First lucid dream.

[Manix]

Congrats on your first LD!
I've tried the "looking at your hands" technique and have never once seen them melt or fade. They just look like my normal everyday hands, with the exception of a few scars and tattoos on the palms that I don't really have.

However, I have never TOLD myself that my hands should fade or melt in a dream. I will most definatly give this a try!

Pleasant Dreams!

[Rastus]

It gets easier over time.

For me, the hard part was getting over the urge to go nutso.  For men that usually means sex (having intercourse in a dream always wakes me up, whereas some other things don't).  Or playing Super Hero
[]

Question for you:  How do you see yourself in your dreams?

I always see myself as a Wizard/Physchic.  I never question myself when I summon power, its a natural extension.  I always have the ability to shield and defend, but other tasks are more difficult.  This is my nature anyway (especially in Martial Arts, I have a stonewall defense but a weak offense).

[smooth]

Well i see my self as me just older but i cant(its not like i could see my self i just knew). I felt like i could do any thing after telling the people to beat each other. i wonted to do more but it did not last that long.

[Nay]

I've use the hand method when I felt myself pulling back/waking up, and it worked quite well, got right back where I wanted to go.

I don't see myself either, I just feel if I'm a man, woman, old, or young.  I have looked in a mirror a few times to adjust my clothing...[]

I have noticed a few times that I'm "inside" someone else, it's not me or a pastlife, it's like I'm in their body, with two sets of thoughts, mine and theirs.  I'm still doing some studies on that one, can't figure it out yet.   It happened to me yesterday morning, I tried to project back into a dream that I had woke up too soon from (some dude is following me around and he showed up and I wanted to try and catch him) But I ended up in some guys body and he was a whaler..[:O] Do they even do that still?

I was not wanting to load the harpoon, but I couldn't control what the guy was doing, I could only control my thoughts, I had to go along for the ride.  I kept thinking, this is terrible don't kill that whale, it's a baby!!  and can anyone tell me if there are different settings on a harpoon? it seems I saw somekind of settings, hard to explain since I've never laid eyes on a harpoon before.[]

Anyhoo, I woke myself up because it was depressing me, interesting but depressing.

Nay

[Lynfer]

I have had dreams where I know that the dream is about to end . It's like a consciouness observing the dream. And I try hard to make dthe dream lasts longer, then some physical noise distracts me into fully waking. Maybe I might try becoming lucid then.[]

quote:Originally posted by Nay

I've use the hand method when I felt myself pulling back/waking up, and it worked quite well, got right back where I wanted to go.

Let me get this right Nay. While you are starting to wake up- you just you look at you're hands and you go back into what you were dreaming?

[Lynfer]

I have had dreams where I know that the dream is about to end . It's like a consciouness observing the dream. And I try hard to make dthe dream lasts longer, then some physical noise distracts me into fully waking. Maybe I might try becoming lucid then.[]

quote:Originally posted by Nay

I've use the hand method when I felt myself pulling back/waking up, and it worked quite well, got right back where I wanted to go.

Let me get this right Nay. While you are starting to wake up- you just you look at you're hands and you go back into what you were dreaming?

[Nay]

Yep, that is exactly right.[]

And by the sounds of it, you realize when you are starting to wake up, so if you could just get into the habit of doing this, it should help you stay there longer.  Mind you..you have to be somewhat lucid in order to remember to even look at your hands.[] so looking at your hands through out the day, for a few days, should condition you enough to do it naturally in a dream.

I also can go back to a dream after waking up..not all the time mind you, but enough for me not to complain..

Nay

[Lynfer]

Thanks Nay![] I'll keep what you said in mind. The conditioning part of the training should be the easiest according to my experience in dreaming.[]

[kairi]

what exactly is a lucid dream anyways?

[Jarthur]

kairi, a lucid dream is a dream in which you know you're dreaming. Depending on your level of consciousness, it can seem more real than reality and you have control to varying degrees over the environment.

I agree Ras, it's really tempting to let your sex fantasies run rampant. Sex doesn't make me wake up, and it seems as real as real and then some.

The other temptation is to fly around for the entire dream. Now you put those two things together and you have a pretty hard thing to resist. Flying while having sex.

This thing about looking at your hands. I don't understand where that comes from. Your dream body hands don't melt like the RTZ body hands do, or at least mine never have(unless of course I make them melt).  Looking at your hands was something Castaneda recommended and it never worked for me.(it works to stabilize a dream but, I think, not as well as spinning)

Someone somewhere here was saying that RB recommends looking at your hands to become lucid but Astral Dynamics has the usual reality checks as a means of lucidity. You verify that you're not dreaming whenever you do something like go to the toilet or whatever. Personally I find the best way is to review the last 15 minutes every once in a while. It's easy and fast and unnoticable to others. If there is no sequence to how you got to where you are, you know you're dreaming.

With that method, I usually become lucid suddenly, seems like spontaneously, because I figured it out instead of referencing something in the environment.

Nay that's really interesting about being in the whaler's body but not having control over it. Worth exploring for sure.

Oh and how do I see myself. The same but a lot more powerful. I gotta try experimenting with my body more after reading Nay's post. I think I'll check out being a woman. That should be interesting.  

