This is probably the closest I will get to writing "What I do to get lucid", so for those asking... um... here.
This is how to make DILD techs more effective, and what I believe, is what DILD techs are for. This will help with WILD as well, but it I shall make a thread for WILD soon, maybe. :P
So! You have read all the tutorials and they don't seem to work. Right? Like, I do something that others have done over and over and even if it works at the start, it doesn't seem to work consistently. I may have weeks without a lucid dream, how do I combat this? Where do I go from here.
Another little note before we start. When first LDing, you don't even know the feeling, so it can be muddled and hard to follow. This may not help people at the beginning. When you have 50-100 LDs, you will generally start doing a "technique shuffle" where you keep changing the tech over and over because they keep falling apart and not working. Even if you stay consistently lucid, the tech shuffle keeps happening, you just get better at the tech shuffle. After about 100, people will start to get that tech down that gets them the feeling, but dry spells and things "leaving the feeling" are going to hurt them and make it harder on them than it needs to be. This is actually mainly for people with some LDs under their belt, but I am guessing that reading it when you don't know the feeling will help you to look for it. :)
Daytime Techniques
Have you ever had the feeling that you were definitely going to lucid dream tonight? Like... "Man... I just need to fall asleep, and I will definitely have a lucid dream!" I doubt the feeling is the exact same for everyone, but this is what I call "Peak performance" and is the best you can get at LDing for your experience level for day work. The problem here is that people are stuck to their techniques, so they end up breaking out of this feeling by working "too hard" and leaving the prime area. Imagine someone playing basketball that cannot yet shoot the ball, but still walks right next to the basket, waiting to shoot. Instead of just waiting until it is time to shoot, he keeps moving, walking around in a circle, trying to get a good vantage point for shooting. Just stand still! The techniques are trying to get you to this point, where you can just easily shoot and score, but you keep moving! Thinking that by some force of will, you will be able to get a better shot than right next to the basket! What the sheol? Just stop and trust in that feeling. I am not saying that if you have that feeling that you will LD, but it is more likely than anything else that you could do at this time. The techniques are there to get you to the feeling, if you have the feeling, the techniques are arbitrary.
Nighttime Prep
Before you go to bed. Instead of "spending 30 minutes visualizing getting lucid over and over" or something like that. visualize what you will do when you get lucid. Because you are already "taking a good shot", don't worry about getting lucid. Just enjoy some time thinking about lucidity without trying to grasp it. This is a time that I think a lot of people lose the feeling and walk further away from the goal. BUT! Before you go to sleep, just double check the feeling, make sure it is there. If it isn't, no big deal, it may have just faded a bit and will come back through the night.
Nighttime techniques
WBTB, Micro-WBTB, DEILD tries, and all the things like this all have one thing in common. Waking up! Why is this important? Because the feeling is not there during your black out stages. On days that I LD many times, I usually have pretty much no time blacked out. A black out phase would be the time before your dream starts or time before you remember what was happening in a dream. Think about the last dream you had. How did it begin? See, black out phase right there. The more you wake up, the less time the black out phase will be. This can put a strain on your sleep, so the amount you wake up should correspond to how much you are sleeping and how well you are sleeping. Every time you wake through the night, you are closer to REM than you would have been otherwise and you are going to have an easier time making the shot. Every time you wake up, you take another shot. This might take some energy, but it gives you another shot, and the more shots you take, the more warmed up you are. The most important thing to do during the night is to bring the feeling back You will lose the feeling, unless you have all lucid dreams all night. The feeling will have faded. But if you just, reach out, it should be close if it was there yesterday. If you wake up from a lucid dream, you still have the feeling, maybe right down a dream or two, but GO BACK TO SLEEP! Think of it like being on fire in basketball, or doing the Micah drill. Just grab, put it back, grab, put it back. If you wake up from a LD for more than a minute, then make sure to grasp the feeling, but not the feeling from before, but the feeling of the previous dream.
