Quote Originally Posted by FryingMan View Post
The corollary of this is that experienced dreamers need to be very careful when wording responses to avoid making poisoning statements. Try to focus on positive statements rather than negative. Never write "Don't do <something> in a dream, it will wake you up!", instead write "I find that doing <opposite of something> extends my dreams and keeps me grounded in the dream."
I meant to respond and add to this earlier, but better late than never. Sageous said something that helped me on a number of occasions, when he said: "For DILDer's, and everyone else, the process is there as well: simply continue paying attention to your environment after the dream fades, and your current REM cycle ends, and do so (here's the tricky part) without following your body's normal path to awakening..." quoted from this post: http://www.dreamviews.com/general-lu...ml#post2132889 . It just clicked for me in a way that helped me realize that I should not expect that I am waking up and it helped me build more successes from any fades or trips to the void. I previously had success extending dreams through focusing on DEILD and also just through the suggestion of there being a thing called the void, but I am currently still using the mindset that I may not have to wake quite yet even if it feels like I am losing the dream...simply hovering in the space between dreams. Vigilantly watching for false awakenings is another method, but the mindset of staying in dreamland and not expecting to "exit" as in DEILDs seems to stick in my head with much less effort. I think that I was affected early in my adult lucid dreaming practice by reading about other people's brief lucid dreams, despite the experiences of my first lucid dream in childhood or decades later of my first lucid dream in adulthood, which were not super short. (Maybe I can say that more succinctly later.)