Techniques vs. Spontaneus Lucidity

Quest for Lucidity General Lucidness
1

Hi,

Within my two months of training I have 5 lucid dreams, yet all of them have been spontaneous. Interestingly the nights that I decide to “take a break” from the techniques (MILD, WILD, WBTB, etc. I still perform regular reality checks, however.) are the nights that I am most likely to have lucid dreams. I was wondering if anyone knows why the techniques are so ineffective when used by me? It’s quite frustrating actually, because it means that I entirely lack the ability to have lucid dreams on command.

Thanks,
Jake

p.s. I wasn’t entirely sure where to put this. Would Pathways be more appropriate?

2

You should have put it in ‘‘Quest For Lucidity’’, but never mind.
Anyway, you are not the only one.Many people get their first LD when they stop trying.

In my opinion, it is because they try too hard.You should know that trying too hard won’t get you anywhere in lucid dreaming.So when they quit for a while, they stop trying hard, and they get a lucid dream.So, don’t try too hard.

That’s it, good luck!

3

You might also be doing something wrong, or relying too much on the techniques to do your work for you.

Were you trying WBTB, though? You mentioned it, and it is generally a very versatile technique. You might wish to use it more, in conjuction with WILD or MILD.

4

Lucid living, the mother of all techniques, is actually a spontaneous effort yet is considered as a technique that you may consider.

5

It’s like trying to remember someone’s name. The harder you try, the farther it sails away from you.

Same thing for lucidity, the harder you try, the harder it gets.

However, just like remembering the name, after you have let it (the trying) go, it either comes spontaneously or you just remember it the second you want to.

Techniques can only raise your awareness. Don’t try to be lucid. Try to raise your awareness.

Don’t try to be lucid. Just be lucid.

And if you get this internal friction just like when you’re trying to remember a name. LET IT GO.

Techniques will work great for you when you get emotionally detached and stop TRYING to force something to happen.

6

Agree w/ Relv; our problem is that we sleep both our mind and our body when should only sleep our body.

7

I’ll describe my problems with each technique:

WBTB: I can NEVER fall back to sleep after waking up. This has happened to me about 11 times and is quite frustrating. I’ve decided to just not use the technique. And I can’t make myself wake up naturally like some can.

MILD: Oddly, I have trouble visualizing. Becoming lucid doesn’t really look like something, you know? What’s odd is that I’m a visual artist so it’s basically my job to visualize things… Also, it keeps me up. When I “think” about things when falling asleep, I don’t really think about it… the thoughts just sort of dart around my mind as I slip under. With MILD though, I need to focus on something and consciously think, which inhibits my ability to fall asleep. When I do fall asleep, correctly visualize, etc (I have been visualizing the lucidity scenes from Waking Life, which is the only visual I really have about being coming lucid even if it’s not myself) It doesn’t work.

WILD: I can never fall asleep and I have never even reached the point of HI.

And yeah, I guess I’m following the “Lucid Life” technique because I have been very lucid while waking and I perform reality checks constantly. I don’t just say “Am I dream” unconsciously and blankly do a reality check, I honestly question my reality.

8

Jake:

LDing is not about being a robot and trying techniques until you spontaneously get lucid.

I don’t know how to get this through to you, but as someone who never heard about it and comes to a lucid dreaming website, I can guess what the picture looks like. However, in reality, that’s not the way things are… MILD, WILD etc… are just suggestions on ways to ‘trick’ your mind into being lucid in a dream.

You can think for yourself of better techniques, ones that work for you…

Don’t be a robot…

Think for yourself…

People get into the mindset of:

Ok. … there’s MILD, WILD, WBTB, whatever, … I’ll try this one, and maybe that one… etc…

That’s not what lucid dreaming is about.

I’ve taught like 6-7 of my friends so far how to lucid dream and they all did it.

I never told them about any difficulties in the process, and I didn’t raise any expectations either. I just gave them techniques to use to raise their awareness while being awake. I also pushed them over the edge so they would think for themselves and become proactive. Some of them had a lucid dream during the first night and for others it took 1-2 weeks, but it happens. And it’s not by using any ‘technique’

It’s just by raising your awareness.

It’s like a muscle and since it’s atrophied, you must consciously raise your awareness until it reawakens.

Paroimia:

I disagree.

You are what you are , whether it’s in a dream or in waking. If your mind is asleep in a dream, it’s asleep in waking life.

People just go through their life on autopilot. They wake up and they just do the things they do subconsciously without giving anything too much thought.

Ponder this,

99% of what you thought, felt & did today is probably the same things you thought, felt & did yesterday.

You want your mind to not fall asleep ?

