side notes

I just started my LD training again after a long break and literally got a Lucid on Night 1. Not only that, but I made decent progress.

"Day in the Park"

I was having some internal dialogue with myself and then I was thing about my homie the other day had something in his smoothie that did not make sense like a rock or something. I became lucid in the most chill way, like, "Heh, yeah, sure dream, sure."

I stayed calm and put my training to use. I walked through a park that children were playing through. I touched this blue plastic surface that had spider webs on it. In order to help with stability, I was narrating my every action and it was working! Unfortunately, I got distracted.

I was thinking about how I was in a dream and how dream spiders could be super scary which kinda stopped me from touching the object. The dream ended shortly after because my monologuing stop too.

I also started with touch. Ideally I'd like to start with sight, then sound, then touch, lol.

Overall, I'm really happy with that dream. That was such good progress, and if I can continue the grind, it will only get easier from here. I stayed calm and began stabilizing the dream. Perhaps it would have ended soon regardless of if I got distracted, but I like to think that if i maintained my focus through the whole cycle, I could have successfully stabilized. I remember when I couldn't stabilize a dream.

Gotta remember to take a deep breath, start with sight, and definitely do more focus meditation.


Additionally, I've been thinking about just how many of the 928 days since starting my most recent DJ I've been really giving LD practice my all, and at most, about 33% of it.
about 8% of THAT was actually lucid; 31 Lucids / 347 dreams recorded. 31/928 total days. Lucid dreaming, like any skill, requires consistency. My adhd makes this difficult. I will really try this time, however. I've been diagnosed and prescribed, though my Adderall is still on delay so no medication yet. Hopefully I can hold out until it arrives though. I can't use it before sleep since it makes you too awake, so unfortunately i'll be on my own in a dream either way. That's why the meditation will still be useful.

Lucid dreaming was one of my hyper fixations, and that allowed me to focus a little bit more on it than other skills. However, as my ADHD gets more severe and depression takes a bigger toll on my life, I've found it hard to continue, much less be consistent. However, even the uneventful Lucid dreams I have bring me great joy, so that also helps fuel me to seeing this to mastery.

So, this is why, despite "5 years of trying", despite knowing so much about how to induce lucid dreams and what lucid dreaming practice entails, I have little to no actual experience in the dream world; A lack of consistent, high effort LD training and day time practice.

It's been a while since my last success. This is mostly due to my sleep schedule going to shit, but I'm getting back into it. Man, even though I understand WILD enough to actually use it, it's still so hard for me. It'll get easier with time, sure, but I can't wait for the day I no longer have to do attempts just to get lucid.

Anyway, I've come to a new understanding as far as stabilization is concerned. What I feel I've been taught is happening is that by stimulating your senses, you are stabilizing the dream. I now feel like you are stabilizing yourself within the dream rather than the dream itself. I say this because I've been reflecting on my previous Lucids, and I noticed something interesting about my last one. I described the dream as Vivid but also Not Vivid. I described it this way because while the dream was visually clear enough to get me to double take, (vivid) I still felt like my other senses were dull.(non vivid) This would suggest that the dream itself was fine; it was I that was unstable.

This would also make sense because people sometimes describe the process as Grounding themselves, or Deepening. It's now my understanding that stabilizing is just part of a larger activity: immersing yourself within the dream world. Stimulating your senses helps you become immersed because you're interacting with the things of the dream, deepening your connection to it, kinda like a WIFI signal. With a stronger connection, you can do more things, and you feel your real body less and less.

This distinction is important to me because I was always looking for some kind of notification from the dream that it was stable when that was never going to happen. It makes more sense to me that it's your connection to the dream that must be strengthened, and this is why you do things to stimulate your senses. But there is one way of stabilizing that is kind of weird: just shouting "stabilization" or something like that. Why does that work for some people? My guess is that it's a dream control thing.

Anyway, I'm still hard at work trying to get WILD to work for me. I keep falling asleep :/