Thread: Hard to keep Lucidity on your Mind.

Big Question:

How come, if we all want to have Lucid Dreams so bad, for most of us it seems rather difficult to keep the Subject of Lucid Dreaming and doing RCs on our Minds during the day and more importantly during the Night?

I mean shouldn't something so desired be pre-dominantly on your Mind?
The things I dream about are not at all per say Conscious desires of mine. perhaps subconscious expressions of subconscious desires.
However I believe things that will linger on yolr Subconscious Mind and end up in your Dreams are things that have made a Great impression on you: Your parents divorce, Having just passionately kissed with a girl that is just TOOOO amazingly beautyfull, An intense, possibly BAD, mushroom trip, a period of time(I.E. a specific summer) when life was extremely good or bad...etc. These are all personal off course.

However the Lucid Dreams I've had have made a gigantic impression on me as they were jawhangingly awesome and unbelievably realistic at times. HOW COME THAT THIS IMPRESSION DOESN'T LINGER IN MY MIND?
I have the idea that one half of me, the subconscious half, has lost interrest for Lucid Dreaming endeavors while on the Other hand my other, Conscious, side still badly wants to attain lucidity.

When something, like my parents divorce, has made a great impression on me it will constantly linger on my Subconscious Mind popping in and out of my Conscious thoughts. Eventually I got over it and all that it remains is a Conscious, statistic Memory of it: Emotionall/Subconsciously I have forgotten about it and lost the negative feel, but my Conscious Mind remembers it all too well. Let's say that the Subconscious Mind is of a very Emotional/Impulsive nature and it's memories are likewise: Emotional impressions, Sensations, Unspeakable inexpressablefeelings. The Conscious Mind on the other hand is very Analytical, critical and logical: It's memories are of a likewise nature: Logical, Words, practical, Emotionless.

An example of this: I CAN remind myself of my parent's divorce and the animosity in our household the years before that happened and it can actually stir around in my Subconscious mind making the EMOTIONAL memories float back to the surface of my Conscious Mind; And thus I can actually feel sad emotions again by just bringing back the Subconscious, Emotional memory.

Now somehow I feel this is material suitable for LD-techniques to build on. To use your ability to make old, emotional memories resurface from the subconscious into the conscious Mind. What if you would continuously consciously try to remind yourself of a memory of a stressfull/joyfull-impressive moment/situation/whatever right as you're falling asleep? As long as facing that memory brings out alot of strong, Subconscious, Emotions. Maybe this is more likely to return in your Dreams? This situation or anything related to those memories could serve as really great Dreamsigns. It's just a conceptsketch so I'd love it if any of you could help me out here.

yo i feel you...its crazy huh..i mean LDs are a huge part of my life yet doing RTs isnt always the first thing in my mynd..i guess its kinda like smoking weed, you get real exited before doing it bout then when youre munching down on junk food you kinda forget you're on it...its crazy.

ps. i dig that poem homie, its outta sight

yeah,
im pretty sure you just answered you own question. i agree. its like, you want to, but other things that dont seem important just come up. it sucks.

Ok, i have a slight answer SKA, hopefully it makes some sort of sense, although it may only be answering part of it.

I agree that your subconsciouss mind may not be interested in the topic, i've had a couple of subconscious projections in a dream when i dreamed about DV and another where i was writing in my dream journal, however i think that when we are all trying to lucid dream we are just demanding our subconscious mind to allow it, i like to think of my subconscious mind as a person or a second consciousness, since its thoughts are only projected during our sleeping hours we don't seem to really care, we even get angry at it if we don't have a lucid dream, my philosophy is that in order to be sucessful with lucid dreaming you have to build a relationship with your subconscious mind, it wants to do the things it wants to do and your not going to get very far by bossing it around, you could be in a way bullying it when you demand a lucid dream and have one, this maybe why people find that DC's are always trying to end the lucid dream. But just think, if you build a relationship with it you could get lucid dreams on a simple thought, but you have to consider that the subconscious mind is another awareness and when we become lucid in our dreams we are effectively making a connection between them both, that is the best time to take action, next lucid dream, summon your subconscious mind in the form of a DC and talk to it, explain what you are trying to do and achieve with this, even ask your subconscious mind if it could help induce your lucid dreams for you, set up a timetable or rotar, you allow your subconscious mind to project dreams one night and the next night it allows you to have a lucid dream, have alternate shifts so its fair between them both, you need a sense of balace between the two because as i said before, if the subconscious mind doesn't like the siuation its in it will deny any requests even more. This is all something i came up with over past nights, it makes sense to me, it may seem silly to all of you lot but when i think about it this way it seems the most promising path to achieve regular lucid dreams. I think of my subconscious mind as my equal but i have to allow it to have its own space, give it time, don't push it around, if i treat it with respect then it will in retun treat me with the same respect back. A better way for me to say it is like this, imagine your subconscious mind as a pet dog, it needs feeding every so often, but whe you try and teach it tricks it takes time and the dog has to be willing to partake aswell for it to work, you give it time, i you shout at the dog because it fails to do what you want it will probably lash out, not try to do it, only with time and patience and building a strong relationship with your pet will you be able to teach it tricks sucessfully. Hope that made better sense.

Well thats what i think about the whole matter, i may write an article for DV about the subconscious mind being like a second person in your mind, explaining how it can be used as an advantage to apply lucid dreaming to it, i wanna know what you think of my explanation, silly, stupid, good, ok etc, i've been thinking and its been making alot of sense to me. thanks

I only recently fell back into the habit of doing reality checks. It was the hardest thing to remember to do. I think the problem for me was that I had too much on my plate, mentally. I had some conflicting issues in my head, and focusing on one would cause problems with the other. Having dealt with them seems to have freed up a bit of RAM in my head to use on other applications. Or maybe that I just accepted those problems and stopped wasting so much energy fighting them.

The memories of LDs may be hard to recall because they are "encoded" in our memory differently. SKA, have you ever heard about "state dependent learning?", sorry I dont remember the correct full term for this kind of thing.
Pretty much if you are under the influence (altered state of consciousness), it is easier to recall and actually feel previous experiences under the same influence. A great example would be Salvia Divinorum - the second it hits me I recall just about every previous experience, and they are very familiar. At the same time the "real" life becomes bleak and distant.
A while ago I performed an experiment in a LD - I've said my full name in a dream. It sounded so far away and detached, it's meaning watered down to nothing. I feel this is very much like the dream recall while being awake.

There's a stub about this on the wikipedia.

I've first heard about this from the book "The Art of Dreaming" by Carlos Castaneda. Don Juan would teach Carlos while Carlos was heavily intoxicated. In the beginning of the book Carlos says something along the lines "It took me almost 10 years to recall this". I skipped over that line with little thought. Afterwards I thought that might've been a weak excuse to write another book without mentioning anything about this phenomenon before. But now it suddenly makes a lot more sense - state dependent memory may explain that.



The subconscious may be against lucid dreaming in the first place. After all my attempts I finally succeeded in contacting my subconscious mind in a dream. An avatar of it appeared and said that "It is neither watching nor interested".