Thread: Having trouble keeping consciousness

I had a quasi-lucid last night, but my subconscious somehow then conned me into thinking it WASN'T a dream after all.

Originally Posted by iank

I had a quasi-lucid last night, but my subconscious somehow then conned me into thinking it WASN'T a dream after all.

What?

Originally Posted by hellohihello

What?

Lawl, I had the same reaction.

However, I don't think I fully understand what you're explaining. Are you literally passing out in your lucids? If so, what happens when you come to? Are you still maintaining lucidity? If not, is it just the world around you that fades away? Or do you lose yourself?

It could be that your focusing too much of your attention inwards, on yourself, causing the dream to implode. However, from what I've read that usually ends in waking up.

Then again the very opposite could be true. You might be spending so much energy focusing on the world, and the people, and the minute details around you that, inevitably, you, yourself, cease to exist. My money is on this one.

Either way, the key is to find balance in where you focus your attention. I know, not very helpful. This thread should help much more than I could hope to. The Cusp knows his stuff. I could find no fallacies within his proposed rules. I'm usually good at finding those, too.

Best of luck to you.

Originally Posted by Mzzkc

Lawl, I had the same reaction.

However, I don't think I fully understand what you're explaining. Are you literally passing out in your lucids? If so, what happens when you come to? Are you still maintaining lucidity? If not, is it just the world around you that fades away? Or do you lose yourself?

It could be that your focusing too much of your attention inwards, on yourself, causing the dream to implode. However, from what I've read that usually ends in waking up.

Then again the very opposite could be true. You might be spending so much energy focusing on the world, and the people, and the minute details around you that, inevitably, you, yourself, cease to exist. My money is on this one.

Either way, the key is to find balance in where you focus your attention. I know, not very helpful. This thread should help much more than I could hope to. The Cusp knows his stuff. I could find no fallacies within his proposed rules. I'm usually good at finding those, too.

Best of luck to you.

Oops, I shouldn't of used the term " blacking out". I would just forget that I am in a dream and it would be a normal dream for about 20 seconds and then "Oh yeah, I am dreaming".

Okay, that's a bit easier to deal with since I've experience that quite a bit. Personally, I don't think it's that big of a deal. As long as you keep enough sense about you to be able to take advantage of lucidity when you need/want it you should be fine. Then again, my normal dreams are usually pretty epic, so I may be a bit biased in the whole 'following the path of the dream' thing.

If it's really bothering you, though, the problem is two fold: You aren't lucid enough, and you fail at having an attention span longer than nine seconds. That's not a joke by the way. This is literally what the internet has done to the world. I would find the articles, but I'm lazy like that. Yeah, digression aside, both of these things can theoretically be worked on. Actually, just working on proper maintenance of your attention should be enough to help you achieve deeper levels of lucidity, theoretically of course.

As nice as that sounds, sometimes you're level of lucidity is so low you're pretty much stuck with what you've got. I don't know how lucid you are in these situations, or if you've ever experienced anything deeper than what you seem to be describing. No matter what, things should get better over time. They did for me anyways.

I had this thing where - I don't know if this was actually real or part of the dream - I thought I was consciously "re-entering" the dream. Thus I knew I was dreaming, yet I emerged "in the dream" in my own bed. I thought "It worked, I'm dreaming", yet then I ran into my parents and they did whatever and I thought "No, I can't be, it didn't work, I must have just woken up properly and this is real". So it just kind of slipped away until I woke up properly and thought "Damn!"