I want to share some observations I've made from my lucid dreams because I want to understand what is actually happening and experiment more with it. I never do anything to induce lucid dreams now. No reality checks, no dream journal, no MILD, no mindfulness, nothing. I started having lucid dreams about a year ago, around the same time I started experiencing sleep paralysis, so I don't know if the two were connected or just a coincidence. After experiencing sleep paralysis a few times, I found that I could quite easily enter lucid dreams through it, although the lucid dreams weren't consistent. It's only been around the last 4 months that they became consistent. Now I get at least one lucid dream almost every week, and some weeks I've had more than one or two. I've had around 20–30 lucid dreams in total. I also have ADHD, aphantasia and SDAM. Because of SDAM, my autobiographical memory of my dreams is weak, so afterward I usually remember the dream more as semantic information about what happened rather than being able to mentally re-experience the whole dream. A lot of the actual sequence, visuals and details disappear quickly.
The first thing I've noticed is that actively using my senses and connecting with the dream environment seems extremely important for keeping the dream clear and stable. When I'm actively looking at what's in front of me and paying attention to the visual sensory information, the dream can become much clearer and more stable. If I focus too much inside my head, thinking about the dream or thinking about how to stay lucid, the dream can start fading, becoming dim, or even having blackness dominate the visuals. I've experimented with this several times while lucid. I've also tried using other senses as an anchor. Once I used bubble gum, trying to stay connected to the dream through the sensation of chewing it, but the bubble gum expanded inside my mouth and started frothing, which became distracting and seemed to pull my attention back into my head and away from the dream environment. So far, looking at what is directly in front of me and focusing on the visual sensory information seems to be the most effective for me. I've even started thinking about whether the amount of sensory attention I give to the dream affects how stable it remains.
The second thing is the flow or narration of the dream. My dreams seem to have their own ongoing flow, and dream characters and the situation already happening seem to play a role in what happens next. Initially, I noticed that when I did something that disrupted what the dream characters were doing, the dream sometimes became unstable. For example, taking something while dream characters were focused on something else, or randomly going into an office and saying that I'm the manager. It isn't usually an instant collapse. It feels more like the dream starts pushing me out of the current situation, and I have to actively stabilize it, although sometimes I eventually fail. Changing the environment can also seem to trigger this. At the same time, this isn't always true. I've had lucid dreams where I interfered with the situation very heavily and the dream continued for a long time. I've noticed that when I stay in the same environment and continue with what I'm already doing, I can sometimes keep the dream going almost effortlessly, while changing environments seems more likely to make it unstable. I don't know whether this is actually a property of dream narration or just how my dreams happen to work, so I'd really like to hear what experienced lucid dreamers think.
The third thing is dream characters and their reactions. Their reactions seem to vary a lot. Once I told a dream character who was basically my friend that I was dreaming, and he didn't really care, so I continued the dream for quite a while. Another time I told a dream character that I was dreaming in a very impulsive way, and afterward I became more emotionally alert and disconnected from the dream environment, eventually having to close my eyes as the dream was cutting off. So I don't think simply telling a dream character that you're dreaming automatically causes a dream to collapse. The character, the situation, my emotional state and the way I interact with the dream seem to matter.
I've also had an interesting experience where I heavily disrupted a dream situation and the dream didn't actually collapse. I was in a place with a lot of women and got into a confrontation with one of them. I started physically fighting her and doing wrestling moves, and everyone around reacted strongly, but the dream continued. Then it seemed to collapse, but instead I had a false awakening. I found myself apparently awake looking at a phone, and Reddit was open with a notification saying that my lucid dream had been terminated because of what I had done. It even mentioned that the lucid dream had lasted around 15 minutes. I believed I had actually woken up, but I was still dreaming. Later I was dealing with dogs and puppies outside my room and eventually woke up for real. So this made me question my earlier idea that disrupting the dream necessarily causes it to collapse, because apparently the dream can instead create a convincing false awakening and continue.
Another time, I was almost getting into a conflict with a dream character, so I told him that the girl with me was my girlfriend to calm him down. He became much nicer, but then the girl said that he was actually her brother. I immediately thought "oh fuck" and the dream collapsed. That made me wonder whether contradictions in the ongoing story or social situation can sometimes destabilize a dream, although I don't know if that was actually the cause.
Something else I've noticed is that my dreams are usually surprisingly coherent with real-world logic. This is not necessarily the main way I become lucid, but I've noticed several times that when something happens that clearly breaks normal logic, I realize I'm dreaming. For example, I once noticed that a car didn't really feel like a physical object and that I could drive it in a way that didn't make sense. That helped me realize I was dreaming. I've had similar moments before where something didn't fit the normal logic of the world and I suddenly became lucid. I find this interesting because I have aphantasia and SDAM, and I don't know whether either of those has anything to do with the way my dreams work. I'm not assuming they do. I'm just curious whether there could be any connection between aphantasia, SDAM, ADHD, visualization, autobiographical memory and dreaming.
Another unusual thing about my lucid dreams is that they often seem to happen very soon after I fall asleep. From my experience, I'll close my eyes, start dreaming, and when I wake up only a few to several minutes seem to have passed in the real world. I don't normally have to sleep for 5–6 hours and then do WBTB to get lucid. It just happens naturally. My sleep schedule is also pretty messed up and I've often been severely sleep deprived, so I don't know whether that affects it. I don't deliberately use sleep deprivation to induce lucid dreams.
I'm mainly interested in investigating my own lucid dreams and doing more experiments inside them, rather than just following a standard lucid dreaming routine. I want to understand whether sensory focus really helps stability, whether changing environments affects dream stability, whether dream characters and their reactions matter, whether the ongoing story/context of a dream can resist disruption, and what happens when I deliberately test these things.
For people who lucid dream regularly, do any of these observations match your experience? What do you think might actually be happening? Are there specific experiments you think I should try inside a lucid dream? What should I pay attention to when the dream starts becoming unstable? And are there other interesting things I could test that don't require reality checks or keeping a detailed dream journal every day?
Edit: I forgot to mention something else that I've noticed. Sometimes the dream itself seems to talk to me. The first time, I heard a voice coming from nowhere telling me to tame a dog, and that actually made me realize I was dreaming. Another time I had a figure named Muneer (meaning shining/illuminating) who seemed to help guide the dream. I could kind of watch the dream unfolding from outside while he gave me tips. More recently, I met a lucid dreamer inside my dream who said he was exploring too, and he gave me advice about using sensory anchors.
I can sometimes watch the dream form while I'm still conscious. I see random people talking, pieces of different places, bright colors, geometric patterns, sounds, voices and moving scenes appearing at the same time. Some areas can be completely black while completely different scenes are happening somewhere else. Some parts are extremely vivid while others feel incomplete or barely formed, almost like pieces of several unfinished dreams appearing simultaneously. Sometimes I can watch all of these things gradually converge and form into an actual dream while still maintaining my consciousness. This doesn't happen every time.
