Staying calm is one of the primary things to learn about remaining lucid in your dreams. It’s really easy when you first become lucid to lose control of yourself. Staying calm is difficult, but it will ensure that you remain lucid for longer. If you’re having trouble staying calm in lucid dreams, you may find that you wake up really easily. This can be a huge problem, particularly, if you are close to waking up, anyway. Staying calm will help you get a grip so you can practice other methods of increasing lucidity and lengthening your lucid dreams.
If you’re struggling with staying calm, the first thing to remember is not to be too hard on yourself. It’s not at all unusual for beginning lucid dreamers to wake themselves up several night in a row because they’re simply having trouble staying calm. However, if you can learn a few simple techniques, you may be able to breathe – literally and with your dream body – and keep your mind calm enough to stay in your dream for longer.
Once you start regularly having lucid dreams, these techniques are helpful for staying calm. They’re some that I used particularly when I was starting out as a lucid dreamer, but they come particularly in handy even these days when my emotions get a little out of control.
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Add calm to your Mnemonic Induced Lucid Dreaming (MILD) mantras
Practicing Mnemonic Induced Lucid Dreaming is a great way to start out, and if you haven’t tried it yet, I’d highly suggest you do. When you’re repeating a mnemonic as you’re falling asleep, start asserting to yourself that you’ll not only wake up in your dreams but that you’re going to be staying calm when you do. Something like, “I will become lucid during my dreams, and I will stay calm and collected.” Remember that assertions and beliefs play a huge part in how your lucid dreams play out, so this can be really helpful.
Focus on your hands
Rubbing your hands together and focusing on every detail of them is one of the best ways to increase lucidity during a dream, but it can also help you stay calm. For me, it’s like, “Oh, these are my hands. They’re nothing new.” Instead of getting freaked out by crazy dream characters or unusual dreamscapes, I just let the normal sight of my hands calm me down. Once I’m calm, I can look up and start experiencing the dream.
Do some mental math
Most people don’t like doing math in their heads, and I’m one of them. However, it does help me stay calm by waking up the logical part of my brain and allowing that part to overcome the wilder, more emotional side that makes staying calm difficult. I like to use basic multiplication problems, which I still have to think through. If you’re a math whiz, you might actually need to do some more complex math to really get your brain to do more than move in everyday ruts that don’t require much actual thinking.
Practice
These are just three things that make staying calm a little easier. However, it will all get simpler and easier with practice over time. It’s easy to freak when you find yourself lucid in a dream, especially if it hasn’t happened to you often. As you get used to becoming lucid and are able to do them more often, though, you’ll automatically start staying calm more easily. This isn’t something beginners really like to hear because they want to get on to the good stuff right away, but it’s true. Practice is imperative here as in most other things in life!
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Rubbing your hands
Rubbing your hands together is one of the most-used ways to increase lucidity and stabilize lucid dreams. Rubbing your hands doesn’t work for everyone, but it’s one of my personal favourite techniques.
Sometimes you wonder what makes techniques like rubbing your hands work for some people and not others. It really has a lot to do with your personality and the way you think. I, for instance, am a very tactile person. I can’t walk through clothing racks without running my hands along all the textures, and in school, my favourite art projects always involved textured paper or clay instead of just crayons.
This is why, I think, the rubbing your hands technique works so well for me. However, even if you’re more of a visual, spatial, or audible thinker, this technique may work for you for a couple of reasons. For one thing, rubbing your hands is a great way to establish that you have a dream body. For many people, this is an essential part of making a dream more lucid.
Also, when you’re rubbing your hands together and looking at them, you can focus on the details of sensation and visualization. This can make the other details in your dream more vivid. As a general rule, the more vivid the dream, the long you’ll stay lucid and the more your lucidity level will increase.
So, rubbing your hands is a great stabilization technique, but there are a few things you need to know if you’re going to try it.
One is that the rubbing your hands technique doesn’t work for everyone. For some people, it will just seem to make them wake up every time. Some techniques are just like that. However, don’t be afraid to try things in lucid dreams just because of this, because you never know what’s going to work for you and what won’t until you try things out. If you try rubbing your hands and end up waking up while you’re doing it, then you just know that you have to try something else the next time.
Another thing to know about rubbing your hands is that it will probably work better if you’re also looking at your hands. As I stated before, stabilization techniques are all about connecting you with your dream work and making details stand out in the entire dream world. While watching your hands rub against one another, let yourself feel them. Yes, you should be able to feel physical sensations in a really detailed lucid dream!
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Also, notice the visual details while you’re rubbing your hands – the texture of your skin, the jewellery you’re wearing, the color of your nails, etc. When you look up from this exercise, you might find that you notice a lot more visual and tactile detail in the dreamscape around you. Noticing detail simply makes you more lucid so your mind can put more detail into your lucid dreams after this exercise.
Something else to note about rubbing your hands is that you may need to repeat the action multiple times in the dream. Some dreams – particularly vivid ones, especially – stabilize very well, and you don’t have to re-stabilize them too often. Other dreams, however, need to be stabilized every few seconds if you want to keep them going. If the detail of the dream starts to fade, you might want to look down and start rubbing your hands again to re-stabilize it.
Finally, there are alternative options to rubbing your hands. For instance, you can reach out and touch something in your dreamscape while you’re looking at it. Anything that helps you notice both your dream body and the vividness of the dream world or dreamscape can help increase lucidity.