To achieve dream consciousness, constant practice is highly necessary because sporadic practice will fail to develop the requisite background thought processes.

As a rule, employing lucid dreaming entry techniques within the context of dream consciousness produces results after several weeks, and the effects of the techniques are increasingly pronounced with time. If there are no results within a month or two, refrain from these techniques for a period of time, take a break for a week or two, and resolve to assume a fresh start later.

Practitioners often stop using these techniques after initial results as later effects become elusive and the frequency of dream consciousness rapidly declines. These techniques should not be abandoned after first yielding results, though a gradual decrease in practice is generally acceptable.

Raleigh, USA

I was sleeping, minding my business in a dream one day, when all of a sudden lots of ninjas started attacking me throwing knives at me. I deflected one of the knives and then I realized I was dreaming. Now lucid, I began flying around and deflecting knives, having fun (M.R.: no deepening). I didn’t have time to experiment in the astral plane because I was busy deflecting knives. More and more ninjas started attacking me. When I ran away and came to an opening outside (M.R.: no plan of action), a large army of ninjas stared me down, and I knew there were too many. I started shooting ice balls out of my hands in a flowing motion as I began to freeze the entire army of ninjas. As I was freezing them, I felt a sharp pain pierce my back. I had been stabbed by a sword. The fun was over. I forced myself to wake up (M.R.: wrong action).

After awakening, my boyfriend called me. Before saying hello, he said, “April, please go back to sleep so I can take my sword out of your back.” I told him about my dream, and he said that he sent the ninjas into my dream to distract me so that he could put a sword blade into my back to test my intentions regarding him. This proves to me that the movie, Inception, is VERY POSSIBLE!

I had put a lot of work into the book the day before, wrapping up a three-day session. My brain was still very tired, and would need more than the previous night’s sleep to recuperate. After working another hour from 8 to 9 am, I fell asleep. I woke up around dinnertime, ate, and was once again unable to resist falling asleep. After about another hour or two of sleep, I woke up motionlessly to partial conscious awareness after a vivid dream. I realized that my mind was clear and relaxed enough to try to enter lucid dreaming. Moreover, I had an intense desire to do so. I tried separating – and nothing. I began observing images. At first they were quite dull. I could make out a forest landscape somewhere in the distance. It quickly became more and more realistic, and seemed to be sucking me in. However, I didn’t feel like waiting for it to pull me in, and so I tried once again to roll out. I was only able to make several degrees of movement, and then I was stuck again. I returned to my body, and once again rushed to force myself to roll out. I was able to move significantly farther, but was still stuck. I returned again, and even more forcefully started rolling out, this time meeting no resistance.

I felt lucid dreaming to be fairly weak. Even deepening techniques hardly helped. I had no vision, and the sensations had less than 50% the stability of those of real life. I was nearly pulled back into my body. I tried palpation on the objects in my room with double effort, and meanwhile ran around in order to obtain more sensations. It took effort, but the situation started to stabilize. Once I could feel that I was stably in lucid dreaming, I put my hands to my eyes and aggressively tried to see through the darkness. Sight quickly came, and I could see the whole room no less vividly than in real life.

Since lucid dreaming still seemed unstable to me and destined to be short-lived, I decided to put aside my plan of action and instead practice skills that I had not used in a while. First, I went up to the wall and started to forcefully knock on it with my knuckles. I immediately felt sharp and unpleasant pain. I concentrated my attention, and the pain quickly subsided. I knocked even harder. There was no pain. I punched the wall several times with all my strength, breaking the surface of the drywall and leaving a dent. There was no pain at all.

I then looked at my slipper lying next to the bed, and tried to move it just by looking at it. After some hesitation, the slipper started to move a bit, though reluctantly. I noticed that the realism of the space around me sagged somewhat and everything seemed to fade a bit – afterwards, the slipper bent to my every will. I moved it across the floor and made it move through the air. I finally dashed it against the window, shattering it. A cold draft blew in. I then telekinetically flipped the bed over and installed it on the ceiling, all by staring at it. I then focused my attention on the light-bulb of the lamp, trying to turn it on by force of will. The light bulb flickered on, and then off. I increased the depth of lucid dreaming to a hyper-realistic state through peering and palpation, and then tried illuminating the light-bulb again. This proved to be more difficult. It didn’t particularly want to obey my will. But after a few seconds, it gently reddened, and then lit up.

I finished my lucid dreaming skills training session by concentrating on the bed, willing it to catch fire. It immediately started smoldering. Then, small tongues of fire erupted here and there. Within a few seconds, the whole bed was on fire, filling the room with a sulphuric smell and a lot of smoke.

