It seems I am no longer able to put together a dream or even remember a state of dreaming since i started trying to become lucid… 
All i remember from this night is repeatedly waking up, and a strange stream of incoherent thoughts in between… 
I’m sad i cant even have a ND and remember it let alone a LD 
Whats wrong with me!! 
What is the first thing you do when you wake up?
Relax ^^ Nothing is wrong. Everything is just right ! 
do you know the feeling of trying to remember somebody’s name ?
And the harder you try, the harder it seems ?
And when you let go, it just pops into your head ? Spontaneously ??
LDing can be likened to (it’s not the best analogy but…) building muscles.
Right now, you have a certain amount of muscle mass in your body. If you go and workout (And eat right etc…) , you’ll get more and more muscles as time goes on (basically) . If we’re talking about LDing, we can say that you have a certain amount of muscle mass , in this case, a specific type of an ‘awareness muscle’ (for lack of a better term). If you’re used to waking up every day, remembering all your dreams with a deep sense of involvement and understanding of them, it’s different than if you’re used to waking up and barely remember one fragment of one dream and lacking any type of understanding revolving that dream or maybe not remembering anything at all.
What I’m saying here is that LDing happens naturally if your ‘muscle system’ is up for it.
Think about dreaming is lifting weights from your waist to your shoulders. The more organized and understandable the dream was, the more ‘weight’ you’ve been lifting. Now, LDing is just about lifting the weights from your shoulders to over your head.
If your ‘muscles’ are strong enough, then you can naturally and easily choose to LD. You might also choose to just keep ‘lifting the weights to your shoulders only’ . Take note here that the ‘muscles’ required to ‘lift the weights to your shoulders’ are different muscles than the ones you use to lift them over your head. Same for dreaming.
The muscles you use for dreaming are different from the ones you’re using for lucid dreaming. Lucid Dreaming involves another ‘type of muscles’ or ‘family of muscles’ if you will.
If you wanna think about it as music, dreaming is like the background music, the ambient, the chords and the beat while lucid dreaming adds a vocalist (or whatever…) . Lucid Dreaming involves a specific type of ‘awareness muscles’ that people usually stop using when they’re very young. As all muscles, it gets atrophied and then you think you can just go to sleep , think about looking at your hand and becoming lucid.
But it’s obvious, every person intuitively understands that there’s something deeper in this struggle for lucidity. Every person understands that there’s something in their system, literally, that’s not allowing this to happen. (or your choice of words)
The problem starts when people try to become lucid and then , since it hasn’t worked, they completely hate themselves (AND LUCID DREAMING - Since all they had is a negative experience from it!!!) .
When you hate something , you’ll do everything in your power to avoid it, trust me. We’d like to think of ourselves as being these logical acting creatures. But truth is, we, almost indefinitely, act on emotions, on ‘movies’, on ‘realities’ that we or others have built and shown to us. quick example, all the movies that you’ve probably watched as a child where the hero was a ‘poor man’ and the villain was a ‘rich tycoon’, made you in some way want to identify with that poor man and hate the villain. Really stop to think about this for a moment.
(Obviously this is a VERY complex issue , and this is written text… so… that’s all for now 
)
Getting back to our topic, people try to get lucid one night and they fail.
That’s basically like lifting the weights to your shoulders for eternity, then suddenly BOOM trying to lift them over your head. Now, suddenly a whole new group of muscles needs to get involved in the process. And what happens when you try to OVERLOAD your system ? It CRASHES. If you did this thing with the weights, you’d probably hurt your hands and your weights would fall on your feet. Ewww …
It’s the same thing with dreaming. You can’t just LIFT those weights. Well, technically, your body can and so does your mind with dreaming, but the system generally doesn’t generally provide a lot of energies to these attempts. Just like when you’re running down the street, you’re not actually using your full potential. If you were running for your life, you would run A LOT faster.
so… You can’t just LIFT those weights.
You lift just a little tiny bit over your shoulders, and you wake up, and you have this new feeling after a dream. Lucid Dream ? no… but if you’ll be quite and gentle enough to listen to your mind, you’ll hear something stirring up inside, slowly, beautifully, perfectly.
Do we get upset that we didn’t Lucid Dream ? No, why would we ? We’ve never had a lucid dream before and everything was fine… Think about it!! It’s insane. We should always be grateful that we’re aware of this fantastic activity that we can pursue. Because that way, at least we have a chance.
But , of course, we get terribly negative. And then what do we do ? We just quit. It’s an automatic process. It happens when you start dreaming. Your system will just cease to even attempt to lift the weights. Because every time you approached the weights and lifted them, your hands were hurting for 3 days. By now, when you just look at the weights, your system gets terrified, when you try to pick them up, it just lets them go, because the system ( you, deep down, subconsciously - automatically - based on habit / automatic choices … sort of…)
is just really frightened by those weights. That’s what happens to most people who try to lucid dream.
They do so for 3 days and every day they wake up feeling more frustrated that they didn’t have a lucid dream than the day before. In reality, they’re actually walking further and further away from having a lucid dream because it [ it refers to lucid dreaming in that persons life. Lucid dreaming is what it is in your life. If you have a lot of them when you want to or just out of the blue, then its probably fun to you, but if you just spend time trying and failing and feeling really bad, miserable, hopeless & frustrated, then lucid dreaming is being perceived as a very negative thing. On a very physical, immediate level, when you just think about lucid dreaming, you’ll think about your failed attempts , and most importantly , emotionally, if all the words were taken out, you would think/feel frustration, disappointment etc… ] starts being perceived as this NEGATIVE experience. Just like that if you go the gym or go running and you rip yourself apart, you’re probably going to resist going there again. but if you go to the gym and meet a nice woman/man, have a nice cool workout that makes you feel good and energetic afterwards + a nice meal with this friendly stranger perhaps ? you’ll feel really really good and you’d really wait to go the gym again. Ye, how simple are we, really ?
