Glad I found this site!

Hello Dream Views,
My name is Jo, and I'm a 20 year old student and artist from Canada. I stumbled across this site while trying to do some of my own research on lucid dreaming. I've been interested in dreams for a very long time as I have had very vivid ones all my life. I have had many lucid dreams but mostly as a child. Still, I have them now from time to time but I have a very difficult time remaining lucid for any length of time.

I hope to learn from the information and the experience of the users of this site. I want to be able to achieve lucidity regularly and increase the duration of my lucid dreams.

-Jo

Hi, welcome. I'm not sure whether your problem is that you lose lucidity to waking up, or to falling back into a regular dream. Waking up too quickly was my main problem when I used to lucid dream often. Common methods to help that involve physically doing things to immerse yourself into the dream world, like rubbing your hands or feeling textures. If you haven't already, you'll run into many great suggestions on this site that you can try yourself to see which work for you. You, as an artist, might find great benefit in lucid dreaming as inspiration for your art. Or some people think the subconscious might work that way. Maybe it doesn't, I don't know.

Thanks for the tip about rubbing hands or feeling textures, I'll be sure to try it next time. I have both problems with remaining lucid, sometimes I just forget and slip back into a regular dream, but other times I get too excited by the fact that I have become lucid and I wake myself up. Usually when I achieve lucidity I want to try out as many things as possible and then the dream starts fading away.

Welcome to the site and I strongly suggest reading through the tutorials sections here to get a nice overview of the whole LDing process. Its good that you have had LDs before, having that first one is, often times, half the battle. You should definitely read up on stabilization techniques. You always want to stabilize upon entering the dream. You can perform them when things start to get fuzzy/unstable throughout the dream as well. Stay calm and don't get overly excited. Once you become lucid, pretend you are experienced and know you will have ample time to do whatever you want. Don't rush things...there will be many opportunities to do cool stuff. If you have any specific questions don't hesitate to ask. Good Luck to you!

Thank you! I've started reading through some of the tutorials and now I can't wait to go to sleep tonight. Hopefully I will make some progress soon.