Thread: Sensei's Secrets

This is a thread about all the things that I have found out, either through asking around or trial and error. I hold all of them to be true, but that doesn’t mean that they are true. Judge for yourself. Please don’t add your own “secrets” to this thread, if you want to know my opinion on something not mentioned, have a question about something I didn’t explain well enough, or want to discuss something, then go for it.

This thread was inspired by Fryingman, who kept asking me a bunch of questions on things that I do throughout the day to try and figure me out. After two years I have found a lot of thing that work and do a lot of things every day. I also have things that I do periodically, or when I hit a dry spell, to make sure that I will get back to it.

No one can give you a guide on how you can obtain lucidity

Sorry if this doesn't make much sense, but it is true.

Because no one can be inside of your head, they can only point you in the right way. Every single guide is a personal person's guide through their own mind in order to achieve lucidity.

No technique can make you get lucid, but it can raise the percentage

Pretty much everything is said in this, but I will explain it because I like it!
Let me say that for the last 3 days I have had a great nights sleep
10%
I have said "calm, dream" about a thousand times today.
10%
I did my work right before bed.
10%
woke up 4 times last night.
10%
typed up my tags up the previous night
10%
Had an LD the previous night
10%
I have had approx 600 LDs.
30%

90% for the night, but that doesn't even include a couple things. So if one thing goes off, my LDs suffer immensely. Take out the top one, and I lose 10% for 3 whole days. If I don't have a good schedule, then I will not wake up in the night either. So 20% taken away. If I don't wake up, I don't type tags, 30% taken away. 60% chance for 3 days means that odds support me missing a day. Dropping a day to 50% chance. So, even though the odds are generally for me having an LD, there is no promise of an LD. In fact, odds might say that I should have 90% chance to LD, which should give me 9/10 nights a lucid dream, but if one thing goes wrong, this can spiral to a measly 50% chance, and because of 2 other factors (confidence and expectation), it can make it even less.

So, looking at someone else, you have to reconfigure the whole thing for their own personal LDing practice. When dealing with a noob, we can say that things are quite different.

Slept good the last 3 nights
1%
Forced wake up throughout night
1%
saying mantra (of course dependent on person, effectiveness of mantra, how long they have had the mantra, if they put feeling into it)
2%
DJed
1%
Had 2 LDs
0%

total for night is 5%, 1/20, and on a crappy hard to keep schedule, it will lower it a few times throughout the month, switch it to 4% a few nights and 3% some nights as well, this will barely get you an LD a month. Even so, not the point of this thread. Even if someone did the same things as me throughout the day night only up their LD % by 10% by doing my exact day, because they are going through their own minds. There are things that I do with my mind that may not even help you a little, there are things that I don't do that might make all the difference. I do my thing, you must find your own.

Confidence and Expectation don't boost your lucidity
You have been lied to. I do not believe that confidence and expectation can increase your chances to lucid dream. Confidence gives you the ability to do something with a much higher chance of success. Expectation gives you the mental ability to do something with a higher chance of success. Your ability through expectation and confidence will never go past the ability that you posses.

Confidence and Expectation are interwoven, and very important because if you cannot control it, you will not lucid dream. The 1/20 might go to 1/100 or 1/1000. Controlling this is a major part to LDing. Note: stress is negative expectation when applied to the future, and lack confidence in the future as well. If you are stressed about something at work, your confidence will be down. Some people have the ability to be stressed and to only expect awesome things from the night because the days are evil. This is a bad thing in my opinion as I want LDing to enhance my life, not tear it down

Lucid Dreaming is 100% Mental
haha, most think that they agree with this, but they really don't. They think that some physical thing will give them lucids. Until science can do more to effect the mental I wouldn't count on physical things (REMEE, supplements). I will not go into details, but there are a lot of reasons that I don't do supplements. Spending money is a big one that no one can argue with, so I will leave that one there.

Since LDing is so mental, every technique is either a physical thing to effect your mental, or a description of something mental.
Example 1
I wake up and go back to bed (WBTB)

Now, first is a description of something physical that effects something mental. You aren't after a physical thing to effect your mental, because you can't promise that this physical thing will always provide a mental thing. However, that doesn't mean that the technique is useless. I would recommend looking for the amount of people that try the technique and the amount that succeed with it.

