From: Harvey Newstrom (newstrom@newstaffinc.com)
Date: Sat Jul 03 1999 - 13:34:08 MDT
Leviathan <Leviathan_3@hotmail.com> wrote:
> I have lucid dreamed a few times, but now I always wake up immediately
after
> I
> become lucid. Does anyone happen to know how to stop this from happening?
> I have heard that as soon as you become lucid, you become more aware of
> outside stimula because you are more aware of your senses than in normal
> dreaming, but if you spin while in the lucid dream, you can stay dreaming
> because
> much of your sensory abilities are being used to simulate the spinning and
> to keep
> you balanced, basically distracting you from outside stimula...I have not
> tried this yet
> though....
Yes, this is exactly right. You become more aware of outside stimula,
because you realize that you are really in bed asleep, and you tend to start
trying to see and feel the real world instead of the dream.
The spinning idea was published in Discover magazine, and they said they
didn't know why it worked. I don't think that balance has anything to do
with it. With many years of experience, I have my own theory. I believe
that when you start spinning, your field of vision moves around to see new
things that were outside of your field of view before. Your
dream-generating parts of your mind have to go into full dream-production
mode to generate the new field of view. This strengthens the dream, and
also gives you more dream stimulus to interpret, so you are less likely to
detect the real world stimulus.
The only thing that makes sense about the balance is that you don't want
your internal sense of balance to realize that you are lying down. You want
to dream that you are standing up (usually). Spinning might confuse this
sense to be unsure which way is down, and which way you are lying down. I
still prefer my first theory above.
The other problem with dreams is remembering them. Dreams go into temporary
memory and are not usually recorded into long term memory. It is like when
you are driving down the road and pass many cars. You don't think about
them and don't remember them later. This is because the conscious mind
filters everything and only records the important stuff. Dreams are somehow
determined to be unimportant, so they fade away quickly. To remember your
dreams, you need to recount the dream to yourself as soon as you wake up.
Try to remember every detail in order as it happened. If you do this, your
conscious awake mind takes note of the information, and it will be
remembered as an important conscious waking thought.
-- Harvey Newstrom <mailto://newstrom@newstaffinc.com> <http://newstaffinc.com> Author, Consultant, Engineer, Legal Hacker, Researcher, Scientist.
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