Thread: Lucid Dreaming Fundamentals -- With Q & A

So I am reading through this, and I think "If this guy is not a pro, then who is?" so I decided to try this out. I have seen posts on methods such as All Day Awareness, but I realize that they are leaving out some of the fundamentals that you talked about here. I've had one LD, and I believe that was from having a rubber band around my wrist, and all day, every 15 minutes snapping it against my wrist, and doing an RC. I see that I can combine that with what you have said here. Thanks for taking your time too type this up, and answer questions because I know that this will be very helpful.

Glad I could help, DragonMaster; or rather that maybe this stuff will help in the future!

I think it will, though, because you already showed the right mindset with the rubber band-snapping ritual; I did that myself for about a month, until I realized that it -- and the RC's with it -- had become routine and I needed to change to a new state-testing habit. But it was a simple routine that tied in nicely with my efforts to build my self-awareness.

Good luck!

How do you feel that dreams have influenced your view on every day things and life in general?

Originally Posted by fOrceez

How do you feel that dreams have influenced your view on every day things and life in general?

They've given me pause.

Aside from the obvious stuff, like the fact that my decades of mental calisthenics for the sake of readying me to LD have helped establish a sense of “self” that I would never have had if I weren't interested in LD'ing (my memory still sucks, though I blame genetics and age for that!), I find myself taking a moment, usually without noticing I did so, to step back and look carefully at situations I might be in, decisions I might be making, or just what I'm really doing as I waste hours in front of the TV. In other words, I have a tendency to remove myself from reality for just a second, a pause, to give it a good once-over -- just like I do in almost all of my dreams. I'm not sure that made sense, but it is the most interesting influence this work has had on my waking life.

Also, my time in LD's has given me an opportunity to wonder if there really is something more out there, something beyond this mortal coil. This opportunity has no counterpart in waking life, period. And, as an added bonus, LD'ing is a hands-on method for exploring that something more, whenever I think I've seen it, rather than just imagining what it could be, or, worse, choosing to believe what someone else told me it is. That, I think, may have changed me, right down to the core of my being, in ways that would never have happened had I never "woken up" in those dreams when I was a teenager. And, when the core of your being is changed, so too I imagine is your view of everyday life!

My wife insists that LD’ing has affected me in other ways, among them my unwavering optimism -- countered by a cynical skepticism of pretty much everything shown me; my infinite patience; the fact that I will not get mad at annoying people or situations that cross our path, because they just don’t matter; and that I have a habit of putting myself in other people’s shoes and defending them, even when they’ve hurt us. But I’m not sure if I would have been that way had I never LD’d, so I can’t say for sure that my dreaming life influenced me. She would say it did, though!

I’m sure there’s more but I’m afraid I’m a wee bit too close to the subject to really know.

Great question, fOrceez; you’ve given me something to think about for the rest of the day. Thanks…I think.

I was recently PM'd the following question, and it seemed like one that ought to be shared here (I won't say who asked, though, because that would be rude):

... I came across your post about the stool of lucidity. So I struggle with self awareness, probably because it's quite an effort to actively think all the time, I try my best anyway, but I wanted to ask you if you have the same problem as me. If I'm sat on the xbox I really struggle to stay self aware, I have to be aware of the character in the game and myself and I can't do it!
Just wondering if there was times you really particularly struggle being self aware. As for the other two keep fundamentals, I think I'm good at.

Self-awareness is the tough one, isn't it? I'm sure I'll be struggling with it until the very last time I close my eyes in this life, as perfection of this skill is so unnatural and, well, so damn hard. And it isn't just our own nature, our own need to glide through life in the greasiest grooves possible (aka, ignorance is bliss), that walls out self-awareness, but it's the world itself.

The world seems designed to distract, and grows more so every day. TV used to be considered the perfect distraction, called the "idiot box" not because people who watch it are stupid, but because it makes the people who watch it stupid, by its nature. But now we have video games, which make TV look downright enlightening. In other words, there's little hope holding onto your self during a video game. But it is an excellent exercise to try -- I suggest you keep at it!

So yeah, there are times that it is harder to remember your self. For me, there are of course TV & video games, but there are many other times I have to really push to notice that I exist. Among them are mundane tasks, like cooking, cleaning, dressing, driving, etc. At the other end are moments when I need it the most, like when I'm in an emotional conversation with a loved one, or when I'm working intently on my writing or art. It seems like there's always something literally meant to crowd out my self-awareness; and there always will be. That's a good reason to always carry around some sort of fetish (I keep a small piece of polished wood in my pocket, always) or machine (like a stopwatch) to remind you to review your moment in reality.

