Lucid dreaming

I had three or so stretches of lucid dreaming last night. I’m getting pretty good at it, if that’s even possible. I know I can occasionally make lucid dreams happen by staying up for a certain length of time (about 10 minutes) after waking up naturally at night. The risk here is that I stay awake slighly too long and then don’t get sleep at all. But when I do have a lucid dream and wake up, I’ll usually be able to get another by immediately entering sleep again. Probably there are ways to achieve them more reliably, but since the dreaming is a bit “exhausting” sometimes, I’m fine with getting them more randomly.

Anyway, once I’m in a lucid dream state I find myself able to do “reality checks”. Everything looks and feels so damn real that I highly suspect it’s not a dream, but I make myself try something wildly unrealistic like making things explode and then realizing it is a dream after all, at which point I usually gain more control “over myself”. It’s just that the dream environment seems to keep trying to prevent me from doing the things I want, or “delaying” for example by requiring me to walk somewhere I could plausibly do the thing I want, and then that walk turns very long (in which case I might be falling to the realm of normal dreams).

The best lucid dreams are very similar to those depicted in the film Inception, probably one reason why I like the film so much. I’ve even had dreams-within-a-dream lucidly and it was so uncannily similar. I think it’s not that unusual given how quite common it is to normally dream about sleeping or waking. The time-dilation is so real in my lucid dreams, although I highly doubt it would compound the way it does in Inception… Sometimes I know my alarm is going to ring in about 30-60 minutes, but I don’t reach out to stop it because that might make me too awake to be able to continue to dream lucidly, and I know 30 minutes of such dreaming feels really long. There are probably some physical limits to the length of dreams, but at least I strongly feel like I’m having one continuous dream from the moment of my alarm to the next alarm (which are spaced by 30 minutes because I’m terrible at getting up from bed).