How long did it take you to gain control?

Hi there,

I started getting serious about lucid dreaming bout a month ago. Since then Ive achieved 9 lucids. All of them I just realized I was dreaming which I'm fine with. Unfortunately all of them were short and fairly...vague If you will. I remember them all well so that's not a problem. My problem is the fact that they were all so short and I couldn't do much really. So, you experienced fellows out there, how many lucids did it take you before you gained an enjoyable level of control and vividness? I realize perhaps it may not be possible for me to gain full control and extreme levels of vividness but I think I'm capable of improving however marginally on my previous levels of lucidity. Perhaps autosuggestion helps with this? I personally havnt seen much results from A. Suggestion but I might have given up on it to quickly. And also, are dilds always very short? It's hard to tell if I'm waking up from excitement or the dreams just at a finish. I naturally wake up after dreams and I can easily keep my eyes closed so obviously I've attempted deilds. But on each attempt, I lay there for a bit and suddenly I start to feel very hot and get pins and needles all over. Is that just how SP feels? Perhaps I just need to fight through it. Thanks for any advice!!

Well being a natural LD'er I can only recall that I've had LD's my entire life since I was a child. It takes time to keep yourself from getting overly excited. Excitement being the number 1 cause of LD interruption and even a little excitement can force the LD to cancel out at a moments notice. I would suggest having a game plan before you sleep. Figure out what you want to to when once you've arrived at the LD. Once you get into it, go immediately to what you've already planned on doing. This will help you not get to excited because it gives your conscious thoughts something else to focus on instead of the excitement.

I second ShadowNightWing's advice. Performing tasks, or attempting to perform tasks, is how I maintain lucidity in a DILD and how I advance my dream control. (And unlike him, I'm not a natural LDer - I only started having LDs around age 18, sparked by curiosity and interest, and have had to learn stabilization, control, etc.) Even in non-lucid dreams, sometimes you'll expect things to happen a certain way and they will; that's a sort of primitive, inadvertent form of dream control. If you expect it, you have a very high chance of getting it. In other words, the "Law of Attraction," aka "The Secret," may be questionable in real life, but it is essential to the workings of dreams. By setting tasks, I think this same principle that leads to these self-fulfilling prophesies in non-lucid dreams facilitates true conscious dream control. One thing you have to be careful of, though, is making self-fulfilling prophesies that you will fail at dream control! I do that sometimes. I think I need to improve on my confidence that I can will anything in the dream world. More success at more tasks in more LDs can help increase that confidence. I've gotten pretty good (but not perfect) at "finding" things...I didn't used to be. And passing through barriers like closed windows and walls was troublesome either. There were even days when I couldn't fly due to self-sabotage, but I can virtually always fly now.