So I hope you keep up the struggle, it's worth it: Keep in mind that you'll always be working toward self-awareness, and likely will never reach it in life, but every baby step you take in its direction is a leap toward far more excellent LD'ing.

What is your take on masturbation before going to sleep? It's something that's been quite irking me, now. There's been multiple threads on this and some cultures say sexual and dreaming energy is very similar, if not the same. Wonder if it's all just a placebo.

Originally Posted by fOrceez

What is your take on masturbation before going to sleep? It's something that's been quite irking me, now. There's been multiple threads on this and some cultures say sexual and dreaming energy is very similar, if not the same. Wonder if it's all just a placebo.

Well. I haven't spent an evening thinking about masturbation in quite a while...

Placebo is the wrong word, I think. I'm fairly confident that masturbation, with a couple of remotely related exceptions I'll get to in a second, has nothing at all to do with LD'ing. This is because, I believe, the physiology of masturbation really isn't connected with that of the dreaming mind. That's physiology -- I'm not talking about dreaming about sex, I'm talking about sexual function influencing dreams. I welcome any knowledgeable MD to contradict me here with facts about endorphins or such, but I'm pretty sure that the mechanics of dreams and masturbation are unrelated.

With two small exceptions: first, masturbation does tend to relax you, and make it easier to sleep, which is always a good thing, and second, there is a chance that a round of masturbation (or sex itself, if you're so lucky) before sleep will reduce the chances of lucidity being too distracted by sexual "events." If that's what you want.

That's all I got. In the end I think this is a non issue in the world of dreaming, one that is raised not for its import but because some folks just love to talk about it...

I agree with what Sageous just said. Having any built up sexual feelings will make you likely to seek out sex in a dream. This can ruin your lucidity. When young men first get started with lucid dreaming, they want to have sex in the dream. However, if you seriously want to cultivate high levels of control and lucidity, then by having sex or masterbating before you sleep, you will get less distracted.

I know this question may be a little vague, and there may be no answer to it, but what exactly is practicing awareness? I'm aware (no pun intended :p) that it's not mindlessly living life on autopilot, but it is basically thinking about everything around you and what you do? For example, when eating fruit you would think to yourself "this is sweet" or when walking somewhere you would think "I'm going to turn left at the end of this road", or if you touch something cold you think to yourself "this is cold"? Because if it is, it seems a little overwhelming to me, I'm finding it quite difficult to do this all the time...

Originally Posted by ShinyBlueStar

I know this question may be a little vague, and there may be no answer to it, but what exactly is practicing awareness? I'm aware (no pun intended :p) that it's not mindlessly living life on autopilot, but it is basically thinking about everything around you and what you do? For example, when eating fruit you would think to yourself "this is sweet" or when walking somewhere you would think "I'm going to turn left at the end of this road", or if you touch something cold you think to yourself "this is cold"? Because if it is, it seems a little overwhelming to me, I'm finding it quite difficult to do this all the time...

I think you might be taking the idea a bit too literally...

By practicing awareness, or better yet by building your self-awareness, you need only make a regular practice of stepping back from your passage through the day to ask yourself things like where you're going, where you were, what you're doing, what effect does what you're doing have on reality, and what effect is reality having on you. Basically you build self-awareness by taking a good look at your position in the world and recognize, regularly, that your actions always have an effect on it, whether you know it or not, and that the world has an effect on your actions, whether you know it or not.

So no worries about being aware of every thing you do; that would be difficult, and won't do much to get you ready to LD. But develop a good habit of "testing" your awareness as described above (and elsewhere on this thread) and you might find that habit, and true self-awareness, appearing in your dreams. And when it does, LD's will be easier to conjure.

this thread is mint!

i've particularly enjoyed reading about your experience with awareness.

i would like to ask one thing i dont think as been been covered yet,
what do you do (if anything) when you go to sleep to set your intention to lucid dream?

Originally Posted by Flying Spaghetti Monster

this thread is mint!

i've particularly enjoyed reading about your experience with awareness.

i would like to ask one thing i dont think as been been covered yet,
what do you do (if anything) when you go to sleep to set your intention to lucid dream?

