How do YOU stay lucid?

Spinning actually confuses me a lot in LDs. When I spin I always end up at a new location. I’ve had the most success with staring at a stable point, mainly, my hands. I get all focused on my hands and see every detail and keep repeating to myself, ‘I am dreaming now’. Rubbing my hands also works to some extent. I tried yelling ‘Stay lucid!’ or ‘Increase lucidity now!’ but those didn’t have a very big effect.

I tend to be far too active in lucid dreams and get carried away quickly; I’m a deep sleeper and an intense dreamer, and find it very difficult to stay lucid. I usually slip into a normal dream with the illusion of being lucid. I’m still looking for a powerful technique that’ll really stabilize my dream and me in it. :\ Unfortunately my mind is just as flighty and unfocused during the day… so I hope it’s not a bad character trait.

I think rubbing should be changed to just using hands… i rub my hands, focus on my hands, etc… i don’t just rub or focus awareness.

Self hypnosis, using that to slow my brainwaves down to alpha and theta brain waves and block beta waves as much as i can while i have a ld.
Also can do it by letting my dream body fall a sleep in my ld.

That still works the best for me.

Jeff

Spinning works wonderfully for me. I say where I want to go (or if I want to stay) and just spin a little.

i said focus awareness because ive only had 2 LD’s in my life(both in the last 4 days) and the first time i woke up right away but the second time i had to focus on not waking up, and it took quite a bit of effort,

so i dunno if thats what u mean by focus awareness, but what i ment was i would focus on not waking up

ive never herd of any of these teqniques, im gonna try spinning around next time, it seems interesting

Had to chime in on this older thread…

When I’ve felt lucidity fading, I like to use telekinetics to maintain focus in my dream. Sometimes, the DC’s get a big kick out of it - others, they don’t even notice. :neutral: But it definetly reinforces the fact that I am actually dreaming; I can’t do this IRL (yet! :wink: )

A few months ago… while i was lucid i started worrying about losing my lucidity and I thought that I can stay lucid because i can control this state.

I used to do the spinning one which sometimes resulted in a change of setting but other times just turned everything black or ended the dream. So I chose Focus Awareness. It works a bit better for me.

I usually try to focus my awarness, but I like to use voice commands too, such as “STABILIZE DREAM!” or “GET CONCIOUS”. I heard that spinning and rubbing your hands was supposed to stimulate your brain somehow, but it seems to not work for me. I think being aware is the best way to stay lucid. Just take not of your surroundings. Realizing the fact that its a dream helps A LOT.

Always when I try the spinning-method I wake up. Why do this happen to me? It seems to work wonderful for almost everyone else. ^^
I havent tried the rubbing-method yet, but I’ll be sure to do that in my next LD. :content:

One thing that works though is when i try to focus on my state of mind and try to take controll of the situation, like sayinf to myself that “I wont wake up, I will stay lucid and just have a good time and do some experiments. :content:” (but in swedish :tongue:)

keep on dreaming!

Chewing bubblegum forces me to concentrate on the texture/taste long enough to focus my thought and stabilise.

My favorite is definitely focusing awareness.

Usually if i sense my stability/lucidity shaking, i drop everything and just focus on a small piece of my dreamscape. That is all that occupies my thoughts. I want to see it in detail (because its fading) and almost immediately it ‘focuses’ into detail. Think ‘zoom focus’ on a digital camera - its just like that! (at least for me) Once this has happened, im usually good to go. The general feel of the dream strengthens accordingly.

Looking at my hands seems to help me too (though it did not in the beginning for some reason), in the same detail fashion (though on an interesting note, my hands are still a little ‘blurry’ and are ALWAYS bright, which is probably why they seem a little blurry cuz im being slightly blinded by them.) Hehe yeah, i never really thought about what my hands looked like (always focusing just on if it helps my stability or not), they are bright!..weird

I havent really tried spinning or rubbing my hands enough to see if its personally effective. I think the one time (?) that i tried spinning, i woke (not being used to the dreamscape ‘clear’ that happened to me). The time i tried rubbing my hands, that worked in the sense that it helped solidify my ‘physical’ orientation in the dream.

I like focusing on my hands as I rub them together. It seems to work well and keeps me lucid longer.

Tough to decide on the ‘best’ one… I normally do a few things.
I’d settle on verbal commands perhaps.
They have an amazing visual effect on my LDs… a forcefield of green crackling energy grows outwards from me and stabilises the world around me.

I use a variety of techniques I made up myself. In one, I just imagine that as the dream gets blurrier and begins to fade that I’m just looking in a dirty mirror or window and turn around or wipe it off. It works pretty well, as long as I was extremely lucid to begin with. Another is under the same circumstances, I’ll just reach out and flip a ‘lightswitch’ and all of the lights in the dreams turn on at once and everything regains clarity. This one’s easier when I’m not as lucid. Other than that, I just try to ‘juggle’ topics. I make sure that I never focus on one thing specifically (like holding some thing you’re juggling) for too long, so that I don’t ‘drop’ the rest. I just make sure that I keep looking around and noticing new things in the environment to prevent the dream from loosing clarity. Really, when you think about it, the major reason people loose lucidity is because they’re convinced that they can’t stop it, so once you realize you can it becomes much easier.

Very true, although sometimes you’re gonna wake up whether you like it or not.
But in many cases, its about belief (as usual)

Yeah, you’re right. Sometimes you just can’t stay asleep or stay in your dreams, but if it is at all possible, all you have to do is believe you can.

I use only spinning if my LD starts to fade away. Although in few recent LDs i have not troubled myself much about the idea how much i can do in LD before it fades away, and just enjoyed my adventure in the dream. So both times i didn’t need to spin myself during the whole long dream. When the dream ended it ended within a moment, so i didn’t had time to stabilize it anymore.

But basically i use spinning pretty much in average LD.

I use “Increase lucidity now!” as loud as I can.

I used to spin and rub my hands, and it often worked. But I think this was because I’d read that it would work. It doesn’t work very well now, and I find the best way is to do an RC, what I do is stick my hand into an object in front of me and the dream stabalizes.