lucid dreaming maintenance or “maintaining” refers to techniques that allow a practitioner to remain in lucid dreaming for the maximum amount of time possible. Without knowledge of “maintaining” techniques, the duration of lucid dreaming will be several times shorter than it could otherwise be. The shortest lucid dreams last just a few seconds. Beginning practitioners usually fear not being able to exit a lucid dream; this shouldn’t ever be a concern because the real challenge is being able to maintain lucid dreaming state, which is easily lost unless lucid dreaming maintenance techniques are used.

lucid dreaming maintenance consists of three primary principles: resisting a return to the wakeful state (known as a foul), resisting falling asleep, and resisting a false exit from lucid dreaming.

Resistance to returning to the body is self-explanatory, whereas resistance to falling asleep is unclear to many. Not everyone knows that almost half of lucid dreaming experiences usually end in a quite trivial way – falling asleep. A person usually loses attentiveness, his or her awareness dissipates, and everything around gradually loses clarity and turns into what is for all intents and purposes a usual dream.

Resisting a false exit from lucid dreaming (false awakenings) is a lot more surprising and dramatic. Sometimes a practitioner detects an impending exit from lucid dreaming and subsequent deepening techniques fail to work, resulting in what seems to be a return to the body and physical reality. Sure that lucid dreaming has ended, a practitioner may stand up and then fall asleep after perceiving a few steps. In such cases, falling asleep most often happens without any movement, but while still lying in bed. The problem is that the difference between lucid dreaming and reality can be so subtle that in terms of internal or external indicators, lucid dreaming practically can’t be distinguished from reality. Therefore, one must know the necessary actions to take in the event that lucid dreaming ceases, since the end of a lucid dream could actually be a trick and purely imagined.

There are specific solutions for the three problems described in addition to general rules that apply to any lucid dreaming experience. Studying these rules should be given just as high a priority as studying the specific solutions, since only some of them, when applied separately, may help one to remain in lucid dreaming several times longer than usual.

In some cases, techniques for maintaining are not applicable. However, knowledge of how to maintain is useful for the majority of experiences. Also, there might be situations when someone need only resist a foul, while someone else may need to resist falling asleep. All of this is very specific to each case and can be determined only in practice.

With perfect knowledge of all the techniques for maintaining, a lucid dream may last two to four minutes, which doesn’t sound like an extended duration, but really is. A particularity of lucid dreaming space is that achieving something and moving around in it takes a minimum amount of time, mere seconds. Thus, so much can be done during 3 minutes in lucid dreaming that one literally needs a list, so as not to waste any time.

There are theories that have neither been proven nor disproven claiming that time in lucid dreaming contracts and expands relative to real time. Thus, one minute of real time while in lucid dreaming may feel much longer in terms of lucid dreaming time.

Perception of time varies from practitioner to practitioner. Novices especially perceive a real minute as more like 5 to 10 minutes in lucid dreaming. This is determined by the particularities of individual psychology, state of mind, and the type of events that occur in lucid dreaming.

In order to understand how long a lucid dream really lasted, one does not need to try using a stopwatch in the real world. It is better to count how many actions took place in it and how much time each of them could have taken. The result will differ from one’s first rough estimate several times over.

The maximum duration of lucid dreaming depends heavily on the ability to apply lucid dreaming maintenance techniques. Some practitioners have difficulty breaking the two-minute barrier while some find it easy to remain in lucid dreaming for 10 minutes or longer. It is physically impossible to remain in lucid dreaming forever because even a 20-minute lucid dreaming is unheard of.

Minneapolis, USA

I had a regular separation, but no vision. I felt around, but the furniture I felt wasn’t my furniture. I thought it would be cool to be in a mountain cabin, and when I gained vision I was in an unfamiliar mountain cabin. Again, I was alone.

It was completely real again, like my last experience. I was so excited I started running around (after doing deepening). I ran around the house exploring for a while until I was out breath (M.R.: no plan of action). Then, I was afraid that all the heavy breathing would wake me up.

This time, the thought of having a real body instantly made lucid dreaming experience weaken, so much so that I was afraid I would fall asleep. I began to deepen.

Then I saw a jug of a drink in the kitchen and told myself it would help me deepen.

