Thread: Mistakes you made when you started Lding

What were mistakes you made that stopped or made it harder for you to achieve lucidity?

One of my first reality checks contained a part where I took a knife, and I just slashed it into my arm to see if my arm was real and not my dream body.
That sucked, because after that I couldn't do that RC anymore.

I started getting truly curious about lucid dreaming in early 2010 or something like that (I am not sure why, but I have always believed in the great possibilities about dreaming, and I always wanted to fly so I had always wonderfed if there was some way to increase the number of flying dreams), and I would try out WILD in the middle of the day a few times a week.
The problem was that I made the classic mistake where I focused way too much on trying not to swallow, and that was extremely frustrating.
I eventually realized that it must be much better to just swallow naturally if I needed to, and then gradually stop caring about it, instead of trying to prevent myself from swallowing because that just resulted in major discomfort.

It was the same thing with itches as well - in the beginning I would try to ignore any itches, but then I was like "what the hell, let me scratch the itches!", so I started doing that and then eventually I would just kind of stop caring about that as well.

In order to succeed with WILD you will have to allow yourself to fix minor annoyances like this, because if you do that you will eventually become so relaxed that you stop noticing it anyway.

My mistake came not at the beginning but after several months into the practice: backing off of night-work, hoping day-work would carry it all, and it didn't/doesn't.

Also, stressing out about missing sleep/dreams and getting upset when on a particular night I didn't get lucid.

Originally Posted by FryingMan

My mistake came not at the beginning but after several months into the practice: backing off of night-work, hoping day-work would carry it all, and it didn't/doesn't.

Can you define night-work? Would that be things like WBTB, setting intentions, dream incubation, RCs upon waking, mantras while dozing back off?

Originally Posted by JustASimpleGuy

Can you define night-work? Would that be things like WBTB, setting intentions, dream incubation, RCs upon waking, mantras while dozing back off?

Yep. Particularly, noticing the wakings during the night, that makes all those things possible. Recalling dreams multiple times per night, re-setting intention multiple times. Basically, blacking out until morning = not good.

Is there anyway you can get LaBerge on DV so he can be my personal teacher?

Probably not (unless he's really Author Frank DiMeglio), but you can rent him for $2600 for 8 days in Hawaii along with a group in May. Oops, the retreat is already full, better luck next year.

Originally Posted by FryingMan

Yep. Particularly, noticing the wakings during the night, that makes all those things possible. Recalling dreams multiple times per night, re-setting intention multiple times. Basically, blacking out until morning = not good.

Yeah, I noticed that. Even though my recall is improving, on the handful of nights I've slept straight through until morning I was lucky to recall 1 or 2 dreams. So if I did have a moment of low-level lucidity the odds are against recall. Plus there's probably much less a chance for lucidity if I'm just running off my work before turning in for the night and it's not being reinforced just prior to another sleep cycle or two or three.

EDIT: Back to the question in the OP. If it can be called a mistake, mine was for the first month I jumped from one method for raising awareness to the other. The upside is it allowed me to sample them and figure out which techniques or portions of techniques felt right for me.

1. Switching from one technique to another without giving any its proper chance to work
2. Not working on increasing awareness constantly and persistently.
3. Thinking reality checks are not useful

Haha....Mimi...you read my mind! same here...

I didn't make any mistakes!

Well, that's not entirely true...

I made plenty of mistakes, probably far more than you guys do now. But the thing was, I was learning to LD almost 40 years ago, before even the term "lucid dreaming" had entered the popular culture (I sure never heard it, and LaBerge was still a student at the time, with EWOLD -- and all those terms, like WILD, DILD, MILD, etc., still far in his future). Also, my dream work began decades before the internet existed, in a world where I was surrounded by people who cared nothing about dreaming, and where resources into dreaming, much less LD'ing, were rare to nonexistent, and what I could find was usually unhelpful.

In other words I was on my own. But that had a major advantage: I never did anything wrong, because I had no idea that there were things to do wrong. Everything that happened, whether it was, in retrospect, a mistake or a real step forward, was for me something new, and always a positive experience. I never had my confidence shaken because I wasn't meeting goals set by others, or wasn't succeeding with RC's, or wasn't doing a technique correctly. I just lived and learned, and eventually began LD'ing successfully (mostly through what would eventually be called WILD's) -- all without ever knowing I was making a mistake. It took a bit longer than people take now, but my path to consistent LD'ing was filled more with discovery than disappointment or anxiety about "not doing it right."

