If anyone has any advice that’s worked for them on stimulating (lucid) dreaming, I would love to hear it.
Keeping a dream journal will make the above less necessary.
I find my "bandwidth" limited during lucid dreams - I can't explore wide open spaces and if I look at details, I am prone to waking up. I never found the "just like being awake and being there" trope to be true. I spent a lot of time on detailed lucid dreaming - mainly, I wanted to test OBEs, so I would have an "OBE" and go to a place I have never been, but could check later, like a neighbor's house, or a store. It would always be absurd and "poorly rendered", nor would it match, when I checked it later irl (what a surprise).
I noticed I was dreaming and tried flying. It worked for a second, until “god” decided it wasn’t possible and I was pulled back to the ground by an invisible, irresistible force (EDIT: I think it’s called gravity?!). Trying to fight it just woke me up.
The poor rendering of places I’m not meant to go to is something I noticed when I gained control of a dream and tried going into a random building that was a “decoration”. The inside was completely empty, and the walls were gray. It seemed like a polite “fuck you” from my brain.
In a normal dream someone threw me a ball and it followed an “uncanny valley” trajectory. Almost right, but so wrong at the same time. Nice try, brain.
Lately I just try to enjoy my dreams. Paying attention to details can spoil a fun dream (I have to be careful to never check my wristwatch in dreams!)
This may be a Can't Unread sort of thing for some people, but... flying in my dreams is now a source of frustration for me since I noticed that no matter how "high" I fly, there is always something on the horizon higher than me. If I fly over this building, another one even taller will be behind it; if I fly over this tree, another one even taller will be behind it.
My theory is that dreams, unsurprisingly, come from your own personal experience and the neural nets you build, and my visual field in real life always has something above me; buildings, trees, etc. I essentially never stand on the top of the horizon, let alone personally fly for real in the cockpit. Consequently, it is essentially impossible for me to dream that I'm truly flying. (I've managed some exceptions a couple of times, but it's not reliable.) Real flying is frustrating because seeing it out the side through this tiny window is not enough visual stimulation to fix the problem; I really need the cockpit view, preferably during takeoff, and preferably more than once every few months.
However, as a compensating factor, I appear to have over the years watched enough Star (Gate/Trek/Wars) and played enough space flight sims that I can be "in space" with reasonable freedom. I have managed to jump from "the ground", which is as I described above where something is always above me no matter what, to "space", by closing my dream eyes and transitioning. It's a risky move, in the sense that it definitely pushes me closer to just plain waking.
Reflecting on your comment about there always being something on the horizon, I realized that I've always imagined being surrounded by a fairly sparse cloud layer while "in flight".
So my two pieces of advice are: (1) Build up your neural network's ability to support large scenes by observing large scenes, and (2) consider things that would be reasonable to find around you while in flight (clouds, planes, other flying people, birds, etc) and actively try to find "yet larger buildings" as unreasonable.
Staying in a lucid dreaming state, for me, seems to be more about knowing when the density of ambient "plausible reality" drops too low and steering (or snapping) yourself away from those areas.
The dream getting unstable feels like how being extremely tired in real life feels like. Your vision might get slightly blurry, your head will feel like it is moving back and forth, left and right, if that makes sense. And then you lose control. Unless you do something to stabilize the scenery. I find that spinning helps in these situations. Brings you right back.
I’ve found that my dreams are a space for me to integrate experiences.
Many people certainly seem to dream about issues of great significance to them. I have before, but it is by far an exception and not the rule. My dreams give me a window into how I conceptualize the world and how I break things down and store them, but it's actually quite unusual for me to have anything that can be traced back to specific emotional experiences.
I work with a variety of folks, including some of the top founders in the valley, and this type of subtle exploration is one of the most useful tools to unlock deeper levels of clarity, performance and wellbeing.
Detail isn't really an issue in my experience. On a few occasions I've experimented with paying very close attention to reflections and things like water droplets. i found them not just remarkably realistic, but hyperreal, with much more detail than I think actually exists in the real world.
I'm also not sure how to tell the difference between a dream where I dream I'm lucid and an actual lucid dream. There's a definite feeling of being aware that I don't get in regular dreams, but maybe that's just part of the dream!
I've naturally lucid-dreamed for decades now (which also means I have no useful advice on how to do it), and I consider this sort of statement to either mean A: they've got a wildly better visualization center than I do (and I know mine isn't tip-top but it's not terrible) or B: they don't really have a lot of experience at lucid dreaming and haven't noticed the limitations yet. It is far from a Virtual Reality simulation.
Keep a dream journal. This will improve dream recall and help you identify patterns in your dreams. Identifying patterns is good, for example, if I find myself in a classroom I know I'm dreaming. I never go into classrooms awake, but occasionally find myself in one while dreaming.
The best way to keep a dream journal is to spend 5-10 minutes while first awake in bed thinking about your dreams and writing them down. That is the time and location dream recall is the easiest.
Just pepper your angus bruh. The effects of this stuff lasts 4 to 6 months after only smoking it a few times.
Perhaps with Miracle fruit I could drink it but no way on its own.
Just smoke it two or three times. Then prepare for journeys to other worlds.
This is utterly awful advice if you don't want to acquire a nicotine addiction.