Ability to LD suddenly slipping away?

Quest for Lucidity
1

Hello,

In early 1990’s I got my first lucid dreams thanks to a dream guide from P Tholey & K. Utrecht where I accidentally stumbled upon. It took about three weeks practicing until I succeeded and during the next months I practiced heavily with a dream journal, reality checks and other techniques explained in the dream guide. Every now and then I got amazing dream experiences from it. But it took a lot of efforts considering the occasional LD I got and eventually I gave up.

Around 1998 I decided to give lucid dreaming a new try as internet was coming up and there was a lot of information and new methods and insights available on the web, including this website. I got my occasional lucid dream again, but once more the results were very poor considering the time and energy I invested into it. None the less some dreams were really great. After two years I gave up on it again.

In 2007 I started exotic gardening as hobby and it didn’t take long before I found information about a strange plant called Calea Zacatechichi which improves dream recall and makes dreams much more vivid. I ordered a cutting via e-bay and started to grow it in my greenhouse along with other exiting plant species.Shortly after I could harvest the first leaves from the dream herb. The impact on my dreams was astounding: they were extremely vivid and detailled and I could remember 4 or 5 dreams each night where it was hardly one before or even nothing when I didn’t maintain my dream journal. Along with the herb treatment I decided to pick lucid dreaming again and got another bunch of great experiences. But the herb grew slow and after a while I got disappointed and gave up lucid dreaming… again :sad:

In 2013 we had a great summer and the Calea plants which were still alive grew very fast and I even managed to propagate them so I had leaves in abundance and I could enhance my dreamlife whenever I wanted. Once again I picked up lucid dreaming but because I was tired from all those time consuming RC’s and other techniques I decided to stick to one very simple RC: just counting my fingers every now and then, trying to do it whenever something unusual happens and every now and then I took Calea leaves so I didn’t need to keep a dream journal anymore to keep my dream recall alive.

The results were promising: in september I got a LD every two weeks, in october every 10 days, in november weekly and in december about once every 4 days. But I noticed something strange: sometimes there wasn’t any LD for two or three weeks and then I suddenly had four LD’s in one night and then again not a single LD for two weeks. However if I calculated the averages I found that my LD frequency was still increasing and certainly during the second half of december I had amazing LDs which lasted up to two hours. I also got the most beautiful dream in my lifetime where I could take over control of a jubo jet, take off in my street and fly above my hometown.

But since christmas my LD’s are suddenly getting scarser and scarser. Nothing changed on my habits, I still take Calea regularly, do the finger test often and have a good to very good dream recall. I tried to get involved more by writing on this forum (the Dutch version) but nothing changed and my ability to LD kept getting worser and worser. Then I moved on to the English forums (the Dutch ones are not very active) and started reading while I worked out a LD game (see quest suggestions) hoping that thinking, writing and reading on the forum would help, but still nothing at all and there are no LD’s anymore.

Does anyone have an idea what’s going wrong here? Looks like some sort of imunity agains LD building up or maybe my subconcious mind has developed a way to keep me from lucid dreaming? Are there people with similar experiences?

Sorry if this story is too long, don’t even know if I should post it under the introductions topic or not, but I give it a try and post it here :wink:

2

I can’t really gave you any advice here because something like that didn’t happen to me. As you may notice from all this years of practicing LD’ing it’s a pretty unstable action and our experiences varies from day to day not to take longer time like years.

On few occasions you gave up with LD’ing, maybe you are on that path again. Maybe you need this mental rest from all of this. It’s not strange taking in consideration how hard practicing can be with everyday life.

I don’t thing you are becoming “immune” to LD. It’s a state of mind, it would mean that you are stopping being lucid in waking life too. I don’t know for what you use LD’ing and what it means to you but many times when people lose fascination in something they stop doing that and maybe that’s what’s happening with you and LD’s, maybe you need to approach in a different way. Maybe you need to explore the “other side of the coin”.

There are a lot of “maybes” here because that’s all I can say, maybe this, maybe that but we can talk, that we can do and who knows it may help you to become lucid. :content:

3

Thanks for your advice on this matter.

Currently I’m not planning to give it up completely, my new goal is to get one more LD, even if it takes weeks from now.

I want to use this LD to approach someone in the dream and ask him/her to become my dream friend who wants to show up in every non lucid dream to remind me i’m dreaming. I’ll see how things turn out then, maybe that DC will do all the dirty work for me so I don’t have to mind about RC-ing and other techniques anymore :razz:

Last night I was very close to it: yesterday I was focussing on a picture from a very handsome person hoping to see that person showing up in my dream so I could start asking questions and to become my dream friend.

And indeed that person appeared in my dream, biking in front of me :smile: It’s the first time that I managed to call subjects in a dream by focussing on an image or picture the evening before. Unfortunately that person was biking too fast so I couldn’t get by anymore. Otherwise this would definitely have resulted in a lucid dream and probably I would have reached the new goal I set for myself…

4

I’m glad to hear that you are not giving it up.

