09d Question: Focusing TOO hard?

[AspirationRealized]

I've been talking to a few people about my current practice of Lucid dreaming. I found that before it was hard to keep myself focused and practicing consistently, so I devised a way of keeping me on track, called Determination.

Determination is just a record of me trying my hand at very basic induction techniques, spread evenly throughout the week (lifted from a schedule BillyBob created). Every day I updated this post, with what I did the night before and my results in the morning. Writing this down would help identify causes for failure (and successes, should there have been any), and showing it to some of my closer dreaming friends would be a sort of pact... now that I had set out to do it, I couldn't let myself back down.

Its a long read and I doubt that a majority of people here would be concerned enough to read through it, so I'll sum it up basically as this. I had about two non lucid dreams that were clear enough to warrant a DJ entry, and a few fragments (one of which I was chasing pj on a motorcycle with a rocket launcher... but I digress). If you look for the causes, there are mainly two: interferences from my family and work, and not getting woken up by alarm enough.

Its important to also understand that at the start of this Determination thing, I drastically changed my sleeping habits. I went from my usual which was stay up all night and get about four to five hours of sleep to sleeping earlier and getting eight hours of sleep at least every night. This had some pretty obvious effects on my practice - I would often wake in the middle of the night four hours into sleep and be restless for some time, or I would not be used to my mornings at all... basically, I wouldn't recall anything.

Now more on to the point of this. Throughout these two weeks I have been VERY focused on Lucid dreaming. Its something I would often think of to preoccupy myself from my work, and I continued learning and talking about it later at night. Brother Steel and I talked about this, and he suggested that maybe I'm thinking way too hard on this and that I should take a week's break from my practice to help even things out.

Now for the actual question I pose to you fine dreamers in this Workshop... is it possible to focus too hard on lucidity... like think about it so much that it influences your practice in a negative way? Also, given all the variables above, should thinking too hard really be considered the culprit? I see several issues... my sleeping habits are significantly different, my waking habits still aren't perfected...

I'm just not sure what my trouble is. My results for this month are even worse than last month and I've improved the things I needed to improve to fix my lucid dreaming... I fear I'll be the only one in this workshop who didn't make SOME progress or at least have one lucid dream. And if I understand correctly, the next workshop will move forward, and I feel I'll be left behind.

[iadr]

Now more on to the point of this. Throughout these two weeks I have been VERY focused on Lucid dreaming. Its something I would often think of to preoccupy myself from my work, and I continued learning and talking about it later at night. Brother Steel and I talked about this, and he suggested that maybe I'm thinking way too hard on this and that I should take a week's break from my practice to help even things out.

Now for the actual question I pose to you fine dreamers in this Workshop... is it possible to focus too hard on lucidity... like think about it so much that it influences your practice in a negative way? Also, given all the variables above, should thinking too hard really be considered the culprit? I see several issues... my sleeping habits are significantly different, my waking habits still aren't perfected...

I'm giving you an "A+" for Effort AspirationRealized, and believe that if you continue forusing on Lucid Dreaming with the same intent that you have these past two weeks you will succeed.   

I personally think that the more a person focuses on lucid dreaming, and the more they think about it, the more apt they are to have a lucid dream, but getting those thoughts into the dream world may take more like a month or two instead of just a couple of weeks.  It certainly takes longer than the usual day or two that I am able to concentrate on them without losing interest.  It is something that needs to become a habit so that it carries over into your dreams at night when you sleep.

The one time I would think that a person has focused too much on lucid dreaming is if it has gotten their hopes up to the point that it starts depressing them when they don't have a lucid dream, in which case I would recommend setting their goals a bit lower to just something like improving their recall.

I would guess that the change in your sleeping habits is what caused the digression and not your increased focus on lucid dreaming.