Lucid Dreaming Techniques: How To Stay Lucid After Achieving Lucidity

Becoming lucid in a dream is a very exciting experience. Unfortunately, this excitement can often lead to you quickly losing the lucidity within moments, as your excited state causes you to wake up. Fortunately, there are specific practices you can use to help prevent this from happening.

Note: If you haven't yet, be sure to start your lucid dreaming journey at the beginning with our first article here: What Is Lucid Dreaming? The Definitive Guide To Learning How To Lucid Dream

As hard as this may seem, the most important thing to do is remain as calm as possible. Enjoy the feeling of lucidity, but as soon as you can, begin to look around and take in your environment. Take time to regroup and collect yourself as you focus on your dream. 

The more attention you can provide to the dream itself, the more likely you’ll be able to remain lucid and not wake up. The following activities have been reported by many lucid dreamers to increase focus once lucidity is attained:

• Spinning. Simply stopping what you’re doing in the dream and spinning around in circles while you remain in one spot can drastically increase the clarity of your dream. This is most likely due to the fact that you’re forcing your dream mind to fill in the blanks of your dream environment. By spinning around, you’re observing all angles of the environment and can become more grounded in the dream.

• Rubbing your hands. If you suddenly feel that your dream is fading or coming to an end, stop and rub your hands together. Providing your dream mind with a tactile experience will help to keep you engaged with the dream and will decrease the chance of you waking.

It is quite common for lucid dreamers to experience false awakenings. 

False awakenings occur when a dreamer believes they have woken up from their dream, but are actually still dreaming. Most of us have experienced this phenomenon, even if not related to lucid dreaming. It can be a very frustrating experience to actually wake up in the morning only to realize that you experienced a false awakening during the night, during which you could have become lucid. 

For this reason, it’s very important to perform a reality check each time you wake up (as you can never be too sure if you’re actually awake or not).

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