Example 2
You want to let go of your thoughts

The second one is something mental that describes...ish something that is happening in your mind. The second one is actually a good description of something mental. You should look for mental exercises that will give you a better reign over your mind. Sivason's class is amazing for this.
It will build your mental prowess.

WBTB is King
WBTB is the best way to test out mental states and to practice mental exercise. When you get a description like the one above, and you cannot simply grasp that concept, your half awake, half asleep mind normally will have a better chance at it. The drawback is that you are worse at concentrating. Try a dream yoga class ("energy flow simulation" or something similar) in day and then during a WBTB, and you will notice that you can more easily accomplish this in a WBTB. Try something that is more… concentration based (sensory awareness, immunity to shock) and you will find the opposite. WBTB puts your mind in a different state that will make it easier and harder for many things. This is why you wake up for a WBTB and don’t DJ or anything, you just go back to bed. Concentration shot.

I do not WBTB depending on time or depending on amount of time awake, these are physical things. I wake up in the night when I decide to or when my dream is over, I go back to sleep when I “know” that the moment is right to go back to sleep. It is mental, not physical. I could use physical things to describe it, like an hour and a half in I usually wake for 7 minutes, but that is no longer my technique, because sometimes 7 minutes is too long and sometimes too short, if I concentrate on this I will miss it more times than I should.

You Don't Have Unlimited Willpower
You only have so much willpower, if you use it all every night you will run out. If you focus too much on recall you will forget the state, if you focus too much on dreaming you won’t recall. There are some that seem to have so much of both that it takes no willpower to recall or realize states. I take very little willpower now to realize state, but I let my recall slide a bit. My willpower is much higher than it used to be though, so I am able to use a lot of willpower on recall.

There is No Such Thing As a Random Lucid Dream
I showed you the percentages! I know that those are very rough percentages based loosely on my thoughts at the time and thrown up as an example only, but the idea is there. I hear this term too much, and it connects too well with known techs, that it is simply not random.
“I quit LDing and a week later I had an LD” is normally significant of someone that has a good percentage of LDing and such, but they either have low expectation or confidence, when they stop concentrating on it, the percentage for some things goes down, but the expectation and confidence issues are dissolved for a time, and this will cause an LD.

“I stopped putting names on things and just did what felt right” I hear from people that have a lot of LDs and try to convince people that the best way to LD is to not read anything about it and just “feel” the lucid. This is ridiculous. There is a point when learning something that you hit the ability to “auto-correct”, when you know enough about something and have enough experience. If you know the fundamentals and have experience, then do what you feel is right. If you don’t know the fundamentals and have no experience, then read and practice.

I looked back on the “random” lucid dreams that I had and I realized that they all were things on my list that raise the percentage even a little.
snoozing my alarm over and over (WBTB)
nightmares (raised awareness, usually from thinking about dreams throughout the day, and always having a good sleep schedule)

What do we say about coincidence?
The universe is rarely so lazy.

Naturals are Just Like Us
Most people completely disregard naturals as unattainable gods, but when comparing people that LD more than me, you always end up with this list of things:
confidence (in themselves, most naturals end up with “arrogance”, while most that work for it have more of a confidence in everyone willing to put the effort forth)
consistency (in technique, in sleep schedule while learning the technique)
their own technique (even if it is a variation, they all have their own mental techniques that they go through)
love of dreams
Years of practice
Fundamentals either consciously or unconsciously down

This might seem ridiculous to you because you look at naturals vs me and say “they come here and they have 6 LDs a night and you have 1?! We are nothing like them!” Well, most of them start when they are 5-8, and we don’t even allow them on the site until 13, giving them 5-8 years of experience at least. Most of them are not 13 though, they are normally 15-50, so when you realize that they spent years perfecting their techniques by themselves and that they don’t have any reason to not expect LDs, or lose confidence, to them, it is either something they think that only they can do, or they think is “natural”. A positive linear progression is always present as well. They normally go from one a month to one a week, to one a day, to multiples.
State Test, Incubation, What I Really Want
I came up with a question a while ago.
“What exactly do I want to think in a dream?”
As a way of incubating, you want to think something with a clear specific method. Since I think of RCs as incubating thoughts into a dream, I came up with the idea:

