If you already had a lucid dream chances are that you got really excited and woke up 5-10 seconds after realizing that you were dreaming. Thats okay, today I will walk you trough the subject of prolonging your lucid dreams.
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Slowing Down
Lets say that you see a cake on your dining table and it looks delicious. You just want to eat it with one bite. Realizing that you are lucid dreaming feels like you have seen the delicious cake but just 10 times more intense. So, newbies usually jump right on the cake and try to eat it as fast as possible. The result is always the same… they choke and wake up.
The first thing you should do when you realize that you are dreaming should be to slow down and explore the dream environment. Then you can eat the damn cake!
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Techniques for prolonging and stabilizing a lucid dream:
All techniques are based on one simple thing. They change your focus and force you to feel certain sensations. Plus when you are thinking about increasing lucidity and stabilizing dreams you are not thinking about other stuff that might have negative effect.
I have rated the prolongation techniques according to my experience(keep in mind that lucid dreaming is different for everyone, so they might give you different results)
Routines
Mixing those 4 techniques has given me incredible results. I start with rubbing my palms because it is really easy to perform, then when my level of awareness has increased I am ready to do the tornado spin + I am shouting: “increase lucidity” in the same time. I do them simultaneously because the tornado spin can sometimes make you experience a false awakening or loose awareness and slip back into a normal dream. And lastly I do the focus exercise to get extra edge.
When to use this techniques?
1) After you realize that you are dreaming
2) Randomly when you feel that the dream has lost vividness
3) When you feel that the dream is fading away.
*If you loose the visual sense try the hand rubbing technique, if that doesn’t work then try to imagine a object and explore it, focus all of your attention on it until the dream gets stable.
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False Awakenings
A common scenario:
The dreamer realizes that he is dreaming, he gets overexcited and wakes up thinking, “that sucked, okay its time to go to work”. After a while the dreamer actually wakes up again(third time) and realizes that he had a false awakening.
Thats why you should do a reality check each time you wake up.
Next Step:
