Persistent Realms

The term and concept of "persistent realms" comes from this DreamViews post by Hyu in 2012^[1]. It's probably one of my favorite posts in a lucid dreaming forum ever.

Essentially, the idea is to establish a consistent universe within your dreams which you can go back to across different dreams and things will be somewhat how you left them.

For example, you could enter a persistent realm in one dream and find a town of people and meet some of them (dream characters). Then you wake up to the real world. Then a couple weeks later, you have another dream (presumably you are lucid in it), and you navigate back to that specific persistent realm, and you can find the same town, and the same people there. Maybe you can even establish your own residence there and visit it whenever you're in that realm, and any changes you make will still be there the next time you visit.

There's a certain feeling of defying entropy here. Normally, dreams can be pretty random, and things by default are definitely not consistent. But by setting the intention and expectation that a certain "world" will be persistent, this (in theory) will lead to persistence. (This is a core part of how dreams work -- intention and expectation are how we influence our dreams.)

I'm being a bit vague about "entering a realm", but really there are many ways to go about it. The DreamViews post I linked above talks about one method of doing it. The general technique is to form a portal which will bring you to the realm (again, the realm being a persistent one is simply defined by your intention, and probably reinforced by your own observation of it being persistent over time as you visit back to it). And then you're there. Hyu details a full example of how they created a persistent world -- it's a pretty fun read.