Intro (My story; feel free to skip):

I'll start with a short recap of my personal experience with lucid dreaming.

From the very beginning, reality checks were a big part of my lucid dreams. I was confident that they would work, and I was pretty desperate to start LDing on purpose (I had already had a few lucids on accident). Sure enough, the RC's did the trick, time and time again.

Then there came a time when I dropped the reality checks purely for the sake of exploring my other options. I continued to learn about dreaming in general and different methods for going lucid. Eventually, however, I was at a low rate of LD success, so I returned to the faithful RCing in hopes of restoring my consistent lucid dreams.

To my utter surprise, after a month of constantly reality checking, I had absolutely no RC-based lucid dreams. By chance I'd stumble upon a lucid every once in a while, but they had nothing to do with the reality checks.

It grew quite discouraging for a while. It seemed my ability to lucid dream was drawing to a close...until through one random lucid dream I happened to learn what was really going on. It was a bit strange...I was in the dream, I was thinking about dreams, and I thought to myself, "I sure wish I could turn this into a lucid dream. I'm tired of just having normal dreams all night!" That's when it hit me: I could turn it into a lucid dream! I didn't have to reality check or anything, just know that I was dreaming.

DUH, right? Well, maybe, maybe not.



The Theory:

So why was it that I couldn't go lucid all that time? And why doesn't everyone with a little lucid dreaming experience go lucid every night? Is it because we truly don't know that we're dreaming?

I'm here to challenge that last question and say that it is not. Instead, I propose we do not lucid dream every night because we've trained ourselves to think lucid dreaming is a difficult thing to attain.

In my experience, I've done so many reality checks, learned a lot about dreams, etc., so that I don't even have to think twice to know if I'm awake or not. And I'd imagine it could be the same way for many of you as well. In fact, I'd say every night I know in the back of my mind when I am and when I am not dreaming.

The problem is, because I've spent the past several months fighting to achieve lucidity, I've convinced myself it's hard to LD, and thus my sleeping mind is fighting against itself with the notion that it can't just go lucid based on this simple knowledge alone.



If this is true, how do I fix the problem?

Lucid dreaming is obviously heavily mental. But at the same time, I don't think this "I'll try to convince myself that I'm going to LD tonight" thing is really all its cracked up to be. And that is not what I'm advocating here. Think about it. If you try to convince yourself that you will lucid dream, that means you honestly believe that without the self-convincing, you wouldn't LD at all! What I'm trying to say is, provided you are pretty aware of your state, you don't need anything to lucid dream, because you practically do it every night, just without being consciously aware of it. So remove the obstruction of "lucid dreaming is hard" from your mind, accept the fact that you can lucid dream every night without following A, B, C, and (hopefully) things will get better.

I'm certainly no doctor, though Feel free to think up your own solutions. I'd imagine it's a little different for everyone, anyway. This is simply what I have done and am beginning to see results with.



So what do you think?

I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts on this. Discuss at will.