Thread: Actually I'm pretty disappointed so far!

Originally Posted by FryingMan

Great, keep it up. Dedicate yourself for a serious amount of time to be and remain mindful every day all day as much as you can. (I think anything less than a year in LD practice is too short of a time to do something seriously). Including the meditation (which I need to do! New Year's Resolucid!)

Couldn't agree more!
I've made a few new years resolutions too:
_Train hard at LDing and focus on concentrating and being aware in the dream, also become skillful at this and at making the dream senses and lucidness higher.
_Become good at drawing anime!
_Watch lots of anime.
_The secret sauce: Gain subconscious experience of anime physics and anime world laws, and derive a way of being in them in LDs without making them look weird (cuz anime girls look weird in 3D!). It's probably gonna be live2D as a solution, which is actually very ellegent, Google it seriously.
_Also get drama in my blood also by watching anime. Dramatic scenes, and when I'm used to it, it'll reflect on my LD story!

Hey LouaiB, I feel your pain! I have the same sort of problem that Fryingman has, where the LD is very short. To stop myself waking I have tried a couple of things; engaging my senses, but also trying to be a more passive observer, just relaxing and not getting too excited, but I have noticed that when I do that, the vividness is less.
My plan is to first work on the length of the LD, and then the vividness by engaging the senses more, on the basis that I can't engage the senses if II have woken up!

Originally Posted by Goldenspark

Hey LouaiB, I feel your pain! I have the same sort of problem that Fryingman has, where the LD is very short. To stop myself waking I have tried a couple of things; engaging my senses, but also trying to be a more passive observer, just relaxing and not getting too excited, but I have noticed that when I do that, the vividness is less.
My plan is to first work on the length of the LD, and then the vividness by engaging the senses more, on the basis that I can't engage the senses if II have woken up!

I also at first keep calm and focused on the dream to stay lucid. Then I focus on fine details around me and on my hand to make the visual sense stronger, and I guess it gives me more awareness. Actually, now to think about it, what does make you more aware, something you can do in the LD to become more aware? I heard a tip the other day. It goes like this: do you know how if you're daydreaming and I pour an ice water bucket on you and you snap aware? Imagine it like that in a LD. If you're not so aware in the dream, summon ice water and BAM snap to awareness after throwing it at yourself.

Hey Lousai,
I don't know if it's like that for everyone, but for me there is a world of difference between LDs that I get via MILD and those that I get via WILD.
In other words when I start the dream non-lucid the dream is just like you have described. Bland, forgetable and in general not worth the effort to get.
But when I do a succesful WILD the reality level of the dream matches that of real life. I feel every step I take, whether something I touch is warm or cold, everything I see is sharp and vivid and more importantly doesn't blur when I focus on something else in my field of vision My surroundings are solid and are highly unlikely to deform. Actually the dream control is worse in those dreams, but I don't mind. Exploring my surroundings in such a realistic quality is a magical experience for me, no need to change it too much.

The only problem I have they are extremely short :/ so far I was not able to make them last longer than a few minutes.
Some other forums describe this state as OOBE (out of body experience), on this forums there seems to be no disctinction, so call it as you want
If you want any tips on WILD you can message me, I am not an expert by any means but I did it quite a few times.

Originally Posted by LouaiB

I also at first keep calm and focused on the dream to stay lucid. Then I focus on fine details around me and on my hand to make the visual sense stronger, and I guess it gives me more awareness. Actually, now to think about it, what does make you more aware, something you can do in the LD to become more aware? I heard a tip the other day. It goes like this: do you know how if you're daydreaming and I pour an ice water bucket on you and you snap aware? Imagine it like that in a LD. If you're not so aware in the dream, summon ice water and BAM snap to awareness after throwing it at yourself.

I'm still a real novice, even though I've been at it for more than 2 years! But I'm sure if I conjured up a dousing in cold water I would get the ultimate kick into reality!

I know the answer is to look really closely and carefully at everything, but to do that I need to be more engaged, but that seems to mean too engrossed and hence excited, so the dream ends as my conscious mind pushed out the dream. It's a really delicate balance, which I think I am getting the hang of slowly.

Btw, I have put aside my dabblings with Galantamine for now. Although it works, it seems to make my general dream recall worse, so I am trying to go "au naturelle" now.

I know the answer is to look really closely and carefully at everything, but to do that I need to be more engaged, but that seems to mean too engrossed and hence excited, so the dream ends as my conscious mind pushed out the dream. It's a really delicate balance, which I think I am getting the hang of slowly.

