I’ve been having lucid dreams on and off for a year or two (still novice) but am DETERMINED to end that now. I always tire myself out and lose that burning drive. I feel like I need a scheduler or something to keep me on track.
One of the biggest mistake lucid dreamers make is trying to hard. And I believe this is what I fall prey to every time. I don’t know how to pace myself.
When I do reality checks, sometimes I get tired and feel myself unable to broaden my awareness. It’s almost as if I had telekinesis, lifting chairs at first, but then after using it too much, I’d barely be able to lift a pencil.
I’ve always had semi lucid dreams where, for one reason or another, I wake up prematurely. It’s been like this for probably a year or two now. I never really got a firm grasp on stabilization, everything I was doing seemed to fail: Rubbing my hands, etc. But I’ve read that it’s simply something that gets better as you have more lucid dreams, which would definitely explain why my stability suffers.
The first time I tried to stop a lucid dream from fading, I rubbed my hands and that did nothing, I touched my shirt and felt nothing, but just staring at the details of my hand kept me in the dream.
After that I have chosen to stabilize by touching nearby surfaces and that seems to work. After I had a few lucid dreams that faded in a second or two, the very first thing that comes to mind after I become lucid is that I need to find something to touch. This need has made walls appear out of nowhere.
And yeah, don’t try too hard, but stay active. I would say that writing a dream journal on ld4all and interacting with other dreamers keeps me on track. I find motivation from competitions like the lucidity challenge and ld4all quest.
Yeah I’ll definitely get involved in the lucidity challenges. And I think the problem for me is I focus my attention for either too long or not long enough.
Now from what other people say, this is normal, but this is the first time that I’ve ever had this happen, so for me it’s kind of strange. I’m worried now that I won’t be able to read text anymore, and I’m sure worrying will just make that happen, but does anyone know why it would suddenly change from always being stable to blurry and weird?
I’m not actually sure, but it’s happened to me to. I was able to read in later dreams though. I have a suspicion it might be because everyone is always saying “You can’t read text in dreams”, so I think when people get their lucid dreams, they can’t. Just like how if every tutorial said it’s impossible to fly in dreams, most people wouldn’t be able to fly. Just what I think though.
So just don’t worry about seeing text, since if you saw it before, you can obviously see it in dreams again.
I think the same. Certain ideas about what you “can’t do” in dreams have become very popular (I blame LaBerge), and because dreams respond to the dreamer’s expectations in so many ways (cf. every time I have a nightmare and I hide and I think “Oh no they’re gonna find me” and lo, they do), a lot of people have internalized these notions and their dreams acquire a limitation.
The next go-round on the ferris wheel is when the people who have internalized the “can’t read in dreams” limitation notice that, indeed, text in their dreams isn’t legible, and so they take this to be proof of that reading in dreams is indeed impossible… and so they pass this bit of “wisdom” on to the next incoming class of dreamers…
And that’s sad, because dream libraries are awesome.
Limits can be self-taught, too. My first long and stable lucid dream involved me flying around like Superman–lucidity dawned while I was running from a Big Scary Dude Intent On Murdering Me, and I thought, “If I’m dreaming, I can just fly away,” and I did! But then in subsequent dreams I somehow got the notion that “flying is hard.” It only took me getting the notion once–then, every time I became lucid and thought, “I want to fly!” the next thought I got was “But flying is hard!” Boom. Grounded. Argh.
Thanks for that - exactly the reminder that I need. “Well, I flew before, no reason I can’t fly again…”