Tajtas, on the Astral Pulse asked the question, “Ive been trying so hard to get it past 25 seconds… When I realize im dreaming I start drifting away and then I woke up. Has anyone have had a LONG lucid dream, dozens of minutes? Is it possible hours or days?”.
The_One made a nice response, “I’ve had this problem. It’s quite simple when you think about it. Don’t get excited, concentrate on a animated character (can be any thing). As, don’t think “I’m about to wake up because I’m lucid”. (Easier said than done).
I’ve substained a dream for so long doing this, I got worried that there was something wrong with my body. As over doing this will pull you out of lucidity and back into the dream.
Hope this helps.”
This got me thinking about why something like that works… I wondered if the effect of how we initially Phase into the non-physical can provide us with a clue about how to REMAIN in the non-physical. We know that there’s a fine balancing act that must be done to Phase… you need to work at balancing your consciousness so your mind retains, at least, a single thread of consciousness.
Generally, we do this by keeping our minds active in some manner… in the case of the “Noticing” exercise, it’s placing our conscious intent within the blackness behind our eyes and noticing the changes of that which we’re seeing. In the “Rundown” exercise, we’re placing our intent within the visualized scene that we’re creating with our imagination.
Well, what if, while we’re in the non-physical, we do this act in reverse? When you feel yourself beginning to lose the non-physical consciousness, begin immediately placing your intent on something within the non-physical, in essence it’s allowing you to focus your intent more INTO the non-physical and away from the physical, which is where your intent seems to be going when you’re slowly in the process of waking up. In other words, bring your focus/attention to something on or around you in the non-physical. It’s kind of the same act as increasing your awareness from Lucid to Astral in the first place, except you don’t need to ask yourself any questions. Your goal here is to give your non-physical mind something to focus on so it ignores the physical reality sensations that it’s slowly beginning to perceive.
A lot of people say to look at or rub your hands together. I believe I now understand why that works… because it’s giving you something to focus your mind on that’s away from the physical senses that you’re beginning to feel.
From the point when I begin to feel that I’m waking up to the point when I actually do wake up… seems to be anywhere around 5 – 10 seconds. So, perhaps it’s best to not even wait for that signal to happen and just do this exercise every minute or so, because once the signal occurs, it doesn’t take long before you’re back in bed wondering what happened.