Thread: Dream stabilization - what works best for you?

so in my opinion stabilizing the dream is kind of overrated. you force it way too much.

sometimes it helps to do some stabilizing to get some vividness or to ground yourself into the dream but most of the time i dont care. i get lucid and i think about what do do and just do it. the dream will be stable when you expect it to be or other way round: since you care and worry so much about stability you have problems with stability. its bad schema.
you say it occures after WBTB´s. that doesnt say much because it might be that you dream already for an hour after your wbtb and therefore are probably deeply engaged in your dream.
stability/vividnessproblems sometimes occure at the beginning of WILDS because you transition from waking to dreaming and it needs some time. the best thing to do it let yourself some time to build up the dream. look around, hear and feel, ground yourself in your enviornment until you feel like you are completely in the dream then you can start do whatever you like.

in my opinion more important is to engage and ground yourself in the dream. participate. look around, hear, feel, taste etc. dont do it in a forcing way but enjoy what you can sense. that stabilizes on its own because you engage with what you sense.

detailed your points:
1. works but dont only touch but look for details, smell something etc.
2. you might spinn around slowly, more a turn around. this helps too but the chances are way lower for a teleport/landscapechange (FA)
4. again bad schema i would call it. there is nothing about darkness. you can even close your eyes without waking up(even tho some say the opposit) its all about expectation. when you are in a bad lighted room: dont care about it when you make it a problem it will get a problem when you just ignore it and are like: wait what is this, and look at something it will get brighter by itself and suddenly the room is not dark anymore. you also can turn on a light, a flashlight, turn on nightmode, open a window etc.
5. one could totaly sit a whole dream talking to one person. again engage in the dream. when the dialoge is intersting and you not only stare like a robot but look the person in the face and look for details, notice where you are how it feels etc you wont wake up from it. again if you are stressed because you think when i stay here this and that long i will wake up you will get what you expect.
6. when your other senses wont work give it more time and try harder. when you smell something and it has no odor smell again, try to smell nuances, you "know" that it has to have a smell and smell it as long until it starts smelling, same with taste.
7.trick yourself is exactly what this whole thread is about. when you take something like a magic potion and you expect it to stabilze the dream probably it will. and why? because you expect it. does it change anything? why should something you drink make the dream longer?

i would recommend you to relax more. when you get lucid do some long breath thru your pinched nose and tell yourself this is all a dream and consider what this means (you can do whatever you want to, no boundries, no obligations etc). this hightens your awareness. you dont have to run or stress things. stress, worrys and excitment tends to wake one up when thinking to much about it. when you approach everything with a calm mind the dream will be more stable. when something is not working (any dreamcontrol or something) again dont stress about it. do another goal and try it later or think about another approach. maybe a dc can help you or you can use a tool to get what you need etc.

and like you say. even when the dream ends (maybe its just not your fault and you cant change it because you got lucid at the end of a REM-phase) just stay calm dont move and visualiize the last dream and soon you will find yourself in the next one still lucid.

and another thing to stabilize your dream when you notice you need a FAST rescue is: let yourself fall backwards because of the feel of gravity and the feel of the impact you ground yourself pretty quickly in the dream. atleast for me it helped some times

A very good post by RelaxandDream! I agree with everything he said. I don't spend much time to stabilize (for better or worse) and instead focus on my goals. Goals are very important in keeping you lucid and engaged with the dream. Lately I have been learning to teleport so I have been relying on more techniques than normal. Here is what works for me:

1. If my vision goes black I grab something, anything and really feel the texture. This also keeps me in the same environment because if I feel the same thing I must be in the same environment.
2. I eat something. My favorite dream food are those sugar cookies with the icing on top or those Limón chips that Lays makes. I should have my dream guide make me a stability potions like you said.
3. In emergency situations I do exactly what RelaxandDream said! I sometimes jump off buildings because the anticipation of the impact makes it an extra vivid sensation.

Don't avoid darkness. You can spend a whole dream in a dim room or under streetlighting just fine. It is only the expectation of waking up that is the problem with darkness.

In general, my best way of stabilizing is by simply incorporating all 5 of my senses.

hey guys, thanks everybody for sharing you insights... it's true, my lucid dreams aren't very relaxed sometimes, because i think they mostly occur on the really last leg of my rem sleep - it's literally a race with time. i have had lucid dreams deeper into the night and didn't have that much problem with stability then, but the other times, late in the mornings i have to really work on staying in the dream and then i can often observe it fading while engaging my senses. nevertheless, forceful or not, it has helped me to stay in quite long sequences of dreams that kept fading but then luckily recontinued (after exertion of some force). in those dreams keeping busy seems the key, i can literally observe how the background fades if i do not engage enough. someone recommended somewhere else to walk into rain, i think i'll try that. the falling backwards sounds good too, but really like a last resort.
for the dark part - if it is night in the dream it doesn't have the same effect, the other thing is just an observation and i think could be logically explained that a dark environment has less details to show, so when you are balancing on the thin rope of a very unstable dream - for example because you have passed your wake up time - i have noticed that staying out of the dark helps, nothing more nothing less, no fear of darkness or such. otherwise dream control hasn't been much of an issue, i always find a way around. i just wished sometimes to hold the dream longer and keep it more vivid, exactly because there is so much fun stuff to do - but the fun stuff alone is not sufficient - i can easily wake up during the crucial point of a conversation, mid flight or at another very engaging point of the dream. happy to hear more suggestions for practical things to try out...