Yeah thats the key point of development with doing that, you have to find that perfect point in between if you still get excited. Once you learn to control your emotions though, everything is so much easier I would say. I just woke up from a Lucid Dream where, for the 3rd time I have been using this technique I developed for myself, and now my LDs are lasting as long as I use the technique within the dream.
EDIT: IF I don't get distracted and pulled back into non-lucidity.

I feel your pain man. I`ve had my share of LDs, a lot more than the counter says by now... and many were short, blurry, hazy. My non lucid dreams feel a lot more real and crisp/vivid than most of my lucid dreams. I've had one super crisp lucid that really got me into it, that was quite an experience. Sadly I've not had another one of this quality yet. The house the dream took place in was stunningly real, albeit a bit empty in terms of furniture. I knew it was a lucid dream from the very start, and although it was quite dark it all looked sooo real. Everything felt real, even a bit over the top at times. The walls and floor felt cold, like ice. The contrast in color was sometimes painful to the eye, and the air felt like a mix of air and water while skimming through it.

But, alas, nothing comparable came after this one. Some cool or even very cool moments, short scenes full of memorable images and whacky stuff, but still theres a lot to be desired...
I've still a long road to go I guess. But what it has brought to me...

I have very cool non-lucid dreams each night, and I recall lots of them. I love it! The reason my wife bought me my dream journal was because I had the impression that I stopped to dream at all. I could not recall a dream for months.
After having the journal beside my bed and thinking a bit about dreams over the day I suddenly started to dream again, or regained recall of my dreams again. That was great... and it was some months later that I discovered lucid dreaming and giving it a try. Even if LD did not yet work out as planned or desired, it still gave me awesome dream recall, and every few weeks I have a DILD moment or even a short DILD without even trying. Nice! I appreciate that. And I fully know that if I invest more time and thinking into it, I will have more consistent LDs again. The repetetive writing method showed me that this works, for me at least. But most of the time I wonder if it is worth the time investment and the sleep loss.

Originally Posted by Djaxup

I feel your pain man. I`ve had my share of LDs, a lot more than the counter says by now... and many were short, blurry, hazy. My non lucid dreams feel a lot more real and crisp/vivid than most of my lucid dreams. I've had one super crisp lucid that really got me into it, that was quite an experience. Sadly I've not had another one of this quality yet. The house the dream took place in was stunningly real, albeit a bit empty in terms of furniture. I knew it was a lucid dream from the very start, and although it was quite dark it all looked sooo real. Everything felt real, even a bit over the top at times. The walls and floor felt cold, like ice. The contrast in color was sometimes painful to the eye, and the air felt like a mix of air and water while skimming through it.

But, alas, nothing comparable came after this one. Some cool or even very cool moments, short scenes full of memorable images and whacky stuff, but still theres a lot to be desired...
I've still a long road to go I guess. But what it has brought to me...

I have very cool non-lucid dreams each night, and I recall lots of them. I love it! The reason my wife bought me my dream journal was because I had the impression that I stopped to dream at all. I could not recall a dream for months.
After having the journal beside my bed and thinking a bit about dreams over the day I suddenly started to dream again, or regained recall of my dreams again. That was great... and it was some months later that I discovered lucid dreaming and giving it a try. Even if LD did not yet work out as planned or desired, it still gave me awesome dream recall, and every few weeks I have a DILD moment or even a short DILD without even trying. Nice! I appreciate that. And I fully know that if I invest more time and thinking into it, I will have more consistent LDs again. The repetetive writing method showed me that this works, for me at least. But most of the time I wonder if it is worth the time investment and the sleep loss.

It seems that Fromm all the replies and info I've been getting, there's no such thing as "Hey, you're brain can't produce sharp senses and awareness in a LD state". I've been paranoid about this lol. Of course vivid LDs kinda need the right attitude, training and neuroactivity(sleep cycles get into that too), but I've been scared of actually mentaly not being able to experience such LD, even with the right conditions and training. Well, now I'm a little relieved.


My recall tends to be kinda wavy too. I never really worry about it cuz dream recall is a thing you always need to train and place intentions for. Even if you're a pro, you can't just stop and say "oh, I've maxed my recall skill! No more DJing or recall intention needed!"

How I trained mainly is to do like 4 wbtbs a night and write the dream down with as much details as I can.
A little trick is to use a voice recorder if I'm lazy, but I'm always worrying my family would hear me going "...and then this hot anime girl came up to me and started undr....." *door slams open* "where's your fear of god boy! You dare do such things in a LD?!". "N-n-no father, Sh-she was laying all over me telling me she wanted to show me her hot springs! I didn't intend for any of that, believe me! It's my subconscious, it hates me, I swear!!!"