I wonder if there's a lesson in there somewhere?

Then LD was in your blood! if i believed in past lives, i would say that a Lama ghost was incarnated into your body...LOL!

Is there anyway you can get LaBerge on DV so he can be my personal teacher?

Originally Posted by Barry

Is there anyway you can get LaBerge on DV so he can be my personal teacher?

Not a chance... he doesn't even go on his own website!

My weakness to put LD on top of priority, and throw out the pot from my list. I know, it is a shame, but long run smokers will understand me. It is a real giving up, and changing of a lifestyle. If there is someone, who is beginer smoker, it is better that he/she knows, that smoking and recall (SHT memory and dreams) are antagonists (yes, there are some exceptional people, but I am not lucky (or?)).

So, No. 1. smoking. The No.2. is following my billowy motivation and not going deeper (again, priority). I am jumping in, after jumping out. No permanence. I can forgive this to my young self, but today...

I just simply must jump in, and stay there, let the smoking for parties...and not one day, but now. Thats the worst, when you fell your abilities, and then you get stuck on stupid barriers, like smoking or lazyness.

Well I'm still a beginner but one mistake I made was to think that writing down my dreams wasn't a big deal. After a while though I hated the fact that I could only remember so many dreams in a month and how my lucidity time was shortened to a number of seconds.

Supplements are good for helping improve the effectiveness of your lucid dreaming techniques, but they in and of themselves do not cause lucidity. And if they don't cause lucidity, DO NOT try to take a higher dose to make them cause lucidity.

And that is the moral of the story of the time I took 600mg of vitamin B6 before bed. Sure, I remembered like 9 dreams that night, but also had almost no restful sleep for 3 days.

Huh boy, this is gonna be a long post.

I think my first mistake was trying to decide what I wanted my dreams to be too much. (As in I would try to plan exactly what would happen in each dream.) I made a huge list of dream characters and a map of a world that I wanted to create. I tried to get myself to dream about it, but after some time, I realized that I wasn't even getting lucid, much less dreaming of the locations and characters that I had tried to create.

Only after about a year did I finally 'get it' and understand to just let my dream world be what it wants to be. Besides it's more fun that way because I can explore and see what the dream-world comes up with, and frankly that's much more enjoyable than going through all the effort to design and manifest one.

Though admittedly, I am still attempting to bring a couple of dream characters into the dream world...

My second mistake was probably a lot more common and a lot more relate-able. And that was being a brute-force lucid dreamer. I would be reality checking every second of every day, and power down through half s like an insomniac. Sure, it got me lucid pretty reliably, but at a great cost to my everyday waking life. I soon learned to work smarter, not harder to lucid dream.

My third mistake was probably abandoning lucid dreaming after about a one-week dry spell. I actually vowed to abandon it permanently, but it only lasted about four months in which time my technique suffered and my recall sank like a brick. (It was when I decided to return from this abandonment that I joined this website.)

Dang dry spells...

My fourth and final mistake was taking lucid dreaming too seriously. I've actually been guilty of doing this a couple times, and sometimes I just need to kick myself in the butt and remind myself that this is a hobby and it's supposed to be fun.

Originally Posted by Barry

What were mistakes you made that stopped or made it harder for you to achieve lucidity?

I remember when I starting lucid dreaming, I saw a documentary about sleep-paralysis, after that I was a little bit scare to become conscious while sleeping.

Moving too quickly and expecting to LD before I was ready to. For me LD'ing is a slow and ongoing progress where each step needs to be identified and understood fully before progressing on to the next step. From my experiences first you must get used to vivid dreams, see them with your eyes, think about them, understand them for what they are, what makes each vivid dream different to the next, what your mind set was at the time, etc. Were you following a narrative? Were you consciously aware of things at any point? What did you question? Did some events make logical sense or was it mostly nonsense? Every dream state is different; to me it is not a hobby but it is a science to be experimented with and understood, and the more understanding you have of the different dream states you encounter the more strength and tolerance you build each time you enter a dream. The mistake I made was thinking that writing a dream journal and practicing RC's was going to make me lucid and I was going to become a master over night, that isn't the reality of the situation for me. There is far more to be experienced, explored and understood before being ready to attain and control states of true lucidity.