rubbing hands together can help, it works for me. You can do it while walking, flying, talking, it's not distracting. when a dream is fading it's even possible to grab hands together and still feel it when you're feeling the rest of your body lying in a bed then it's pretty easy to catch a LD again.

Objects and surroundings touching is super effective!

I'm used to touch everything around me, the background.
But also my own hands (rubbing them is really efficient), and lately I discovered that blowing on them works too, and have a very important benefit : it calms down. Blowing gently and being able to feel it involves some concentration and some relaxation.

Very recently I also found out something to struggle against one problem I often have : while flying I have no contact with the material background, that's why I often need to touch back down in order to stabilise the dream, sometimes several times. But when I carry any small object with me (a rock, a bunch of sand, a piece of stick...), I can feel and touch it while I am flying, without needing to have contact with the rest of the landscape. So I recommend it to people who, like me, have trouble during flying sessions

Originally Posted by LuneBleue

I'm used to touch everything around me, the background.
But also my own hands (rubbing them is really efficient), and lately I discovered that blowing on them works too, and have a very important benefit : it calms down. Blowing gently and being able to feel it involves some concentration and some relaxation.

Very recently I also found out something to struggle against one problem I often have : while flying I have no contact with the material background, that's why I often need to touch back down in order to stabilise the dream, sometimes several times. But when I carry any small object with me (a rock, a bunch of sand, a piece of stick...), I can feel and touch it while I am flying, without needing to have contact with the rest of the landscape. So I recommend it to people who, like me, have trouble during flying sessions

with this i would recommend to focus on the sensation of flying itself. feel the acceleration feel the wind blowing in your face and your body etc. you just need to focus a little on it and you will start feeling it and then you can keep a little of concentration on that sensation.

it is the same with smell and taste sometimes. most of the time one smells nothing or sometimes you dont tast something you put in your mouth but when you dont give up instantaneously and really give it a moment and concentrate and expect it to have a smell or taste it will come up!

Commanding stability doesn't work for me. What does work is hand rubbing and focusing on what I see (describing what I see in detail to myself). I haven't tried spinning yet.

Here's what happened to me. I used to worry alot about stability, as I was waking up only seconds after lucidity. Then I realized that I had convinced myself that the dream would destabilize when I became lucid. Once I let go of that, my stability improved greatly, and my dream life benefited.

However, when I do start to see the dream destabilize, I just assure myself it will become stable while focusing on the closest object.

I've also read that some people do math in their dreams to make it more clear and to avoid "drifting away". It works quite well for me to keep the mind at bay.

Last night, in my lucid dream, I knocked on stuff like a door. Simple but it helps.

So far I've only had spontaneous DILD - if that's the right word for it. At some point in my dream I just realise I'm dreaming and become lucid. If it's not because I checked my hands and tried to count my fingers I will do so afterwards. And also some more times during the dream to stabilise it. Weird looking hands are a very reliable dream-thing for me. And flying.
Gaining height is a good sign and losing height is usually a bad thing

...I have big problems staying in my dreams for long. I will start yelling for clarity or tell myself over and over again that I am dreaming... and sometimes that will stabilise the dream for a moment... but sometimes I have a feeling that it just gets me confused.

I am then aware of being in bed, sometimes I can hear the music that I've been listening to before I fell asleep or can see the lamp/ceiling of my roof. I'm not sure if I'm actually seeing and hearing these things or if I'm just imagining it. Do my eyelids flutter? Or are they actually closed and I just *think* I can see my room?
Anyways I then try very hard to hold on to the dream but it will eventually get all mixed up and slip away and then.. I just open my eyes and am awake.

I think I never had a lucid dream that just become a non-lucid dream. I just wake up right away.

I guess I have to try and remember using other stabilisation techniques. Touching things and looking for details worked for me once or twice, but letting myself fall back just woke me up, probably because it remembered me of me being in bed.

I'd be happy to read of other ideas to stabilise and prolong the dream and hope I will remember to try out some of them.

Like with a lot of previous posters, incorporating all my senses, and really noticing all the details helps.

Also here's what kills the dream for me. Excitement, stalling in one place for too long undecided, trying to do too much dream control work like changing environments.

Also, you get what you expect. The dreams I felt I would be lucid for longer, I was. And in the dreams I thought I'd wake up double quick, I did. Despite all the senses work.