Lucid Dreaming

I promised to make a post about lucid dreaming on this forum couple of weeks ago ( @goodnice 2.0 ). Sorry for taking my time to do so. Flatlines are not easy on me.

I strongly believe that mastering lucid dreaming can be a significant update and hack to anyone's quality of life.

We spend one third of our lives virtually "unconscious" in our beds and yet every person has on average five dreams every night whether they remember it or not. It is incredible and life changing experience, also it is so much fun, there is nothing like it. This the ultimate virtual reality, except that at some point it doesn't seem so virtual anymore. More about that later.
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Of course lucid dreams are powerful triggers. Anybody who finds himself conscious and aware in the dreamworld where every and any fantasy can come true and it feels as real as in the waking world, can easily be triggered into experiencing their secret fantasy that nobody will ever know about.

But my position is that it's up to us how strong we are. Successful nofap journey means no avoidance but facing the urges and anything else you need to face.

Also, being fully lucid when dreaming means that you are completely in control of your dreams. You are creating all of that. Things don't just happen to you. So if a lucid dream gets sexual, it is because you have consciously made that decision.
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Different methods work differently for different people. It's about experimenting and seeing what suits you best. But the dream journal, reality checks and programming your intent every evening to dream lucidly is a must.

Once you have your first lucid dream and will experience for the first time that your consciousness is here independently on your body which is right now sleeping in a different world, it has the potential to change how you look at death, spirit, life, everything.

You can use all that newly acquired time to learn new things, to face your fears and overcome your phobias, you can speak with your higher self, with the people who are here no more. Or you can fly to Mars and make love with a Martian princess. Or travel back in time and prevent the assasination of president Kennedy.

It's up to you how you take advantage of this experience. If you make your dreams into piece of art and uplifting potentially spiritual experience. Or if you go at it like Decadence Unchained.
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So how to do it? Well it's not that easy and also it's not that hard. It's actually mainly about discipline and consistency and those guys here who have succeeded doing hundreds of days on their nofap journey they indeed have the makings of a lucid dreamer.

After you have your first lucid dream, which is probably going to be very short ( more about that later), and you and your mind know that this stuff is real, that it exists, it will be easier for you to dream lucidly more.

There are many so-called methods to be found on the internet. But I will share combination of three simple things that worked for me:

1.) Dream Journal: this is without a doubt the most important thing and consistency is the key.

What you need to do is to write anything you remember from your dreams as soon as you wake up. No, don't do it 10 minutes later. Then you will remember only 40% of what you could have written down.

It really needs to be the first thing you do in the morning, every morning. We were programmed to forget quickly. If you want to lucid dream, you need to bypass that.

And you need to have time for all this. So set your alarm clock 10 minutes earlier. And take your time to write down as much as you can.

It doesn't matter that what you're writing doesn't make any sense. Do not write only what and where. Write how you felt when you saw that, what you were thinking about, write down how it smelled.

In the first couple of days your journal entries will have only couple of sentences or none at all. But if you're consistent, one month later your dream record could easily have several pages.

How could it be? Well the thing is called dream recall and that's the whole point of writing a dream journal. Dream recall is like a muscle you need to work out.

Firstly, what is the point of being able to dream lucidly if you remember nothing in the morning? But even more importantly the more you will remember your dreams, the more likely you are to realise that you're having one right now. There is so much you can learn about how your dreams work and to help you learn how to distinguish between these two different realities. Having a dream journal is absolute must. Plus by having one you will also learn a lot about yourself and your subconsciousness.

So first thing in the morning, use some recording application in your phone with speech to text feature and just say it aloud, as much as you can recall, you can edit it later during the day.

After some time you will learn to identify your typical dream clues - inconstitencies in your dreams which when you realise them might help you become lucid in your dreams. For example - you're not living there at this old address anymore or your uncle is dead. But to be able to do that, you need to remember your dreams first.

