This may sound like the lamest advice you've ever heard, but bear with me for a moment.

Believe it or not, living out your wildest fantasies in living detail gets old after a while. When you wake up, you face the fact that all those sexy situations basically amount to masturbation. All those amazing conversations are just you talking to yourself. Sure, you gain access to creative and inventive parts of your consciousness that you don't normally connect to -- and don't get me wrong, that is wonderful and important! -- but you're still running up against the limits of your own mind.

It's time to go further.

The best part is, it's simple: Do nothing.

I mean it. Do nothing. As soon as the lucid dream stabilizes around you, using whatever techniques you've learned to accomplish that, resist the temptation to create some new fantasy. Instead, just ignore whatever people or events are moving around you, battling for your attention. No matter how fascinating, intriguing, scary or repulsive the dream gets, just ignore it with calm dispassion. You're a lucid dreamer. Nothing can harm you. Likewise, nothing can interest you.

People will approach you with beautiful things to look at, delicious foods to taste, dangerous weapons to murder you with, or eyes to fall in love with. Pay them no mind.

Instead, will them away (if you can do so without distraction), and just sit down calmly wherever you are. What I like to do at this point is look at the ground or the bench or wherever you're sitting. Reach out and touch it. Run your fingers over it. Feel how real it is. Notice how you can feel every tendon in your hand as you touch it. Knock on it. Notice how the sound vibrates through it in exactly the right way. When you're nice and calm, look up. If you're outside, look at the trees. Notice how they sway so gently in the wind and how the light dapples through them in exactly the right way. Listen. You'll probably hear birds somewhere. You might see one or a few gliding up in the sky, making their way somewhere. You may hear the sound of distant traffic. You may see a jet plane high in the sky.

By now, after a few moments of calm, detached observation of basic details in the fabric of the world around you, you'll notice that it has become perfectly and utterly real. There is no sense of fuzzy dreaminess, no detectable difference between the world you're seeing and what you normally refer to as the waking world. Try your reality tests. They'll pass.

What you do at this point is up to you. Explore the world. Smell the flowers. Embrace the miracle of sensation. I tend to ponder my waking life and realize things that have forever changed the way I see the waking world. Sometimes I'm visited by people who identify themselves as higher beings and teach me things about the universe, sometimes forcefully. You may find it difficult to wake up from this state. Try not to be afraid. You will eventually.