Thread: Losing lucidity

Not sure whether this is the right place, but couldn't find anywhere else.

So, whenever I become lucid (not very common), I slow down, start rubbing my hands and looking at them. I noticed that whenever I look at my hands to stabilize, I lose lucidity. Is there some reason for this, and is there a stabilizing technique that works as well as it does? Looking at my hands gave me my first lucid dreams, but now I seem to lose lucidity when doing so.

Since dreams are very responsive to our expectations, this might have been a coincidence the first time it happened, but it implanted the expectation that is now playing itself out like a bad habit. Any time you're worried that you might lose lucidity or that the dream might end, you increase the likelihood of such things happening.

Perhaps the best thing to do in the short term is to break the pattern that has become problematic: use a different stabilization technique, or else try to remember not to look at your hands. Instead of rubbing your hands you might try touching the surfaces around you: I often get very realistic textures by rubbing my hands on the carpet or over the wall, and I think it is comparable to rubbing the hands together in terms of improving stability.