Thread: How do I make my dreams last longer?

Your rapid waking could be a deep-seated expectation, perhaps even brought on by the act of stabilizing. Do you have long non-lucid dreams? How vivid, clear, and stable are your non-lucids? Do you recall them in high detail? Do you love dreaming as a whole, and treasure and enjoy all your dreams, or do you feel that a non-lucid dream is a "failure?"

Of course, late morning LDs could be just that: your mind is already in the final stages of waking up, and you just manage to get lucid while still within the dream. In this case, there's often very little you can do.

I have lost LDs when I stopped to stabilize, on more than one occasion. My longest and most stable LDs are when I'm engaged in the dream, having fun, and working through dream goals.

You could work on day practice of visualize getting lucid in a dream, and acknowledging the fact while generating a (calm) feeling of joy, and just moving around within the dream environment.

I find that "retreating into my head" sometimes leads to waking. "Physical" movement through the dream environment for me helps to deepen the engagement.

In short, I recommend on emphasizing a general "dream practice," where you're also trying to get lucid, but if you don't, it's no big deal. When you have less invested in achieving full lucidity, but forming a deep and significant relationship with your dreams, the longer LDs will come along naturally, I'd wager.

BTW, everyone dreams differently, but most of my highest quality LDs and epic, long non-LDs, typically come at about the 6 hour mark. Approaching closer to 8 hours of sleep, I find that dream awareness begins to drop rather than increase.

Originally Posted by FryingMan

Your rapid waking could be a deep-seated expectation, perhaps even brought on by the act of stabilizing. Do you have long non-lucid dreams? How vivid, clear, and stable are your non-lucids? Do you recall them in high detail? Do you love dreaming as a whole, and treasure and enjoy all your dreams, or do you feel that a non-lucid dream is a "failure?"

This is actually hilarious because I came to this conclusion myself About a day after. I was reading through a post I made a year ago on the LD subreddit where I talk about how excitement doesn't have to wake you up. I read a comment that said something like, "It’s so strange how many “truths” there are to lucid dreaming, that are likely down to just our beliefs and expectations about how the dream world should function."

And then I thought, maybe this is true for stabilization...

I mean, why do I stabilize? Well, to prevent the dream from collapsing. Well, why does the dream collapse? Because that's what happens to dreams. Not to non-lucids. Well Lucids are different, but are they really? Is it a coincidence that my longest lucid dreams are ones where I didn't stabilize? Is it a coincidence that whenever I go to stabilize myself, the dream ends? After thinking on it for a while, I don't think so. I think that a lucid dream wont end unless you want it to, or unless you think it will, and when I rush to stabilize, it implies that I think the dream will collapse if I don't. So yes, I think it's my problem here. And, even if it isn't, I'm gonna do what I want to do and have fun with the time I have in the dream.

And yeah, I think I will take up DJing again at least. I'll see if I can stop treating LDs and NLDs as separate roads of progression.