Originally Posted by
sivason
Thanks Gab.
Here is one main difference between 10 year olds and 31 year olds, intoxicants. I do not know if you use any recreational substances, but they all can seriously impact your dreaming experience. I have no solution for anyone who wants to smoke pot and LD. It handicaps you big time. The same can be true for drinking and even large amounts of caffeine. I will go on assuming that this is not the case for you, or that even if it is, you may still want to LD and keep waking life as it is.
The way you need to deal with a crumbling dream or one with dangerously shaky aspects is to reduce all the data your brain needs to process. This is my go to stabilization for collapsing dreams. I may use other methods for routine stabilization, but for a collapsing dream sensory reduction is what you need. To do this you stay very calm and pretend something that will reduce all the needed virtual rendering to a minimum. This includes thinking.
Here is an example from one of my dreams. I was walking through a crowd and a naked woman tries to get my attention. She says she is angry that I did not see her. I look at her in an intimate way and the dream starts to fall apart. I feel it happening just like you describe. Things become two dimensional and the colour fades, I saved it by suddenly looking at her ankle and deciding all I can see is her ankle and the ankle bracelet. I say "oh look, your clasp came loose." I focus just on the clasp now and my fingers tips holding the clasp. I do not think about anything but the simple little clasp. I casually look at it and try to picture what the clasp would look like. This is a close up view of just her ankle, the clasp and my finger tips. It is so focused on limited rendering that there is no foot or body or crowd. I just examine the little clasp. I do this for about 45 seconds and the feeling of collapsing has gone away. I test the dream by now trying to use my fingers and work the clasp. The details come in and I can work the clasp plus her ankle is now 3 dimensional. I then resume my adventure until the next time I need to stabilize.
This is the idea: at these points when the dream is collapsing your brain is not processing information fast enough. The worst thing you can do is spin around or anything that increases the amount of virtual rendering needing. I hope that helps. It is a little advanced perhaps, in that it requires you have control over what you are seeing and doing. However, you have past experience, so maybe it will work for you.
