Thread: My Obstacle That Needs to Be Defeated

Hey there,

When I read my post, I cannot help but immediately think of three things:

- You're too impatient
- You're too eager
- You're too hyper-sensitive



Maybe I'm wrong, but going over your post, it seems to me like you want the skyrocket to instant lucidity, and everything else isn't good enough. In my experience it doesn't work like that. Lucid dreaming is about exploring your dreaming life. It takes time, it requires you to take an active interest in your *entire* dreaming life, and above all it requires you to find a good balance.

Give it some time, a week is really nothing at all when it comes to lucid dreaming. Learn to appreciate and pay attention to all the dreamsensations. Ideally, you should be able to go to bed with a sort of 'yay, I can go dream again', mindset. Not with a 'ahh, now I have to lucid dream or it's a failure!' mindset. Find a balance between waking and dreaming. Don't exhaust your waking hours with so many different techniques and reality checks and what not that it becomes a chore.

Don't be fooled by the myriad of posts here that promise instant garantued succes. Learning to lucid dream is a lifelong process.

Just my 2 cents,

-Redrivertears-

I agree with Redrivetears. Im not a great lucid dreamer, but I like to take my time and not force things, because this usually brings frustration.

Stick to one or to techniques that suit you and the rest will come by itself in its due time.

i have no experience with your method of mastering lucidity - i used castaneda's (starting by finding my hands) so i don't know how it is - but i'm quite sure that all this relity checks induce sleeo paralysis.

also: in my case, i'm seldom really lucid, and sometimes keep it for very short periods and go back to un-lucid dream - for security reasons: un-lucid dreams are far less dangerous. DCs - present or absent - (like "the old hugg") can't do much to you as long you are not lucid...

look at your dreams and see: are there severe dangers awaiting you? your body knows the answer.
if it's yes - don't try to be more lucid!
but i do recomend you abandom the reality checks.

instead make a very accurate affirmation to say aloud before you go to sleep. "i am a dreamer", (CCs sugestion) "i want to dream fully aware" (my own's) - whatever, put it in positive terms.
do you know the 7 gates of dreaming (cc, "the art of dreaming"?) try those.
good luck.

Redrivertears, wow. I never thought of it that way. Thanks for the good advice! But what I do wonder about is why I started to remember my dreams at such an incredible rate all of a sudden, but why lucidity happened at the most random of times. Actually, when I was lucid it didn't actually FEEL like I was lucid. I felt like I was stuck between lucidity and non-lucidity (sort of like you're drugged or something?).


Polmc, thanks for the tip. Rushing = bad. why do you think that only one or two techniques are better than more?


Charlila, I guess I might be doing too many reality checks. But too be honest I don't catch myself doing a reality check soon after I just did one. I seem to space them out a bit during the day.

I don't know if this is any help, but it sounds from your post that you are very into dream-control. Now, this is no bad thing of course, but from my experience, a much better way to prolong and stabilise lucidity once you gain it is to actually be very passive. Rather than trying to make things happen in the dream, just stop, control your excitement, maybe look at your hands or rub them together to calm yourself, then look round at the dream-world. Try to focus in on small details, and touch things, feel all the different textures, see if you can hear any sounds, etc. Once you have done all this, you should be much calmer, and then you can start trying to make things happen in the dream.

Also, when you say you think perhaps your constant RCs may be dulling your sense of dreaming lucidity... maybe you should experiment with different RCs. What I try to do (and this perhaps isn't strictly an RC but I think of it as such) is to emulate a sense of 'waking lucidity' whenever it occurs to me to RC. It's hard to explain, but I deliberately bring on that peculiar feeling you get when you become lucid in a dream. I try to make myself feel that way, and then I look at the environment around me in a super-critical way, not just trying to see whether I'm dreaming or not but actually pretending that I'm dreaming. Then I try to make things happen, e.g. if I'm walking down the street and see someone, I try to make them vanish with sheer thought. Or I try to make things appear, or I will myself to fly (I do this all in my mind, no physical action, because if I was dreaming, no physical action would be required to do these things). When none of these things happen, I know I'm not dreaming, and I let go of the peculiar lucid feeling and go back to real life.

I hope that makes sense. Basically, I do a RC where I assume that I am dreaming, and then try to prove that I'm not, rather than assuming that I'm awake and trying to prove that I'm dreaming. Hope some of that helps.