Changing Clarity and Stability

**Zuma** · 07-11-2009 08:58 PM

How do I make my dreams more stable and clear?

Sometimes when I someone, their face and body will change every once in awhile.

Is just the nature of dreams or is there a way to make it more stable? It seems like the more vivid a dream is, the more stable the environment is. Do these go hand and hand?

Is there a way to actually control this or does REM just spike sometimes to make the dream temporarily more vivid.

**spiritofthewolf** · 07-11-2009 09:25 PM

what i personally do when i become lucid, is i just sit there for about 5 seconds.. i just let everything come into focus.. i look around at everything and let the details set in and get myself stable enough so i can keep myself focused... some people state that yelling "Clarity now" makes it increase.. it has worked before way back in the beginning when i first started, but does not anymore...

Just stay calm, relax, let yourself and your surroundings come into focus.. once your calm and if your surroundings have come in good... go have fun!

**Bucketheadjamz** · 07-11-2009 10:57 PM

Rubbing your hands together is a common way to increase stability.

My guess is that stability and vividness do go (at least somewhat) hand in hand.

EDIT: Interesting idea about REM spiking. If you assume that DMT (a psychedelic substance secreted in the brain) is the cause of dreams, then it is not unreasonable to say that you are experiencing a spike up of REM/DMT concentration. The effects of LSD come in waves so I don't see why DMT couldn't. Just a thought.

**Zuma** · 07-11-2009 11:32 PM

Yea, I'd really like to know how REM works exactly, if it is in waves or not.

And Bucket, I've tried hand rubbing a lot, and yea it works but not as well as I want it to. Yelling 'clarity now' works for me sometimes.

I do agree with you about the just standing back and looking around calmly until it gets better. I did this morning and it worked, but then it would fade every once in awhile. Problem is sometimes my dreams start to fade when I stop moving, if I'm constantly moving and touching things, seeing things then I know my dream can go on forever (until I wake up naturally).

Maybe if I just look around slowly while rubbing my hands and quieting my mind.

I think my main problem though is just people's faces or objects changing. I summoned someone this morning and then her face started to change, actually her face was on a different person's body. It looked really weird, I got mad so I grabbed her head and threw it off of the fake body, haha. New heads kept popping up but they didn't look exactly like her. It was annoying.

**Zuma** · 07-11-2009 11:40 PM

I just remembered another variable.

Sometimes my dream begins to fade but I stay with it in the darkness until something appears and I have a false awakening.

Upon false-waking up, my dreamworld has all of a sudden become extremely vivid. It's almost as if my mind is trying to trick me to make me believe what I'm seeing is a non-dream by making everything extremely stable and lifelike.

Usually the normal reality checks I use do not even work when this happens. In an extreme case, I must of done at least ten reality checks and they all passed even though I knew I was dreaming. I checked my hand a bunch, kept looking away and looking back and I always had five fingers, couldn't get my finger through my palm, and words and sentences were stable and constent. It was awesome.

I wonder if there is a way to harness these occurences and control their likelihood.

**SpaceTime** · 07-13-2009 10:48 AM

Eat a lot of cheese before going to sleep.

**Lucidbulbs** · 07-13-2009 06:22 PM

Oy, it's all about focus, you drift off and things don't stabilize, sometimes it's because your REM is shifting to NREM that it loses focus, so no matter what you do you'll lose the dream, but otherwise, just focus on the details and such and things don't change.

**Redrivertears** · 07-13-2009 06:49 PM

Heya there,

I'm not convinced vividness and stability go hand in hand. I've had very vivid dreams that nevertheless had a lot of constantly changing elements like you describe. I've as of yet no idea if its possible to make things more 'stable' in a dream.

However, making the dream more vivid in itself tends to be a matter of paying attention to my dream surroundings for me. Simply taking a few moments to look around at the sights, to try and smell the scents, to touch things and feel them, tends to make a dream more vivid (and incidentally helps to keep the dream going if you feel it starting to fade). I think its this principle that the popular 'hand rubbing' technique is actually based on, because with hand rubbing, creating and paying attention to dreamsensations is exactly what you're doing.

The opposite works as well. The fastest way for me to wake myself up is simply to stop paying attention to my surroundings. Sit down, close my eyes, cut myself off from the dream, will pretty much end a dream in seconds for me.

I believe that 'sleeping' and 'dreaming' are very much related to turning your attention inwards, away from the external and bodily stimuli that assault us every waking second. All the various techniques and things I've read, going from how to fall asleep, to how to get to sleep paralysis, to stabilizing dreams, all seem to follow this underlying concept of 'attention shifting away from the external, to the internal'. In that same vein, the more attention you pay to your dreams in general (by writing them down in a dream journal, for instance), the more vivid your dreams will start to become automatically (and hence the easier to remember as well).

Just my 2 cents,

-Redrivertears-

**The Cusp** · 07-13-2009 09:43 PM

As for stability, it's simple. Everything requires your attention to exist. If things are unstable it's because you aren't focused enough on them and they change or fall apart. Although it is possible to focus on the changes, making the theme of changes a stable part of the dream.

Likewise, Vividness depends on how much attention you give something. Nightmares are always vivid because you give the nightmare elements too much attention and they grow out of control.

Take an RL example where the person in bed with you snores and you find it really annoying. The more you focus on it, the more annoying it get, and the more annoyed you are, the worse that snoring seems. Same thing in dreams.

**Banana** · 07-14-2009 05:43 AM

my old stragety waws to say or yell CLARIFY but it didnt work

i tried CLARITY and it worked. i could see alot farther then and it seemed to have worked pretty good

try just telling your dream to become clearer. it will usually listen