A Good Sleep Schedule
You know what a good sleep schedule is, and the better you are at LDing, the more you can stress the idea of a "good sleep schedule" I used to have to sleep before 11 for 3 nights in a row, now it is... different. Even if I stay up till 1 or 2 or more, I can still usually LD, It just won't be as much as it had in the past, it still adversely effects me, but it doesn't cripple me. I can also tell that if I go to bed on time every night, I will have way more lucid dreams, dreams, and recall of all them if I just go to sleep on time. This is one I struggle with greatly and LDing has been the only thing to make me go to bed on time. :P
Meditation
Meditation is amazing, plain and simple, everything that we do for LDing is a form of meditation even LDing itself. This doesn't mean, however that any meditation at any time is a good thing. Some meditation is always good. Like, clearing your mind, or stress relief, or fun visualization. Intense meditation for the sole purpose of LDing can be you walking away from the goal though. I have this ritual I do, it takes a while, but if I don't have the feeling at all (usually when I haven't been lucid in a bit), I will sit on a couch in a position that I cannot fall asleep, I will then visualize all my LDs that I can remember until I get the feeling back, then I stop immediately. I didn't used to know why I stopped, but I knew it was time to stop. I have tried before to do this every day, because I thought "I always get a lucid when I do this" and I didn't get a lucid for weeks while trying this. IT IS MY BEST TECHNIQUE?! WHAT THE HECK!? Because I wasn't staying near the goal. The feeling, not the tech.
Stress
Why does stress effect us so much? Because it is literally the waking feeling being overwhelming. Your life is pressing in on your mind in a bad way. You can't think about anything but your problems. This is why LDing is hard during stressful times, lucid nightmares happen more often as well, if you experience "great waking stress" and this can be an extremely distressing experience. Try not to stress, even if life is hard and pressing on you. I feel like a very unqualified person to say this because I am a very carefree person. When I first started LDing, I was FT work and college, wife, and a child on the way and I didn't have a care in the world. This is not what holds me back, but it holds a lot of people back.
Insomnia
The old fiend. If there was one thing that held me back in my LDing, it was my insomnia. I would have the feeling for days and be lucid almost every night and then BAM! I don't sleep even a wink at night! :/ It used to take me three days of sleeping well and doing techniques to find the feeling, now it takes... less time. :P After a good night of insomnia and then sleeping well the next day because of, well, being completely and utterly tired, I would draw an accidental (or maybe not so accidental) line between the insomnia and the feeling. This has haunted me and held me back for years. So much so, that now that I am over it, or feel like I am over it, I don't see anything stopping me from having LDs every single night until eternity. :P How did I get past it? The same way I lucid dream. I realized that I have a feeling every time I think I am not going to get to sleep, and then I worry about it, and then I don't sleep. So I started some techniques for keeping the feeling away, and that "anti-feeling" I treat like a feeling. If I feel like I will sleep tonight, I don't worry at all. If I start feeling like I am not going to sleep tonight, I do my techs to bring the other feeling back. This has worked for a month and will really be tested with the Dreamviews competition. It is something that has caused much insomnia in the past, and I am excited to see my progress. Ways to fix this have included, self affirmations, visualization, meditation, etc.
Forgotten
This is something that I have forgotten time and again and have either had it as a "sure sure, I know this" or "I can't believe I forgot!" type thing. If I had kept with it all the time, I imagine I would be farther than I am now at LDing, but I am where I am, and it isn't a bad place to be. :D
Technique is not a bad thing
Techs are needed, especially at first, but they are not the goal. They are the bow, they get you to the goal. Most people see techniques as things that they need to do every day, but they aren't, they are like drills and may be something that you need every day at first, but when you have the fundamentals down, you may just need to brush up on them every week. However to score every night and to keep getting better and better, you need to try almost every night.
One last note on DJing
Dream Journaling is not needed to LD, but it will probably benefit you more than anything else, especially if you are wanting to get better at dream control, persistent worlds, etc. Dream Journaling doesn't have to be a tedious crazy thing either. You can just write a quick summary. I might even just use keywords and phrases, but if you want to remember a dream, write it down. One of my favorite lucid dreams, I have read time and again, is the first one in my DJ, I reread it for the first time in a year the other day and I had completely forgotten a big part of how I got lucid! It changes the whole context of the dream! If you are serious about LDing, then at least write down the LDs that you want to keep, you won't just remember all of them.
To some, this may seem overly complicated, to others, it may seem like it isn't complicated enough. When you read through this, you may realize that if I have the feeling, I don't need to do anything to get lucid. I just go to sleep and wake up with the lucid dream. Note, this is a technique on how to utilize the dream feeling! I doubt that it is the best possible thing to do with it, it is just what I do with it. Explore, figure out what you want to do with it. :D
This is how to make DILD techs more effective, and what I believe, is what DILD techs are for. This will help with WILD as well, but it I shall make a thread for WILD soon, maybe. :P
So! You have read all the tutorials and they don't seem to work. Right? Like, I do something that others have done over and over and even if it works at the start, it doesn't seem to work consistently. I may have weeks without a lucid dream, how do I combat this? Where do I go from here.
