 15 minutes or so. When the dream ended I was very disturbed and could not return to sleep for some time, simply because it had felt real. However, it helped me understand the instability of what we think of as a "self."

I think the "you" in your dreams is always the same "you" (universally speaking) in that our identities are not fixed but actually very amorphous and stream-like. To borrow a Buddhist metaphor, the mind is a stream; it is never the same and yet never not itself. Our minds (our "selves") change based on reactions to stimuli; in dreams this is the reaction to the dream plot. If the dream plot says we will be the opposite sex, we react as such. If it says we will be a police officer, or a killer, for the most part we go along with it, unless we have trained our awareness to notice that these identities do not coincide with our waking life identity. We are making choices, but they are Hobson choices because we don't truly understand that there is an alternative--that none of it is real.

In essence, I question whether or not there are any dreams where "we" are not doing anything, or making any conscious choices--even the dreams that seem like memories, and not present experiences. We may not be aware we are dreaming, but we feel that we are living and doing and "making the best of it" because people never consciously make mistakes. Gurdjieff once said that it was man's greatest mistake to believe he had a stable self:

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We think that if a man is called Ivan he is always Ivan. Nothing of the kind. Now he is Ivan, in another minute he is Peter, and a minute later he is Nicholas, Sergius, Matthew, Simon. And all of you think he is Ivan. You know that Ivan cannot do a certain thing. He cannot tell a lie for instance. Then you find he has told a lie and your are surprised he could have done so. And, indeed, Ivan cannot lie; it is Nicholas who lied. And when the opportunity presents itself Nicholas cannot help lying. You will be astonished when you realize what a multitude of these Ivans and Nicholases live in one man. If you learn to observe them there is no need to go to a cinema.

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I think dreams provide one of the easiest ways to show us all these different identities that can live in one person, simply be presenting us with plots that draw all these characters out. A human being can go in any direction with enough prompting, and the appropriate social, cultural, and otherwise karmic evolutions of mind.