Extending Lucid Dream. In order to enjoy yourself in a long lucid dream, you need to remain lucid (consciousness) as long as you can. When we first discovered this new-found exciting and fun surreal experience, most of us can only manage to stay in lucidity state for a short while. Then the dream-world around you suddenly begins to fade and you feel your dream consciousness decreasing. And you wake up. It is very frustrating as we are not able to hold on and continue dreaming.
Here are tips on how to control or stabilize your level of lucidity, so you can prolong your lucid dreams.
1. Be Calm: the first thing is remain calm and remind yourself not to be overly-excited. Tell yourself to stay relaxed. Or you can utter to yourself, “Calm down, calm down.”
2. Stay Focused: As dreams happen fast and fuzzy, try to stare at any object in your dream. Focus on it and chances your dream will fade out.
3. Hand Rubbing: You just rub both of your hands together, as suggested by Dr. Stephen Laberge. I tried this method and it works for me. Or you can try just by looking closely at your own hands.
4. Observe Your Surrounding: Try looking around you and do realty checks whether it is a real world or not.
5. Spinning Round: Do spinning in your dream, either with your eyes open or closed. But you need to concentrate or you may find yourself waking up. According to Laberge, when you wake up when doing a spin, it could be just a false awakening.
(Note: False awakening is waking up within a dream. You think that you have awaken from a sleep just like in real life. But actually you are still asleep in your lucid dream!)
So you need to conduct a reality check, before you keep your lucid dreaming going again.
6. Falling Backwards: Try falling backwards to keep your lucidity going. Again this method could cause you to wake up or cause you to experience false awakening.
7. Demand Lucidity: Say aloud or shout something like: “I want to stay lucid” or ” I want to keep dreaming”. Sounds silly though, but it works fine for me at times.
8. Say What You’re Doing: Narrate to yourself what you can see or doing in your dream. For instance, “I am walking down a shopping mall full of people”, “I’m driving in my car now”, or “The girl over there is gorgeous”.
9. Be Mobile: Try moving around all the time and concentrate. Don’t stay still or you could slip out of lucidity.
10. Do Arithmetic: Before I came to know all the other methods on how to extend my dream, I tried this method on my own. Do a simple arithmetic question, for instance 2 plus 2 just to check my consciousness.
11. Grab Things: Try grabbing something you see in your dream and at the same time, tell yourself that you are dreaming.
Anyway, this is what I do if I happen to wake up while in the midst of my lucid dream. I re-enter it by not opening my eyes or also try not to move my body. I just lay still and wait for the dream to return. At the same time, I keep reminding myself that I am dreaming.