Theory for More Lucid Dreams - your thoughts?

So, I have this theory. You can practice paying more attention to your surroundings in order to get more general awareness to identify the differences between the waking life and dreams, which is one of the biggest steps to becoming lucid more frequently. So what if you (this may seem boring) used your lucid dreaming, to note and practice telling yourself your dreaming. For instance, if you do reality checks while you know your dreaming, pay close attention and practice in a dream, in theory you would be even better at identifying dreams and becoming lucid more frequently.

I haven't had a lucid dream to attempt this theory on, but you can increase awareness in a dream, couldn't you do this? What do you think?

If this doesn't make sense, I just got off of work and I'm tired so I apologize.

I guess what you want to earn is simply knowing that you are dreaming without any RCs. This actually comes (I think) with dreams anyway, but sure this might work, if I can I'll give it a try. Sacrifice some for even more!

Well see if you make it a point to look at the dream for a while and practice, it'll make it easier because you actually observed the dream while questioning and concluding. So even if you don't spend an entire lucid dream doing this, if you do a habit reality check while lucid, conclude you're dreaming, you'll develop a habit and be more encouraged even when you go through the waking life to do reality checks. Just a thought. I woke up just now so sorry if this is written terribly.

To have more lucid dreams, ultimately, you would have to be proficient and being able to accept all the tools of the trade. And how you go about learning the mechanics of those techniques etc. as being routes towards lucidity, you'll realize they're just supplements. Of course, there's probably a few techniques we are all naturally able to be better at for various of reasons, but not allowing yourself to stick towards one technique alone can save you a lot of hassle in trying to take advantage of those chances of becoming lucid, whether it's:

- Doing an RC when you have abnormal set of emotions that you don't express as much in waking life

- Seeing a pig or animal talk and speaking fluently

- Or just knowing for sure you're dreaming


The thing is, when newcomers try to understand the concepts behind lucid dreaming (not assuming any of you are by the way), they tend to focus on what is the most minimalist type of method because they want the instant gratification of being aware of their dreams and doing whatever based on their level of willpower to make it so. And the more you get into understanding not just your lucids, but non-lucids, you will eventually develop a decent understanding of how you react to the environment, thought-forms/dream characters/figments of your imagination. Not only that:

- The lessons behind the dreams, even if they may be trivial

- Seeing near perfect projections of realities where it's easy for you to think you're really born into them

- Feeling pain and suffering that hopefully lets you develop some empathy and understanding of concepts about the nature of experience

- And much more


It's about knowing how your mind works, and how using things like mantras without adding substance to them most likely will leave you battered up in the end. You have to put a little more effort into this, not only because it's the practical thing to do, but the fact that you as the owner of your own state of being is expressing aspects of your mind that you find that doing these techniques, etc. will be beneficial to you. Because while you're saying a mantra over and over, the critical factor in your mind is going to go,

"Alright! Alright! I get it already, god dang it! I'll try to do something about it"

But if you attempt to put why you want to do this, how you'll do it, foreseeing yourself doing it, and being able to do it again after you've done it, the critical factor might say,

"Oh alright, I see where you're going with this, I'll try to slip it in for you and get back to you."

Of course, I was just using the conversation for the sake of an example, but hopefully you get what I meant. But yes, despite everyone having their own on and offs with which method works for them, a general idea is that if you show why lucid dreaming is beneficial to you to your mind, one goal at a time, in theory, you will have more lucid dreams. It's about the person developing a higher state of inward concentration that reduces the distractions to increase the chances of the goals becoming reality to them ;seeing yourself devoting wholly to a task one step at a time will help you grow as one who embraces both dreaming and waking life.

I appreciate the insight but fail to see where my theory is taken into account. I guess in a way you confirmed that it would work in retrospect being that you're describing watching the dream world of your mind.

Pro tip:

It's more of an obvious theory that's common on dreaming forums like this. The type of awareness you were referring to is just being mindful of your surrounding in waking life, and I felt I didn't need to add much to that other than trying to do the same in your dreams. The "day residue" is a general term to describe that if you practice reality checks, etc., it'll eventually transcend into your dreams. If you add enough visualizations and expecting that those habits will occur in your dreams as well, it should work.

But if what I stated fails to fit your theory, then I guess I can't get any basic than that honestly. Your goal with the theory is to be aware of reality itself in hopes that you'll develop the same curiosity and questioning in your dreams, and ultimately, it's about going back and forth with acknowledging both waking and dreaming life. If not focusing on being aware of your surroundings and having better concentration fails to fit the theory, then I don't know what will.

