Could use some help please.

Quest for Lucidity General Lucidness
1

Ok let me just first explain my situation. I am trying to achieve lucidness and have been trying to do so since the beginning of last summer. I haven’t succeded once and it’s making me a bit frustrated. One time during that summer I was pretty close but it failed. I’m using the MILD method and I’m pretty well informed on the entire Lucid dreaming subject as a whole. I have read Stephen LaBerge’s Lucid Dreaming: A Concise Guide to Awakening in Your Dreams and in Your Life and pretty much everything I’ve found on the intrent about the subject.
I haven’t been motivated the entire time since the start of last summer in the quest for a lucid dream, but lets say for the sake of simplicity that I’ve spent approximately 40% of the days conducting things relevant to the project. During my most intense periods I’ve made around 8-10 reality checks a day that are very thorough.
My dream recall is really good and it can take me up to an hour to write everything down. Presently I’ve filled 2 books (similair to this one freeimageslive.co.uk/files/i … tebook.jpg) with my dreams and I’ve gotten to identify several different personal dreamsigns.

Also worth mentioning is that I cannot recall ever having had a LD and that I apart from personally wanting to learn how to lucid dream, am doing this as my senior year school project. This shouldn’t be a problem though due to the fact that there is no requirement that I must succeed.

I’m sorry if the text is poorly organized but I hope you understood the situation. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. Am I puting to little effort into it or could my reality checks be to immense or is there something else I’m missing? I’m not desperate but I would really want to have a LD.

Ty for any help :smile:

2

+1 For spreading knowledge about Ling via a school project. Kudos for that, man! :happy: I’d like to hear more about it if you don’t mind. :wink:

As to your difficulty, here’s a piece of advice that I give everyone as determined as you are that is on the brink of devastating frustration: Don’t be too hard on yourself.

Look at it this way: You’ve overloaded your waking life with everything LD. While that’s cool, and somewhat effective, you leave your subconscious mind little reason to bring that content into your dreams. Why should it? You already have so much of it.

Now I’m not saying don’t stop everything, oh no. I’m suggesting you relax a bit. The more you want something the less likely it’ll throw itself into your path. Ease up a bit, take it easy.

Also you should be sure to NEVER let your belief that you WILL LD falter as that tends to be all avid LDers Achilles Heel.

To clarify on the “take a break” clause, let me give you an example of what happened with me recently. I’ve just returned to college from Winter Break. During the break I developed a, perhaps unhealthy, addiction to a TV series called NCIS. Now, in my dorm I don’t have a TV so I can’t watch the show like I used to.

The first night back I slept and had an NCIS dream. Two nights later, another.

See what I mean? All break I was effectively gorging my mind on the show. The first moment I stop watching it, BOOM! It shows up in my dreams. I have known about and occasionally watched NCIS for about two to three years now, but only after I overloaded myself on the break and then stopped suddenly did it make an appearance in my dream. (Of course you could also blame it on the Tetris affect as I couldn’t stop thinking about it, either. :razz: )

So keep the following in mind when you make your decision on what to do next:

Belief: Don’t stop! (Seriously, most important.)
Daily LD Content: Keep yourself exposed, but remember LDing is supposed to accent your daily life, not take it over. It’s a spice, not a dish. :wink:

If you have any other questions I’d be glad to answer some more.

*Scipio Xaos sends lucid vibes.

3

Thanks man, feels good to have some support. I’m in one of my more intense periods (as I mentioned) now and I hope it’ll turn out better this time.

What kind of method do you use? WILD, MILD or another perhaps? I’ve heard from different sources that MILD is the easiest one for beginners that’s why I’m sticking to that one but do you think I should try WILD out (pun not intended)?

I think that two of my beiggest problems at the moment are that I tend to be unable to recall my dreams when I wake up in the early morning to practice MILD. This leaves me with nothing to focus on. Secondly I don’t have a desired thing I would like to do when lucid which LaBerge explains to be very important in his guides.
How essential are these two factors to my succees?

Ty for the help once again :smile:

4

No problem. It helps to have support. (I like it to. :razz: )

As to methods: my primary goal is not to LD right now as I know that any LDs I get would be sporadic at best. (And even then I hardly have them.) This doesn’t mean that LDing is removed from my list, oh no. I’ll still relish any lucids I get and occasionally try to WILD at night before sleep.

One note about WILD: people say that you shouldn’t do it before sleep, because you are almost certain to fail. Well, I personally believe that if you practice WILD enough, even right before bed, you will eventually become successful. It’s a skill earned. If you do try to WILD before bed and you don’t succeed, even if it’s for months, remember what I said above: don’t lose heart. You just need more practice.

Now, obviously, you don’t want to practice to infinity, right? So what I do is occasionally practice WILD with a focus not on LDing, but on DJing. Right now I want to make my recall so superb that I recall nearly all of my dreams I had in a night with such unbelievable detail that I WILL have to leave stuff out if I plan on getting anything done that day.

