Waking up consciously.

Quest for Lucidity
1

There’s a lot of emphasis put upon falling asleep consciously…

but frankly, the best way to lucidity is waking up conscously!

Do you realize how many times we wake up in a night? Make a habit of doing SOMETHING after you wake up. Check the clock every single time, or, do an RC every single time, or try to WILD or MILD every single time.

don’t just roll over and zombie out.

Falling asleep consciously is rather tricky, because the brain wants to keep going into delta (and needs to I might add)

but waking up… well, REM starts when you leave delta and go back up to near-awake levels of consciousness…

those proficient in lucidity will tell you that it is often very easy to go back into a dream once you wake up from it…

REMs get closer and closer together as the night comes to an end, as well.

So, did you just have a dram? You weren’t lucid… no worries… wake up consciously. Pay attention to the fact that you are waking up.

This starts, quite simply, by realizing that you HAVE woken up, which means… where in the world were you before you were awake?

Go back. Go back. If it was just an NREM sleep, go back. If it was REM, go back.

Don’t complicate it really. It’s complete intuition. If in your daily life you often find yourself waking up and realizing “you know, I think I was dreaming” or things like that… that’s all you need to reverse engineer yourself back into lucidity.

Now… if you are able to simply realize that you have woken up, and we all do it every night, it’s just a matter of realizing…

then all you have to do is not move a single single single muscle in your entire body. Now pay attention. Were you IMMEDIATELY just in a draem? Then start talking to the dream characters that were around you with your mind. They will be glad to pull you back out of your body.

Were you in a light sleep? Then MILD or WILD.

Forget about the body lying in the bed. effortless WILDs, immediate lucidity, simple MILDs are available to absolutely anyone who meets this simple criterion:
did you just wake up
is your mind more clear than it is drowsy?

that’s it.

now no this wont’ be super easy if you go to bed at 10, wake up at 1, and then want to go lucid… but if you go to bed at 10, wake up around say 3-5 or 6 a.m., it’s easy as pie.

it’s about waking up conscious… you can wake up conscious even if you aren’t lucid… even if you are lucid but can’t for the life of you keep the dream alive…

all you gotta realize is “i’m waking up” or “I just woke up” and retrace your steps.

the emphasis is placed upon this, because, the barrier between the dream world and the waking world is almost nonexistant in such states of mind, and because when you learn to operate in the “I’m kind of awake, but not really” state of mind, you learn how to have prolonged periods of lucidity by simple will of mind.

if you try these techniques while falling asleep, as opposed to waking up, it’ can be challenging.

but in the “I just woke up” scenario, at least half of the time, you don’t have any falling asleep required to go back into a dream, its just a simple exercise of will.

2

Sounds good. My first impression was “so it’s WBTB?”, but it seems to be something else entirely.

I like it.

3

WTFILD :tongue:

4

This part really drew me in, but I would like to know, has this been tested before?

The idea on waking consciously is very interesting! Great topic :content:

5

tested how?

I know very assuredly that it works. That you can even prolong a dream far longer than you are “supposed to” this way.

I’ve read of other people who do the same thing, not moving a single muscle, to keep a tie to the dream world (and presumably, the dream “body”) instead of interacting with the physical world.

I mean if you think about it, rolling over, or scratching, or doing something like that, means you are choosing to interact with the physical and be “awake” whereas lying motionless and focusing on the dream you just had is kind of like choosing to interact with the dream world instead.

6

Wow! I have to try this… I am anxious to see what happens… I wish I didn’t have to wake up at 6 tomorrow… Then I could really experiment with this without any risk of overshooting my alarm.

Just to clarify, there is a passageway between dreaming and reality, right? And when you’re about to wake up, you are being thrown out of this passageway into reality, but you can get back to dreaming if you really focus on the dream world and not reality?

7

when you say to wake up at 6 am, how do you propose doing that? is that assuming you will wake up naturally around then and just make sure that you dont move? or does it require some sort of other means of waking you?

thanks
eyegug

8

absolutely. at first it may be hard to tell, but with practice you will be able to tell whether or not you can go back at any given point.

and if you can’t go right back, MILD often helps…

it’s kind of like there are 3 states: dreamy, awake, sleepy.
you want dreamy. dreamy feels almost identical to awake, but somehow you can just keep your consciousness still fixated where it came from, by focusing on what you were just doing… and by trying to get back, you won’t become sleepy at all.

awake feels almost entirely the same, you just realize, well, i’m too awake to go back. and if you are sleepy trying to go back, then that isn’t so good but can sometimes work.

you always wake up naturally, so it doesn’t matter when. it could be midnight, 1, 3, 4, 5, … I just said 6 because it’s a bit easier in the morning.

part of our problem is an overreliance on alarm clocks. I think I forgot to set mine today but I still woke up many times before it was going to go off (though I was just waiting for a phone call and didn’t have to be up)

9

i guess my problem is i don’t realize when i wake up in the middle of the night. i remember reading somewhere that we wake up at least 15 times a night and just dont realize it most of the time. is there any way to catch myself better when i wake up and not fall back to sleep immediately?