Thanks! I'm glad people are still checking this thread out. Now...

I don't do much of anything regarding intention when I'm going to sleep, because I've already been careful to "set" it all day, so that intention is pretty much a part of me by the time I lay down at night. This works well for me, and I recommend it simply because it keeps you in the "LD game" all day, which is always a good thing. However, I don't do this because it works better than other options, I do it because I have -- and always did have -- a very difficult time holding my thoughts together right before sleep at night (WBTB or napping is less of a problem), so I needed to develop a different plan for setting intention.

In other words, if you can take five minutes right before sleep to deeply assemble, organize, and visualize your intentions, then do it all when you lay down at night. If that's a real problem, as it is for me, then let all that stuff build gradually into your mind over the course of the day (or week, or month, etc) so that intention is a given by the time bedtime arrives. Or do both; it certainly couldn't hurt!

The goal is to present your dreaming mind with images and ideas that transcend the day residue and unconscious bric-a-brac that normally fuel the dream's design, so that what you want to dream about is added to the mix. How you do it can be flexible; that you do it is critical for successful LD'ing.

How would you say you started having transcendental lucid dreams? I tend to get stuck in a circle where I can regularly have LDs with good control but I end up just doing the same old things (basically flying and sex ). I then start to get bored, lose my motivation and don't focus on LDing for awhile... Almost all my LDs feel forced instead of like meaningful experiences. Experiments like asking DCs questions to get answers from my subconcious has never produced meaningful results for me at all. I really want to take LDing to the next level but I'm not sure how to go about it...

This thread is absolutely amazing! I hope you are with us here at "real DV" to answer some more questions. It seems you are everything I want to be when it comes to Lucid Dreaming

I'm trying (like everybody here) to get that awareness to work, but man it's hard. I don't really know what to do or what to look out for. So I'll try to explain what I do and hope that you'll comment on it.
So whenever I remember to be aware, I try to "feel" the room that I'm in (not necessarily looking). Like what is around me right now. And not only the room, but also what is around it. It's not an intellectual thought like "outside is the garden and then the road" but more of a feeling of where my body is at the moment. If I'm outside it often leads to a feeling of being very small. Last week I did this while in the metro and it was an almost surreal experience because the room I was in was moving.

Also, I would like to know how important you consider having a meditation practice to be, as I am trying to learn how to meditate but feel like I suck at it. I do want to learn it regardless of it's benefits in lucid dreaming, so I don't know why I'm asking this. Maybe because you haven't mentioned it at all and it seems that a lot of people consider it of importance to lucidity. Anyway, I hope by meditation to learn what this awareness is supposed to feel like.

Thanks so much for taking your time to answer all these questions. You should write a book on all this, or maybe just publish this thread

-Strit

Originally Posted by FancyRat

How would you say you started having transcendental lucid dreams? I tend to get stuck in a circle where I can regularly have LDs with good control but I end up just doing the same old things (basically flying and sex ). I then start to get bored, lose my motivation and don't focus on LDing for awhile... Almost all my LDs feel forced instead of like meaningful experiences. Experiments like asking DCs questions to get answers from my subconcious has never produced meaningful results for me at all. I really want to take LDing to the next level but I'm not sure how to go about it...

First, sorry for the delay... wanted to give the guys at DV a chance to get things sorted...

I wouldn't say I started having transcendental dreams as much as they started having me. I was minding my own business with my LD work, just pushing the envelope of experience a little further every chance I got. In time -- a lot of time, mind you -- I found myself on the other side of that envelope, trying to see what lay beyond my (dream) control and comprehension. I can't really where I was, but that doesn't matter here. What does matter is that you may be on the right track. That "same old thing" you mention, and the tendency toward boredom, were once all my LD's were. I even erroneously stopped doing them on purpose for that reason for several years, thinking I had "done it all" until I had a few accidental full-on LD's in a row back in the '90's that led me to believe I was not at an end, but a beginning: I decided that LD'ing is just a tool for awareness, in the end (granted a really fun tool), and there comes a moment when you can step away from the dream and dive even deeper into your Self, and perhaps discover things that are simply beyond anything humans can currently explain.

