Hello LD fans and followers!
I used to post here a lot last summer and took part in the competitions. I would average 10 or 11 LDs in a month which was pretty good for a beginner.
I come here today with the news that I’ve turned myself into a natural LD’er. I can have them on command and devote absolutely zero time to thinking about it all day. No RC’s, no nothing.
I’m not writing this to inflate my ego - I want to share some tips with the community that will prove to be very useful. You see, LD’ing is the most subjective thing you can take part in. Your beliefs play the most intimate of roles in dictating the experience you will have.
You come to this board and although i’m not saying it’s totally useless, it distorts what you SHOULD be thinking about LD’ing by presenting oodles of failures and frustrations. It’s one of the easiest things you can do if you have good dream recall. All you have to do is ask yourself, “Am I going to have an LD this morning?” If you don’t answer that with a resounding “YES!”, you know where your problems lie.
Usually I set my alarm for 6-8 hours after going to sleep, get up, go to the bathroom, visualize myself looking at my hand in a dream and noticing more than 5 fingers, thus becoming lucid, and go back to sleep. The whole process takes 2 or 3 minutes. I had a 20 minute LD this morning from 9:30AM to 9:50AM and let me tell you, it was amazing. I had full control and it was vivid.
This brings me to my next subject - extending your LDs. When I first started having them, they would last barely a minute. I didn’t know more was possible so I was content with them. One day I took my shoes off in my dream and told myself “As long as I can feel my footsteps, I’m dreaming.” This successfully extended my LD to about 3-4 minutes. I was happy.
Recently, though, I started experimenting with the role your beliefs have WHILE LD’ing. You’ve all read the advice naturals give you: have full belief you can (fly, create fire, materialize a person, etc) and you will be able to. Obviously, your beliefs play an intimate role in what you’re capable of experiencing while lucid.
What I found was startling. In my LD today, just as it was beginning (It was my longest to date), I proclaimed to my dream friends, “It is perfectly natural to experience extremely long LDs”. I genuinely believed it would happen, and, 20 minutes later, I woke up. The moral of the story: ANYTHING is possible if you believe it enough in your LD.
Finally, I want to comment on dream incubation. I had a weird experience today: When I first started my LD at 9:30AM, I was in a street outside a few houses. I grabbed someone walking on the street, and said “LETS GO TO THE MOON!” I jumped, thinking I would land on the moon, but landed several hundred feet in front of me. Yes, it was a failure, but not really - When the LD was over, I sat up for awhile recapping my experience, and went back to sleep. I then had a very long dream that took place on the moon, in a civilization filled with my friends and family. It was fun 
So, If you took nothing from this post, believe this: Your beliefs dictate your reality, outside dreamworld and inside.
. Which is (arguably) better.
