WHY?! I’ve had so many dream signs, and just downright blatant things that should definitely make me lucid. My friend even had a DC run up to him and yell “LUCID!!!” in his face, and he didnt become aware. This is not a “what have you missed” its a “Intelligent responses to WHY we miss them” In my ND’s I have written in my DJ a ton of times, and been on LD4all, and never get lucid.
What can be done to change what causes it. If this is the same idea as RC’s how come they work, and people yelling “LUCID!!!” in your face doesn’t?
I really have this problem. I think part of it is maybe I’m seeing RCs as just RCs and not a way to really check and think if I’m dreaming.
As for the DCs telling me I’m dreaming maybe it has to do with me assuming too much (as IRL) that I’m not in a dream, and if I were I’d know without thinking or the thought that there’s no real way to tell.
Other times I’m just not paying attention, I’m too busy thinking of RL problems to notice my surroundings.
I don’t know about dream signs. I’ve recorded about a month’s worth of dreams since I started getting into LDing (about 45 dreams or so). I’ve got a short holiday week coming up and I’ll be checking all the dreams for signs.
But as for the RCs. I’ve been lucid a few times before (only one vivid LD, though). In that dream I did a breathing-through-the-nose RC, and it failed (or worked, however you look at it). Thing is, when I do the RC in real life, I always do it out loud.
Block nose
Try to breathe in (ending in failure)
“I can’t seem to breathe in with my nose blocked. In a dream I would be able to. I can’t do it, thus I am not dreaming” - I think this explicitly and out loud and if I do it in the privacy of my own room, or if there’s no one around, I even say it out loud.
Alternatively, if I CAN breathe in: “I can breathe in through my nose even though I’ve blocked it. In a dream I would be able to. I can do it, thus I am dreaming. Lucid!” - Last time I got lucid I actually said it right after the RC.
You just need to explicitly state that you either can or can’t do something IRL or in a dream. If you merely perform the action and don’t respond to said action, chances are that you’re not thinking critically enough (which is hard enough in dreams as it is).
It’s because your rational mind is not awake. Doing the stuff that you have done (i.e., thinking about dream signs you have missed so your subconcious mind can remember them in your dreams,) I think will help stregthen those bonds between concious and subconcious.
It is because you have lived too long, taking your experiences as reality. If it was the other way around you would go insane. It is natural for the brain to believe the experiences that are fed to it regardless of how absurd they may be.
I’ve seen some messed up stuff while I was awake and before discovering lucid dreams, I never thought that I might be dreaming. If we wasted all our time validating each experience our brain wouldn’t be as powerful…
I’m exactly the same! A lot of it has to do with the fact that the area of the brain that controls logic shuts down when we go to sleep. This is why, when we are in the hypnogogic stage, we often have extremely irrational thoughts pop into our head that we can’t control and that are completely random.
The only thing I can think of is to try the caffeine or chocolate method. These increase rational thought and awareness during dreams in general, and assist in the ability to become lucid.
I agree with the above posts that the cognitive part of the brain is inactive. I’ve even been lucid or at least semi lucid and still get things mixed up.
in my opinion, the dreams that we shouldve been able to tell we were dreaming, just maybe the unconscious dreamer were enjoying the dream the way it was running in the first place? and thus no need to question something that we like