Another little note before we start. When first LDing, you don't even know the feeling, so it can be muddled and hard to follow. This may not help people at the beginning. When you have 50-100 LDs, you will generally start doing a "technique shuffle" where you keep changing the tech over and over because they keep falling apart and not working. Even if you stay consistently lucid, the tech shuffle keeps happening, you just get better at the tech shuffle. After about 100, people will start to get that tech down that gets them the feeling, but dry spells and things "leaving the feeling" are going to hurt them and make it harder on them than it needs to be. This is actually mainly for people with some LDs under their belt, but I am guessing that reading it when you don't know the feeling will help you to look for it. :)
Daytime Techniques
Have you ever had the feeling that you were definitely going to lucid dream tonight? Like... "Man... I just need to fall asleep, and I will definitely have a lucid dream!" I doubt the feeling is the exact same for everyone, but this is what I call "Peak performance" and is the best you can get at LDing for your experience level for day work. The problem here is that people are stuck to their techniques, so they end up breaking out of this feeling by working "too hard" and leaving the prime area. Imagine someone playing basketball that cannot yet shoot the ball, but still walks right next to the basket, waiting to shoot. Instead of just waiting until it is time to shoot, he keeps moving, walking around in a circle, trying to get a good vantage point for shooting. Just stand still! The techniques are trying to get you to this point, where you can just easily shoot and score, but you keep moving! Thinking that by some force of will, you will be able to get a better shot than right next to the basket! What the sheol? Just stop and trust in that feeling. I am not saying that if you have that feeling that you will LD, but it is more likely than anything else that you could do at this time. The techniques are there to get you to the feeling, if you have the feeling, the techniques are arbitrary.
Nighttime Prep
Before you go to bed. Instead of "spending 30 minutes visualizing getting lucid over and over" or something like that. visualize what you will do when you get lucid. Because you are already "taking a good shot", don't worry about getting lucid. Just enjoy some time thinking about lucidity without trying to grasp it. This is a time that I think a lot of people lose the feeling and walk further away from the goal. BUT! Before you go to sleep, just double check the feeling, make sure it is there. If it isn't, no big deal, it may have just faded a bit and will come back through the night.
Nighttime techniques
WBTB, Micro-WBTB, DEILD tries, and all the things like this all have one thing in common. Waking up! Why is this important? Because the feeling is not there during your black out stages. On days that I LD many times, I usually have pretty much no time blacked out. A black out phase would be the time before your dream starts or time before you remember what was happening in a dream. Think about the last dream you had. How did it begin? See, black out phase right there. The more you wake up, the less time the black out phase will be. This can put a strain on your sleep, so the amount you wake up should correspond to how much you are sleeping and how well you are sleeping. Every time you wake through the night, you are closer to REM than you would have been otherwise and you are going to have an easier time making the shot. Every time you wake up, you take another shot. This might take some energy, but it gives you another shot, and the more shots you take, the more warmed up you are. The most important thing to do during the night is to bring the feeling back You will lose the feeling, unless you have all lucid dreams all night. The feeling will have faded. But if you just, reach out, it should be close if it was there yesterday. If you wake up from a lucid dream, you still have the feeling, maybe right down a dream or two, but GO BACK TO SLEEP! Think of it like being on fire in basketball, or doing the Micah drill. Just grab, put it back, grab, put it back. If you wake up from a LD for more than a minute, then make sure to grasp the feeling, but not the feeling from before, but the feeling of the previous dream.