10

yeah. don’t go back to sleep!

it’s an issue of intent mainly I guess.

i mean don’t you ever wake up to go use the restroom then lie back down? that’s a natural waking up occurence, you don’t just realize “I have to pee” and abort deep sleep… or even usually if you have to real bad and you’re dreaming you still don’t wake up…

you can set your alarm to a horrendous time in the morning and see if you wake up and turn it off before it gets off. i do that a lot when I try to WBTB… I get up and turn the alarm off before it goes off because I don’t want it waking me up.

if you have to be at school or work and you are getting more than 7 hours of sleep you can deliberately NOT set your alarm clock… as long as you clearly want to go to work you should be able to get up on time, though… it depends.

basically all you have to do is realize that you have woken up from a dream.

it is very simple, but very intuitive and it’s not something that i can think of a way to have a “method” of doing, other than setting up WBTB every 2-3 hours for the entire night long, to train yourself to be more alert.

you can also have a default wake up time like 4:52 and set your alarm every night to get you up at 4:52, and use that time to practice WBTB… then after a while you should be able to wake up at 4:52 or before it without setting the alarm.

the key thing i’m trying to emphasise is noticing the transition from being in a dream, to waking up. and if you don’t notice that, then upon waking up, realize that you just had a dream, because maybe you weren’t lucid.

but if you wake up from any dream, at all, during any time, you can simple lie motionless and intend yourself to go back. it really depends on so many things though.

often times for me i “know” that i can’t go back… or accept that the dream is over and don’t want to push to getting back into it.

but if you aren’t lucid during a dream, you will know you just had a dream when you wake up from it, and if so you can easily go back.

11

What stages don’t you wake up in? Surely there are at least some where you wake up.

12

Last night I got a call, saying that I could come in to work an hour later than I usually do. I was pretty happy about this, because I got to try the method!

Before you ask: No, I did not have any success.

BUT I do have a story.

My alarm went off very early in the morning. I shut it off, and went back to sleep (just call this a very brief WBTB). Then, I began to have a ND. I woke up a little while later. I forgot the part about not moving :sad: I decided to try and get back into it with some MILD and by trying to connect with the DCs in my dream (the most memorable being Donald Trump :happy: [no, I didn’t have a nightmare about his hair attacking me])

I decided to leave it and get ready for work. I’m covering for somebody Thursday, and they’re covering for me tomorrow, so I’ll get another chance tomorrow morning :smile:

13

soccer fan. moving makes re-entry quite a bit harder.

it is still doable definitely though. you also don’t want to hurt your body, if it has to move to regain circulatoin or something that’s better than getting lucid, but generally the desire to move is just psychological like “ahhh i wanna roll over” when you really don’t “Need” to per se.

that’s mainly my problem with WILDing by falling asleep is having the very persistent and strong urge to simply roll over.

i don’t know. it’s possible.

my experience makes me think that unless it is a bodily emergency, because you have taken conscious control of the elimination of waste, it is left entirely for the conscious mind to take care of.

this would be why you can dream of urinating but you don’t get relief from it. and why when you finally wake up from the dream, you get up and do it for real.

if it were a bodily absolute necessity it could easily interrupt sleep, but i think that because your body is so relaxed and in a repair mode, that if your insides are in good health… you don’t wake up because you go to the bathroom.

you wake up normally, then go to the bathroom.

it may very well happen in a period of very light n-rem sleep, where you can make a semi-conscious choice of waking up and going to the restroom, or staying asleep, and normally if you didn’t have to, you may stay asleep. if so this would be kind of a twilightish trance state similar to the one i’m trying to describe that you reside in after waking from dreams, but where entry is still possible.

feel free to question away, this peeing thing is just my best speculation combined with my experience. because you have to be awake to pee (if you are wired like most of society’s adults) it makes sense that you would just simply get up to pee when you naturally wake up, in accordance with your rhythmns.

therefore one good lucidity method is to drink a huge ton of water before going to bed.