If asking the DC to help you won’t work, you can demand it. At the end it’s you who you asking. At least if that’s your view on this matter. Demand and you might succeed. I’ve personally had success with this way of doing things.

That’s why I like so much M83s song “Outro” and it lyrics:

[center]"I’m the king of my own land.

Facing tempests of dust, I’ll fight until the end.

Creatures of my dreams raise up and dance with me!

Now and forever, I’m your king!"[/center]

That’s very common in mine case too, whenever I would be on the verge of doing something new but still not be able to do it completely result manifested in some rather stupid way, well in a way that only dream logic might justify…

5

Finally I made it to get another LD last night.
Shortly after taking off on a flight from Amsterdam to Kathmandu (will do the same trip IRL in two weeks but departing from Brussels - so the subject starts to show up in my dreams every now and then) I realised that I was dreaming. But it was all so breathtaking beautiful that I decided to passively enjoy the scenery in stead of undertaking anything. I didn’t even take the effort to walk to the first class compartiment of the plane :wink:

Specially ascending above the thin layer of clouds was realy great to see and after a short while we were above Germany but in stead of land there was only sea as far as you could see between the clouds. Some of these clouds were quite massive and it didn’t take long before we flew into a cluster of thunderstorms, still above the ocean. Nothing serious happened like turbulence or lightning, but I couldn’t see anything except from a grey/blue fog as we entered the clouds and that was when I also started to loose touch with the dream scenery. I woke up shortly after it.

Will take my chance to ask before mentionned things to a DC when I get the next LD, looks like dream recall is improving again and probably lucid dream frequency will start to increase now.

6

It happened to me a few times that I didn’t wanna change the theme or the scenery of the dream because of the same reasons as you. Dream just felt awesome or it was giving me information that I saw useful.

There’s nothing wrong with that but it’s harder to maintain the lucidity in a scenario where you are only passively participating then in the one where you are the center of the story…

Well I hope this becomes more often thing for you! Good luck! :content:

7

I’d rather skip substance-influenced lucid dreaming. I don’t say that its bad, but I believe that its all up to your mindset. While such substances have a prominent impact in your lucid dreaming, I believe that over time, their potency will lower, and by that point, if you havent learned anything from it, then everything is wasted - you will only rely on the substance to induce lucid dreaming, while it gets less and less effective up to the point where you simply give-up.
Buuut… if it works for you and you are actually learning from it up to the point that you can go without it, why not?

Also, another thing I believe is that just wanting to have a lucid dream doesnt work. You either forget about lucid dreaming and enjoy when you have some (believe me, they come, might be not so frequent, but those ones are the best) or always daydream about what you want to do in a lucid dream (I used this way to get achievement points for the basic LDer achievements xD). Wanting to have a lucid dream with no idea of what you actually want to experience is thrown away by your subconsciousness. Its like you are creating a text file in your PC named “I want this Lucid Dream” with empty content inside. Normally when I see an empty file in my PC, I instinctivley press shift+def - your SC does the same.

As far as I understand your post, you simply lack the hype. No… you are overhyped, you want sooo much to have a lucid dream that you do everything that you’ve read and blindly execute it as a robot would do. It has the same effect as grinding a lesson in a given subject - you grind and grind and grind, memorize it from-to, in hopes to understand it. This is not understanding… this is just copying without putting the element of “you” in it.
What I mean is that there are sooo many ways explained here to have a lucid dream, sustain it, etc. each one reflects to a given personality. What everyone does is to try them out, I did the same. In the end, when nothing works for a given person, he just assumes that he does something wrong, so did I. Then he gets back and tries to find the mistake, so he can fix it. While there might be a mistake, what most people don’t understand is that there might NOT be a mistake. I was lazy, I didn’t want to put so much effort into brute-forcing my way into lucid dreaming, I just said to myself “fck it, im too lazy to do all that, I will either find a way on my own, or fck it anyway”. Up till now, I’ve found a handful of ways to have and maintain lucid dreams, all of them dont work when I want, but do work when I want. I have not found a way to have a 100% bulletproof lucid dreaming way, but I’m satisfied enough. I dream as much as I need.
So… you are wrong because you are wrong. :smile: (actually when I read it several times, you can pretty much use it in many scenarios here xD )

8

Thanks for your input.
Probably you are right about the use of substances for lucid dreaming. Since a few weeks I started to notice that the vividness and recall of dreams when I use the dream herb is not much better than nights where I didn’t use the herb anymore.

However, during the nights that I didn’t use the herb, the recall and vividness of my dreams is very good, so it’s not ruled out that the herb has either a long term effect or it has ‘learned’ me to improve dream quality.

I’m now trying to put less force behind lucid dreaming. In stead of really wanting it, I’m more of ‘when it comes, it comes’ and since I have this spirit, it looks like my dreams are showing symptoms of an approaching wave of increased lucid activity (like the weird LD I described in the lucid adventures section of the forum).

So I have good hope that I will get a chance to approach my ‘dream buddy’ sooner or later, who will help me to remember me I’m dreaming…