Lol that was fun to write >w<

So, whenever I have bad recall, I just place stronger intentions and do more wbtbs, and if it doesn't work, well then I'll have to wait until my recall comes back from it's vacation. I'm sure my memory didn't die, or else I wouldn't remem...... wait, what was I talking about?......Wait, it's 2015?! Last time I checked, it wa...... Wait, what was I.... where am I?!

Lol I'm having fun today!

This might hurt, Louiab, but I think the answer to your concerns is that you're still early on in your LDing practice.

Check out the podcast on LD count by Sensei: http://www.dreamviews.com/dreamviews...ng-sensei.html along with his podcasts on recall. Sensei basically says that 50 LDs isn't enough to make conclusions about what your LDs are like. Also, recall is probably the most important thing you need to be working on.

I've completely started from scratch this new years. In my second year of university I was sharing a room and decided to go on a hiatus that ended up lasting a year and a half. The biggest impediment to coming back has been recall. To be honest I've always neglected recall, I even held recalling my NLDs in contempt, such was my hatred of dream journalling. Of course, with no recall I had zilch LDs. I've completely changed my mind, and now view recall as the fundamental it is, and not an optional extra. This involved switching to dream tagging (Throw Away Your Dream Journal: Remember Your Dreams The Easy Way) and now I've become quite addicted to seeing how many dreams I can tag each night!

I suggest you make recall your complete focus for the rest of the month, trust in your day practice to get you lucid, and only concentrate on remembering your dreams for your night practice. Start trying to wake up after each dream period and recall. Use the mantra "what was I dreaming about?" each time you wake up.

This is my current technique loadout:

Daytime:
2x 10mins vipasanna meditation sits
Lucid living
5 reverse RCs
MILD visualisations

Nighttime:
Drink water
Mantra to wake after every dream and recall my dreams
SSILD

And here is my progress since new years:

1st- no recall
2nd - fragment
3rd - no recall
4th - natural awakening, 4 fragments, 1 LD
5th - 4 dreams, 2 fragments
6th - 1 dream
7th - natural awakening, 2 fragments, 1 semi-LD
8th - natural awakening, 1 dream, 3 fragments, 1 LD from an "epic" (the name Sensei gives to dreams in which you seem to be "present" and are making conscious decisions and which often lead to LDs)

Note that I'm actually not doing much to induce LDs in the day, and hardly anything at night. I believe that all that is necessary is to work on the fundamentals, and then pick an arbitrary technique as a placeholder for intent to its work. This is why I love SSILD. On the face of it is meditation/MILD, but it's basically a non-technique. I use it basically to trick my unconscious (or whatever) that I'm doing something to make myself lucid when it's my fundamentals/intent doing the work (not to disparage SSILD, I think it works fine as a standalone).

It's actually quite easy to build your self-awareness to a level where you have the potential to lucid dream (in my case I seem to be able to get away with 10 minutes of meditation and a few RRCs on some days), but you need to develop the general dream awareness to bring it to bear.

tldr; sorry for the essay, these are all Sensei's ideas, basically (Sensei, if you're reading, please weigh in on the discussion!)

"This might hurt"...on the contrary,you're assuring me that practice and training gets me there! My worry was that I would never get vivid and crisp-senses LDs, even with the proper sleep conditions and training. I don't care if you told me I need 10 years to get there, I just want to know that I will.

My recall is pretty awesome, even though I'm a lazy DJer. I remember on average like 4 dreams and usually one of them is epic or at least highly vivid and pretty aware.

In fact, last night I had a dream of robbing a bank and killing and then having to kill my own family (which where the rest of the gang itself). I had lots of "hey this place, I dreamed of it before", and "this is kinda familiar", and a lot of conscious choice making (lol I can't believe I agreed to kill my family! I was like "OK I will" *imagines staging them* *realizes that I can't stab someone* "on second thought, maybe I'll place poison in the dinner instead")

I used to do like 4 wbtbs a night to train my recall. Worked like a charm!

Well it sounds like you're on exactly the right track then! All you need is more lucids under your belt. I still recommend you check out Sensei's lucid living thread, though.

Originally Posted by Ctharlhie

Well it sounds like you're on exactly the right track then! All you need is more lucids under your belt. I still recommend you check out Sensei's lucid living thread, though.

Thnx man! I'm really glad hearing that!

I already read his lucid living thread. He is quite an awesome LDer and teacher!
He is our Sensei after all! (Lol pun)