Lucid dreams are amazing and fantastical experiences. Once learned, lucid dream initiation is essentially a free ticket to another world that belongs only to you. A blank canvas for you to experience anything that you can imagine and dive into the deepest channels of your mind. But beyond becoming lucid lies one more major hurdle for dreamers: stability. Learning to lucid dream takes time, energy and patience, and unfortunately just learning how to have lucid dreams isn’t enough. Our first lucid dreams are often jumbled, messy and fleeting to the point where most people wake up without getting to experience much at all. Whether it be a lack of clarity or waking from excitement, your first few lucid dreams almost never go as you planned. This is where dream stabilization techniques become extremely important, as they will allow you to keep your dreams consistent enough to truly explore and experience your lucid dreams.

If you continue lucid dreaming beyond just a few tries, it’s likely that you can overcome waking up too soon or lack of clarity in your dreams by just keeping at it. However, if you’d like to speed things up and get the most out of your time, using techniques created to help stabilize your dreams is an important step to take. By mastering both lucid dream initiation and dream stabilization techniques, you will be able to keep your lucid dreams stable enough for you to explore and enjoy. Here we will look at the best techniques used to stabilize lucid dreams, and hopefully you’ll find one that works well for you.

Lucid Dreaming Stabilization Techniques

As with any lucid dream technique, keep in mind that the one that works best is whatever works best for you. What works for others may not work as well for you, but you won’t know until you’ve given these techniques a real try. Once you have found a technique or combination that works well for you, you will be truly free to explore your dreamscape (and try advanced lucid dream techniques like dream control)

Spin Around

When you feel a dream fading, try spinning around 3-5 times in the dream. Spinning is a great way to stabilize your surroundings in a dream because your brain already expects what you see to be blurry when you’re spinning. So by deliberately disorienting yourself, you give your mind a reason that things are blurry and it will do its best to make things around you more clear once you’ve stopped spinning – as it does in waking life.

Demand Clarity 

If you’ve read through our main articles on how to master lucid dreaming you may have noticed that setting intent is a recurring theme. This is just as true with stabilizing your dreams as it is with becoming lucid in the first place. Just as setting the intent to have a lucid dream tonight will help you do so, you can get a lot out of just asking your mind to stabilize your dream.

If you find yourself in a blurry or jumbled dream, try yelling out something like “make my dream more stable!” and you might be surprised at just how well this can work.

Engage with Your Surroundings

A common way to ground yourself in a dream when you find it fading is to find one thing around you and focus on the sensation of touching it. You can touch the ground, brush your hand along the leaves of a tree, or touch virtually anything else in the dream. If you focus on that sensation, it allows the rest of the dream to take time to stabilize by time you look back up, and by focusing on whatever you’re feeling you will get rid of some of the anxieties that seek to wake you up early.

Many people recommend simply rubbing your hands together in dream, since it is very likely that your hands will consistently be with you in most dreams. It doesn’t really matter so much what you touch, but by using something that’s usually there like your hands or the ground, you can make a habit of doing the same thing to stabilize your dreams.

One last thing to note here is that this does not apply only to touch. Although it is a bit more bizarre, many people have reported good results from tasting things around them in their dreams – such as licking the ground. You can probably see why this is less popular than rubbing your hands together, but ultimately the choice is up to you. The main point of this technique is to find something tangible (so to speak) in the dream to focus on if you feel like you’re about to wake up.

Re-enter If Need Be

Once you get familiar with lucid dreaming, you should be able to start returning to dreams. If you wake up from a dream and wish to go back, laying back down and calmly imagining the dream that you just left is often enough to throw you right back into it or a similar scene. The important part here is that you stay calm.

If you wake up from a lucid dream when you didn’t want to, it’s easy to be angry or disappointed, but if you remain calm and lay back down immediately instead, there is a good chance that imagining your most recent dream in that state will take you right back into it.

Be Distrustful (Of False Awakenings)

False awakenings are when a person believes they have woken up from a dream, but they have actually just changed settings in their dream. It is actually very common to ‘wake up’ in your bed or somewhere else only to later realize that you were actually just having another dream.

As frustrating as it is to wake up multiple times only to realize that you had still been dreaming, there is a solution. You need to get in the habit of conducting a reality check when you wake up. If you keep with this habit, you will find that some of the time you wake up from lucid dreams, you’re actually still dreaming. 

Get More Out Of Your Lucid Dreams

Learning to stabilize your dreams is an important step to truly mastering lucid dreaming. Once you have found dream stabilization techniques that work well for you, you are finally ready to really begin exploring your lucid dreams. If you want to delve even further into lucid dreaming, once you have mastered stabilization you can move on to dream control techniques.

If you have any other dream stabilization techniques that work for you and aren’t listed here, please comment down below. Together we can all share our knowledge and experiences to help everyone learn more about their dreams and more about ourselves in the process.