[loco]

This "look at your hands" method  should be top rated in the LD manuals !  Is really amazing how well works for most of us.
My first lucid dream was thanks to this.
Jarthur,
I gave it a try becouse I read it in a Castaneda book: "The Art of dreaming" It was incredible...You look at your hands and...voilà !, lucid! Castaneda books were interesting till then, but after that they became something huge...what was just an amusing read became true...weird feel.
Anyway,Don Juan (Castaneda´s guide) says in the book that looking at your hands is a subterfuge.That what really counts is that you´re giving a purpose to a ,otherwise, regular dream, and getting control over it.
I have also become lucid by other means,but this hands things is really amazingly effective.

Cheers

[GANAMOHA]

hey does it mean anything if you never and by that i mean never ever see yourself in dreams
like does that mean something about who i think i am or something?

[GANAMOHA]

oh and when i first had a lucid dream i think or maybe a obe i was climbing up a mountain (i had controll the moment i started) and continued climbing this enormous mountain somewhere in asia and followed these two asian guys in robes and after a while i got to the top and sliped through a crack in this enormous rock after this guy said the choosen one may enter so i went through and it turned out that this giant rock was surrounding this temple no covering the top though and all these bald guy in orange red and i tiny bit of yellow were there around a square of pure untouched sand meditating and the inside of the temple was red does anyone know what this means what it was?

[seraphis]

GANAMOHA: no idea at all what your dream meant - maybe it was just an ordinary dream, maybe your guide or a sign that you should go to tibet or whatever

anyway, about who i am in dreams and how i look: that's really weird. i get so many different things! so if anyone's interested, a detailed account:

1) persepctive: variing degrees of the three persepctives you get in literature and mixtures - a) being a person ("i")  b) being focused on a person but not really being them c) being focused on one person, but also aware of the thoughts etc. of other persons (instead of the all-knowing perspective). in b) and c) i usually see the person(s) from outside as opposed to being (inside of) them, which means that i don't have a body. in a) i sometimes see myself from outside as well - i can't remember ever seeing a mirror in my dreams.

2) age: anything between 8 and middle-aged, although i had something above 22 only once from perspective b/c - a middle aged man (i'm 19 and female). usually between 17 and 20.

3) gender, character and looks the biggest variation in a single dream that i can remember was being, with no apparent transition, myself, harry potter, hermione, a mixture of harry and hermione, and navis (character from the comic sillage/wake). usually i'm myself or myself looking different. once i had short hair and was wondering whether i was a boy or a girl, but decided that i must be a girl. somtimes i really can't tell afterwards wheter i was male or female, because it somehow didn't matter in the dream. once i was myself and female but disguided in the body of a male. you get the picture []

4) lucid dreams in lucid dreams i'm always myself with the inside-perspective, although i usually know how i look like. sometimes i look different, and sometimes i simply don't think about how i look like. in one dream i tried to make myself look different but forgot about it (maybe because it didn't work straight away). after a while i was wondering why everybody was so big and realized that i had succeeded in changing myself and made myself too small []

BTW: my english teacher told me that she always dreamed in black and white - anyone else?

[SSGR]

I've been looking to have a Lucid Dream since I started hearing/reading about them, but haven't been able to yet.  It seems that people are having good luck with conditioning themselves for it by looking at their hands throughout the day, for several days.  I will definately give it a shot.  

Does anyone have any other suggestions for working toward lucid dreaming?

[funinfloating111]

sorry i dont know any techniques to induce a lucid dream, im one of the lucky few who naturally get them, but im sure you could find alot about techniques and stuff on google or something. when im lucid i have never seen myself or looked at myself (like my hands or feet) but i seem to be just like myself. on my next lucid dream im gonna find out who i am, you never know what i might find out [] congradulations smooth, lucid dreams are one heck of an experiance, expecially if its your first, or first in a long time. you tend to forget exactly what its like over time. i too am amazed sometimes at the contol i have on my dreams. like sometimes i will just think of someone for a brief moment and the setting will completly change and i will be at his house, things like that. i have never tried looking at my hands, i have never tried any of those reality checks really (except once when i "awoke" from a lucid dream, i decided to jump and viola! i jumped straight through the ceiling!. it was so hard to believe that it was actually a false awakening) so i am going to try this looking at your hands thing and see how it works out.

[SSGR]

-ALL
 Thanks for the input previously posted on this topic.  Normally I have difficulty (which is to say I don't [xx(] ) remembering my dreams...  I told myself over and over before I went to sleep last night that I would remember them and it worked surprisingly well!  I remembered about 2 (can never be sure) dreams.  I will continue to work, and also begin keeping a dream journal next to the bed, I think that will work well.

Thanks again,

Dave

[smooth]

I had my first lucid dream last night!

I was running from a hole bunch of people that wonted to beat me up i was so scared. But all of a sudden i kept saying to my self "look at your hands your dreaming". Than I realized i was dreaming. So I turned around a I told the guys that were chasing me to fight each other not me (not really thinking they would). It was funny they all just looked at each other and started to punching each other. The bad thing was it was hard to stay in a lucid dream. And than i just went back to my dream state.      

Now i need to start working on staying in a lucid stat. the methed i used was to look at your hands as much in day as u wont. and if u look at your hands and ther fading/melting that means your dreaming. So u just tell your self when your hands fad/melt your dreaming.