I have made RC often for like a month, two times I have looked at my hands in a dream, one hand was missing a finger, the other one had one extra and the thumb was forked, but I did not get a DILD. What do I do now?
Seems like you need to do your RC more consciously. When you perform the RC in real life, be sure to really question reality, don’t go like “Oh yeah my hand has five fingers anyways, time to move along”. Look carefully at your hand, maybe even count your fingers and think a bit more about how you can be sure that this is WL. A back-up RC would be a good idea too, for example the nose RC or an awareness check. Just don’t let this discourage you, it’s only a tiny step to a LD when you have already managed to do a RC in your dreams!
Thanks, I will do that. I have also do the nose RC and the fingers-through-palm RC, but that did not appear in the dream. I always do the hand RC first.
You need to make sure that you have practiced your own awareness enough, so that you understand exactly what a RC during a dream really means - otherwise you will just do a RC on autopilot in the dream without really understanding it, just like you treat everything else during a ND.
Try to maintain awareness as much as you can in real life (LL) by using all your senses as much as possible and paying as much attention as possible to everything around you - think of how small children behave, the reason they always stare at everything and ask all kinds of questions is because everything is new and interesting to them, and that’s probably also why children tend to have more lucid dreams.
Imagine that real life is a dream, then you may notice that you are suddenly paying much more attention to everything around you - you know that you are doing this right if you feel a sudden strong, long-lasting excitement and wonder.
Maintaining awareness in real life can be very stressful in the beginning, but it does get easier and easier the more you do it.
I will try to do that to. Thanks, sound hard though.
It’s not too bad, you don’t have to go all out at once.
It’s perfectly enough if you try to keep extra aware for just a few minutes per day in the beginning, then slowly work your way up as you get more used to it.
When I started LL-ing I practiced it in chunks of 5 minutes the first two days, then I tried 10 minutes the following three days and I kept increasing it like that.
Basically, what’s important is that you practice it as much as you feel you can manage.
Don’t overdo it though, it should always be a pleasure to do this and you don’t have to be extra aware all the time, just more than usual and as much as you feel like.
It’s also an excellent idea to practice the WBTB method, which is probably one of the best techniques for beginners.
The point of that technique is essentially to interrupt one of your REM cycles (which is when you dream), then get out of bed and let your brain “awaken”, focusing on lucid dreaming and whatever you want to experience in your LD (you can for example write down the dream you had in a DJ during this time), and then get back to bed again and dive straight into the REM period with a much more active mind.
The best time to wake up during WBTB is usually around 6 hours after you have fallen asleep, so try to wake up about 6,5-7 hours after you go to bed.
Ok, last night something weird happened. I dreamt that I looked at my hands, but they looked normal, but I still remember this specially. And I also dreamt that I pushed a light switch and nothing happened, I also remember this, but in the dream I took that as there was electrical problems. It seems that I get slightly lucid when these things happen, but I do still not get a lucid dream. Like a week ago, I dreamt that I looked at my hands, they looked strange, then I tried to summon a TARDIS, but since I did not stabilize the dream, I woke up. This was probably a false LD.