I believe that if one can recall their dreams with sufficient accuracy, one will become familiar with his or her on unique dreamland. This familiarity will, consequentially, lead to easy, spontaneous LDs. And if you combine that with practice on WILD you’ve got the holy grail of LDing.

So my advice is to pick something you’re comfortable with. Choose to devote as much time as YOU deem necessary to your goal doing what YOU think is important to accomplish it. If you do this eventually your only option will be to succeed.

5

i just wanted to help you a bit with how i started. first i started with the mild tech. to get better dream recall. once i got that i read about the hands technieque and that it was mainly for beginers. then i read more about it and found out that 90%of people who tried it for thier first ld succieded at least within a week or 2. i tried it and got lucid 3 days later and again 5 days after that. it is different for everyone but you have to stick with it every night before you go to bed and it helps to do it again if you wake up in the middle of the night and then go back to bed. now you dont want to stress it but be relaxed when you do it. if you dont know what the hands tech is you can look it up on this site. if you cant find it just post and ask and i will be glad to post back and explain how to and what not. hope it helps. i have been doing the wild tech once i had a few more ld’s after that

6

I’ll echo what Scipio Xaos said, ease up a bit on your daily focus on LDing. I’d also add that in my experience, dream recalls ability to help you LD sort of plateaus. I only jot down a paragraph or two a morning, usually I can read that and the dream comes back to me.
As for more general advice, keep your RCs quick and simple, and do them often. I’ve gotten into the habit of always giving my timepiece a double take. I naturally tend to check the time a lot, just a weird habit of mine. This way I get to RC 20+ times a day without losing any real time to it. (Waking life IS the priority after all. :wink: ) IMO complicated RCs don’t work well. You’re brain has to focus on them so much that your mind could alter the dreamstate enough to pass the tests, because you know what you’re looking for.
An RC should be more of a " Hey… :eh: " Which you can then take more thorough Reality Test. Try and keep your RCs short and sweet. :smile:

Good luck and keep us updated on that report of yours! Differently something a lot of people here would find interesting!

:rc:

7

Concerning keeping your reality checks short and simple, is it okay to chose any way to question the reality in or are some ways more profitable than others

Okay so here is my up until today reality check I’ve been conducting. As you said it’s easy to get lost and lose focus when the checks are to long which is something I experience in my case.

  1. ask the question out loud: - Am I dreaming/ is this a dream?
  2. Where am I/ What is happening?
  3. Is there something strange going on?
  4. Am I interacting with someone (it is very unusual for me to be alone in my dreams)?
  5. Where did I come from and where am I going?
  6. Am I aware that I am aware?
  7. presence of personal dreamsigns?
  8. Is this my natural form? (I tend to shift shape or se things through other beings eyes)
  9. Is the scen or surroundings unstable/fluctuating?
  10. read a piece of text close to you, look away then back and see if it has changed.
  11. Touch the things around you. Do the feel real?

As you can see it is pretty long but it has always seemed to be the right way for me to conduct a RC. I’ll try to do a simpler RC next time.

Ty for the advises once again guys, it is really helpful :smile:

8

Looks like you’re basing some of your RCs on your dreamsigns. When you asked if some RCs are better than others, the answer is it depends on the person. Dreamsign based RCs tend to be more focused towards your particular dreamworld so including those is great. You’re more likely to see your dreamsign and act upon it than just a random RC. Other than that all RCs tend to be equally effective (excluding the ones we just talked about, they tend to be more powerful :wink: )

Now, if those are all your RCs, do you do them consecutively, all at once? If so, about how long does it take you to do them?

In my opinion if you’re spending more than a minute or RCs you might be wasting your time. I believe you only need to spend at most 30 seconds per RC to establish if you’re dreaming or not. So if you are doing them all at once I’d suggest you choose (perhaps randomly) from among that list which RCs you decide to do each time you RC.

What I mean is when you go to RC, pick two or three from the list you gave and do those. You can keep all the RCs, just do only a few each time you decide to RC.

But remember, this is only my opinion. RCs are different for everyone. You have written that “it has always seemed to be the right way for me to conduct a RC”. If that is so just keep doing it how you want. The most important thing is that you’re comfortable with what you’re doing. It shouldn’t be overburdening to you to do your RCs.

9

Yes I do them all at once and the reason for me to bring RCs into the spotlight is because I am not satisfied with the way I am doing them. I always tend to lose focus and start thinking about other things and that really ruins the whole thing.

I did a focused RC and timed it. It took me about 1 and a half minute which I think we both can agree is too long. I’ll try to alter it from now on :smile:

10

Good idea. Just remember the RCs are supposed to point your attention to reality, not absorb it entirely. You should generally do the RC in about 30 seconds at most and then use the heightened awareness you get from it to pay attention to what’s happening around you. (IMO)

11

Have you tried combining WBTB with WILD? Instead of writing everything you remember down from the first dream, just notice that you’re awake and then relax back into the dream that you were having before you woke up. Then you should be lucid. Hope this helps! I actually kept dream diaries for years before I had my first lucid dream, so one doesn’t necessarily lead to another.