Tips for maintaining lucidity while dreaming

[Michael_E]

quote:Originally posted by Blue Giant

Hello,
I was wondering if any of you know how to either stay lucid while your dreaming or recharging your dream to stay in it. I've tried one technique that kept the dream going. I spun around in circles and it completely re-energized the dream. Lately, I've been having dreams where I will wake up in them (become lucid and then kind of drift away from that awareness. Sometimes, I've been able to remember what I wanted to do in a lucid dream by using my memory from the waking state. I've brought forth questions that I wanted answered, but these dreams have diminished over time. Why?

Blue Giant

Greetings Blue Giant!,

Are you asking why are the lucidity of my dreams not as strong as I would like them to be or why am i not remembering my dreams(lucid) more? Well regardless, i will try to answer both as best i can. Ive been lucky enough to have a fairly active lucid dream life and what i have found is that all the tricks that robert bruce talks about like spinning looking at hands or the ground do help to ensure a firmer connection to the dream world.

What also helps for me are doing excersizes that involve the good use of concentration,if you raise the level of your ability to concentrate it seems to become inherent and carries on in the lucid world especially if you do the concentration work right before going to sleep. You can test this your self by not doing any particular excersizes isolating the development of good concentration for a month or so and seeing the difference in both the abiliy to recognize a dream and to take good control over it when compared with when you do concentration practices.

As for remembering the dreams. I can see how getting good concentration could help out there too. The deeper you can concentrate on remembering something the more you will remember! Remebering dreams is best done the MOMENT you awake, dont even move a mucsle when you wake up, set remembering dreams as a priority upon waking and think back to what happened.

Hope this helped at all.

[Nagual]

And it could also be related to your level of energy at the time...
How do you feel now, compared to when you had the first LDs...?

[Blue Giant]

I'll try what you said, Michael E, about the level of concentration on things. Thanks for your help! Nagual, I do recall feeling less harmonious as I did a while back. Negative thoughts have been filtering in more as well as my level of innocence has fluctuated in a decreasing manner. I feel lately that I'm in a constant battle with others (on a mental level of course). So many games to deal with

Blue Giant

[holy reality]

i've come to believe that the reason you can't stay in a lucid dream very long is simply because of your sleeping cycles....

most of the times I'm lucid tend to be during the span of time (usually 3-5 a.m.) in which I am prone to FREQUENTLY WAKING UP... thus, I can enter a dream at the drop of a hat, and I'm going to be constantly dreaming through that time span, but my body doesn't want to stay asleep becuase I'm not getting into deep enough levels of sleep.

If I do become lucid during deep sleep I can usually adventure for a long time before having to worry about reality decaying and trying to force myself to stay asleep.

This week though.. I haven't been able to stay in even REGULAR dreams... it's like, so many times I think that in the back of my head I know I'm dreaming but I force myself to forget that becuase the dream I'm in is cool and I want to think it's real...

I dreamed I was a soldier last night and got captured in Iraq... they sent me to a prison, but it was an extremely nice prison, well, there were torture chambers but they put me in the highest level, which was kind of like a school, loose security, okay food, lots of socialization and such... well...

This dream was very long, I'd say an hour or two.... and toward the end of it I kept waking up, and I knew I was waking up before it happened, despite not really being the slightest bit lucid... and when I would wake up I just wouldn't move, I'd just sit there with my eyes closed lying in my bed focusing really hard on everything I had just experienced and trying to reconnect to it, and keep repeating the last scenes over and over... and I'd lose consciousness, then I'd be back where I left off... this happened a good 3 or 4 times and it fragmented the overall dream itself rather severely, but it still more or less remained the same in general.

Then I made the mistake of rolling over when I woke again, being uncomfortable, which disrupted my flow and concentration and made it hard to get immediately back asleep and into the dream.

The first time I ever did this I almost accidentally projected... I was focusing on the last image I had seen from the dream I was just in... and I ended up kind of out of my body, but still in it, and looking at this huge one dimensional stack of spiral slides... I started hearing this song "helter skelter" by the Beatles.. only I've never heard the song before in my life, and the lyrics were greatly inaccurate, but nevertheless I had read about the song and Charles Manson's connection to it that day, so it was in my head and playing out...

Well.. my vision panned to the top of the slide complex beyond my control, and the song said something like "helter skelter she's coming down" and i got really afraid... I started seeing intense colors like I was tripping my head off or something and I heard a voice just like the one at the start of Tool's The Gaping Lotus Experience that went "whoahhhh" then I heard an evil deomnic voice going "you're in trouble now boy!" and I felt my body being distorted and contorted and pulled in all sorts of impossible angles.......... which I sometimes feel when projecting if I let my body exit on it's own free will and it just goes nuts and ejects itself....

but anyway maybe I was projecting to a lower plane... maybe it was just a combination of hypnagogic imagery and projection... but that was probably my first encounter that I can remember with projecting.

It is highly effective though, if you believe you have woken up and feel yourself on your bed, and do not think you have had a false awakening, to just DO NOT MOVE and remember the last scene you saw from the dream and visualize it in your head... it's easy to do given how tired you are and how your brainwaves aren't normal since youv'e just woken up.

Or you can just lay there and wait for paralysis and try to project if you aren't feeling exceptionally mentally tired.

Spinning yeah.. it works sometimes, but it won't help you if your body insists that it needs to wake up. It'll just delay the process.... but spinning, lying on the floor and staring at it... staring at your hands... rubbing your hands together... rubbing your hands against a wall and staring at it... they all work very well in revitalizing the vividness of your dream.... to an extent.

*wishes most of his lucid dreams took place during extended periods of sleep rather than during the morning so they lasted longer*

one more thing... simply asking for help in being taken back into the dream, if you are like half awake but kind of enshrouded in nothingness.... that can be insanely effective... one time i was talking to an alleged angel that i had called upon, which ... well.. was quite far from being an angel.. and there were many points where i just kept waking up, and i just simply asked her to help keep me in the dream, she brought me back each time, and after a while i stayed in the dream consistantly till it was over more or less.

(though i think it's good advice not to ask for help from anyone, even angels, it's not like they are going to kill/posess you but well... some weird as hell stuff happened, i'll just put it that way)

[Michael_E]

quote:Originally posted by holy reality



If I do become lucid during deep sleep I can usually adventure for a long time before having to worry about reality decaying and trying to force myself to stay asleep.

My experience with lucids has been the complete opposite. I have very short and rarely remember my lucids during deep sleep. Lucids in the morning hours are always the longest and more lucid because i dont worry about falling into a deep sleep and forgetting the experience and im just more alert of the different state of awareness because im not as fatigued.

[Blue Giant]

Hello,
I was wondering if any of you know how to either stay lucid while your dreaming or recharging your dream to stay in it. I've tried one technique that kept the dream going. I spun around in circles and it completely re-energized the dream. Lately, I've been having dreams where I will wake up in them (become lucid and then kind of drift away from that awareness. Sometimes, I've been able to remember what I wanted to do in a lucid dream by using my memory from the waking state. I've brought forth questions that I wanted answered, but these dreams have diminished over time. Why?

Blue Giant