Praciticing real-world skills?

Lucid Adventures
1

I’m not entirely sure which sub-forum would be best for this question, as it seems to bridge several topics, but this one seemed to fit most closely.

I’ve been interested in lucid dreaming for several years, and had some small success with it, but quickly encountered a difficulty: I can’t seem to influence what’s actually going on in the dream. Rather, I end up being aware in whatever preexisting scenario is available, and I can’t seem to change it.

The reason I initially became interested in lucid dreaming was because I read some research regarding practicing real-world skills within a dream. This idea was fascinating to me-I loved the idea of being able to learn skills with my unconscious mind. I was quite motivated to learn to lucid dream and practice a skill in a dream.

Unfortunately, aside from my difficulty in setting up my dream the way I like, I seem to be having some trouble establishing conditions conducive to lucid dreaming. For some information: I’m a college student and a semi-professional gamer. I spend all of my time in class, studying, or in front of my computer practicing. I’m aware that spending a great deal of time with a computer is a bad idea for lucid dreaming, and I probably practice 5-6 hours a day. On days off, that number may jump to 8 or 10.

Due to this, I find I don’t seem to be dedicating enough mental space to being aware of reality checks, my surroundings, or any dream techniques. I’d like to avoid messing up my sleep schedule if possible, and I find I don’t have as much time to dedicate to lucid dreaming.

So I suppose I have two overarching questions: First, is lucid dreaming something I should still pursue when I’m not 100% focused on it? Is there something I could be doing that won’t interfere with my current schedule?

Secondly, and relating this to the topic, I’d like to be able to simply set up a lucid dream scenario in which I can practice. You can imagine how this would be advantageous-rather than playing 6 hours a day, I could gain several more through lucid dreams. Is there some way to force a dream to set up the situation I want? Even when I’m fully aware that I’m dreaming, I can’t seem to control anything no matter how hard I try.

Sorry for the long and rather rambling post. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

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Well, so far it doesn’t look to me that there is anything that can stop you from lucid dreaming, for example, you can RC everytime you die, RC everytime you finish a match, RC every time you renember. And your RC can be based on computer, for example, you play a game that you;ve never played before or so on … idk, your the expert.
Now let’s see about the control problem, you should probably check out the different dream control tutorials on this site. Here is an example that might help you out.
But as far as practicing real-life skills in a dream, i do not know to what extent you can achieve this because the physical skills are completely rule out, the mental one require you just to understand the information you already have. For example in mathematics, if you know Phytagora’s Theorem that means you can practice it in a dream (you can just create triangles, apply the theorem “live”, but if you do not know the theorem you can’t practice it because in a dream you have no information source. So as far as you know the information you should be able to alter it and perfect it in a dream, but you can’t learn new things…
I hope this helps, i wish you good luck from now on

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Thanks very much for the advice and the link! As far as actually practicing a skill goes, I think it’s more feasible for my purposes than most-the game is mostly mental, so I imagine my unconscious could simply simulate playing against an opponent. My mind should already have all the information it needs; I’m just playing with an arbitrary ruleset, much like if I tried to play chess in my brain. There are plenty of openings I don’t know, but they all operate off an identical set of rules and should be possible to see in a dream because of that.