What DO you DO ?
You just do your best every night. Slowly and gracefully. It won’t take long. And if it will, so be it. [size=150]Getting pissed off about it WILL NOT make it work.[/size]
Just like a muscle, after a few days, you’ll be able to reach your lips, and then your nose, and then your eyes, and soon, you’ll be able to stretch your arms up above your head with increasingly heavier and heavier weights without straining a single muscle.
If you’ve already gotten yourself into a position of being so negative about dreaming.
I would HIGHLY suggest, that you just completely let it go for a week or two. Just accept your life without the fun of dreams or LDs for now. Have fun with your friends or whatever… After a week or two, you’ll start developing a normal and healthy relationship with dreams and dreaming…
But you have to really let go of wanting to have this fun. It’s not about thinking : ok… one day over , in 13 days I can try lucid dreaming again.
Just let it go. When you’ll be ready, you’ll know it.
It’s so counter intuitive , it’s so hard to actually let those wishes go.
I really understand you. I’ve been there. And it’s hard. Because we’re so powerful.
And because we can make the things we feel and see appear so real. And so we’re really frightened to let go of our wanting, because we think we’d be letting go of our receiving, our experiencing. We think that we must feel this frustration and that we must remember this pain, that we must continue to be here (in this state - wanting to lucid dream) in order to get to there. But the thing is, you can’t get to nowhere if you’re not willing to move.
And I believe that truly everybody has this natural intuitive understanding that things are really ok. Deep down, we know that we can let this silly thing go. We realize , naturally , that you never really forget anything. And that the things that you really want to remember will always somehow find a way to stick in the back of our minds. I think we all knew that. But it’s also quite easy to forget.
No one ever told us as children that everything is ok. No one ever told us to relax. People, because of their OWN insecurities and fears, frighten their children to make them behave as THEY ‘see’ fit. As a child, my parents were always frightening me. No, they weren’t beating me up. They had a lot of money and they treated me well. But I was terribly afraid all my childhood, whether it was from getting a bad grade in school leading to things way way more serious and way way more stupid. (Fear is NOT rational) They always told me lots of things about how to act and how to be but they didn’t seem happy to me at all. They always tried to warn me so I wouldn’t be like my sister ( My Fabulous Sister ) which had no money. But they didn’t seem happy to me at all. And every time I would confront them and tell them : " If you have all this great advice and you know everything that needs to be done, HOW IS IT THAT YOU’RE SO UNFULFILLED ? "
It drove them crazy!!
(wow, I’m really going all out here huh)
And it’s obvious. It’s obvious because most 10 year olds would see what I’m saying here, while fewer 15 year olds will, even fewer 25 year olds will and even fewer 50 year olds will.
Cause it’s not about this struggle to learn. It’s about this allowing to remember.
How do you make lucid dreams happen ?
Think about having a lucid dream. If you haven’t had one, imagine what it would be like to have one. Don’t pump volume into it. Feel it naturally. As little as it feels naturally and no more. You need to take this feeling of curiosity , of excitement and anticipation and let IT guide you. Make everything a journey. Document your dreams.
HAVE FUN with it ^^ ^^
If you’ll have fun with your dreams , even once a week. You’ll steadily grow to be more and more enthusiastic about it.
Developing ‘lucid dreaming’ muscles is really not that hard. And with todays technology , such as binaural beats, it’s really amazing how easy it is.
But you really have to let it go.
And I’m saying this to you on a person to person basis since I know how it feels, I can be VERY self sabotaging at times.
It seems so counter intuitive just because of our fear of letting go but what I’m saying is that, basically, statistically, the best and quickest way for you to consciously experience a lucid dream right now would necessarily involve forgetting all about it to begin with.
Don’t worry. if it’s important enough, you won’t lose anything. And you know what, maybe you will forget about it. Maybe you’ll rediscover it again in 5 years in perfect timing, who knows.
Also, often times, people experience spontaneous lucid dreams in one of the following nights after they ‘quit trying’.
This, essentially, is identical to the phenomena where you remember someone’s name exactly when you give up trying to.
Also, based on experience, and if you’ve ever gambled , you’ve probably had this happening: When you play a slot machine or something, LOTS of times, when you give up and just give it a ‘last spin’ before you leave, you win.
Also, the exact same mechanism, remembering someone’s name, Lucid dreaming, and gambling. Isn’t it amazing ?
Anyway, hope this helps,
I just got an important call so if you wanna ask something just ask : )
have fun
relV… Ive just got to thank you. I was honestly just getting P’Od at myself about not being able to have LD, and it was eating at my nerves. 
I guess its exactly like what you said though, its that name you wont remember until you forget about it. I’m going to take a break from focusing on dreaming until i can least remember my normal dreams again.
I appreciate your post a lot (although it was frighteningly long 
).
I got the point, is what I’m trying to say.
Thanks again anyway. Till i start dreaming again… I’ll say a brief farewell to Ld4all.
Super perfundo on the early eve of your day 
.
First of all, “frighteningly long” indeed! 
but great stuff, as usual 
I think I’m finally getting closer to fully understand what you mean, relv (as can be seen in this topic. )
also, my sig is something I find useful reading every once in a while. 
oh yeah, baby!
Wow…
That is an insanely long post, perhaps the longest i’ve ever seen. 
Anyways thats great advice!
reiV, you know you could just paste 5 of your ordinary posts together and make the ultimate guide for us to follow and worship. Oh, what am i saying, 3 will suffice.