Thread: Your First Lucid Dream

A Newb's Experience with Lucid Dreaming

Lucid dream control requires a balance of attention. This leaves only three outcomes for any newbie dreamer. Achieve a balance, or tip the scale in one direction or the other.

1. Balance: If a first time LDer begins to interact with his environment right away, then he inadvertently achieves balance as his awareness gets spread around the dream scene. Things seem stable as long as they keep up a steady interaction with the dream.

2. Introversion: The dreams realizes they are dreaming and are so amazed, excited and thrilled by this fact that they focus all their attention on that thought alone. What that implies, the realization of what's happening, what's possible, all these thoughts direct a sudden rush of your awareness inwards to deal with all these mental machinations, which creates a corresponding vacuum in the dream around them. With no attention to sustain it's self, the dream collapses and the dreamer wakes up.

3. Overkill: Realizing they are dreaming, the dreamer checks things out and something fantastic, bizarre or just plain interesting catches their eye. They go in for a closer look and the directed increase in attention causes that element to grow out of control, demanding even more attention. They get in too deep and don't know how to stop it. The resulting confusion also leads to waking up, which is a form of the second outcome.


The second two are only pitfalls at the beginning. With practice they become your main tools. The reason it goes so badly at first is because people don't recognize what's happening. It's like giving a loaded gun to a monkey. The monkey doesn't recognize what the gun can do, what it was designed to do. Yet it can still fire the gun, which will probably scare the living crap out of it!!

I'd say that overkill can cause a loss of lucidity also, instead of only waking up. In my first LD, I made the sun rise and the clouds looked so weird that I focused on them until I forgot that I was dreaming. I didn't wake up, and I can't remember any dreams after that.