Becoming lucid while you dream is actually the easy part, oneironauts. Now we’re going to learn how to hold on to it and make our nightly adventures last. Welcome to Week Four of our Lucid Dream Workshop.
How to Stay Asleep and Maintain Lucidity
If you’ve managed to become lucid for the first time, it probably didn’t last very long.
For most people, the process goes a little like this:Critical state test.
“Wow, I’m dreaming!”
Wake up.
This usually happens because novice oneironauts get too excited when they realize they’ve finally achieved lucidity. Don’t feel bad if that keeps happening to you. It’s hard not to be excited about it, after all.
Fortunately, getting past that barrier is easy to do as long as you’re persistent. The more often you can reach a lucid dream state, the more you’ll get used to it and find it less surprising. But there are other helpful tricks you can do within your dream as well. Try these three things in this order:
- First, stay calm and look at your hands. If looking at your hands is part of your critical state test (like mine), do it again. Stay focused on the fact that you’re dreaming, but let yourself ease into it. Don’t immediately go flying into the air shouting “I’m dreaming!”
- Now, practice some inner speech while in your dream. Develop a mantra of affirmation you can repeat over and over in your head, like “this is a dream, this is a dream, this is a dream…” If you have to say it “out loud” in your dream, that’s okay, but it’s better to do it in your head so it doesn’t dominate the dream experience.
- Once you’ve got your mantra going, perform some kinesthetic actions or movements to stimulate the brain. Something as simple as rubbing your hands together like a dastardly villain is more than enough. Actions like hovering or pushing your hand through objects are useful actions as well, but they might also jolt you awake if you’re still not used to the dream state. Make your actions subtle.
Practice those steps and you should have an easier time staying asleep and lucid. If that’s not enough, you can also try a technique called “dream spinning.” But we’ll go over that in the assignment section.
You should consider active engagement as a key player when trying to maintain lucidity. More often than not, oneironauts lose their focus and wake up because they weren’t stimulating…
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