Sounds spacy, I know, and sorry about that. That's the main problem with transcendental experiences: they have that name because they "transcend" all the metaphors, archetypes, and symbols we have on hand to explain them -- or, yes, to even remember them. That's right, we could all be having transcendental dreams every night, and simply cannot remember them because there is no mechanism in our brains (yet) to keep them on hand! I'm hoping LD'ing will be the tool for me to build that mechanism.

Sorry, I'm rambling. To answer your question, FancyRat, I started having transcendental LD's almost by accident (if that's what they were -- keep in mind that I'm still basing all this on memories that defy definition and, because of that, open a door for creative interpretations that might be all wrong). Well, maybe not by accident, but more as a result of that envelope-pushing, but I really did not know what I was pushing toward. I still don't, I suppose. But if you were to seek them on purpose, I would say it would be done by pushing that envelope of awareness until your self-awareness completely eclipses the dream itself and finds a way to meld more thoroughly with your dreaming mind (aka, the unconscious) than nature currently allows. Bottom line: don't be bored with what you're doing in the LD's; use that boredom as a tool to create a new horizon or two. It might be fun.

I hope that made sense. If not, then ask again and I'll try harder.

I also hope I'm actually posting this on DV's site, and some Russian hasn't invaded my computer!

Originally Posted by Strit

This thread is absolutely amazing! I hope you are with us here at "real DV" to answer some more questions. It seems you are everything I want to be when it comes to Lucid Dreaming

I'm trying (like everybody here) to get that awareness to work, but man it's hard. I don't really know what to do or what to look out for. So I'll try to explain what I do and hope that you'll comment on it.
So whenever I remember to be aware, I try to "feel" the room that I'm in (not necessarily looking). Like what is around me right now. And not only the room, but also what is around it. It's not an intellectual thought like "outside is the garden and then the road" but more of a feeling of where my body is at the moment. If I'm outside it often leads to a feeling of being very small. Last week I did this while in the metro and it was an almost surreal experience because the room I was in was moving.

Sounds to me like you're on a good path toward excellent awareness, Strit, but I do have a suggestion:

The awareness exercise you describe above is a good one, and not a bad idea for anyone to do regularly, but not necessarily the best tool for LD'ing (more on that in a minute). You might consider focusing more deeply on your self-awareness, rather than just general awareness. I think I explained this exercise better earlier in other places in this thread, but I'll give it a quick once-over again for you:

Instead of pausing to "feel" the room you're in, try pausing instead to consider your presence in the room -- literally stop and wonder for a few seconds about where you are, where you just were, where you'll be in the next few seconds; think about why you're where you are, what effect you're having on your immediate environment, and what effect your immediate environment is having on you. Throwing in a reality check at the same time, while considering these things, would be a very good thing as well.

This sounds like a lot of work, but with practice it's less than it seems, especially after you find yourself doing it without actually verbalizing the questions. And of course you might start off by asking just one or two questions, or rotating them, until you get the hang of it. Basically what you're doing is confirming, for an instant, that your presence has an impact on reality, always, and reality has an impact on you, always.

Why does this help? Because it helps strengthen your self awareness, which is the tool for successful LD'ing. It also helps you in everyday life -- pausing like this if you're having an argument with a friend or are being frustrated by a difficult situation might help you get through them. Personally, I think that if everyone on earth did this exercise, just once, we would all be living in a much nicer world..

Why is it different from what you're doing? Because by just making reality very important (again, not a bad thing) you're lowering the significance of your own presence in the scene; you're actively forgetting that you are a part of reality, and reality is a part of you. In a sense, a non-lucid dream is essentially exactly what you are doing: after all a dream is simply an adventure where the dreaming-mind-created "reality" is a thing in which "You" are not present. I can see how only doing the exercise you describe might actually make LD'ing more difficult (though I could be wrong about that).

I suggest you add the exercise, or something like the exercise, I described above to what you are already doing. It might help, and it most assuredly will not hurt!

Also, I would like to know how important you consider having a meditation practice to be, as I am trying to learn how to meditate but feel like I suck at it. I do want to learn it regardless of it's benefits in lucid dreaming, so I don't know why I'm asking this. Maybe because you haven't mentioned it at all and it seems that a lot of people consider it of importance to lucidity. Anyway, I hope by meditation to learn what this awareness is supposed to feel like.

Nope, I'm not a major fan of meditation, in terms of LD'ing. That might be for personal reasons, because I'm really bad at meditating (or concentrating on pretty much anything for more than a few seconds at a time), but I think it's more because meditation might become a sort of self-fulfilling distraction that gets in the way of advanced LD's.