I'm Dreaming
Three syllables to remember
I decided not to worry about repercussions since, as of yet, there is no cases of someone through practiced effort giving themselves over to a second reality and letting go of the first (always through trauma, if you have some form of mental illness, I would always recommend talking to your doctor before LDing).
I repeated this throughout the day, all day, every day. This is and incubation mantra. I was also told many time that mantras only work in the present tense as well. Thinking “I am going to lucid dream tonight” might even come into your mind in a dream and you still not get lucid.
4 Syllables helped a lot too. I wasn’t trying to send a crazy long text message to my future self (120 characters or less), just this specific idea. I saw major improvements through this method, especially when I had 3 weeks of work that I set off minute alarms (an alarm every minute) to remind me to say “I’m dreaming”. I got serious headaches from this, and I ran almost completely out of motivation. I believe that I had 10 days without an LD when I stopped this because the tax that it took on my mental state.

Slow, I'm Dreaming
http://www.dreamviews.com/dream-cont...our-goals.html

I added this a little while ago. It is just to remember to slow down every time I say dream.


The Secret of LD Count
A lot of you are really wanting to lucid dream to do amazing things with LDing, and you are thinking that in 10 LDs or in 20 LDs you will be able to do a lot of good things. Honestly… Your first 20 LDs are probably going to suck… You might be able to do some goals, but you are probably either going to wake up really quick or go into “caveman mode” (find the nearest DC and try to get it on). This can be extremely down putting. The first few times it is great, you are like “HOLY CRAP I AM LUCID” and then “MOTHERS OF PINE SWIRLS I AM AWAKE!” and you are fine with that at first. Then of course, we get to LD 20 and up, you might have some good LDs, and might be better at remembering goals, stabilizing, or control, but odds are that you are still going to have very many good LDs.

I know what you are thinking “But when I get to 100 I will have all good LDs all the time”... probably not, really rare for someone to have many good LDs around this time. This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t want to get to LDs, or want a specific amount, but don’t get disappointed when you get to 50, 100, or 200 LDs, but realize that this is a “lifetime hobby”.

Meditation is Really Really Good For You
Inside LDing and out, you need to look into meditation and find which ones appeal to you. I would recommend doing them all, but I definitely have an affinity for meditating, so I don't mind practicing meditation during free time. If you need some ideas on how to meditate, then look into sivasons dream yoga class, as well as any visualization that you wish. I personally recommend learning how to "forget your body". I might put a thread up about this. Who knows? :/

Motivation
Giving and Taking
I know that “motivation cannot make you LD”, and just had a conversation with Zoth about the pros and cons of it. The truth is that you will run out of motivation, and if you don’t continue practicing without motivation, then you can’t succeed at anything. You can have zero motivation and not get frustrated, frustration is when your experience doesn’t meet your expectation. So the easy way to not get frustrated is to expect your motivation to fail. When it does, realize that it is fine that it has, but screw it all, you are still going to LD.

Now, I only have a little on being motivated, because even though you might not need it to LD, it is nice to have, because that makes the whole process more fun.

I apply everything in my life to everything in my life, it makes things a lot easier in life when you realize that there are rules that transcend all things. One is like the above, if you stop doing something when motivation fails, then you can’t succeed. The next one is this idea in Christianity that we call “fellowship” (you all probably know what this word means, but let’s look at the original). It comes from the Greek word “Koinonia” which has the idea of “giving and taking”. Something I see around this forum is a lot of taking, and a lot of giving, but not all people are “giving and taking” I would label some as givers and some as takers. For instance, this thread that I am writing is “giving” I am taking the time and burning some of my motivation by writing this whole thing out (Can’t really measure it). When I get a lucid dream or watch something about LDing, get motivation. Having friends that LD or spending time on DV can make this motivation go up as well.

