Thread: Lucid Dreaming Fundamentals -- With Q & A

Everything in this thread is absolutely brilliant - sorry for clogging up your notifications by liking almost every damn post!

Your explanation of memory makes a lot of sense to me - and was how I'd started to have a lot of my lucids. Instead of a sudden burst of awareness and RCing I'd simply be able to notice and feel that everything around me wasn't real - the awareness that I am not awake and am dreaming. I've sort of lost this due to the way school/work/etc tend to take over every now and then.

Have you taken many breaks in your long time lucid dreaming? Do you have any tips for balancing your dreaming and training your memory/awareness with every day life and worries?

Thanks Dark_Merlin!

Originally Posted by Dark_Merlin

Your explanation of memory makes a lot of sense to me - and was how I'd started to have a lot of my lucids. Instead of a sudden burst of awareness and RCing I'd simply be able to notice and feel that everything around me wasn't real - the awareness that I am not awake and am dreaming. I've sort of lost this due to the way school/work/etc tend to take over every now and then.

Well get it back, man! See below...

Have you taken many breaks in your long time lucid dreaming? Do you have any tips for balancing your dreaming and training your memory/awareness with every day life and worries?

I've taken a few breaks -- though rarely on purpose -- over the years. The most major one was an almost-ten-year gap in the late '80's-early '90's when I allowed the "joy" of career and its accompanying dollars and materialism to take a front burner to my dreaming quest, which in turn was put on a small back burner at a very low setting. When I finally "woke up" one day to the fact that I was leaving behind the one thing I wanted to do in life just for the thrill of riding a train to Manhattan every day, I realized, in hindsight, how easy it can be to lose my grip on the esoteric stuff as waking life gets more hectic, complicated, distracting, and above all, comfortable.

I then thought long and hard about just what you are asking -- well then, how can I establish a balance? After a time I realized that you really cannot. Waking reality, especially in the West, is simply not conducive to developing spiritually; the two just don't get along. So instead of trying to balance -- which I had incorrectly thought I had been doing during that stretch -- I established priorities. "Dream Stuff," as my wife calls it, became the project, and everything else was secondary. I stayed at my job for ten more years (got a few promotions, a BMW, a house, and lots of other stuff in the process, so materialism was still quite active), but now I was more focused on dreaming...I blew dust off a book I had started in the '80's, finished it, and then wrote another -- both heavily based on my dreams and my opinions of them; I bought LaBerge's toys -- like, all of them -- and discovered that there was no quick fix in regaining my lucid skills; I read extensively, and ultimately got involved in that newfangled Internet thing in the early '00's. I did more, but my point here is that I got back to dream work while still succeeding at my job and living comfortably.

About 80% of what I term "dream work" was working on my self-awareness (memory came much later). Ironically, dealing with work -- and with being a commuter Zombie -- became much easier as I built my self-awareness and found a sense of Self. In a sense, you find the daily grind much easier to bear when you know that, in the end, none of it matters and it ain't all about you!

I took a couple of shorter breaks in the last few years, especially after I retired (at 42) in '04 to a life of dreaming, writing, and art. Part of the retirement included fixing up the old house we moved into, and that can be extremely distracting. But in time I reset priorities and the dream stuff stayed mostly on that front burner.

Did you see any "tips for balancing your dreaming and training your memory/awareness with every day life and worries?" Me neither, though I was sure I'd included them... I guess the only real tip is that self-awareness is not something you can fit in to your schedule; it needs to be a major part of your life, especially if you want to bring it into your dreams. It is literally an attitude that needs to be a part of you, and not a skill. Regarding memory, which in this case is a skill, there are lots of routines, exercises, and RC's you can jam into your day to strengthen it. I won't recommend anything specific, though if you can get something like LaBerge's P.E.S.T. that I mentioned somewhere above, that would help.

So I guess the bottom line here is that if you want the fundamentals to work for you, you must make them important to you -- more important than short-cuts, techniques, or any of the ancillary stuff they talk about here. Sorry it took so long to say that, thanks for staying with me if you did. If you want me to be more specific on the awareness bit, let me know and I'll try, but bear with me if I keep speaking in circles about it...