While exploring your nocturnal journeys and witnessing the weird conjectures of your subconscious mind, do you often find yourself saying, “Hey, is this a dream?” Well, then you must be interested in learning tips on how to stay lucid in a dream for more than just a moment.
The most obvious way of maintaining this lucidity is to avoid panicking when the dream starts fading. At such times, you can observe the dream environment quickly and just go with the flow of the dream.
Conscious efforts that bring on anxiety and frustration won’t help in trying to stay lucid in a dream. Instead, you are likely to drift away from your dreamland and be thrown into reality if you struggle too hard.
Here are a few techniques to help you learn how to stay lucid in a dream for longer.
- Keeping your eyes closed and focusing on the settings and sense perceptions pertaining to the dream works as an effective trick to prolong lucidity in your dream. Staying calm and relaxed can help achieve this focus.Try to look at the tables, trees, vehicles or other objects in your dream scene to reinforce the dream feel. You could also focus on tastes or aromas arising in your dream, just enough to avoid waking up. However, do not fix your attention on a particular object for too long.
- While maintaining this focus though, you would not want to lose lucidity. Therefore, it is suggested to perform reality checks at intervals. In this regard, applying common sense and logic is the simplest thing to do. Observe your clothes or dream body to ascertain if you are in dream or reality.You may also perform simple mathematical calculations like addition or subtraction. Skilled lucid dreamers can even perform levitation tests by checking if you are able to fly. Programming yourself to conduct such reality tests will help you realize that you are dreaming.
- Once you have achieved stability, instruct yourself to gain lucidity by vocalizing your intent. You can repeat phrases like “This is a lucid dream”, “More lucid awareness”, etc.
- Rubbing your dream hands together is probably one of the most popular dream stabilizing techniques for increasing lucidity in a dream. This movement tends to engage your mind, thereby preventing it from returning to waking state.
- Spinning your dream body round and round is another widely used technique to stay lucid in a dream. You can also try falling backwards in order to ground yourself to the dream environment.Initially, these tricks tend to induce false awakenings (believing that you have awoken from sleep when in actuality, you are still dreaming). Thus, you can conduct reality checks/tests to decipher whether you are dreaming or not.
- In cases where you try to maintain conscious awareness while dreaming but are being forced out of your dream to an awake state then try to remain still in the position you were while dreaming and imagine yourself back in the dream. Do not let your attention hover to surrounding objects from the real world.
Apart from following these suggestions on how to stay lucid in a dream, try to remain being a part in your dream scenario by finding more details in it rather than wondering what next and letting your left brain take over.
