[TC_Halogen]

Originally Posted by MrRubix

The problem is that most newbies will try to focus really hard, in their dreams, at some spot on their desk and wait until an apple shows up. They manage to think "I want an apple. I want it to appear here," and then they basically try to envision an apple appearing in the same way you'd envision an apple appearing on your desk in real life -- only you expect it to stay there in your dream after you get it to appear.... but in such a way that you can interact with it as a function of your automation. That is to say, you made the apple appear and now your dream automation involves an apple. Such a common mistake will make you wake up almost every time.

I'd describe it as a sort of "confidence," instead. Instead of just "imagining" an apple into existence, it's really a kind of "I know there's an apple here already." Ever have dreams where you "know" something is true in your dream when, realistically, there's no way it could be true? Or perhaps you've had dreams where you have "false memories" of something but blindly accepted as true? I guess it's a similar sort of function. For me, control is a function of already-fulfilled expectation. If I want to completely change my dream, I might think, "I want to go to Disneyland, and I know it's behind that door over there." Then opening that door will usually lead you to Disneyland if you "know" it's back there.

Of course, with more practice, you can actually use that expectation to make things appear out of nothing. I can actually look at the desk and make an apple appear as part of my dream automation because I know it'll happen -- I don't have to "wait and hope" that my mind will do it for me.

Marcus is bringing up exactly what I was trying to do after first reading about this, and it was extremely frustrating because I would always get the same result - absolutely nothing. Simply trying to force your mind to randomly generate an object will not get you anywhere; think about what you're doing. You are -trying- to create an object, but creating this object will revolve your entire dream around it, because you've focused so hard about it. Lack of addition to anything you dream about will cause you to wake up because you are aware that you created this.

The way that I was able to pick up lucid dreaming was to keep track of certain objects that would appear in dreams and write them down. Regardless of what the dream was, an key item would appear in the dream, and it was either completely out of place, or there was something completely wrong with it. This is where your reality test kicks in. Certain things will be askew, and the toughest part about this is realizing that it's nothing more than a dream. When just starting, seeing random things out of place will be more than enough to pull you out of lucidity.

The way that I practiced lucid dreaming involved exhausting myself greatly with some form of exercise or just having a very long day (in terms of how long I was wake). Because of the extreme fatigue, I was able to gradually push myself down to the dream state (WILD), and even better - it's considerably harder to wake up. However, trying to start lucid dreaming in this manner might not be effective because the fatigue may prove to be difficult to control. It just took me a lot of practice, and a lot of patience.

I'm still finding it difficult to get lucid dreams through DILD -- it's extremely difficult to gather control, unless I get something extremely bizarre.