Couple of mythbusters here!!!

Okay…

  1. Supposedly one of the ways to see if you are dreaming is to try and think backwards and see if you can remember what you’ve done. If you can’t you are dreaming. Well…! That turned out not to be true for me, I was perfectly able to recollect the things I had done during an ND. The fun part however is that I ended up telling myself, "Wait, I am not supposed to be able to recollect things cause I’m dreaming, thereby becoming lucid! LOL.
  2. Supposedly spinning around fast changes your dream scenery. Well!! I tried and tried, but that didn’t work for me, I stayed right where I was! Guess I wasn’t meant to leave the scene (which actually turned out to be true) :smile:
    KauaiDreamer’sQuest 56 LD log

Well, just because those things didn’t work for you, doesn’t mean they won’t work for others. Everyone is different. For lots of people, those techniques actually work. I think it has a lot to do with whether you believe it will work or not. Some people can fly in their dreams, others have trouble flying, but just because they can’t do it the first time they try doesn’t mean it’s impossible for them or other dreamers! It takes practice sometimes to master certain dream skills.

All RC’s should be taken with a grain of salt. The nose pinching seems to be mostly reliable, as dose the hand RC; however, even these can fail from time to time, especially if you expect them to fail. The trick is that if you ever have reason to believe you’re in a dream (which you really should at all times) do mupltiple RC’s until you’re sure that you’re sure that you’re sure you are awake.

I did not realize those were considered RCs I thought that those were just standard facts, not being able to think back in an ND, and that spinning would change the scene. Now I know! :smile: My bad!

:wink: There are no rules written in stone in our dreams. Anything goes :content:

Actually the spinning thing works if you have the location you want to land at in your head. I once span around while saying “when I stop I will be in my old neighbourhood!”. I stopped spinning, and I was back in my old neighbourhood!

So what is really cool here is that trying to think back to what you did earlier Did, in Fact make you become Lucid even though you Did remember what you did prior to this.
I’m glad to read your experience because I am trying to use this particular RC more and more, and had a What-If thought (of what you experienced) but it looks like it can work anyhow because it just simply makes you more conscious of your surroundings and thoughts. :wink:

That’s what I thought, I had a picture of the perfect meadow in my head. Didn’t work though! :smile: I take it that the reason it didn’t work, was because my subconscious was trying to make me realize that I don’t need to be in the perfect place (my meadow) to be able to produce energy to heal. Like Robert Waggoner wrote in his book Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the inner self:
“No sailor controls the sea. Only a foolish sailor would say such a thing. Similarly, no lucid dreamer controls the dream. Like a sailor on the sea, we lucid dreamers direct our perpetual awareness within the larger state of dreaming.”

Yep! I’ve read people saying that “in dreams light switches NEVER work” but that’s not true. It might be for some people, and even for me it is usually true, but I’ve had them work ok a few times. When talking about dreams you can never say never (;p) or always, specially because dreams are so personal!

I don’t try to see what I’ve done in the dream, i try and see how I got there

Try to imagine how you got where you are.
if you don’t remember how the dream began, then how did you get here?
trace back until you’ve gotten to the beginning.
until you cant go any farther.
what happened before then?
if you draw a blank, that’s the point.
if you don’t know how you got there, NORMALLY, your dreaming.

now if the last thing you remember is a couple of guys in ski masks walking up behind you, the back of your head hurts, and your tied up to a chair, then your probably not dreaming :grin:

Flying is hard, phasing through stuff is hard, reading is hard, sex is…difficult :tongue: , switching lights is hard…
How many people have proven each one of them wrong? And if they’re special, then everyone’s special.
Some things may require a slightly different execution from what you’d do IWL, but we know from the start that a dream works in a different way (for one, you have to keep it stable :tongue:), and some tend to forget that when approaching some usual tasks. If you stick to what works in a dream, and figure out your way with some investigation and clever reasoning, then nothing can stand in your path.