Introduction

A warning: this is going to be long. most importantly this is not supposed to be any attack or negative criticism of the hard work that goes into the invention and writing of lucid dreaming techniques and guides

This forum is full of threads started by beginners stating that whatever technique they are using just isn’t working for them. To answer the question of exactly why lucid dreaming is difficult we have to consider that to become lucid you are rebelling against a lifetime of conditioning, and a vast amount of mental information, that has programmed you to be unaware and non-lucid in your dreams. While on a conscious level you may be enthused, excited, and fired up for lucid dreaming on your first night, as far as your unconscious is concerned lucidity is a completely foreign concept. You simply haven’t built the bridges and forged the neural connections in your unconscious that say that you are a lucid dreamer.

While this process can be bypassed to some degree through phenomena of auto and hypnotic suggestion (which are designed to feed information directly into the unconscious mind), for the majority of techniques, and the majority of people, becoming a ‘natural’ lucid dreamer is a matter of time and hard work. Time and work is necessary to replace the neural circuitry of a non-lucid dreamer, some succeed, most fail.


Any technique can yield lucidity on a regular basis, all that matters is mindset

Through experimentation with a wide range of DILD techniques, as well as looking at the effects of beliefs, confidence and intention on lucid dreaming, I have come to the conclusion that:

either

Any technique has the potential to yield lucid dreaming on a nightly basis over time, all that is important is the dreamer’s mindset and, above all, self-belief

or

Technique is entirely irrelevant and unnecessary when compared to the importance of the dreamer’s intent and lucid dreaming mindset

To explain why I believe this I’m going to explore the idea of ‘method’. For any lucid dreaming technique to be truly a method it has to be a) valid and b) reliable. No lucid dreaming technique is either of these things. Validity is the degree to which an output is caused by an input, in this case the output is lucidity and the input is any technique (say, ADA). I you practice ADA and you have a lucid dream, was it caused by that technique? You may think so, but the next day you practice ADA and hey wait a second, no lucid dream, what’s going on? You’ve replicated the same input (ADA) and yet the output (lucidity) is different, in other words the technique is not reliable. In a lab if you react oxygen and hydrogen you will always get hydrogen oxide, water. But as we all know from bitter experience, lucid dreaming is nowhere near as clear cut.


Intention

There must be some other cause, some other variable, outside of the technique that caused lucidity the first time and was absent the second time. Intent. The word intent comes from the Latin root ‘intendere’ which means to ‘stretch toward’ or ‘aim at’. As dreamers we intend, we stretch our will toward the goal of lucidity, a technique is a vehicle for this intent.

Silverbullet has written an excellent (if vague) guide to directing intent towards the goal of lucid dreaming: http://www.dreamviews.com/f12/silver...eaming-117015/, but because he kinda didn’t explain intent too well there was a hostile reaction from some towards what was seen as an attempt to attack the hard work of lucid dreamers out there who had worked to write the various tutorials on the site and so it has slipped into relative obscurity. The message behind it was important, lucid dreaming isn’t about any technique, it’s about you, as an individual.

In the ‘Art of Dreaming’ by Carlos Casteneda Don Juan explains that intent is how ‘sorcerers’ ‘do without doing’. That’s one way of putting it, but I believe intent is the active process by which we form the unconscious mindset, the neural connections, (that I mentioned earlier) of being a lucid dreamer.

Techniques are vehicles for intent, our conscious mind needs to attach our attempts at lucid dreaming to some concrete process in order for our unconscious mind to get on with the important work of intending.

That is why I am not saying to abandon technique or that technique is bad, some people can intend without a technique but the vast majority of us need some vector through which to channel our intent.

What’s important though is that you realise that any technique at all can be this vehicle, all the you need is to realise that it is you doing the lucid dreaming, not the technique. The reason we get stuck in ruts, dry spells, there are a number of reasons that we may not lucid dream on any given night (alcohol, fatigue, stress), but what causes you to become lucid? It’s certainly not 10 RCs each day, it’s how those RCs direct your intention.


Making lucid dreaming about YOU again

Review your early goals, we all make the most ambitious and exciting goals when we first learn of the possibilities of lucid dreaming, recapture that excitement.
Repeat to yourself a simple affirmation, make it present tense and positive, ‘I am a natural lucid dreamer’, really feel the meaning behind the words, so that get that excited feeling in your stomach.
Meditate, meditation is a great tool to connect with your inner mental strength and renewing self-confidence. It can also give you access to states at which your unconscious mind is open to suggestion.


See Also:
This should be required viewing: Advanced lucid dreaming: part 6 - YouTube although it’s nominally about meditation, the real message behind is to put faith in yourself, not techniques
http://www.dreamviews.com/f11/how-ta...eaming-120910/