In terms of developing awareness, sure, meditation is just fine, and I highly recommend you pursue it if you're interested in it... it's certainly a valuable talent to have, regardless. Just don't count on it being more than a handy tool for some of the induction techniques or perhaps stabilizing low-level LD's.

I could certainly be wrong about these two things, but they are my opinion. If you want me to expand, ask me again and I'll try (I'll also likely draw some posts from meditation experts who likely have different opinions than mine.

Thanks so much for taking your time to answer all these questions. You should write a book on all this, or maybe just publish this thread

You're most welcome, I hope I was able to help. I like the idea of publishing the thread, but I'm not sure the folks at DV would go along

Well that gives me more hope It sure would be nice if I had an accidental windfall of full-on LD's. In the meantime, I guess I'll just continue to work on it with some of those new perspectives

Thank you so much for you reply

Originally Posted by Sageous

Instead of pausing to "feel" the room you're in, try pausing instead to consider your presence in the room -- literally stop and wonder for a few seconds about where you are, where you just were, where you'll be in the next few seconds; think about why you're where you are, what effect you're having on your immediate environment, and what effect your immediate environment is having on you. Throwing in a reality check at the same time, while considering these things, would be a very good thing as well.

This sounds like a lot of work, but with practice it's less than it seems, especially after you find yourself doing it without actually verbalizing the questions. And of course you might start off by asking just one or two questions, or rotating them, until you get the hang of it. Basically what you're doing is confirming, for an instant, that your presence has an impact on reality, always, and reality has an impact on you, always.

I've been doing this (a couple of times only) after reading your post on it earlier in this thread. But it feels very forced. Like I have to make full questions and answers in my head. But what you are saying is that it's OK that it's like that in the beginning and that it will change when I get into the habit?

Originally Posted by Sageous

...meditation might become a sort of self-fulfilling distraction that gets in the way of advanced LD's.

If it's OK I would really love if you'd explain more about this view on meditation. I don't understand why you think that it could come in the way of LD's (and maybe I'll try to read more about why some people praise it as a shortcut to LD'ing, as well).

Again - Thank you!

-Strit

On what Sageous said about meditation and lucid dreaming:

Awareness is a mindset, but it can also become habitual. I found that awareness through the day came after I started inducing lucid dreams with some regularity, without intending to I found that my awareness of my self and my environment during the day had increased. So awareness in the day and in dreams isn't just a one way street.

Meditation is a practice (particularly in the zen school) aimed at increasing personal awareness of self and the nature of self and reality. How would that not be productive of lucid dreams? I found that the night after I first meditated I had 3 lucid dreams through the night unintentionally (I hadn't been focused at all on DILD/MILD since I was only thinking about WILDing that night).
I strongly urge you to try meditation again and perhaps find a style that works for you, from the sound of your personality you may favour the skinkantaza variety of Zen meditation in which you sit with no concentration on breath or any object but remain aware of your thoughts and environment Zazen - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Originally Posted by Strit

I've been doing this (a couple of times only) after reading your post on it earlier in this thread. But it feels very forced. Like I have to make full questions and answers in my head. But what you are saying is that it's OK that it's like that in the beginning and that it will change when I get into the habit?

It will feel forced at first, perhaps even for a while, because doing this is literally unnatural. So yes, it is OK, but I must insert a quick warning about habit:

Try not to let this exercise -- or any practice you make regarding this or RC's, for that matter -- ever become habit. For true self-awareness, you really need to have every "pause" feel fresh, not rote. And it should, because isn't every moment you pause to consider a new one? If you allow habit to take over, you risk simply creating a regimen of rehearsed statements that mean nothing to you and thus do nothing to nurture your self-awareness or wonder of the world (that's from the first exercise you described). Try to remember that the questions you're asking aren't the important bit -- the answers, or at least the consideration of their existence, are the key here. So feel free to re-frame your questions regularly, just so you don't get into an interest-eating habit, and in time you will find that during your pause you're not asking the questions at all; only listening for answers.

If it's OK I would really love if you'd explain more about this view on meditation. I don't understand why you think that it could come in the way of LD's (and maybe I'll try to read more about why some people praise it as a shortcut to LD'ing, as well).

