nice to meet you!

[aluminium]

Greetings! Nice community! Glad to be part of it! I just wanted to tell you about my lucid dreaming career so far - even its not that spectacular. I came to know the topic LD about 2 years ago when browsing on amazon.com with "find related products" for a different subject. I was fascinated and instantly knew that this was a thing to go after. I immediatly realized the potential and possibilites of LD. What i really like about LD as a psychological method, which LD doubtlessly can serve as a lot, is that it doesnt require you to "have good thoughts", "think positive", "love everything" and similar common sense thoughts. You just need discipline, willpower, concentration, visualization abilty and can "be yourself" (<== horribly overused term, but fits in this case). At first i was a bit afraid of the thought of lying in my bed while "being in another world at the same time", but til now i got used to it. I kept reading a lot on this subject but i was too lazy too do some serious RCs, and often had excuses to start with them at a later time (a common problem it seems..). About one year ago i read some more about WILD, and had some beginnig WILD experiences but i almost always cancelled them when it got really interesting, because most of the time it was quite frightening. For example in one WILD attempt i was walking on a street at night and soon fully realized i was dreaming. Then i thought "well if this is a dream i can go through walls and every matter if i wanted". Right afterwards i "sunk" into the ground like i turned into ghost and i woke up on purpose because i couldnt stand the massive shape of the planet which i was about to see from the inside. Thinking about it theoretically is one thing, thinking about experiencing is no problem too, but actually experiencing it is, well, different. Sad fact is that only recently i had my first full-blown lucid dream. I wasnt really lucid but i kept questioning it because everything looked and felt very real. I spent the rest of the dream walking and looking around thinking "this must be a dream but this looks real, this looks real too..". But i also was careful not to focus my eyes to much, knowing that this makes one most likely to wake up, so in the back of my mind i must have been quite sure that i was actually dreaming. A few days later i had a real lucid dream, being absolutly sure about it, but it wasn't that intense and i woke up after 30-60 seconds or so.. My biggest problem seems to be the lack of consistency, right now for example i often go to bed late and get up late and do no RCs, thinking something like "the day is fucked up now anyway, so why bother", needless to say i cant even remember my dreams right now or even have lucids. My dream diary is accordingly sketchy. Tomorrow i will start another approach of trying to do as much RCs (the "think back" RC) as possible. I will try to keep imagining that i'am dreaming and try to "get used to the feeling". Most important thing for me will most probably be not to give up when i realize that i forgot doing RCs for some time. Furthermore i will get up early on a set date (lol i try to do this since years, with varying success). What really should help is going to sleep a bit earlier than usual. i found out that a healthy sleeping pattern for me is to go to bed not too late (before midnight). then i find myself often getting awake between 4 or 5 in the morning, which leaves me with 2 - 3 hours of REM - rich sleep. This waking up is not even forced but comes naturally to me. Lets see what happens. After all this time already passed its really time to push things forward now.

[aluminium]

*replys to himself* the last few days did't went that well. i am still having terrible discipline problems, didn't even care about my dream diary. the main problem seems to be that, as a student preparing for the next exams, i am under permanent distress which also means a high level of constant frustration. all this makes not care about LD. learning for the exams also takes the full mental capacity and i can not maintain doing RCs while at it. still all these are just excuses, i should at least be doing RCs while not learning..

[Burns]

huh. Guess I must've missed your initial post. Anyway, welcome to the forum! And congrats on the LDs you've already had! Maybe while you're concentrating on exams, you should give LDing a break. Schoolwork is more important right now - you've got your whole life to practice LDing. But after school is done, you'll just have to buckle down on yourself and have some self-discipline. I know how easy it is to say, "I'll start tomorrow." (I do it with exercising all the time, I just can't make myself get motivated enough to actually do it). But you need to be stronger than your procrastination, and just do it. You'll be glad you did.