Thread: All of my LDs are extremely short

Something that helps is to stay aware of the dream itself instead of being too consumed by my thoughts or what i want to do next. Though this is merely my personal tip from my own experience, maybe it can help.

I noticed that more engaged and grounded I am within the dream the more stable the dream will stay and last much longer. Our sleep stage and mindset at the time matters too. Like if you were close to end of REM cycle when you become lucid, it will be short. Anyway, If there are thoughts like "it will end soon" in back of our mind then it surely will at some point. You are a co-creator. All you can do other than getting into right mind state is stabilization and engaging senses. In one of my longest dream there was a constant scent of flowers. It helped me stay aware and keep the dream stable. I sometimes go to the nearest washbasin in a dream and wet my hands as the sensation can help ground me better. Regardless of all the grounding and intention, I have had very short lucids too even after becoming somewhat initiated. ^^'

I have the same problem

I'm hardly an expert, but the limited success I've had with this is when you sort of fool yourself into not noticing you are lucid, if that makes sense. It's a balance where if you are not very aware you may need to confirm you are lucid with RCs, but if you are a bit too aware you have to sort of go back a bit into almost non-lucid again. If you are too much aware of your situation, and not immersed in the dream, you will wake, at least that's my finding. I'm still not very good at it, so do have the same problem. I've been working on trying to come to being lucid slowly from the non-lucid side, trying to make each non-lucid progressively more and more vivid and real. If ever I get that "eureka!" moment I tend to wake quite quickly, so I'm trying to make very vivid non-lucids as matter-of-fact as possible to eventually drift into lucidity gently so as not to startle myself out.

Basically just try to immerse in the dream and not even think about the fact you are lucid.

HTH.

edit: This was meant to reply to lucidbunnie:

Originally Posted by lucidbunnie

In one of my longest dream there was a constant scent of flowers. It helped me stay aware and keep the dream stable. I sometimes go to the nearest washbasin in a dream and wet my hands as the sensation can help ground me better.

Sorry to necro this 2-month-old post, but I wanted to ask you about this constant scent of flowers you mentioned, it seems like it could really work! Do you think I could summon a necklace of fragrant flowers or something similar in my pocket and put it around my dream neck so that throughout the dream I'm constantly smelling the flowers and passively stabilizing as I go? (the washbasin idea also seems like it could work, since my best stabilization attempts in the past have usually been when touching cold surfaces like an ice-block floor, snow, or dewy grass)

So far, like OP, my longest lucid has probably been maybe a minute and a half in length. I really want to improve this and have been trying to think of ways of engaging all my senses at the start of each lucid, so your post really stuck out to me. Anyway let me know what you think!

This might be a rather extreme way of doing things, but something I found to work quite well for me was to induce a feeling of pain while lucid. This would range from scraping my hands across a rough floor to punching walls and other hard objects. These feelings could be quite intense at times and would force me to focus on the senses I was perceiving in the dream world.
I suffered a lot from short lucid at the beginning of my lucid adventures, but eventually they became so long sometimes that I couldn't possibly write it all down because I would forget half of it. This led me to prematurely waking myself up just so I could record it... Ha!
Nevertheless, just keep at it. Lucid dreaming is a skill that anyone can master with enough discipline.

Originally Posted by LucidJuggalo

they became so long sometimes that I couldn't possibly write it all down because I would forget half of it. This led me to prematurely waking myself up just so I could record it

Sounds like a good problem to have LJ! Just curious -- how long have you been at it? And what was the longest lucid you've had?

I feel like I'm starting to finally get into some good passive habits and figure out how I tick as far as getting lucid, it's just that most of the time my experiences are shorter than a minute. I'm trying to find that secret sauce that will keep me in the dream, my aim is to stay in for 10 minutes by the end of 2019. However I did just have a 2+ minute one a few days ago, which was a PB, so things are looking up.

Hmm, let's see... Well I think I started the whole thing when I was 15 and must have continued going until around 19 or 20. It was quite a while. Due to my waking life becoming too busy I stopped and have since tried to get back into it but found it hard to consistently record my dreams and in the end gave up. That was a few years ago. I've recently started my journal again and so far so good... But no lucid yet.

As for my longest lucid dream - that's a hard question to answer because there is one that I've always remembered being ridiculously long. It felt like hours. I also recall I couldn't wake myself up and decided to just go with it instead. It was super realistic but that's all I can remember about it.

Out of interest, what kind of LDs were you guys having when they were either short or long? DILDs, WILDs, etc...

As an adult, all my short LDs have been DILDs, but I don't have enough WILD experience in my adult life (because it is generally too difficult to do) to make a good comparison between durations.

I think the majority of my lucids came from DEILD. I got pretty good at becoming aware of when I'd just woken up. A lot of them were pretty short but I'd consistently chain them so I'd have 2 or 3 lucids in one cycle.
I wasn't amazing at WILDing but I've pulled off a fair few. Those could be pretty long. Same with DILDs. I've had a lot of those too. I found WILDs to be pretty vivid as I'd literally be thrown into a dream. Also had my fair share of WBTB but I don't remember if they were long/short.