A Good Sleep Schedule
You know what a good sleep schedule is, and the better you are at LDing, the more you can stress the idea of a "good sleep schedule" I used to have to sleep before 11 for 3 nights in a row, now it is... different. Even if I stay up till 1 or 2 or more, I can still usually LD, It just won't be as much as it had in the past, it still adversely effects me, but it doesn't cripple me. I can also tell that if I go to bed on time every night, I will have way more lucid dreams, dreams, and recall of all them if I just go to sleep on time. This is one I struggle with greatly and LDing has been the only thing to make me go to bed on time. :P
Meditation
Meditation is amazing, plain and simple, everything that we do for LDing is a form of meditation even LDing itself. This doesn't mean, however that any meditation at any time is a good thing. Some meditation is always good. Like, clearing your mind, or stress relief, or fun visualization. Intense meditation for the sole purpose of LDing can be you walking away from the goal though. I have this ritual I do, it takes a while, but if I don't have the feeling at all (usually when I haven't been lucid in a bit), I will sit on a couch in a position that I cannot fall asleep, I will then visualize all my LDs that I can remember until I get the feeling back, then I stop immediately. I didn't used to know why I stopped, but I knew it was time to stop. I have tried before to do this every day, because I thought "I always get a lucid when I do this" and I didn't get a lucid for weeks while trying this. IT IS MY BEST TECHNIQUE?! WHAT THE HECK!? Because I wasn't staying near the goal. The feeling, not the tech.
Stress
Why does stress effect us so much? Because it is literally the waking feeling being overwhelming. Your life is pressing in on your mind in a bad way. You can't think about anything but your problems. This is why LDing is hard during stressful times, lucid nightmares happen more often as well, if you experience "great waking stress" and this can be an extremely distressing experience. Try not to stress, even if life is hard and pressing on you. I feel like a very unqualified person to say this because I am a very carefree person. When I first started LDing, I was FT work and college, wife, and a child on the way and I didn't have a care in the world. This is not what holds me back, but it holds a lot of people back.
Insomnia
The old fiend. If there was one thing that held me back in my LDing, it was my insomnia. I would have the feeling for days and be lucid almost every night and then BAM! I don't sleep even a wink at night! :/ It used to take me three days of sleeping well and doing techniques to find the feeling, now it takes... less time. :P After a good night of insomnia and then sleeping well the next day because of, well, being completely and utterly tired, I would draw an accidental (or maybe not so accidental) line between the insomnia and the feeling. This has haunted me and held me back for years. So much so, that now that I am over it, or feel like I am over it, I don't see anything stopping me from having LDs every single night until eternity. :P How did I get past it? The same way I lucid dream. I realized that I have a feeling every time I think I am not going to get to sleep, and then I worry about it, and then I don't sleep. So I started some techniques for keeping the feeling away, and that "anti-feeling" I treat like a feeling. If I feel like I will sleep tonight, I don't worry at all. If I start feeling like I am not going to sleep tonight, I do my techs to bring the other feeling back. This has worked for a month and will really be tested with the Dreamviews competition. It is something that has caused much insomnia in the past, and I am excited to see my progress. Ways to fix this have included, self affirmations, visualization, meditation, etc.
Forgotten
This is something that I have forgotten time and again and have either had it as a "sure sure, I know this" or "I can't believe I forgot!" type thing. If I had kept with it all the time, I imagine I would be farther than I am now at LDing, but I am where I am, and it isn't a bad place to be. :D
Technique is not a bad thing
Techs are needed, especially at first, but they are not the goal. They are the bow, they get you to the goal. Most people see techniques as things that they need to do every day, but they aren't, they are like drills and may be something that you need every day at first, but when you have the fundamentals down, you may just need to brush up on them every week. However to score every night and to keep getting better and better, you need to try almost every night.
One last note on DJing
Dream Journaling is not needed to LD, but it will probably benefit you more than anything else, especially if you are wanting to get better at dream control, persistent worlds, etc. Dream Journaling doesn't have to be a tedious crazy thing either. You can just write a quick summary. I might even just use keywords and phrases, but if you want to remember a dream, write it down. One of my favorite lucid dreams, I have read time and again, is the first one in my DJ, I reread it for the first time in a year the other day and I had completely forgotten a big part of how I got lucid! It changes the whole context of the dream! If you are serious about LDing, then at least write down the LDs that you want to keep, you won't just remember all of them.
To some, this may seem overly complicated, to others, it may seem like it isn't complicated enough. When you read through this, you may realize that if I have the feeling, I don't need to do anything to get lucid. I just go to sleep and wake up with the lucid dream. Note, this is a technique on how to utilize the dream feeling! I doubt that it is the best possible thing to do with it, it is just what I do with it. Explore, figure out what you want to do with it. :D
via Lucid Dreaming - Dream Views - Attaining Lucidity http://ift.tt/2iYGUbT
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