Any tips for getting back into it?

Hi everyone,

I started practising lucid dreaming last year and ended up getting pretty good at it (I was a natural at it, which definitely helped). However it made me very tired and I started getting sleep paralysis quite a lot so I stopped trying.

After a bit of a break I have decided that I want to get back into having lucid dreams but I am afraid that I have lost all the natural ability that I used to have, as last night I completely ignored obvious dream signs including repeated device failure and changing text, which before I could pick up even without trying :( Also is there anything I can do to limit tiredness and sleep paralysis this time round?

Any advice would be appreciated :)

My best advice is just to get back into it and start trying it. It's pretty much the same as the first time around, except that this time you have the advantage of already knowing what works for you. Keep a dream journal and do whatever technique worked for you last time. Don't worry, it will come back to you with a bit of practice. Just be patient for a while. :)

There shouldn't be anything about lucid dreaming itself that makes you tired, unless you do WBTB. This is sort of pointing out the obvious, but if you're tired you should try to get more sleep. It may help your recall/lucidity as well.

The only way I can think of limiting SP is to somehow suppress REM, which I wouldn't advise doing for more than a little while because: 1) Most vivid dreams happen during REM, 2) You'll go crazy, and 3) I'm not even sure how you could do it.
Are you afraid of SP, or do you just find it annoying?

Thanks for the advice. I think I'm going to start a dream journal tonight but I probably won't be able to commit to it too much, as I am in my final year of school and very busy. What I found worked for me was thinking about dreaming and having to intention of remembering deams/becoming lucid so hopefully I get good again soon.

I do normally get enough sleep but before I would find that after a night of lucid dreaming I would wake up feeling like I had not slept at all and then feel tired for the whole day. I think that's just me though...

Actually come to think of it, my lucid dreams always used to happen in big clumps. I would have one DILD and then wake up (usually with sleep paralysis) and then I would just fall back into sleep paralysis and go into another lucid dream and cycle would continue until I had to get up unless I actually got out of bed and did something which usually fixed it. So maybe that's what caused the tiredness.

In answer to you question, I don't find it too frightening and have had only one really bad experience with it. I just found it really annoying not being able to go to sleep properly when I woke up from a dream and having to get out of bed if I wanted decent sleep for the rest of the night.