Losing Heart

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Hello All,

A month ago (August 19th) I had my first lucid dream. Since then I seem to have lost heart with my lucid dreaming practice. I stopped doing reality checks during the day because I noticed that when I did them in the dream they were pointless as I already knew I was dreaming. I still play with the hypnagogic state every night, trying to float down knowingly into a dream but I’ve had no luck for a while now, I’ve even started to wake up and have no idea what I drempt about. I’m still keeping a dream diary but the entries are getting shorter and shorter.

I need to revitalise my lucid dreaming practice. I know why I’m doing it and so really want to continue. Are there things I can be doing in the day (I’ll start doing reality checks again) that will help? Just to be clear I affirm,“Tonight I will have a lucid dream”, every night. I do WBTB on my days off. I do MILD when going into sleep but it all seems to have stopped working. I can’t stay on my back too long when I sleep so tend to roll onto my left side, but surely one can lucid dream on their left side? What position you sleep in don’t matter, does it?

What should I be doing in the morning/afternoon/evening to prepare for when I go to sleep?

Any suggestions would be a big help.

Thank you for any time you can spend on this problem,

Atma.

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Took me 5 months to have a lucid dream and I average maybe one a month. Using galantamine helps me, but I’m pretty old and it’s harder just to get to sleep, let alone dream. What makes a difference for me is studying Dharma and putting these principles into practice, using the nighttime as a support for the daytime and vice versa. Have you listened to Andrew’s dialogue with Daniel Love? This may assuage some of your concerns. It does for me. Also, I try to practice gratitude to help me to retain my focus during some of that down time.

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Hey Atma, you are not alone, this happens to me too and probably most lucid dreamers from time to time.

My first suggestion would be to… relax.
Like Alan Wallace said in one of his lucid dream recordings „Chill, dude!“
Sounds to me like doing the daytime practices is stressful to you, since you write you are losing heart.
If there is mental pressure and expectation in your practice, frustration is inevitable. Discipline yes, stress no.
Consider finding a way - your way - to approach lucid dreaming and the associated practices … playfully.

You write that you feel that doing the reality checks is pointless. How do you do them, and how do you experience yourself while doing them?
I too had issues with the RCs and initially just did them superficially and without heart.
Nowadays, I try to playfully and out of curiosity pay attention to the freshness of the miniature moment of awakening when doing a RC.
Take your time and dwell in that awakening experience triggered by prospective memory. For me this feels kind of like the moment when I understand how a magic trick works, or the instance when the solution to a chess problem comes into consciousness.
I try to watch out that doing RCs remains fun.

What also helps me a lot, is shamata practice as taught by Alan Wallace. The triad of relaxation, stability and vividness seems so important for lucidity, as explained in „Dreaming yourself awake“.
It helps me to train to relax my mental tendency to try to control hypnogogic imagery way to early and improves the skill to rest while observing it, neither engaged nor disenganged.

Namkhai Norbu writes that it is not necessary to sleep on the side in order to dream lucidly, although it is supposed to help initially due to energetic reasons (i.e. one channel is more open, with smoother energies).

Best wishes!

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Barry!!! Thank you! I had no idea this podcast existed, I’ve just finished listening to it, it’s fantastic! I was being so stupid about it all. I’ve been practicing Advaita Vedanta for a little over 3 year and only felt any benefit resonantly, I just had a passion for sticking with it. I play the guitar and have done so nearly 30 years! I get it, lucid dreaming is like any other spiritual or recreational practice. I need to put a day time routine in place but otherwise I feel better able to move forward.

Thank you Barry, and thank you Andrew and Daniel.

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Thanks for the advice. I’m going to try and integrate my lucid dreaming practice with my Advaita Vedanta practice, they are full of similarities anyway. I will start to do the reality checks again and, as you say, just try and relax and stop taking it all so seriously. My first month was full of strange occurrences, an OBE and a lucid dream. I suppose I though once it happened it would continue to happen all the time, forever! After watching the video suggested by Barry I feel much better about the whole thing.

Thanks.

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I’ll confess, when Holecek mentioned on a public webinar how he was meditating, got drowzy, then experienced his (mind? brain?) drift down into a dream and then come back out, back to meditating - I think I signed up right then.

Oh to have that experience, to have access to my mind…when torth and stupor (right words?) set in as they always do!

I’ve been giving it a ‘go’ again, using the lotus visualization. I can follow my breath around it once - so 4 breaths. Then to continue - my mind wants nothing to do with it. The next inbreath I’m not on that first lotus leaf much less the lotus, but off into some random wilderness.

I celebrated making it all the way around in attention, but my mind seems to think the celebration was “yay, no more discipline!” and just leaps off!

I really think a solid meditation practice during the day will help me, personally. Effort and Discipline - with a light touch. The desire to be lazy is too great in me. So I notice.

I have a hard time w/ meditation because I honestly feel like a fraud. I’m part of the wreckage that was Shambhala and it’s kept me OFF the cushion.

(it’s just an excuse, though)

Yeah, I might as well toss all my practices. But shamatha has always been the foundation - that doesn’t require any turbulence with gurus etc. Lament, yes. What could have been - yah that’s still there. Anger is underneath it. But I’ve sat w/ shamatha and all kinds of arisings early on, and that’s all these are. So what’s my resistance all about?

Shamatha is basically the most profound instruction - “do nothing.”

“Kickin’ it in space.”

But that’s why/where I personally am having difficulties.

Not sure if you have a daily meditation practice - and if you do, maybe take a peek at how that’s going.

To get woo-woo on you, the sun was in a crappy sign and just bumped into a more social and engaged sign - for personal energies. (the moon really has an impact on my intensity as well - towards learning, or towards ‘checking out’, or ‘fixing myself’, or ‘getting some actual stuff done’).

Just some thoughts.

Losing heart is part of the path. Keeps us real, in a sense. But if we take it too far…

(totally guilty!!)

We have Dreams of Light to start infiltrating our mindstreams and that, I suspect, will help me ‘tap back in.’ It will keep things fresh, for me at least.

I hope it does for you as well!

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