For the last year or so, I've been practicing RCs in my lucids just for fun.. never thought about it helping my lucidity over all. Something sorta related that I've been doing lately, which I do when a lucid is lasting particularly long, is I make myself start mentally journaling the dream.. WHILE still in the LD. In a recent one, a DC was talking to me and I kinda ignored him for a moment to mentally recap on what had happened so far. That helped me remember it really well when I woke up.

I know that's not the same thing, but I like the way you think. There are things you can do mentally while still in the lucid dream, to help you all around. Cool thread.

ps. I also just got off work so I apologize for my current train of thought :P

Sorry to disagree, oh wise one, (I can see you enjoy talking a lot), but you still miss the point of this theory. The fact that its "obvious" but you miss it clearly shows that your opinion needs to be forfeit. Quickly at that.

I digress. The point is not to have awareness in the waking life (how in the hell did you come up with that), the theory is basic yet you can't grasp the concept. Let me lay it out.

If you practice concepts that you are supposed to practice during the day, to knowingly increase knowledge of what is dream and what is not (follow me yet?) at night, those practice sessons could (in theory) show greater results if you did them frequently In a dream. If you stopped and asked yourself if your dreaming (much like regular reality checks) while looking at a dream scene and actually point out that you're dreaming and simply dedicate lucid sessions to this and only concentrating on the dream, you could have more lucid dreams by being in top notch awareness and familiarity with your dreams.

If you don't understand what I said, and plan to tell me what MY theory implies and is saying, please regard this post as an invitation to not taint this thread any longer, thank you. Also I would like to point, I understand "tools" for lucid dreaming, I've been doing it for 4 years now, and would appreciate it if you could tone down your ego a bit.

Your theory is correct, but sadly, things aren't that easy.

You can actually enhance many skills in a lucid dream. From physical performance (there's a brazilian study that showed that students can increase accuracy in a "throw a coin into a glass" exercise by practicing in a lucid dream), and if we take dream as an (even higher) degree of mental visualization, then we can take for granted that the fact that you are dreaming about exercising can actually have impact on your muscular mass. This is thought to apply to virtually any physical exercise (even things like playing the piano), and it's also thought that it applies to other mental exercises.

The problem lies exactly on the concept of "becoming" lucid. Despite the several ways of inducing a lucid dream, you need a certain "state" of mind to do it. You could call this something like "constant questioning" or awareness. And you probably already guessed the issue with this: it's not an easy feat to accomplish in a regular basis. We know that certain habits take much longer than the 21 days that once the majority of people thought an habit took to form, and lucid dreaming seems to be on of those extreme cases that might take quite a while to get really sticky into your daily routine. Just ask people like Sageous, who took several years to reach his current state of lucid frequency.

Besides, lucid dreams are not quite common, and don't usually last more than 1 hour, so you'd have pretty limited opportunities to practice. It's a good theory, that would indeed work with a large sample of lucid dreams, but it is not very practical. I really like your chain of thoughts though :)

Edit: reading through the posts reminded me of something interesting! There's lots of evidence in cognitive psychology research that you have better chances to recall a specific memory if you are in the same environment of when you previously formed it. That means that being in a lucid and building this "mental note" of lucidity might have indeed some more powerful effects than to simply create a mental note while awake!

That's really interesting! Thank you, I'm going to do that as well, maybe create an alarm system in the dream to remind me to recap every 5 minutes. Though I might need to use the alarm once I work on time extension.

I think it would be well worth it to use at least 1 In 3 lucid dreams to focus on it if it makes your chances of becoming lucid higher, ya know?

Also about the physical practice, I practiced juggling a soccer ball in my dream once and found amazing results when I did it in my waking life. I also apologise for any error, I'm on my phone lol

Wouldn't doing that in a dream be the same as doing it while awake? The objective for both exercises is to distinguish one world from the other. Plus, you already invest so much of your time to try to achieve lucidity, it wouldn't be very satisfying to do the same after you've actually achieved lucidity. Just my 2 cents.

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Originally Posted by NickCamp

I think it would be well worth it to use at least 1 In 3 lucid dreams to focus on it if it makes your chances of becoming lucid higher, ya know?

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You'd need many hours of active awareness, it just wouldn't be worth it.

Hard work, Aka the result of more lucid dreams, would be more satisfying than having only one a week. In regards to your second comment, that's why it's a theory, to me it makes sense that you would do better if you made it a point to examine your dream world more and do the checks. I mean we live in reality and do reality checks which is a part of the process but if you're in a dream, where you can literally check and get the results that you are dreaming, it would mean more and also make you more comfortable with identifying it as a dream, does that make sense?

Not only that but you'd be practicing self control, focus and patience which are also key for LD's. if my theory is correct I see more benefits from it than just brushing it off. Next LD I get I'm going to attempt it and ill get back to y'all about it