Extreme Difficulty

Hello, although for many lding comes easy or even accientally, there are those of us that lding is next to unabtainable.

I have been trying ever since a month or two before I joined the ld4all forum, which was quite a while ago. I have had 2LDs, combined making a total of about 7 seconds of Lding. One LD was a WILD, which was about 3 seconds of total blackness, the other is a normal LD were you do an RC in the middle of a regular dream(I forget the accronym), in which I remember a few disconected scences(I wake up, realize I am in a LD, blackness comes, then I am running down the driveway). My ability to recall dreams is inconsistant, sometimes as good as several dreams a night for weeks in a row, but mostly as bad as a couple a month. I have tried eating certain foods, dream journal, WILD, WBTB, but not mechanical assisstance, such as masks and vibrators.

So I was wondering if anybody else hiding out there :peek: has had difficult times like me; and if anybody can help :help:

Really, am I the only one with difficulty? If so I guess achieving the ability to LD easily may be near impossibal for mesigh

I’ve been trying for years, but on-and-off until I joined ld4all so haven’t had that many successes. I don’t know how regularly or effortfully you’ve been practicing, or even your waking life routine (which could take a lot of time out of say remembering a dream in the morning, or not being so exhausted at the end of the day that you can’t take some wakefulness down with you) but-- maybe it’s not so much about what techniques you practice with as the proper mind-state for lucid dreaming “clicking” into place? On the bright side, you’ve already done it-- so that’s something to be less pessimistic about :smile:

I’ve been trying on and off for three years and have only had about 4 LD’s, only two were really intense. Just keep trying, and I admit at times (probably for months on end) I don’t even think about LD’ing, I don’t think it’s one of those things that happens when you want- you’re body and mind have to be ready to go through with this, you might not be ready. It might be a good thing that you aren’t ready yet- Lucid Dreaming can reveal things about yourself that might be amazing and shocking, it would be bad for this to happen at the wrong time.

Or of course you can just go have a bunch of fun =P

It may be your age, not sure how old you are, but I know that I didn’t start having vivid dreams until my late teen years 16-19. I kinda hit a turning point in my life experiences and they just started coming.

I wouldn’t worry about it too much though. Sometimes overthinking \ analyzing a situation can cause more harm than good.

I am sure it will come to you :smile:

I’m pretty sure it has to do with your age. From 3 to 14 I was LDing each night. Now I LD only about four days a week :bored: .

I would recommend eating and drinking before you go to sleep. Milk seems to help a lot with me, so I usually eat a bowl of cereal or something similar before bed. Like you, I’ve found eating the foods people tell me to eat doesn’t work for me. However, this brings me to how I arrived at cereal before bed.

I’m always hungry before bed, so I used to eat whatever was available. Eventually, I found that I would LD more frequently with dairy products and even stronger still with pure milk.

So this is another thing you could try doing: Eat before bed, without caring if it’ll help your lucid dreaming or not. Eventually you might find something does and you can use that.

I know exactly where you’re coming from :sad: When I was first starting my lucid experiments about 4 years ago, I reached the point where I could have at least one, usually two, lucid dreams a night. Now that I’m older (and significantly more stressed out :smile: ) I’m lucky to have one a month. But I do have good news. You can get there no matter your former luck. Like any mental discipline, it requires a strong foundation. I got lucky when I first started and was able to enter WILDs with little effort. I relied on this gift too heavily, and when depression hit, I lost my most valued escape, my dream world. So by building the foundations of lucid dreaming, you will not need to master a technique, you only need to do two things.

  1. Reality Check. There is almost nothing more vital than adopting an attidue of doubt in your waking world. The more you question whether or not your current situation is dream or reality while awake, the more you will do it while asleep. The more reality checks you do, the better, but remember to give them meaning, don’t do it mindlessly.

  2. Dream Recall. We have 6 or 7 dreams a night. We are programmed to remember none of these, or maybe just the shattered remnence of one vivid dream, but in preparing your mind for lucid dreaming this really is the most important thing. At my peak I remembered and wrote down all 6. I got lazy and stopped writing them down, and in a week I had my first month long dry spell.

Meaningful and frequent reality checks and Diligent dream recall are, in my opinion, the most vital aspects of lucid dreaming. When you give these practices respect and dedication, you will find becoming lucid in dreams to be a natural and fluid thing.

Don’t get me wrong, it still might take a while, but everyone can lucid dream, it’s just a matter of getting used to the yoga of it. There are no techniques that work without heart and openness. This is why I would also reccomend looking into meditation and philosophy, because the more you blow your preconceptions on what is real, the easier it is to cross that bridge to the mythic world beyond it.

I wish you luck, I hope this helped a little :grin:

Well I am an ‘adolecent’, 13 years old and I have kinda given up on the DJ and I don’t even have LDing cross my mind for months at a time, so maybe I can try again and will get it this time, despite however my dam hormones want to screw up my sleep cycle :tongue:

It takes time. Two nights ago LD-ing re-entered my mind(after three months) and I mainly wanted to focus on dream recall. I got my first LD that night.

Just practice, and if you feel frustrated, take a break.