Squilli0's Workbook

MINOR WORKBOOK UPDATE: Short and Inane Dream Clusters

I had a huge cluster of 7+ (Mostly) short dreams and more before that I can remember from last night. They aren't really of note, and some less pleasant then others, but the point is that I was lucid to a small extent for the majority of the dreams. I had little control, but I was flying unintentionally. It was odd, because one second I was somewhere in my local area and then I was soaring through the clouds. I woke up about 5 times and DEILD'ed back into lucidity on many occasions, but the possibility of a certain phenomenon piques my interest. It has occurred to me that perhaps I had a False Awakening about doing a DEILD, and then that I was Falsely Lucid, meaning I thought I was lucid but in fact I wasn't. I'll look into this, because it just seems like a funny thing for my Sub-Conscious to do.

Great recall. I think false lucids are possible but I am not sure I have had one or how that happens.

There have been a lot of threads discussing "false lucidity" or "semi-lucidity" or "pseudolucidity".

Apparently, it's what you just stated — a dream where you are dreaming that you are lucid, and seem to follow a storyline without much thought.

For me, that is still a lucid dream. However, I think that there is a huge difference between knowing you are dreaming and understanding you are dreaming. The former entails that you merely know you are dreaming, and may or may not have control and much clarity of thought. The latter, however, means that in addition to knowing you are lucid, you fully understand the implications of it being a dream. When you truly understand that it's a dream, fear vanishes because you know there are no laws and you can do anything you put your mind to.

I do have many lucids where I merely know it's a dream, and I'm still a bit foggy with consciousness. A lot of the times, even though I know it's a dream, I still get scared because somewhere in the remote corners of my mind, a part of me won't let go of the fact that it's a dream and anything is possible. :D

I've been stuck in a dry spell for a couple of weeks. I am getting frustrated, due to a bit of a block occurring with my DEILDs. It has stopped me from having an LD many times. I keep on waking up with my eyes closed, imagining the dream scene, going back to sleep and then losing Lucidity. When I do get lucid, I either stabilize and fail, or forget to stabilize and lose lucidity. Please share some tips, because this is getting really discouraging.

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Originally Posted by Squilli0

I've been stuck in a dry spell for a couple of weeks. I am getting frustrated, due to a bit of a block occurring with my DEILDs. It has stopped me from having an LD many times. I keep on waking up with my eyes closed, imagining the dream scene, going back to sleep and then losing Lucidity. When I do get lucid, I either stabilize and fail, or forget to stabilize and lose lucidity. Please share some tips, because this is getting really discouraging.

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Hey Squilli0! I'm sorry to hear about the dry spell, but we've all been there at one time or another.

I'm the World's Slowest Learner at DEILDs, so I'll leave the DEILD tips for others to provide. :D It sounds like you've gone a bit dry with DEILDs but you are having some DILDs occur that just give you some stability issues. DEILD dry spells are pretty much the story of my life, but DILDs alone can provide you with tons of great lucid dreams. I don't know whether you are still bailing out of DILDs intentionally in order to chain back in, but if you are, maybe look at this as an opportunity to work on stabilizing your DILDs.

The good news is that you are still achieving lucid dreams, so that's great in itself. All you have to do now is keep them going. It seems that the first problem is when you "stabilize and fail". Can you describe a bit more what happens here? What sort of failure do you experience and what sort of stabilization do you perform? I find that the biggest factor in stabilization is simply making yourself a part of the dream scene in every way you can. This especially includes your dream body. Rubbing your hands together, studying your hands, feeling the scenery, clinging to dream characters, feeling objects in the scene, licking the wall or floor, whatever! All of this works.

A lot of super-experienced LDers just sort of naturally anchor in and don't need to do any explicit stabilization. OpheliaBlue and paigeyemps have both mentioned that they no longer explicitly stabilize. Believing that you are a part of the dream scene is the crucial factor. I find that interacting aggressively with dream scenery (dream body included) is a great way to enhance this belief if it does not come naturally.

As for forgetting to stabilize, try making it your primary lucid goal when settling down to sleep or for a WBTB. If you commit to yourself that your main goal in the next LD is to study your hands, rub them together, and just feel the dream environment in every way possible, you'll be that much more likely to get right to it. This can be a great deal of fun all by itself! Studying your hands close up, for example, will amaze you. Your mind can generate incredible detail.

Good luck and let us know how things go for you!

Thanks CanisLucidus! Unfortunately, I don't get the opportunity to try the DILD bailing things. When I fail to stabilize I mean that I don't commit to it well enough, so all in all I only get about 10 seconds lucidity. I'll work on the stabilizing things first before I get into my other goals, like the Task of the Month.