WAKE UP

9

Yeah, certainly. I entirely understand! I don’t know if you read the OP but I have already “correctly” tricked my mind into lucid dreaming and I have successfully had 5 lucid dreams within one month of training. I am simply noting that the preconceived techniques do not work for me, which is exactly what you are saying. And I actually had already read Stephen LaBerge’s Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming before coming to this website so I am not that much of “a n00b”.

10

What I do, is I don’t rely on the techniques. Like reIV said, you may need to think for yourself. Try expecting a lucid dream. I came up with a method to help induce lucid dreams on command, but it requires huge dedication, obsessiveness and compulsiveness. It works for me just about 100% of the time since it causes me to really expect a lucid dream, to really feel that one will come soon. I try to be light on myself, and if one doesn’t come tonight, one will come tomorrow, etc.

11

Relv:
maybe you misunderstood my statement, what I meant was that we should ALWAYS be aware, even in the process of sleep. I agree when you say that we go in autopilot, and I think is because of both lazyness and fear of confronting our reality.

12

Para - We’re having a disconnect. I say that you are what you are, whether it’s a dream or waking… wake up in waking —> wake up in dream. anyway… ^^

Jake:

Let me tell you a little bit about how I started lucid dreaming.

I actually had one crazy experience when I was like 8 years old.
I fell asleep and woke up ‘in’ the hall between the living room and the corridor to my room on a mattress. I immediately realized that I’m really in my room. Now, this was NOT a lucid dream. I was awake and moving my physical body. My eyes were simply deceiving me. I stood up, baffled by what was going on and started to walk slowly with my hands out front towards my room. After a step or two I hit a wall with my hands (although no wall was seen at that locale) , I realized that this must be the wall in my room next to my bed. Eventually, I just lied back down ‘on the mattress’ and fell asleep again to wake up in my room.

Now, I don’t remember if that was before my first LDs or after, but anyways…

My LDs started with nightmares. I was constantly being chased and having bad dreams about getting things that I didn’t want to. It was always really frightening. One day, as I was dreaming, I just realized, hey, this is too bad, ohh it’s a dream… And suddenly, my fears just melted away and I turned back to who was chasing after me and started shooting them with iceballs or something like that.

From that day on, I , pretty much night after night, just willed myself to have lucid dreams. Not through use of MILD or anything like that. I just made the clear intention to be lucid. Imagine for a second that you want to jump out of bed when you wake up, and as you go to sleep, you just decide to jump out of bed when you wake up, if your intent is focused and concise, you will. Well, that’s what I did, I just decided to be lucid, no constraint , no efforts, no willpower, no repeating affirmations.

I stopped somewhere along the way and continued some time ago.

I’m telling you this just to give you a different picture about lucid dreaming.
To be honest, I don’t think that Stephen Berge or anyone else can tell you anything about it. Just like everything , knowledge will come from experience. There’s no way around it. Read books if you want to, but experiment with it, really try to logically, and objectively (without being emotionally attached to it) think about lucid dreaming.

Here’s a topic in which I gave someone a bit of advice, maybe it’ll be useful.
[What should I do now?)

In the end, the biggest thing you must do in order to have lucid dreams is to LET GO.
The moment you start feeling the feelings of WANTING & DESIRE, you’re suggesting that it’s beyond your reach. If you want my most honest advice, don’t attempt any technique if it makes you feel like you WANT to have lucid dreams. Lucid dreams are just like walking, they’re something you choose to do. If you think, and more importantly, feel, that something will keep you from having them, you most definitely will, or at least , it will require tremendous amounts of energy (since you’ll have to trick yourself using your conscious mind) and will power.

Let it go…

Just keep doing reality checks, increase your awareness in any way you can. Be aware of your perception. Look at what you see, hear, feel , smell, touch… make changes in your life. Put on earplugs. Wear a blind fold for an hour a day. Pretend you’re in a lucid dream and think about what you’ll want to do…

again, experiment.

Try to raise your awareness.

And please, don’t try to lucid dream. It’ll take lots of energy to succeed this way.
If you want to do it without efforts, just do it. DECIDE

When you’ll get it once this way, you’ll suddenly go, aaaaahhhhhhh , how could I not see this ?..

P.S. - Brainwave entrainment / Meditation will be very helpful

13

Relv:
what you say is very striking, I think what you mention is similar to Lucid Living. i’m interested on it, but I have a question, do you sleep aware somehow when you sleep? Like meditation? Or you just ‘let go’?

EDIT:
I think I get it, it is about fully commiting to decide to have lucid dreams, but the moment you try you put doubt. Other thing is to see sleeping as an ‘experience’ and not just plain sleeping.
When I start drifting to sleep I get what seem to be flashdreams similar to HI, but I only get them when I experience sleep and not just sleep cuz I’m tired.

14

As most of the things that seem extraordinary to people, it’s just way too simple for them to understand.

It’s not about ’ fully committing to decide ’ .