14

When I wake up, most of the time my vision is directed to the right, where my alarm clock sits facing to the left (hence, when I wake up, I am looking straight at my alarm clock). Would I be disturbing the balance between awake/dreamy if I put a post-it note on the alarm clock that said “Don’t move?” It sounds like a good idea in theory, but I’m not sure if reading will take me away from the dream and into reality.

15

that’s a good question. my eyes are usually closed when i’m in such a state.

i noticed that being on my back let me have HI last night, which is very very rare.

it took some creativity to use the HI to go back to dreaming, because I had spent a long time in the dream and my body didn’t want more, but I got about 3-4 minutes in and only woke up because i did something stupid.
(tried to travel through an oven because a pig did it… i didn’t understand what he was telling me. I asked him to take me tom someone, and when we got there he said “pay attention to the mirror” then disappeared into the stove, and I tried to follow him, but it was dangerous and had me trapped.)

i think he meant walk around and when you see a mirror pay attention but… live and learn.

opening your eyes shouldn’t really influence a lot because you use your eyes to look around the dream world according to Laberges study, but it may.

it’s best to remember on your own either way but anything that helps you!

16

I tried it for the second time this morning. I was perfectly still at first, but then someone turned a vacuum cleaner on by my room, which shocked me a little and I accidently turned over. :grrr:

I decided to still try it anyways. My previous dream took place in a jewelry store. I imagined the guy that was working the store. I tried to get him to pull me back in, but all he really did was just stand still as I visualized him. I got about two seconds worth of actual moving HI, but I quickly lost it and decided to just go out and get the mail.

17

that’s great. if you can see him in HI and keep persisting, talking to him, you’re almost all the way there.

you do have to be attentive though. you will eventually “know” whether or not it will work or not.

for instance today i had a sort of ND about going hang gliding in Alaska… well I kept waking up from this dream, but I really was immersed in the plot, and kept giving my brain new challenges to do so that I didn’t wake up before I finished hang gliding… this was sort of sucbonsciously done but I was aware of it too.

so like, when the dream would be unstable then it was time to go set the hang glider up and clmib a mountain, etc, etc…

as soon as I finally landed the hang glider I woke up.

Sticking with the dreams plot is a good way to keep the brain busy, which is why I really like talking to the DCs I was last with if I’m waking up, and asking them to stay with me and take me back. I say “I’ll be back soon… hold on…” and just go with it.

the hang gliding dream was very vivid for some reason. i had to jump off a huge mountain, but we had to climb up it first, and set up the hang glider and make sure it was working right.

flying it was pretty real too, though i’ve only been hang gliding once and the instructor mainly flew it.

keep trying the method, because you were extremely close.

18

OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG
(sorry very hyper…)

But seriously! Before I knew about techniques, this is EXACTLY what I would do!! Infact, I still do it when my sister wakes me up practically every night telling me to rollover because I’m snoring. Then I instantly go back and continue the dream or start a new one.

So, this is definately possible.

(In IRC, we called it BHIBILD because there’s this big hole in my bed that wakes me up every so often. Big-hole-in-bed-induced-lucid-dream lol) :tongue:

19

This is good advice. In EWLD, LaBerge says that we wake up ten to fifteen times on an average night, but we quickly forget it. I think if we can train ourselves to realize when we wake up, we will greatly improve our chances of having lucid dreams.

Think of it. Let’s say you wake up ten times during the night and take these opportunities to do reality checks. That’s ten times that you perform reality checks and get your mind thinking about lucid dreaming again. That will greatly increase the likelihood that you will think about lucid dreams when you fall asleep and continue dreaming, or that you will simply think to do a reality check in a dream since you’ve been doing them so much. You are periodically throughout the night reminding yourself, and your subconscious, to think about lucid dreaming.

Now you don’t have to just perform reality checks on these awakenings. Like holy reality suggested, you can also try MILD or WILD, given you are sufficiently awake. That’s ten more chances every night to try to lucid dream! You won’t have to wait for Friday or Saturday night to wake up at 6 AM and hope MILD will work this time. You will get to try several times every night, instead of the usual one-off attempts during the week.

I’ve been meaning to get into the habit of realizing when I wake up and doing reality checks, but I keep forgetting to try. I’ll be putting a lot more effort into it now, though. I’ll record my progress for the next few weeks and tell how it goes. :smile:

20

is there any way to make sure that you dont just fall back immediately? is there any way to notice when you wake up even? i know i never remember in the morning, but that makes sense. maybe a mantra before i go to sleep…:
“when i wake up in the middle of hte night, i will do a RC”

who knows, something has to work although…