Ya know, when it comes to stabilizing, becoming completely conscious of your surroundings can be very helpful...Practicing it during the day is also very helpful. All Day Awareness is what its called, although that doesn't mean you have to do it all day. Here are a couple links that will be a bit more helpful...


!This is about Stabilization!

!This is about ADA (All Day Awareness)!

Enjoy :buns:

WORKBOOK UPDATE 12/9/12: Sudden Influx

I'm probably going to use this update to address two changes, as one of them I should have added a looooooong time ago but I was too lazy.

UPDATE: 12/5/2012

Dryspell is broken, I had a short LD where I was a passenger driving in a car passing through the Simpson Desert. I became lucid with barely any stimulus and managed to hold my s**t together and not get excited, eliminating the need for stabilization. It lasted about 10 minutes because I tried teleporting, but Marvelous Monsieur Subconscious decided to intervene with my scene change and send me into a Hellish dimension, where I was side scrolling along platforms like a deranged Mario. I was woken up when a certain family member decided I had slept long enough.

UPDATE: 12/9/12

Wow, mental suggestion is freaky stuff. I hadn't had any LD's since the dryspell was broken, and last night I set myself into a firm mindset, telling my self that there is no chance of me not having an LD. It worked, and I managed to have 3 LD's. I wasn't too excited, so I didn't have to stabilize, but perhaps I should have, because one was only about 5 minutes long. First one, I was in a long train carriage, and there were fire sprinklers on the ceiling. They were going off, and dream me decides rather then evacuate the carriage I may as well take the opportunity to have a shower. :uhm: . Well anyway, someone was throwing rocks through an open window carriage into my makeshift shower, so I walked down to the other end of the carriage, away from the window. I decided to have a drink from a water dispenser that some people have on their fridges. Que non lucidity. Fast forward. Que Lucidity. Que forgetting what happens during said lucidity. Fast forward again. Que Lucidity. So for the 3rd LD I was trapped in a bus outside a gas station. I teleported out, and had a chat with some DC's. I roamed around the station a bit and then woke up.

WORKBOOK UPDATE 12/13/12: Clear dreams


As per the three to four day average rule, it's been four days since my last LD. I had a grand total of three lucid dreams, but two of them are kinda quasi LDs due to them being short.

The first one, I was at a local gym type place, but it was much larger. I lost lucidity due to not stabilizing.

The second one, I was under a tree on the shore, about 50 metres inland from the beach, and there was some person trying to start a riot. Don't ask me how this made me lucid, because I have no clue. I remebered my goal of doing the basic ToTM of making it snow, but remembering this external stimulus made me wake up. I madly stabilized as the colour bleached out of my dreams.

I kept my eyes closed on waking up and immediately imagined the scene I was in, but my subconscious inervened and made me focus on the scene of the first lucid. This pissed me off, but I couldn't really fight it. I almost woke up completely out of the void scene straight after losing lucidity, but I focused harder and rather then thinking of sight I focused more on smell and sound. This got me lucid, but I can't remember what I did in the following LD.

Anyway, I was out of town, and sleeping in a different bed somehow helps me gain lucidity. Speaking of which, I had a nasty cold last night so I took one of those night pills for colds (Don't know if Antihistamines is the correct word, I always thought they prevented allergies/colds rather then subdue them) so I was pretty drowsy when I went to sleep. I don't know if this counts as a lucid aid as well as a sleeping aid, but I avoid lucid aids like Vitamin B6 and such.

I would write more descriptively, but right now I'm on a dilapidated Dell Inspiron 6000, and I'm currently experiencing a 25% chance every 5 of this thing spontaneously combusting.

Congrats on breaking the dry spell!

Also, i think the medicine you took could have helped. i know i get lucids sometimes when im sick and take some medicine like those for colds or cough. :D

And good luck on your laptop not combusting and stuff x)

WORKBOOK UPDATE 12/29/2012: Dry Spell and Motivation Deficit

So recently I've been having a really long dry spell, and it's stolen away most of my motivation. It's kind of like the chicken or the egg, I may have lost motivation due to the dry spell or I may have had the dry spell due to loss of motivation. Either way, I take this as a trial standing between me and my lucidity, so I'm gonna revisit lucid dreaming with a new motivation.

