Thread: What's up with those "rules" about lucid dreaming?

I would not call them rules. Everyone is free to do whatever they like and whatever works for them in their lucid dreams. These things that you refer to as "rules" are things that people have come up with to resolve issues they have experienced while lucid dreaming. Some of these issues such as trouble with stabilization are very common. Of course if you wanted to you could come up with your own method to resolve stabilization issues. There are people on this forum who had been lucid dreaming successfully for years without knowing that it was called lucid dreaming or what the recommended techniques were, and if they also encountered stabilization issues, they on their own figured out how to resolve them. However, for those who prefer to not only use their own approach, they have the option of reading techniques that have worked for other people, and then they have the option of either trying some of them out to see whether these techniques also work for them, or deciding not to follow the ideas in LD tutorials, but come up with their own instead. None of these approaches are wrong. If you feel that tutorials on LD might limit your imagination, you might consider not reading them or not following them. This could lead you to find new innovative ways of doing things, and in that case, please tell us about them, unless you so strongly feel that it would limit our imaginations, then feel free to keep your methods a secret. Whether you do things your own way or follow ideas proposed by others, either way, there is no guarantee that you will be successful LDing faster: some methods work better for some people, some people achieve lucidity and stabilization faster than others, no method fits all. There are some methods however that are less likely than others: if you come up with your own method which is that every time you begin to suspect that it is a dream you firmly tell yourself that such thoughts are nonsense, and then make sure to think of something else, I doubt this unique method would help you lucid dreaming.