I’m kinda new here, and I’m just gonna get to the point.
I had my first lucid dream a few days ago. Here’s what happened:
I was in some room that I’ve never seen before. I was like talking 2 of my friends in my dream. There’s this fireplace in the room, and the fire looks really unnatural (like it was waving around and wasn’t shaped like fire). I thought to myself “that doesn’t look right”. Suddenly, I become self aware and realize that I am dreaming. The fire then froze, and so did my friends. I started looking around to see where I was. The room suddenly started distorting and everything in it. The room was like collapsing. Not like it shattered into pieces, but it started distorting itself severely and going black. Before my eyes everything was turning black. I was floating in nothing. I tried to “imagine” the environment but I couldn’t. I started to get this falling sensation. I was just surrounded by nothing, and I couldn’t figure out why there was nothing. My dream ended there, and it was black.
Can anyone help? I don’t have much experience with this sort of thing. What happened to my environment?
I can’t be one to tell you what the first encounters of lucid dreaming is truly like, but it seems most frequent to be a foggy, fading of colors, and fading away of most everything. I can’t say what you experienced here is normal or not.
There’s been statements that Lucid dreaming happens only during REM cycles in your sleep, however, through personal experience, that hasn’t truly been the case. Someone had mentioned an article of a recent study that shows that it may be possible to have lucid dreams at other times in your sleep. But, generally, it seems like lucid dreaming is most sensitive, tailing the end of your sleep.
Just keep at it, through experience and practice, you should be able to bring lucidity earlier.
To answer your question, yes, most dreams are only a few minutes (15?) although there are ones that go up to an hour. Often for me though, a dream can feel much longer than it actually is. Maybe dreams happen faster than waking life sometimes.
Also, to get lucid at the beginning of the dream, you might want to try WILD or DEILD. But a lot of it is just chance, if you just happen to get lucid.
That has to deal with the sleep cycles. Dreams last much longer than 15 minutes, typically people just don’t recall them very well. I personally have experienced extended dreams that last throughout the night. This is in opposition to the idea that dreams only happen during REM, though there are still small areas in these long dreams that are vague, and undetailed. (assumed to be those fractures outside of REM) But 15 minutes is cutting it quite short.
I don’t know enough about dreams/REM to agree or disagree, but related to length of dreams, I’m interesting in knowing if dreams that seem to last through the night are actually one long dream, or just a bunch of dreams that just continue what was happening in the previous dream. Or if it’s somewhere in-between.
The best answer I can give you?
It varies.
Due to my experiences though, I couldn’t really give you an answer as to how it actually works, or is supposed to work. I know I deal with a lot of different things than other people, and it interacts with my sleep. But I couldn’t image I’m too much different, and don’t ultimately believe I’m an exception to any rules.
The nights that I have one long flowing dream, with near perfect recall, are exceptionally rare, though. But they do vary from 10+ random nonsense fragments, to a single flowing dream.
The best thing I can give you, is a suggestion to read up on sleeping cycles, and examine and explore your own dreaming habits.