I’ve been actively practicing lucid dreaming for only about three months.
Previously, I used LaBerge’s MILD and WILD methods to achieve lucidity in my dreams.
Now I use Mikhail Raduga’s techniques; they’re more effective for me because I can enter a lucid dream whenever I want. However, I have trouble with the duration of my lucid dreams. Often, when something happens or I want to do something, like start a conversation with someone or do something else, I simply return to my body, then repeat the technique and prolong my adventures for a little while, but usually they don’t last more than a couple of minutes.
Nope. A single lucid dream is limited by the duration of its REM bout. Which is less than one hour. You can feel, though that a dream lasts more because brains are great at “splicing” by inserting fake memories. I think that the most reliable method would be just perfecting dream reentries. It helps that sometimes when you think that you’ve woken up, you actualy haven’t.
P.S. 
finally, someone mentioned Raduga! I’m so-o-o tired of mild, reality checks and dreamsigns. His approach to DEILD, from my experience is far from the ideal, but it’s a good start for tweaking. In the post-soviet community it’s basically what MILD is to the westerners.
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Thank you for the reply. If reaching one hour is unrealistic, what are the actual limits? If a REM sleep phase with brief awakenings can last more than 90 minutes, is it possible to stay in the phase for at least 30 of those minutes? I’ve heard about deepening and stabilization techniques and I’m trying to practice them, but usually I only manage to apply deepening at the very beginning. After that, I often forget about stabilization and wake up because I’m not maintaining the state.
People don’t sleep for months, and in the real physical world, no one has ever been recorded having a dream that lasted more than a short time. Definitely not days or years. Brain scans show that deep dreaming happens during REM sleep, which usually lasts just minutes at a time, up to maybe around an hour.
But here’s where it gets tricky and controversial: Could a dream actually last longer on the inside? Not just feel long when you wake up, but really have more time passing within it?
Some people say yes. In vivid or lucid dreams, they’ve lived through events that unfolded over what felt like weeks or even years. These aren’t just random images. They include clear thinking, decisions, memories from earlier in the dream, and emotional changes. It feels like a life going forward step by step. If that kind of experience can happen in 20 minutes of real sleep, could a one year dream actually contain more inner events, more steps, more real mental activity than a shorter dream?
The idea is that dream time might not be fake. Maybe the mind isn’t just fooling itself later. It might actually live through more during certain dreams. The brain might be creating a dream where events truly unfold over a long period like a full year step by step, not just all at once or made up after waking.
But others argue this isn’t possible. The brain doesn’t speed up during sleep. There’s no strong evidence it can handle extremely long, complex chains of thought and thus dream a life as long as waking life. What feels like a year might just be a mix of pieces the mind stitches together after waking, making it seem longer and more detailed than it really was.
So we don’t know for sure. Is a long dream truly longer on the inside? Does more actually happen in it? Or is it just how we remember it? It’s still a mystery.
And then you get other potential complexities. For example, some people believe in a soul or other non material sources beyond the brain where dreams might come from. If consciousness isn’t only produced by the brain, then the rules might be different. Dreams could tap into something that isn’t limited by biology or time as we know it.
In my personal opinion, I tend to believe that it is possible to have a longer dream. There are reports from individuals who claim to have lived through years in a single dream, with consistent details and deep experiences. While we don’t have scientific proof yet, I remain open to the idea. The debate is still ongoing, and we may need new ways of studying the mind before we fully understand what dreams can do.
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How would you change his DEILD approach? What did you find more effective for yourself?
In my experience, it’s more complex than “notice awakening - perform cycling”. I wasn’t able to notice awakenings reliably. And when I did, techniques just didn’t work. On the contrary, when I suddenly (and unreliably) wake up in the proper state, it’s much easier to reenter than he claims. It’s hard to combine them with dream recall, because you need to choose between remembering a dream and reentry. Also, his approach feels mentally taxing so he even doesn’t recommend to perform it every day.
I’ve been trying to solve these issues for more than a year and in the end came to a quite different approach. It’s heavily reliant on the proper sleep conditions/hygeine (and even on daily lifestyle), seem to perfectly blend with everyday dream recall, and the reentry part is rather simple. Still heavily WIP, because, again, it’s much deeper and intricate than than Raduga pretends it to be, so when I find a new factor, it basically wrecks the whole system so I need to start investigating anew 
I have mostly problems with noticing awakenings, as well. But I think one can train it.
But I also noticed that when it works, it’s rather too simple. And until now, it has never worked after cycling. But I’m still a beginner and haven’t had so much experience yet. Maybe it’ll become better.