2.) Reality Checks: Are you sure you're not dreaming right now? It might sound silly to you but seriously your dreams are in their rendition as realistic as your waking life. And for that very reason they are so awesome.

Again you will find many different ideas on the internet about how to do reality checks. And in my opinion they get unnecessarily complicated. But I like to keep things simple. If you're able to stop whatever you're doing during the day 5/6 times and ask yourself these two questions:

How did I get here?
What did I do today before I got here?

..then you're good to go.

Why are we even doing the reality checks? Well the most important reason is that by performing them consistently in your waking life, it is only a matter time before you do that in your dream too. And then you become lucid in your dream. Just like that.

Again different people take different aproaches towards timing of your reality checks. My favoirite way is to simply write LD on my hand which guarantees that I will see it many times during the day and it serves me as a reminder to perform the reality checks from time to time.
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O.K., I'll take the small detour here now. When you become lucid first time and even the first couple of times, there are high chances that you will immediately start waking up and losing your dream. It's just a lot to experience for the first time that you are here and your body is somewhere else. If that happens you need to stabilize your dream quickly. What used to help me used to be to shift my attention to something simple - like looking down on my feet and it worked quite easily. The point is to calm down and take a moment.

Now when writing this all down, shifting attention actually makes a lot of sense to me. Because what it really means to be lucid dreaming is that you have full control over everything. You are the maker of this world and you're creating by the speed of your thoughts. So if you think of your body, then it makes sense that you're waking up. And also it's very natural that you do because this is totally new experience and quite incredible.

And of my life goals is to master the lucid dreaming so that I am able to do this every night.
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3.) I don't really know how to call this part:
What I was doing is that I was reading about lucid dreaming every night shortly before going to sleep. And another thing that was part of my routine was that in the process of falling asleep I was kind of programming myself with my intent and slowly repeating in my head something like - next time I'm dreaming I will realise that I am dreaming. So I guess we can call it a bit of autosuggestion.

But to be honest I don't know which of these two aformentioned things were more helpful to me in reaching the success.

And since I don't really know, now when I'm planning to get back to consistent lucid dreaming training soon, I will probably do the both again. And I will see how I feel about that.

One more thing that might be helpful to do before going to bed is to read a bit from your dream journal.
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O.K. now a few words about my experience with lucid dreaming. I've been fascinated by the idea of lucid dreaming since I was a kid but I started to train the aformentioned consistently only in my mid-twenties. I don't recall how long it took me exactly before I got the first lucid dream. it could be weeks, could be months. I really don't recall.

But having the first lucid dream felt almost better than how I imagined it. I could see that there are virtualy no limits to what I can experience and how real it feels.

In the next couple of weeks I experienced maybe 9 different lucid dreams with different level of lucidity. I was walking through the walls, flying, confronting myself with my demons and much more. But then I became lazy and for some reason I've never again mustered that same kind of determination and discipline for my LD training. But I always knew that I will come back to this. I'm planning to start my full on LD training since the beginning of Aprilm on daily basis once again.

And strangely, after many years I had one lucid dream also last week. I just realised that I haven't seen these people for twenty years. What are they doing here? It's not very likely that all of the would be here. Then it striked me. I'm dreaming. The dream was clear and once becoming lucid I was fully in control. Unfortunately shortly after my alarm clock killed it for me.

So as you can see I am no master in lucid dreaming. But the good news is that if I did it, so can you.
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Once you become awake in your dreams, you will experience different levels of lucidity. That is also skill you will need to train and develop, how much control you have over the dream reality. Sometimes the lower level of lucidity might also be connected with the stage of REM cycle you are finding yourself in ( You can lucid dream only during REM, which means that lucid dreaming shortly after falling asleep is highly unlikely.). There is still much research to be done but what we already know is that the later you lucid dream at night, the higher level of control you have.

That is also the reason why many people experiment with WILD - wake-initiated lucid dream. I have no experience with this technique but since part of it means waking up late at night/ early in the morning, it wouldn't be attractive for me.

