^^ First, thanks for moving this from the PM format; I do appreciate it!
I think you'll find that much of what I have to say tends to leave people with unresolved contradictions :)! For instance:
The key word in what you just asked is "popular," I think. Sometimes concepts that sound quite reasonable find their way into the popular lexicon, and "heighten your dream senses to stay in the dream" is, in my opinion, definitely one of them. This is beside the fact that I've found that most -- if not all -- of the stabilization tutorials I've seen (and God knows I've seen a lot of them) tend to require you to already be highly lucid (aka, stable) just to do the stuff they ask you to do. Yes, it is very popular to tell dreamers to heighten their dream senses, but very little is said about what exactly a "dream sense" is, and, of course, no mention is made of the fact that, if you allow the "senses" of your DC "you" to take center stage, you might just find yourself sensing lots of things, but doing so quite non-lucidly.Quote:
The first thing i would like to bring up is how the idea of stabilization is popular as the "highten your dream senses to stay in the dream" argument that i've seen countlessly in almost all stabilization tutorials and such. In your message, you said that there is no need to attach myself to the dream environment since it's a part of me and not an external object that would exist without my attention. I do understand that so far, but what's the reason that people give this importance to dream senses being vivid for the dream itself to stay in place?
I think people give importance to dream senses, honestly, because it sounds like a reasonable thing to do (and it is a very easy instruction to put to paper). Unfortunately, heightening dream senses, almost by definition, tends to erase any non-dual perspective you might have, because you are prioritizing your DC "you" over the true "You" in your dream and diminishing your chance of fully realizing that everything in the dream is you. In a sense, there are no dream senses, only imagery meant to imitate senses, so any heightening of them only heightens the non-lucid base from which they're formed.
So I think my opinion here is that heightening dream senses might run against the stream of heightening lucidity... It might sound good on paper, but in the end focusing on schemata that your dreaming mind offers up (including dream senses) as real and vital things only leads you down a path toward abandoning lucidity, and not strengthening it. Ironically, of course, this sort of focus might just conjure NLD's about increased or stabilized lucidity. The only sense, I think, that you must heighten to stabilize and prolong a LD is the sense of your presence in the dream, that this whole dreamworld is one of your making; the rest is just window dressing.
I know I'm an outlier on this, but I hope you'll at least give it a thought.
In this case, you may indeed have been letting your expectations have their way with you.Quote:
Right now, i'm starting to see that my dreams collapsing may not really be what i think it is. In my most recent LD, i used meditation to keep my consciousness with me as i went through those moments of my senses fading away and what i thought was me waking up:
I'm not sure what to make of this. I might be letting my expectations lead to this happening, or it might be something else. Either way, i'm going to be observing this in my next lucids to see what it really is. In this manner, i may learn some things relevant to it.Quote:
I recalled my intentions to use meditation as a tool of stabilization, so i sat down cross-legged on the ground and started putting my attention on my breathing. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to have worked since everything went pitch-black very shortly.
I continued my attention even as it felt like the dream itself ended, but surprisingly i found myself back again in another lucid environment.
In between the two dreams (?), i think i had a game menu screen appear with text relevant to how i would move onto another lucid dream or not. I can't remember it very clearly.
The first problem might lie in that you assumed that your dream was collapsing; it probably wasn't. Next time you think your dream is collapsing, try relaxing a bit and either allow a new dream to form or form one yourself; assuming that a dream is irrevocably collapsing will very likely lead to its irrevocable collapse... expectation is a very powerful thing in dreamland.
The next problem (and one that I have always had with meditating in dreams) lies in the very act of sitting down cross-legged and doing things like putting your attention to waking-life activities like breathing. Because you are asking your dreaming mind to produce content that corresponds with a content-free activity like meditation in the context of waking-life reality, you might just short-circuit its dream-forming wiring and wind up with, yes, a moment of zero input, or blackness. It was very cool to see that your dreaming mind find a way out, though, by offering up that menu! If that happens again, I suggest that you be as creative as possible... maybe add your current dream goal to the menu, and "click" on it!
I guess the tl;dr here is that techniques for stabilizing dreams do not work on their own; you really must have your head in the right place before you do any of the techniques, popular as they may be.
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