I have been interested in LD for about 6 months now, I read a lot about it, then tried reality tests for a few months but nothing happened. So I kind of stopped thinking about it.
But last night I had my first LD. I realized I was dreaming and looked for a light switch, I turned it off and nothing happened… I then became lucid and tried to influence the dream, which I managed to do to a certain extent. But I tried to fly and couldn’t really take off it was weird, I tried to talk with dream characters but I couldn’t really hear the replies and generally didn’t really manage to “control” a lot in my dream.
Is this common? Any tips?
note: I stopped smoking a few weeks ago, and I am sleeping with nicotine patches, which have made me remember my dreams more.
you have to believe you can fly. in your dream, it is your subcoscious mind. you can reprogram your mind. do positive affirmations when you are going to sleep
I am in perfect control of my dreams
I am an archangel so I can fly
If I jump up in a dream I can fly
Dream characters will respond to me
Rebecca’s first sentence is the core principle to make your lucid dreams enjoyable: believe.
If you try to force your way through the dream, it will often not quite work. I’ve had many such experiences myself. Lucid dreaming doesn’t really mean you will be in full control. It means access to consciousness. Yet your dream is still built by your subconscious (SC). If you want to do anything in your dream, your SC has to let you. So you need to negotiate.
Now if try to force your ambitions in the dream, it’s like telling your SC at gunpoint: “let me fly!“. Unsurprisingly it doesn’t respond well to threats and commands like this. And you SC does not answer to your conscious mind, it’s the other way around in fact! But the good points are that
your SC is very open for peaceful negotiation, especially inside dreams
your SC is still part of you, it’s not your bully neighbour or somebody hostile like that
So, how to practically use this for anything? Well, instead of trying to bend the dream to your desire, try to incorporate your ambitions into the dream. Again Rebecca gave some good examples like believing your an angel and of course angels can fly. Or that you can jump really high and this is practically flying, isn’t it?
Be nice to your dream and your dream will be nice to you. Because your dreams are a representation of your SC. The better friends your become with it, the more it will let you do. It may still have a bad day sometimes it really want you to listen to it instead of it listening to you, but you can definitely work that out. I think it’s important to also highlight that you can and should work on this in waking life, too. Positive affirmation that Rebecca already mentioned is a very good tool.
Congrats on your first LD, hopefully the first of many!
It is common to not be able to “control” many aspects of a lucid dream, with that being said,
I agree with both responses above, belief is a major factor in having control in your dreams.
Speaking specifically about flying, you should find a technique that is right for you.
There are some references you can check out on the forum on the types of flying techniques
and which ones are the most popular so you can get some ideas.
I wasn’t expecting the method I use to be the one I actually stuck with, but I’ve been doing it for years now
and it’s worked pretty well. It’s what Iron Man does to fly, where he points his palms to the ground and bursts up into the air. I feel that way is good for control in the air and good for takeoff as well.
I’m late to the party here, but what helped me was having an idea of what flying should feel like. I used to love the movie Hook, and as a kid I’d daydream about flying like Peter Pan. I created a pretty solid idea of what the sensation was like during that time.
At first in LD’s I had a really hard time. My first attempt I sort of floated off without control, and my second my lower body flew off into the subset without me. After that I tried to think of that feeling. Sure enough, it worked. It did take some time to refines it, but now flying is relatively simple. Every now and then I have to go back to basics and think of the feeling, but usually it’s as natural as walking.