That can't be healthy. And as my ambition is to turn lucid dreaming into lifestyle, this would not work for me.

On the other hand, if you wake up spontaneously during the night and many of us do at least for a couple of minutes from time to time, then this is a great time to engage the WILD. So even though you do not want to practise WILD on daily basis, it would be smart to familiarize yourself with the method.

But back to different levels of lucidity. The lowest level would be when you know it is a dream but you can not really change the story. I personally find even this kind of lucid dreams highly enjoyable. It's like being in one of those star trek holo-novels. And the highest level of lucidity would be when you can control everything and with ( or without) a blink of eye change the whole scenery. I have experienced those too.
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There are several established communities and forums about lucid dreaming - my favourite LD4all.

And there are also many books that might be useful:
https://www.thelucidguide.com/post/the-top-10-best-books-on-lucid-dreaming

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I actually think that nofap/sperm retention might go very well together with lucid dreaming. Surely I'm not the only one who has noticed that dreams on nofap tend to be deeper, more epic and colourful. Even the dream recall seems to come more easily.
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The possibilities of what you can experience when lucid dreaming are incredible. You can meet with you friend and lucid dream together, you can enter a dream of somebody else, you can speak with your spirit guides, you can slow down time and enjoy that "holiday" of yours for a week instead of couple of hours.
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But sooner or later you will stop playing games and start to work with the obvious spiritual dimension to your lucid dreaming experience. There is so much more to discover. Lucid dreaming could be your bridge towards astral travelling. Once again, your consciousness is here whereas your body is somewhere else. That itself has potential to change you in a very liberating and uplifting way.
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In the end, let us ask a simple question? How real is this reality that we're living in? Doesn't it sometimes almost feel like a dream? If you ask me, I'd say that nothing here is real nor important. Everything shall pass, everything here is quite insignificant. The only thing that is actually real here is our spirit and the experience we get.

What about dreams then? Well, the very same applies there. It's just a matrix for our experience. Nothing there is real except you and your experience.

 

In the early morning I kept waking up and somewhere there I had a spontaneous lucid dream, which is cool. It's good and important experience to remind myself how it feels and that it is not such a science fiction.

The dream was very stable but my level of lucidity - meaning how much control I had over my dream, was very weak. But the disappointing thing is that I immediately went to search for something sexual. Luckily I failed given how little control I had over my dream.

I knew that lucid dreaming would bring whole new frontier of urges. And it kind of feels like shooting myself in the leg again. Every time I'm close to making some progress on my nofap journey, I tend to increase the level of difficulty and then fail in the process.

For example the digital detox was like that and I relapsed because of it in the first weeks of the detox, being overwhelmed by unexpectedly strong urges. On the other hand today I have been few months clean of the digital world and my digital footprint is not more than 10% of what it used to be so I can't say it wasn't worth it.

Yeah, my old-new ambition to train lucid dreaming will bring challenges. But I can't make my life smaller because I'm afraid that something might happen. That is no way to live. Avoidance is not the way.

I must train myself in the dream world, the same way I have been training myself in here. I don't know why I snapped like that today. Perhaps because this kind of experience is so rare and so special.

I think it shouldn't be so hard to bring my determination and resolve from the waking world to the dream world once I start to train lucid dreaming consciously ( from the beginning of April). I'd like to blame the surprise of finding myself lucid in the dream world.

Important experience actually. Even though I failed the test, I know what must be done now. Hopefully I remember this experience next time I find myself lucid in a dream.

It''s strange that I hadn't had any lucid dreams in so many years. And yet this has been the second one already in the last couple of weeks. I'd say it's because of my increased awareness and higher level of dream recall, which goes hand in hand with nofap adventure.

 

Intriguing post. Thank you for sharing.

How did you achieve that. What techniques did you use? If you wanted to get back into lucid dreaming, what would you do?

You were actually able to project yourself astrally. I think that's amazing and also very rare. What do you mean "some kind of demon ripping me apart"?

Could you elaborate on this a bit?