Though Ctharlhie makes an excellent defense of meditation below, and I certainly could be wrong about my view, I'll try to clarify quickly:

Meditation is a discipline unto itself, with its own benefits (including, as Ctharlhie notes, a chance for heightened awareness) which can certainly complement LD'ing, especially in the LD induction department. I do have a concern though that meditation might have a tendency to build a mindset that is not conducive to advanced LD'ing.

This is because meditation is basically a mental discipline that creates a defined mindset in the practitioner, and that definition is almost always founded by the words, instructions, or guidance of someone else. This is not a bad thing at all, in itself, but it can create a set of expectations or, worse, artificial emotional buffers, that might dampen the connection you must make with your dreaming mind in order to fully establish your self-awareness in a dream. Again, though it certainly won't hurt with low-level LD'ing, and might even be a shortcut* of sorts, meditation could get in the way when you really start exploring (or, worse, prevent you from seeing where to expand those explorations).

I re-read what I just wrote and didn't like it at all. Let me put it this way: LD'ing is all about surprise, and that surprise must come from the discoveries you make when you include your self-awareness in your dreaming landscape. An artificial definition of that inclusion could result in an interruption -- a distraction -- of the lucidity itself; you'd be creating "explanations" or post-script expectations that would interfere with the marriage of your Self with your, well, Self in the dream. Those explanations would be nearly unavoidable because the people, philosophies, and established practices that helped you learn to meditate properly are intrinsic to the act itself -- in a sense you're adding an entire layer of knowledge and thought to your being when you meditate -- a new, formidable barrier through which you must now pass during your dive toward your dreaming mind. I think I just said two different things there, but I hope you get the point: meditation, by its inherent and generally laudable quality and power, can be a real distraction.

I hope that made sense. I could go on about this for days, but here is not the place for that, so I fear that my words are either unintelligible or that it looks like I'm blowing smoke out my ass. If you don't like my answer, just toss it -- it is just an opinion, after all. And, should you master meditation, you'll know for yourself whether it helped or hurt your LD'ing.

I'll shut up now.

* P.S. There are no shortcuts!

Originally Posted by Ctharlhie

Meditation is a practice (particularly in the zen school) aimed at increasing personal awareness of self and the nature of self and reality. How would that not be productive of lucid dreams? I found that the night after I first meditated I had 3 lucid dreams through the night unintentionally (I hadn't been focused at all on DILD/MILD since I was only thinking about WILDing that night).
I strongly urge you to try meditation again and perhaps find a style that works for you, from the sound of your personality you may favour the skinkantaza variety of Zen meditation in which you sit with no concentration on breath or any object but remain aware of your thoughts and environment Zazen - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Well said, and I understand what you're saying. I won't attempt to repeat the mess I laid on Strit just above, but I will add that much of meditation -- the Zen variety being a particularly good example -- involves a reduction of self while increasing awareness of reality (and yes, your self's place in it). This reduction, though again a very good thing in context, is exactly the opposite of what you need to do when LD'ing.

Think about it. A dream is not reality, but your dreaming mind's projection of reality, based entirely on you. To appreciate this projection in the same way that is done with meditation is to elevate it to something beyond you, which, I believe, would indeed diminish your self awareness in the dream. As I said somewhere above, with meditation skills in play you might find yourself making the dream -- and not your presence -- the real thing, and thus lose lucidity. And again (again), this only pertains to higher-level LD's; meditation probably does no harm, and might help initiate and stabilize lower-level LD's.

Thanks for the suggestion to try meditation again. I actually never stop "trying," and have had some limited success, though my physical brain seems wired to disrupt most of my attempts. Thanks also for the link: I'm both familiar with and actually have a bit of good experience with Zazen, but I think its cool that you picked one that worked for me! I'll likely never give up trying to master the art, because I've had a taste of its benefits -- I simply will be avoiding the active use of it in my LD work. Of course, I guess I'll always have its residue present, but that's manageable -- maybe even good.

Sageous, you've really opened my mind on some aspects, thank you for that. I'm sure we can benefit so much from your experiences, a specially your concept on self-awareness.

I've LDing for 16 years. They were all kinds of dreams. When I heard about the WILD method, I decided to give it a try. My question is, if you have any idea of course, why have I always been experiencing this method as OBE? The number is so far 28. Every one of them happened exactly the same. I've had thousands of LDs, but why now OBE? They were also differ in terms of senses.