It’s just deciding. The reason you’re getting confused is because something inside of you tells you that there is something hard about lucid dreaming. That you just have to put SOME efforts. That it can’t be just a natural decision. And this is the biggest obstacle in your way.

Your mind is SO POWERFUL. SO SO POWERFUL… If I could only show it to you.

But it works in a certain way…

Everything is a choice, and all choices are composed of information/data.

If you’re reading this right now, you’re making a choice to read it, you’re thinking about reading it, then physically reading it. If you want to stand up and go out of the room, you first have to see it in your mind. Then , your brain sends complex electrical signals to make your nervous system create the necessary movements.

But, why is it that if someone wants to lucid dream, he’s automatically thinking about WANTING to lucid dream, or FAILING to lucid dream.

Imagine you were trying to walk out of your room, but all you could think of was breaking your leg on your way, the door not opening, and you not walking. You couldn’t walk!! What you see is what you create. Everything you do is a result of visualizing it first. When you walk down the street, you internally visualize every step you take before you take it. It can’t happen any other way…

Emotions are especially powerful because they are softwares that keep some visualization going on inside your mind on and on and on… without your conscious attention… so, if someone feels he can’t lucid dream, or that he WANTS to lucid dream. He starts internally visualizing that day in day out… At this point, it requires TREMENDOUS conscious energy to override the ‘softwares’ in your mind to create a lucid dream. That is why LETTING GO is The Most Important Thing. If you really had no strings attached to it, a conscious decision, no efforts, no concentration, would be more than enough. Just like you decide to stand up and walk out of the room.

With regards to your question, my sleep is always changing and so I can’t really tell you ‘how it is’.

I’ve had times when I woke up realizing that I was asleep but aware, very strange thing indeed, you could call it a transcendental state if you’re familiar.

Other times, I just go to sleep normally. I usually don’t mess with my dreams, I let whatever comes my way, come. When I feel like having a lucid dream, I just have one…
If I wanted to, I could just rewire myself to be lucid in every dream. It’s really not a problem. But dreams have their jobs in place too…

Reality is much more flexible than you think.

When you start using Theta/Delta brainwaves in your everyday life. Everything starts to change…

For example, about 6 hours ago, I just lied down, and started seeing all sorts of things, being in all sorts of places, consciously and subconsciously , it’s really hard to explain, I’ve been there, but I was passive in that environment while still engaging in some unrelated thought processes.

Another example, yesterday I woke up and went to the fridge to open a bottle of San Pellegrino when I remembered that I was (while I was being ‘asleep’) at the kitchen and saw a friend of mine taking the bottle… In case you’re wondering, I didn’t open the fridge, but the bottle was not there (obviously) . Those things happen.

You’re really just consciousness in a virtual reality. Reality is so fluid…
You’re not limited by space. (nor time - although when seeing/going to the future, we’re talking about probable future)
Dreams often have ‘real’ elements to them but people are just so drugged they can barely even see anything anymore.

However, having said all that, I could never convince you of anything, you may believe me consciously but deep down you’ll still think something else. And that’s simply because the mind can accept anything it’s being told. And go see the ‘problems’ and ‘difficulties’ children are exposed to… The mind just assumes this is the way things are. Not to mention the fact that most people are walking on the planet dehydrated, without sufficient energy (ELECTRICAL energy, not calories), without enough oxygen and also completely drugged from sugar and all sorts of chemicals, hormones, and other drugs that basically goes into every type of food out there. And most importantly, the fact that people do not meditate (shut their minds down) is like trying to run a computer (live) while it’s already stuck on overdrive and can’t even open or close any software. Is it a wonder people get so stuck ? …

Humans are not rational or logical. They’d like to believe they are but they’re really not. They can ‘rationalize’ what they’re doing but they’re driven by pure emotional energy. Rational is present in humans in very scarce quantities. In reality, most humans are just as a bit less automatic then monkeys.

That’s why I urge you to go ahead and experiment. Experience is the only thing that will unlock your mind to the possibilities.

MEDITATE.

Use brainwave entrainment, especially Theta. Let go of things daily… etc… And you’ll start opening up to whole new avenues of life.

Honestly, I can’t , through writing, show you what I’m talking about. Text, words, even art has its limits. Only experience will really make you see.

I just got a software to design brainwave entrainment tracks . Now, I’ll get a windows so I can operate it and I’ll start uploading tracks to the net.

I’m also in the process of working on some big projects over the internet, if you’re interested in all of this, PM me.

15

I used to only get them spontaneously. I’ve been putting a lot into having lucid dreams for the past week, and I had a dry spell. Last night I tried but didn’t put nearly as much effort into it. Since I was much more tired then usual I get 2 lucid dreams. That has only happened once before in my life.
So for me I need a mix of the techniques and simply being tired enough.