Thread: Unlearning Everything

We try and teach people not to depend on a tutorial and to do what works well for each individual.

When people have trouble with lucid dreaming or start losing clarity we always suggest taking a break and getting back to the basics of lucid dreaming. Return to a healthy sleep pattern. Write down your dreams. Wake up slowly and spend time remembering the dream to improve recall.

Each technique is merely the beginning of a path that isn't yet made. You need to work on getting good rest and having good recall before you spend time worrying about a lucid dreaming method.

Almost everyone goes through a time period where dream recall becomes difficult. Don't worry, it's normal. It will pass. Reduce stress, get good sleep and wake up slowly to improve recall. Soon you will be ready to get back into a lucid dreaming method that works for you.

I don't think that reading too many tutorials messes up your lucid dreaming ability.

When you just starting out with lucid dreaming, tutorials give you an idea what to do and how. Without it, how would you know, what to do? Sure, you could do what pioneers did, figure out everything by yourself. But why, when others already figured things out.

This ofcourse doesn't mean, that you have to adhere to tutorials. You try the basic method and then based on what works for you and what doesn't, you adjust it to fit you, personally, the best.

I like to use this analogy. When you learning to write, someone has to show you, how to write the ABC. And when you know how to, you can make the letters fancy, bold, italics, different colors, use pencil or pen, or paint brush, make them big or small, ... You write them the way you like it.

You should also use your best judgment when reading tutorials. Some are really out there. If someone promises you 'easy method with no effort, all you have to do is [insert something silly]', than that's probably not the tutorial you want to follow.

Tutorials are diverse, because people are diverse. Not everything works for everybody the same way. It's up to you to read it all and to figure out, what makes sense and what doesn't.

It's been my experience that, in dreams as in waking life, what you expect to happen, tends to happen. Therefore, I would suggest you get into a habit of expecting highly lucid moments to happen more and more frequently. Not just in dreams, but in waking life also. Moments where you truly realise your situation, whatever it be.

But don't loose any sleep over it! Accept the way, this aspect of your life unfolds, without getting mentally or bodily worked up in any way over the temporary lack of lucidity.

Keep healthy, keep fit, and maybe stop every once in a while to notice, whatever there happens to be noticeable at that time and place.

I expect you will find lucidity creeping in all over the place.

Unlearn everything? How about just learning to ignore it?

I would bet that the stuff you learned is clouding your abilities less than you think. Rather, you likely just started out like gangbusters simply because your mind was enthralled by the novelty of LD'ing and, when the novelty wore off, your mind lost interest in supporting your efforts... your mind being your unconscious plus your own self-awareness, of course.

In other words, all those techniques did not impair your ability; learning them was merely coincidental with the novelty wearing off -- had you never learned a new technique, you still might have found LD'ing more difficult over time. Ultimately successful LD'ing cares nothing about techniques, and everything about the condition of your self-awareness, memory, and expectations/intention. Success is all about you, and not about the techniques. By extension, blaming the techniques will only slow you down.

I have an old thread, Lucid Dreaming Fundamentals, that might help. You might want to check it out.

tl;dr: Don't blame the techniques, because in the end they just don't matter, no matter how many you know. Success is all about you, and the state of your own mind.

I agree. Just because you know this stuff does not mean you need to apply it. I like using my DJ system to figure out what works for me specifically. I have read all the tutorials on here and all the past "Induction techniques". I know more ways to induce than most people. I only concentrate on what works for me and I say screw the rest.

if you mean its good, at some stage, to put less emphasis on tecnhiques and focus more on achieving a natural lucidity through changing your view of reality and mindset i agree with you.

you need to choose tutorial for understanding once you understand it try it.. and notice effects of it and if its helpful for you then continue with it and if not then move ahead with other technique and so on. you need to choose best techniques or some time combinations of two techniques which helps you to achieve it.. so tutorial are not waste just try to use it appropriately..

I think I know what you mean by reading too many tutorials.

Before joining DV I was relying on finding out everything the hard way. It took me years, I just had natural LDs, had some issues I needed to work on and I still need to learn so many things now. On the one hand this helped me learn a lot by myself, but on the other hand it could have gone much smoother had I just googled a few things. I really had no approach to the whole thing and my LD notes were not as extensive.

Finding DV has helped a great deal but also initially confused me. BUT it is not DV that confused me really, it was, again me, because I was getting so enthusiastic about it, and as you did, I read and tried to implement many techniques at once. That was my mistake. Now I know, you should really pick one technique and stick to it for at least few months. Well, I consider myself an organized person, but my desires were the ones that kind of confused me, because they were making me go in all directions. So I finally made a plan for myself:

- Stick with RCs and ADA daily
- DJ daily if possible
- try WBTB once/twice a week
- be prepared to DEILD

Now this makes trying for an LD a much more manageable and enjoyable task and now that I am not attempting to do too many things I see some improvement in LD quantity. Hope my example helps you establish an LD routine for yourself. View techniques as a menu and just pick a starter, main, and a dessert. Good luck!

I find that my progress toward lucid dreaming goes through phases, and sometimes it feels like I take two steps forward and oe step back, and occasionally maybe even one step forward and two steps back. However, a better analogy is if you are exploring a new territory: you will find that some rocks you lift up have nothing interesting underneath them, and some paths will be boring or too steep or reach a dead end or cliff or water you cannot traverse. However, you learn new stuff through all those experiences, and at the end you know the terrain better than you would if you had just been following a guide or a map marking the scenic route. If you look at all the failures: all those boring rocks, and all the dead end paths, and analyze them, you may discover that they taught you valuable lessons which you did not notice at first.