WORKBOOK UPDATE: 12/30/2012: Elusive lucidity returns as well as a strange feeling

Well, having reset my motivation and setting my intentions for half an hour prior to sleeping last night, I had three consecutive lucid dreams! Recently I've been skepticizing (Is that even a word? Well it is now :P ) about dream guide things, so I decided the best way to determine it is to try it out myself. I had some fun NLD's for a while, then I realized I was dreaming. I immediately stabilized. Hilarity ensues. As I frantically run my fingers through a DC's hair, they look at me as if I'm some insane person. I started to doubt whether I was in a dream, so I flipped my s**t and ran a few streets until I was well clear of a potential personal invasion crime scene. I ran into a small room with a plastic desk on one side, and completely forgetting my goal, I set a new one of lying down and going to sleep in an LD. First I RC to make absolutely sure I didn't just invade someones personal space. Seeing three fingers on my left hand, and two fingers connecting at the tips on my right hand, I was reassured enough to lie on the floor and try to sleep. Evidently, it makes me wake up in real life.

I snapped my eyes shut and focused on the previous scene, and I was transported through it. Unfortunately, my dream reconstruction isn't all there yet, so I wound up in some random's house (who seemed to recognise me) and stabilized. I then remembered my goal, and walked through the house, repeating something about dream guides over and over. No DG was apparent, but I got this feeling of my limbs locking up and spiders crawling down my back, which lasted until I woke up and entered the next LD, which I can't quite remember. :panic:

Sorry about the DG stuff, which probably belongs on a different part of the forum, but it was in an LD so I sort of bundled it up with my LD progress and so it is here. :P

Wowie, cool dreams! I don't know why it is, but I'm the same way when I "go to sleep" in an LD: I wake up for real. Like we can't be asleep in 2 places at the same time lol.

Anyway, congrats on the lucids, and on adjusting your motivation to get through the dry spell. It sure worked fast! Sometimes that's all you need: to take a little pressure off yourself, or redirect your attentions one way or another. When I go through my dry spells (which happen for me regularly enough that I just call them "cycles"), I stop focusing on technique, or awareness ALL day long, and just focus on one thing: getting the right amount of sleep. Sometimes, just a couple days of good, solid sleep seems to be what I need to break the cycle. That's just me though.

Anyway, now that you're back on the lucid track, good luck with finding your DG! And in regards to talking about the subject of DGs here, remember that this is your workbook. You get to put whatever you want in it. It's for you to progress in anyway you see fit. Plus it gives DVA staff an idea of what you're trying to do so we can help better. :) Hell, if they'd had DVA workbooks when I first joined, it would have been a s.h.i.t.t.y. mess lol

Thanks! I think what was going on wasn't so much a dryspell as much as me losing interest. I haven't been doing RC's lately, and I generally haven't been paying any notice to lucid dreaming, but just spending half an hour on DV 1-2 hours prior to going to bed seems to be like the pilot light to my lucid dreaming oven or the spark plug to my LD-Mobile's engine.

~

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Originally Posted by Squilli0

Seeing three fingers on my left hand, and two fingers connecting at the tips on my right hand, I was reassured enough to lie on the floor and try to sleep. Evidently, it makes me wake up in real life.

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This is cool! Its like to the dream you, the waking life is a dream. While in your waking life, going to the dream means going to sleep. Interesting metaphor. :)

WORKBOOK UPDATE: Slight issue causing a dry spell

Recently, whenever I've been waking up from a dream the transition is instant, I get no grogginess. I wake up fully aware and ready to hop out of bed. You'd think this is a blessing rather then a curse, but I'm currently halfway through my summer holiday, And the only thing this is really doing is keeping me from my DEILD's. Recently, whenever I DEILD (If ever. Although this has been a problem before I was waking up fully aware) I can get back to sleep alright, but I can't transfer my awareness into the next dream unless I've had an LD beforehand. It's been quite annoying, and I think it's one of my other lucid habits/issues I need to revise. Speaking of which, I should list them.

• Fixing these DEILD shenanigans.
• Restart doing RC's.
• Restart my DJ

WORKBOOK UPDATE 13/1/13: Last night's lucid and tonight's WILD attempt

Last night I had a freaky dream, where I went somewhere with my sister and drove her car to a parking lot near where I live. My subconscious put a tennis court next to the parking lot, so I walked through it and came to a movie rental shop. I poked around, but found nothing good (There were a few Harry Potter movies and some Aliens movies, but I can't recall any but them) so I walked back to the parking lot. I got sidetracked and walked down a path into a sunny forest clearing, and halfway down the path I got a funny feeling. I looked at my hands, and I had three fingers awkwardly protruding from each hand. Without a thought for stabilization (I've gotten into a habit of forgoing stabilization) and no doubt in my flying skills, I hurled myself forwards, arms extended superman style. I flew 50 metres in the space of a few seconds, and then I hit a mental hyperdrive switch and my surroundings bleached away. "Cool! A new scene!" I thought. Wrong. It was just me waking up.