It was the most delicious thing I’ve ever tasted. I’ve eaten and drunk in lucid dreaming before, and it always tasted like whatever I thought it would. I didn’t have any expectations, only that of deepening. It was like a sweet carbonated drink, only without any bite. It was truly indescribable.

Strangely, the drink did deepen me back to complete realism, and I was so excited that I ran around exploring again. Then, once again, I became afraid of waking. This time, that thought brought me back to bed.

I attempted to separate, but then my wife called for me and so I got right up. After a few moments I realized that I was still in lucid dreaming. I actually only got up in lucid dreaming, but it took me a few moments to realize this. I was back in my house.

After some time in my house, I awoke in my bed for real, but quickly re-entered lucid dreaming into my house once more.

I was going to do a fourth reentry, but my real wife shook my arm during separation to get me up for the day, because it was well past the time I normally get up.

I’m not sure how long I had slept for before I entered lucid dreaming the first time. I do remember having a very vivid normal dream during that time. I may have also fallen asleep between lucid dreaming experiences, but I still remember them being so real that I doubt it.

I got up for the day 1.5 hours after first waking up for the deferred method (lucid dreaming likely happened just in the last few minutes).

The Art of Dreaming (1993)

…It seemed at that time that every breakthrough in dreaming happened to me suddenly, without warning. The presence of inorganic beings in my dreams was no exception. It happened while I was dreaming about a circus I knew in my childhood. The setting looked like a town in the mountains in Arizona. I began to watch people with the vague hope I always had that I would see again the people I had seen the first time don Juan made me enter into the second attention. As I watched them, I felt a sizable jolt of nervousness in the pit of my stomach; it was like a punch.

The jolt distracted me, and I lost sight of the people, the circus, and the mountain town in Arizona. In their place stood two strange-looking figures. They were thin, less than a foot wide, but long, perhaps seven feet. They were looming over me like two gigantic earthworms. I knew that it was a dream, but I also knew that I was seeing. Don Juan had discussed seeing in my normal awareness and in the second attention as well. Although I was incapable of experiencing it myself, I thought I had understood the idea of directly perceiving energy. In that dream, looking at those two strange apparitions, I realized that I was seeing the energy essence of something unbelievable.

I remained very calm. I did not move. The most remarkable thing to me was that they didn’t dissolve or change into something else. They were cohesive beings that retained their candlelike shape. Something in them was forcing something in me to hold the view of their shape. I knew it because something was telling me that if I did not move, they would not move either.

It all came to an end, at a given moment, when I woke up with a fright. I was immediately besieged by fears. A deep preoccupation took hold of me. It was not psychological worry but rather a bodily sense of anguish, sadness with no apparent foundation.

The two strange shapes appeared to me from then on in every one of my dreaming sessions.

Eventually, it was as if I dreamt only to encounter them. They never attempted to move toward me or to interfere with me in any way. They just stood there, immobile, in front of me, for as long as my dream lasted…

I had a lucid dream. It was a dream I have quite often: going home from work and realizing I’m missing my suitcase. As soon as I got home in my dream, sure enough my suitcase was standing there. I then became aware of a discontinuity: I remembered that I had punched the flextime clock at work when leaving, but the card for this was in my suitcase. How could I have done this if my suitcase was at home? This must be a dream! I became lucid, and as usual at this occasion I immediately woke up in my excitement. However, I instantly entered the vibrational state, which seemed very strong and stable. I tried the rolling out method and it worked perfectly.

As usual, I reached for the silver cord, but only felt something like mild electrical energy in my neck where the cord is usually located (M.R.: no deepening). First off, I decided to walk into my mother’s room with whom I was living at the time (M.R.: no plan of action). I expected to see her in bed and for an instant I thought I’d see exactly this, her face on the pillow (I couldn’t see very well however), but then I realized that she must have been in the living room since she always got up very early and must surely have been awake at this time – it must have been a reality fluctuation. Next, I looked into one of the mirrors in my mother’s room, wondering what I would see. What I saw were several distinctly separated body parts of mine floating around – like a photograph of me had been cut into a jigsaw puzzle!