Rubbing my hands together in order to deepen the state, I went up to the broken window, startled that lucid dreaming had lasted so long, as it had initially been so unstable. I decided to use the last moments of it to take off into outer-space in one of those ultrafast machines featured in the move "Star Wars". I focused my attention on the idea, closed my eyes in anticipation, and immediately felt myself moving. I gradually felt the sensation that I wasn’t standing, but sitting on and sinking into a comfortable chair that had just appeared. I now felt that I was dressed in some kind of spacesuit, and holding a pilot’s joystick in my gloved hands. As soon as I focused my attention on that tactile sensation and had already decided to bring back my sight, a horribly loud sound started blaring. A force of titanic proportions pulled me from the chair and cockpit that I was in, its safety restraints nearly tearing me apart. The shock forced my eyes open.

Fortunately, my eyes did not open to the physical world. But unfortunately, I saw that I was approaching a huge spaceship at high speed, with sparks flying about all around me. There was already nothing that I could do. After another second, there was nothing but darkness, and I was weightless. Vexed at the interruption of such an interesting adventure, I totally forgot to employ further techniques, and soon realized that I was lying in bed, and could feel daylight through my eyelids. I figured that it was time to get up and continue writing the book. Without attempting to get back into lucid dreaming, I went to the bathroom to wash up, meanwhile reflecting on what had happened. I looked in the mirror, and did not immediately realize what was happening: I had huge beer-belly. At first I was in shock, because I had devoted so much energy to getting rid of this "trophy" that I got from "bulking up" and heavy weight training. Taking the belly in my hands, I squeezed and rolled the layers of fat. I then realized that I had never had a belly like this before. And then came the epiphany – I was still in lucid dreaming! One can only imagine my relief …

Houston, USA

I already had a few successes with astral projection, but they hadn’t lasted long, and I had never made it out of my house. I consulted with a friend and she told me there was a sort of gravity that tended to pull you back into your body if you stayed too close to it, and that what she did was try to immediately leave the location of the physical body so that the pull would be weaker.

So, I set my intentions on leaving my house as quickly as possible on my next successful attempt. After a few days I had a projection. And I remembered that I had wanted to get out of the house this time, and so as soon as I rose up off the bed I started running down the hall, down the stairs, and to the front door. I opened the door (or at least it felt like I opened the door) and ran outside. I had done it. Within seconds of leaving my body, I made it outside the house. I hadn’t really planned what I would do once outside and I just started running through the yard and towards the street. I happened to look back toward the house, and I saw a couple of little red eyes in the darkness. And those eyes were moving too! I could see that it (whatever it was) was running too, and I was afraid that it was running after me! I got scared and immediately found myself back in my body (M.R.: no maintaining and no re-entering).

This projection was special because it was the first time I was able to leave the house and the first time I encountered another entity while outside my body.

cabeludo@hotmail.co.uk

So I woke up at 6:30 this morning, did a few things, and went back to bed. I didn’t do any techniques as such, but it took me so long to get back to sleep that I felt myself enter sleep paralysis, and so as soon as I felt the moment was right I got up and fell off the end of my bed (seems to be becoming my standard exit procedure these days). After some deepening I walked out my room and saw my reflection in a mirror: I was wearing a hat, which was confirmation for me that I was now in lucid dreaming, as I haven’t worn a hat in years.

So I wanted to repeat my previous test in a slightly different manner. I got my sister to write down a 3 digit number and put it in her room to see if I could read it in the OBE state. I walked in her room and her boyfriend was asleep, I called out his name a few times and tried to convince him it was a lucid dream but he seemed sleepy and didn’t respond. The results from looking at the number were inconclusive, as I perhaps hadn’t deepened enough and it wasn’t very stable. Anyway, after also telling my sister that this was a lucid dream and they could both do what they wanted, I dived through the floor to relocate.

I ended up in an old library and tried some deepening, and the normal method of touching everything worked. There was also a CD on the floor, I wanted to use more senses than touch to deepen further, and so I licked the CD. At first it didn’t taste of anything, but after a few licks it kind of tasted how I suppose a CD would. This did seem to make my surroundings more realistic.

Last night before bed, I was reading a highly interesting website on the Illuminati, actually made by some members. I figured I would try to find out more about them in lucid dreaming, and so I called out, “Illuminati”. Before I finished the word, 3 chairs moved by themselves into a small row and a voice said, “take a seat”, and so I did. The walls of the library opened up into a stage and many robed figures began to put on a show and sing (nothing like I was expecting!). Shortly after it began, I thought to myself, “if I just sit here and watch I will probably wake up soon”, and lo and behold after thinking that I pretty much woke up straight away (M.R.: no re-entering).

Perhaps just having the thought of waking up made me lose lucid dreaming quicker?

Also, I’ve noticed that if I have an idea of what I’m going to do in lucid dreaming, it generally comes with some expectations of what will occur when I try it. Not on one occasion has trying an idea out ever met my expectations (I’m not saying it has been better or worse, but just completely different to what i would expect). In lucid dreaming I would expect happenings to occur based on expectations, but clearly this isn’t quite the case.