Thread: I just can't do it

Originally Posted by Daniele

If life is already stressful then I would take care of that first and take the focus off lucid dreaming techniques. Lucid dreaming won't directly reduce stress because lucid dreams can't happen with stress already present. Start a meditation practice to calm yourself down and focus your mind. You will start to see improvements in all areas of your life. You can still read about lucid dreaming before going to sleep and that in itself may trigger lucidity, but just focus on getting good sleep. When the stress in your life is reduced and you feel calmer and more focused you can begin practicing techniques.



Also, if this refers to personal experience this tells me that you are having success already and don't know it. These are signs that you're getting close to a lucid dream. Imagine what you could achieve with a calm mind.

This, 1000 times this. Marc VanDeKeere writes that one of the important steps to achieving lucid dreams is to pay attention to and to take care of your waking life. Stress is a dream killer. It is because when you wake up stressed, your mind immediately starts churning over your waking life worries, allowing the fleeting dream memories to vanish before you can move them to long-term memory.

And let me just say, if your goal in life was to become a concert pianist, would you quit after one month if you couldn't yet play Chopin's Grand Valse Brillante? No, you would practice, learn the fundamentals, and gradually increase your abilities over time. You have to train yourself to play the piano, through repetition of exercises appropriate for your experience level. You must enjoy the process, it should be fun for you and a positive addition to your life, or in the long run you won't stick with it.

Lucid dreaming is the same. You must learn the fundamentals, and put them into practice on a daily basis. You must stick with the practice for the long run. You must keep a positive attitude, and enjoy all of your dreaming experiences. And along the way to mastery (which just like piano or any discipline requiring effort, can take years and years), you will have many amazing experiences that keep you motivated and entertained. If you already have a "dream journal filled with endless pages of dreams," then it seems to me you have little to complain about -- some people struggle just to recall a single dream per night. You already have a major leg up on one of the foundations of LD practice: dream recall.

You need to change your attitude to enjoy and treasure all your dreaming experiences. If you keep associating negative emotions with dreaming, your SC will eventually turn off the recall spigot since you're building the association that "dreams = more stress".