So tonight I thought I'd try a WILD. I've set my alarm and my intentions to do the basic ToTM of freezing a lake over and donning ice skates. I'm getting myself into the state of mind with no doubt that I will have a WILD. I'll add my experience in the morning.

WORKBOOK UPDATE 14/1/13: Close, but no cigar

The results of the WILD are semi-conclusive. I woke up naturally a minute or two before the alarm, so I nailed the timing. I went to bed at 11:00PM and set the alarm for 4:15AM. I stayed up reading Robert Jordan's "The Eye of the World" until 5:00AM and then I tried lying down in several comfortable positions and counting y breathing soon enough I started losing count due to my brain trying to go to sleep, but I can't remember SP. (Which isn't to say it didn't occur) I actually think I got to the REM stage, but I must have lost focus and followed a dreamlet, because there was no lucidity.

I'll try again tonight, last night was more successful then my first attempt which only got into the relaxation phase.

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Originally Posted by Squilli0

Recently, whenever I've been waking up from a dream the transition is instant, I get no grogginess. I wake up fully aware and ready to hop out of bed. You'd think this is a blessing rather then a curse, but I'm currently halfway through my summer holiday, And the only thing this is really doing is keeping me from my DEILD's. Recently, whenever I DEILD (If ever. Although this has been a problem before I was waking up fully aware) I can get back to sleep alright, but I can't transfer my awareness into the next dream unless I've had an LD beforehand.

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That's interesting to hear you say that, because my reply was going to be for you to attempt WILD. But in your subsequent posts, I see that you already are. The reason I find that interesting is because DEILDs were always a bit weird for me too: either I would DILD early in the morning, then maybe have a DEILD. But usually it would just be additional DILDs. Ironically, in my quest for trying to get DEILDs just right, I accidentally stumbled upon the elusive WILD for the first time in my life (happened just months ago). My ticket wasn't SP, rather vibrations. They acted as a signal that I could "open my eyes" and be in a lucid dream already. Sounds like you're headed that way yourself. Got my fingers crossed for you man!

It seems like it is easier to DEILD from a lucid than a non lucid. Perhaps it is because you arwareness is already in place when coming out of a lucid. I have only DEILD from a non lucid a handful of times. I need to work on that more. Ive found mantras to be a great tool. That's just my 2 cents anyway :D

WORKBOOK UPDATE 1/18/13: ToTM complete!

Last night I had a DILD, and it was the usual, I started waking up as soon as I reached lucidity. But straight after, I started hearing the noises of waking life, and I briefly wake up. Too determined to stop there, I pulled myself straight back into the dream. I stabilized straight away (Unlike my last few DILD's) and after stabilizing, I realized I was in a tour group in Antarctica. This reminded me of the ToTM, so in a rush for ideas on how to freeze the water around the ice floes, I summoned a giant pink monolith of ice. I shoved my hand into it and pulled out a fist sized shard, and holding this I ran into the water. Except, I didn't fall into the water, the ice was being created under my feet. I created about 50m square of ice on the water, and put a pair of ice skates on my feet, soon starting to skate around.

I'm quite happy with this, but perhaps it doesn't count because I did it in Antarctica? :?

Awesome work, Squilli0! That's probably the most challenging of the Basic TotMs that I've ever seen. I didn't even go for it! (Edit: Meaning, I didn't even go for this one, not the arrogant "Even I didn't go for this one!"... lol)

And hey, you were in Antarctica, too! You could have done one of the Task of the Year items afterward, too. Maybe you still can if you find yourself back there!

Excellent work! :goodjob: Glad things worked so well for you, and great job DEILDing into an awesome lucid after almost losing the whole thing. (Or at least I guess it was a DEILD.)

Thanks! It was a bit of a quasi DEILD, I wasn't fully out of the dream, but I had the sensation of the bed sheets around me and hearing commotion downstairs :P . I may or may not go for task of the year, on one hand it's a good ongoing task but on the other, I might still have to improve some aspects of my lucid dreaming.

Okay, I know I've said this before, and I'm tentatively saying that for real I'm going to get back into LD'ing. I've had a lot on my plate recently, and I haven't been giving my LD's the attention they deserve, but that's gonna change soon!