Then I looked at my hands, they started to melt until the stumps looked cut off, just like the picture in the mirror. Next I continued into the living room, looking for my mother, but I didn’t see her. Now I decided that I finally had to leave my apartment, something I had never accomplished in all my years of OBEs. Without any difficulty I walked through the closed main door and out into the corridor. The light out there seemed to be on, but I realized that I was having some sort of tunnel vision, a very narrow field of view. I demanded more energy and better sight, but this didn’t help much. As I walked down the corridor, physical reality disappeared more and more towards the end of the hallway (where in reality the door to my grandmother’s apartment was located, where I wanted to go), there was just some kind of rectangular portal. Now only half conscious, I decided to return to my body and end the experience because I didn’t want to risk losing my memory of it (M.R.: wrong logic). That very instant, I awoke physically in my bed (M.R.: no re-entering).

Moscow, Russia

Returning from a night out, we wandered into a shop called "The Magic Stone". We bought a druse piece (small crystals encrusted on the surface of a rock or mineral, in our case, amethysts). According to my girlfriend, the rock helps one to "tune in to one’s dreams". To that end, one simply needed to put the piece on the headstand of one’s bed, and just go to sleep. That’s just what we did. We had to get up really early the next morning (at about 5 am) in order to make it for an excursion. As it were, we didn’t have time to waste, but I nevertheless made an attempt to "tune in" to my dreams. I feel asleep at some point, but continued on to dream that I was lying on the bed and trying to tune-in for an exit from the body. At that very moment, I felt a light tingling in my back, a kind of life energy. I even tried to facilitate the sensation, thinking, "great, it’s coming, so act!". It intensified, and now felt like waves going up and down my spine (M.R.: no separation). A characteristic sensation, long forgotten, went through my body. The sensation could not be considered pleasurable in any way, and that’s when I thought to myself, "now I remember why I had stopped intentionally trying to enter lucid dreaming." However, it was already too late to turn back. At some moment I was lifted up, barely having time to look back at the couch.

I soon found myself in a spacious room (M.R.: no deepening). It was so large that the only thing that I could see clearly was the wall next to me. There were also some people in the room. They all wanted something from me and kept coming up to me with stupid pretexts. I kept telling them to "buzz off", and tried to drive them away. I had only one thought in my head: "I’ve got to find my girlfriend". I tried as hard as I could to remember where we had fallen asleep, but my memory kept failing me. Different characters constantly distracted me the whole time, one of them was especially persistent. At one point, he even insisted that I help him to open his bottle of wine with a corkscrew. I decided to help him, and once I had opened the bottle, I thought: "Why not? I’ve never tried out wine in lucid dreaming," and put the bottle right to my lips. The wine tasted really funny, more like watered-down blackberry jam with pieces of fruit floating around. The unfinished bottle somehow was no longer in my hands, and I continued trying to get out of that room.

The only thing I could find to deepen with was the wall of a strange construction made of wooden planks. It was whitewashed with what seemed to be an oil-based paint (more than anything else, it reminded me of an outhouse). I was about to poke my head in when an assertive type warned that, "… it’s a portal from which uninvited guests are able to crash in…" Not eager myself to climb in there, I contented myself with taking off a small dark mirror from the outer wall. I played around a bit with my reflection (which did not always want to follow when I moved my head), but those characters milling about stuck to me like glue. I then decided to have some fun, and began looking into the mirror together with those companions, in pair with one at a time. However, their reflection was quite different from their outward appearance. I got quickly bored with this game, and told everybody to go away again.

I finally decided to get out of that building, concentrating on where the place at which we were sleeping might be. I abruptly opened a door, but was disappointed. There was an unfamiliar outdoor scene on the other side. It seemed to be just before dawn outside, the darkest hour. Single cars went down the street. I began to peer at the cars parked at the curb. They had quite a funny-looking appearance. Suddenly, a car swerved off the street and towards me. It drove up to me, and I could see an interesting-looking woman sitting behind the wheel. She was wearing mostly green. We talked, and I couldn’t get past the idea that she was speaking "bookishly", as if quoting the lines from a character in 19th century literature. I told her, "Now you’re saying all that and so on…" She looked at me, and I noticed her strange eyes. She had green ladybugs instead of ordinary pupils. I realized that I was beginning to return to reality (M.R.: no maintaining).

I woke up (M.R.: no re-entering). I realized that I was lying on my back with my arms at my sides, and holding my girlfriend’s hand in mine. She suddenly woke up too, and began to relate her experience…