The dream guide system kind of allows for people to destroy their motivation. Spending a lot of time working on things for LDing that uses motivation and they normally lose their LDing ability first and then they stop coming to the forum. I am not against it, in fact it has gotten better. I just think that you should be wary of how much motivation that you are losing and using. Write down a list of things that increase and decrease.


Fundamentals

Sleep Consistently
If you do not know how to sleep consistently, then you can google it.

Work Consistently
Work hard on lucid dreaming, and work hard on recall

Don’t Stress
Stress is not just about not letting the things in your life stress you out, but not letting lucid dreaming especially stress you out. Things in lucid dreaming can stress you out in two ways.

How to Not Stress
A couple ways to stress out about LDing.
1) You don’t get lucids or something and it frustrates you. This is mostly worry (before) or frustration (after), they can cause stress, but they are not stress. More likely to happen and to drive people from LDing.
2) You work too hard on LDing. There is a limit to the amount that we can work on something, especially something that takes concentration and willpower (focus is unlimited, but not the amount of time that you can engage it). All of these are limited, you cannot expend an unlimited amount, most probably don’t know this, because most do not expend their max amount of any often enough to do this. I noticed this mostly during competitions. I may not push myself too much on a normal basis, but when I push myself to the limit two weeks straight I see problems pop up. Hopefully this is your problem, you will need to fix it.
You don’t have a max amount of these three, but unless you have fixed the willpower problem or have an extreme amount of willpower (unlikely, even though you think that you do), you will not run out of the other two (very unlikely). So I noticed it in competitions that I kept having problems. One was the violent uprise of my LDs during competitions, which could be associated with “competition”, but that is not how your mind works. Competition in competitive people brings up your willpower and makes you use existing willpower to the max for a time. After 2 weeks of really exerting, I find two things happen.
a) I don’t get lucid and I get angry (or some other negative emotion)
If I don’t get lucid, I have very little willpower to work with, and trying to do something that you have lost a bit of confidence in without willpower will bring out things like anger, sadness, or boredom with LDing. I have almost quit because of this many times.
b) I get lucid like freaking crazy
I stop putting willpower in, but because of the willpower exertion before and the expectation being high and all the other factors exist, my LDing stays on the crazy awesomeness, because it takes almost no willpower to keep doing something that you are doing well at.

Because of this, I use this a little like medicated steroids during competition, I up the amount of willpower that I put in a lot each day, and then wean myself off and back to regular amounts by the end of the competition. There are probably better things to do, but I have not thought about anything better to do.

FOCUS VS. CONCENTRATION :: IART Clinical Fitness Certification

To reiterate, being in focus does not mean an individual is focused on the specifics of a task at hand. It means that his mind is ‘in touch’ with reality. And so, when a trainee is in focus while he is at the gym his mind is clear, alert, and ready for action; he is fully aware of the equipment around him. With every piece of exercise equipment he looks at a flood of information that instantly is available to him. Being in a daze and not being cognizant of his surroundings as various thoughts float in and out of his awareness would be the opposite of being in focus.

The best method a trainee can use to get focused is for him to ask (what may seem like trivial questions): “Where am I? What piece of equipment am I going to use? Why this equipment instead of another?” He should ask of himself orientating questions that will make him more aware of his physical surroundings. A sure fire way to know that he is not in focus is if he is distant or even seems separated from the objects around himself. A trainee who is at the gym, yet seems distant from his physical surroundings is most likely not in focus.

Best part of this is that this sounds very much like ADA. You hear a lot of them saying to “focus on everything”. Also to concentrate on the world around you. But focus is the goal “orienting questions that will make him more aware of his physical surroundings.” The next part is simply interesting because we are training at all times. So the goal of ADA would be to be in focus, not concentrating.

If you cannot see the difference, then you might be wasting your time trying to do ADA (as most are). The differences is what makes it powerful. I personally think that after a while, raised focus is what makes LDers LD, but it is what makes us raise our focus that we put in guides. ADA is close to the truth, but since it isn’t the truth, it leads people astray. This will make it very hard to become lucid from ADA. I wouldn’t recommend it. Find a list of people that get more LDs than I do using ADA as described in any tutorial, and I will reconsider this statement.