How to Prolong Your Lucid Dreams
In fact, becoming lucid during sleep is an easy task, oneuronauts. We will now learn how to keep it and prolong our nightly adventures. Welcome to the fourth week of the Lucid Dream Workshop .
How to stay asleep and stay clear
If you managed to get clear for the first time, it probably didn’t last long. For most people, the process looks something like this:
Critical condition.
“Wow, I’m dreaming!”
Wake up
This is usually due to the fact that newbie oneuronauts are overly excited when they realize that they have finally achieved clarity. Don’t be discouraged if this continues to happen to you. After all, it’s hard not to be thrilled about it.
Fortunately, this barrier is easy to overcome if you are persistent. The more often you can achieve a state of lucid dream, the more you will get used to it and the less surprised you will be. But there are other helpful tricks you can do in your sleep. Try these three steps in the following order:
- First, take it easy and look at your hands. If during a critical condition test (like mine) you look at your hands, do it again. Focus on what you are dreaming of, but allow yourself to relax. Don’t just take off into the air shouting “I’m sleeping!”
- Now practice your inner speech in your sleep. Develop a mantra of affirmation that you can repeat in your head over and over again, for example: “This is a dream, this is a dream, this is a dream …”. If you need to say it “out loud” in a dream, this is fine, but it is better to do it in your mind so that it does not affect your dream experience.
- After you’ve recited your mantra, do some kinesthetic actions or movements to stimulate the brain. It’s more than enough to just rub your hands together like a sneaky villain. Activities such as hovering or pushing your hand through objects are also beneficial activities, but they can also wake you up if you are still not used to your dream state. Make your actions subtle.
Practice these steps and it will be easier for you to stay awake and stay awake. If that’s not enough, you can also try a technique called sleep spinning. But we’ll cover that in the assignments section.
You must view active participation as a key player in trying to maintain clarity of thought. More often than not, oneuronauts lose concentration and wake up due to insufficient stimulation of their brain. The more you can participate in your dream, the better. This helps to determine the intention of the dream before going to bed. This makes it easy to get down to business as soon as you realize that you are dreaming. If dreaming is like watching a movie, then lucid dreaming is like taking part in a movie. You need to act, not stare.
How to wake yourself up from lucid sleep
If you find that the state of lucid dream is too much for you, there are some easy ways to step back. Losing your mental clarity is usually much easier than maintaining it, so don’t worry. Here’s what you can do:
- Distract your attention, focus, and concern from sleep. In general, it gets boring . Stop doing all the cool things you do and let go. Once you stop actively exercising, sleep will disappear and you will probably wake up. Or like Beverly Kedzerski, Ph.D. says about this: “fall asleep to wake up.”
- Part of staying awake in lucid sleep is looking back in amazement at everything your mind has created. However, if you focus your gaze on one point in your dream, you can not only cause boredom, but also prevent your real eyes from doing their thing during REM sleep, which will also help you wake up.
- Last but not least, you can wake yourself up. You don’t need to jump off a cliff or kill yourself in your sleep in any way – you just need to give yourself a boost. I have had successful attempts to catch something in my sleep or scream loudly. In the latter case, my real body did make a noise and it woke me up.
However, before you try these methods, keep in mind that these methods are not ideal for getting rid of nightmares. If you are in a state of fear or confusion, these tricks can lead to “false awakenings” or to a state of thought that you are awake but still asleep. You see these dream-in-dreams snippets all the time in films, but they are real and can be far more disturbing than the original nightmare. But don’t worry, next week we’ll be looking at the best ways to beat your nightmares.
Assignment: try dream spinning
Since vigorous physical activity is the key to lasting lucid dreaming, you need a quick and easy way to make your body feel several things at once. Enter “spinning in a dream” as it sounds. The trick was discovered by Stephen LaBerge, Ph.D., and is now widely used by oneuronauts around the world.
The first step is to know how you feel when your lucid dreams begin to fade. This process is felt differently for everyone and can only be learned through personal experience. For me, a fading lucid dream is like a decrease in the contrast of my vision, followed by a loss of color, and then objects and people around me begin to lose shape.
When your lucid dreams begin to fade, do the following:
- Extend your arms and spin in circles, over and over. Do not imagine yourself spinning, actively spin in your sleep so that you can feel this sensation.
- As you spin, remind yourself that you are asleep and that the next thing you see will also be sleep.
- Once you feel like everything is back in focus, do a critical condition test to prove once again that you are asleep.
This process can be repeated several times throughout the entire REM cycle to maintain a state of lucid sleep. Remember, spin to win.
Do you have any special techniques for maintaining clarity of consciousness? If so, do not write in the comments below.
Okay, oneuronauts: sleep well and keep dreaming.