Originally Posted by roland3tr

Sageous, you've really opened my mind on some aspects, thank you for that. I'm sure we can benefit so much from your experiences, a specially your concept on self-awareness.

I've LDing for 16 years. They were all kinds of dreams. When I heard about the WILD method, I decided to give it a try. My question is, if you have any idea of course, why have I always been experiencing this method as OBE? The number is so far 28. Every one of them happened exactly the same. I've had thousands of LDs, but why now OBE? They were also differ in terms of senses.

Though I'm sure there are others here more versed on why the WILD technique produces OBE's (indeed, though I don't attempt OBE's myself, I'm pretty sure that WILD is THE technique for inducing them), I'll give you my take on why OBE's seem to follow WILD:

When you WILD, you are entering the dreaming state without losing waking awareness, and by extension without gaining the input from your dreaming mind that normally would be made (meaning, you're sidestepping your natural dreams). So there you are, asleep but with waking awareness, with your dreaming mind scrambling to fill in the void you've created. I think what might happen next is that your dreaming mind joins with your waking expectations/recent memory, and hastily produces a dream in which you wakefully find yourself in the most recent place you were, like your bedroom or home. And, if you let the sensation continue, it turns into what feels like an OBE (or, perhaps, an actual OBE).

Here's a thought -- and actually what I do when I use the WILD technique: next time you use WILD and find yourself in an OBE, disregard the sensation and try to move out of your "room," perhaps by flying straight up through the ceiling. Then float quietly in empty space and allow your dreaming mind a moment to "catch up." I think after you so establish that you're interested in starting up a dream, your dreaming mind will quickly oblige with a more substantial, or at least less local, dream world. This is even more effective when you set solid intentions/expectations before you begin your WILD.

Just one other note that has nothing to do with your question but I try to say it whenever I'm talking about WILD's here: WILD is a means toward lucid dreaming; it is not an end in itself. Use it as a tool, when it is most helpful (i.e., during WBTB) to get to the LD's you want to have and it works well; assume that it is an experience unto itself and you'll regularly find yourself limited to curious sleep-paralysis events and things like OBE's but you might never get to the dream itself.

Originally Posted by Sageous

Though I'm sure there are others here more versed on why the WILD technique produces OBE's (indeed, though I don't attempt OBE's myself, I'm pretty sure that WILD is THE technique for inducing them), I'll give you my take on why OBE's seem to follow WILD:

When you WILD, you are entering the dreaming state without losing waking awareness, and by extension without gaining the input from your dreaming mind that normally would be made (meaning, you're sidestepping your natural dreams). So there you are, asleep but with waking awareness, with your dreaming mind scrambling to fill in the void you've created. I think what might happen next is that your dreaming mind joins with your waking expectations/recent memory, and hastily produces a dream in which you wakefully find yourself in the most recent place you were, like your bedroom or home. And, if you let the sensation continue, it turns into what feels like an OBE (or, perhaps, an actual OBE).

Here's a thought -- and actually what I do when I use the WILD technique: next time you use WILD and find yourself in an OBE, disregard the sensation and try to move out of your "room," perhaps by flying straight up through the ceiling. Then float quietly in empty space and allow your dreaming mind a moment to "catch up." I think after you so establish that you're interested in starting up a dream, your dreaming mind will quickly oblige with a more substantial, or at least less local, dream world. This is even more effective when you set solid intentions/expectations before you begin your WILD.

Just one other note that has nothing to do with your question but I try to say it whenever I'm talking about WILD's here: WILD is a means toward lucid dreaming; it is not an end in itself. Use it as a tool, when it is most helpful (i.e., during WBTB) to get to the LD's you want to have and it works well; assume that it is an experience unto itself and you'll regularly find yourself limited to curious sleep-paralysis events and things like OBE's but you might never get to the dream itself.

Well, perfect answer, thank you That was also the most logical one regarding WILD method.

I forgot to tell you, in all those 28 WILDs, well maybe not all of them, I got out of my room somehow, usually flying. And you are totally right when you said "I think after you so establish that you're interested in starting up a dream, your dreaming mind will quickly oblige with a more substantial, or at least less local, dream world". Examples:

http://www.dreamviews.org/f12/last-s...e-night-67158/ - http://www.dreamviews.org/f13/portal-wormhole-128822/