Thread: Lucid Dreaming Fundamentals -- With Q & A

I'm sure that by now you're sick of seeing me asking you questions, and i'm pretty aware of the fact that i've done it a lot by now. Still, i'm incredibly frustrated by my progress. If you could take a moment to read all of this, i couldn't be more greatful. Stay with me as i poorly explain my story since day 1 of my practice..

I accidentally ran accross the concept of LDing back in 2011, yeah that's a long time ago.. And to this day, i've never had as much success as my first year of practice. As the years passed, i could only get more pessimistic about my own skills because i could only see them go down and down. Only through the past year have i tried to get an idea of where i've gone wrong, but it still stays unclear. One thing i regret is reading about all the information on the forums. Because of this, i've gotten my practice mixed up with hundreds of different "ways" to LD. I've essentially lost my way with the time i spent reading up about all the techniques and so on. I don't really blame anyone but myself for this though. My view on LDing went from "RC only" to a ridiculously complex understanding that to me, LDing became such a hard thing to do in my mind.

Technique after technique, tutorial after tutorial, i've gotten confused so much i tried quitting this for the second time today.. Only when i tried to quit i realized that LDing became part of me.. Hence what? 5 years of trying to do it? I'm actually surprised by the amount of persistence i hold, i even bugged you out for WILD continuously for 4 months only to realize in the end that i was forcing it on myself.

I knew nothing special. I only RC'd. That's all. No dream journals since i used to remember my dreams in my head, and nothing more than RC's and WBTBs.

Through this very simple approach, i gained 70 LDs in around 1 year, with around 2~3 LDs weekly. I did what i just mentioned for that 1 year, and after that i got burnt out and stopped RC'ing as much, and i eventually stopped it all. Ever since then, i could never get the same success with any other method. I didn't know about anything other than just "RC to lucid dream". As i delved more into how it all worked, i only got more confused from it.

I'm literally listing down what i used to do:
- Nose plug RC all the time
- Occasional unintended WBTBs
- Consistent sleep (School days)
- Consistency in the practice (months ~ 1 year?)

How come that doing stuff so simple, i got success rather easily? No complex "requirements" to LD.. I only "just did it" It's pretty obvious that i could just mimick what i used to do to succeed again, but i'm not even sure if it would work again, which is making me unsure of whether or not i should go through it.

My frustration is probably leaking through this text, but i've really had enough of wasting anymore time without improving. 5 Years is a lot.

Maybe all of this is irrelevant to the thread, but i could only find this thread as the best place to say this. I've recently jumped into the practice of self-awareness, but something feels wrong and i don't know what it is. There is something i'm misunderstanding in here, and i'm asking you for help on figuring that out.

Here's my summary question: What should i do next if i want to succeed like i used to?