How to lucid dream without waking up?
Lucid dreaming can be a fascinating and freeing experience, allowing you to explore faraway places and the inner workings of your own mind. It’s achieved by realizing (becoming ‘lucid’) that you’re dreaming within a dream. You become aware of the dream itself, and can even control the environment and the characters in the dream. Lucid dreaming’s rich history has been around for centuries. Lucid dreaming is central to the ancient Hindu practice of Yoga Nidra, there’s even examples and references to lucid dreaming among Aristotle’s collected works.
Most people are concerned with achieving the state of lucidity in the first place! Practicing reality checks, and tons of acronyms. FILD. DILD, MILD, WILD. Achieving lucidity is the first big step if you’re experimenting with lucid dreaming. All of these methods can be studied endlessly, and put to work.
Finally. You realize you’ve achieved a lucid dream. Your heart racing you begin thinking of all of the amazing things you want to do and see. Where you want to fly, what super powers you want to try out first. Then bang. Dragged back to the world of the living.
Once you’ve realized you’re in a lucid dream, here’s 3 tips to prevent yourself from waking up:
Relax & Focus
Achieving lucidity is great, and of course you want to run off and experience all the amazing things you can do in a lucid dream. However, it’s important to take a few moments to relax and focus on actually landing in lucidity. Dreams have a wishy-washy quality to them, and if you get carried off in your lucidity, you may forget you’re lucid in the first place. It’s important to lock yourself in and take the time to focus on gaining full control of the dream. Most premature awakenings will happen at this stage.
Physical Sensation
Most dreamers recommend hand rubbing or focusing on the hands. Though others believe that it’s a purely physical sensation. The sensation of your hands rubbing or holding firmly on an object is sometimes enough to stabilize the dream you’re in. This gives your dream something to lock on to.
Reality Checks
Give yourself a few more reality checks, to really understand that you’re dreaming. This gives you a task to complete, which helps you calm down after the initial excitement of gaining lucidity.
As always, the most important part of lucid dreaming is your dream journal. Make sure you’re writing down each technique you’re trying, and keep track of which techniques are working best for your own dream stabilization. Writing down details about each of these dream stabilization attempts will help strengthen the memories associated with your dreams, and provide insight into how you’re behaving in your dreams after achieving lucidity!
Remember, it’s easy to get too excited and immediately lose the wonderful experience of a lucid dream. Take a few moments, maintain your composure, and then go explore dreamland!
