Lucid Time!

Spoiler for REALLY long side notes:

Well today is lucid dreaming day, and unfortunately, due to time differences and class scheduling I will be unable to catch the live-stream, live, though I still am considering watching it in post. But I see it a very appropriate day to address the elephant in the room. My lucid dreaming career has been on hold since late February, and this was due to the horrendous failure of my previous lucid dreaming method, my meditation and chart method.

I suppose calling this a dreaming ‘Restart’ is not really an appropriate title, outside of matching up with that of my art thread, that title is somewhat inappropriate. I do not plan on simply discarding 6 years of lucid dreaming experience but rather doing what I told myself I would do on the off chance that my meditation failed; that being to step back, analyze what went wrong and come up with a new approach. Since meditation has proven itself a very poor means of self improvement in my case (though perhaps my particular techniques and lack of experience were to blame.) this is to be my means of analysis and composition of thoughts and coordination of how I shall carry on. That is to say that thisis much more for my own sake and self help than it is for any of you to read into it, though it is available to anyone who is faced with similar dilemmas might find merit in this writing. Though do expect it to get a bit dense and rambling, as I will break a lot of things down and describe in detail a lot of things that may not necessarily be particularly important.

My Previous Attempt(s)

I suppose to figure out what went wrong with my previous attempt I must break down what exactly it was that I did in my efforts to lucid dream. The self-derived technique worked on the principles of DILD and meditation. The first thing I recognize is that this technique is self-derived. Generally techniques taught on this forum are taught to a general audience and designed to work for most people. This only became self-derived as I began to take what I had learned from others on the forums and morph it into something that I thought would better suit me. Whether or not contorting a tried-and-true technique just because you think your modifications will suit your particular psyche and thought patterns will improve or lessen your results in lucid dreaming is up for debate, and probably varies.

Regardless, the technique, at least in its final incarnation set three main goals to occur every day:

Two meditation sessions, one in the morning and one in the evening. I broke this down more in my post on the meditation thread but the key detail was that each meditation had two distinct parts, a portion in where I cleared my mind and a portion in where I would either attempt to focus on maintaining a stillness of mind or focus on analyzing and finding solutions to a particular problem. Generally I focused on problems or ideas centric to waking life in the mornings and things related to lucid dreaming in the evenings, on the probably correct notion that meditation could benefit me both in waking and dreaming life.

Documentation of reality checks, with the aim of improving awareness. I would carry a small notebook and document each reality check. Generally this was done in a quantity over quality mentality, attempting a few very thorough reality checks that would help to raise my awareness and thoroughly confirm my reality rather than just clipping a clothesline pin to my nose and hoping for the best.

And the third being a rather straightforward consistent sleep schedule with it never ceasing to amaze me how much better I can recall dreams and how much easier I can become lucid when I go to bed at a reasonable hour.

These three focal points of my technique came together in a chart that documented my own work ethic along with a column for a star ranking system that would rank the results of each night on a loose scale from one to five, with one star being brief non-lucid recall, and five stars being an ideal night of a long lucid dream or a chain of shorter ones. I always found lucid dreams difficult to quantify because dreams are by their very nature an almost purely qualitative experience, so ranking in the system is generally based on my own judgement rather than a hard rubric or set of rules.

Before that there were earlier evolutions of this technique that involved a chart. At one point I attempted progressing (or regressing) as the case may be to a written dream journal having heard some say that writing your dreams by hand helps you to think more about what you’re writing. The dreams were documented along with basic information like listed above, star rankings, and a chart was kept in the back of the dream journal. But I honestly find that I can type about 80 words a minute, and my dreams often have complex scenarios or details that require explaining for the dream to make sense. The ability for text on a computer to be cut, pasted and moved around is also helpful when you don’t recall the dream linearly; you don’t have to rewrite everything.

And before that, the previous six or years were spent with my interest moving in and out of lucid dreaming, following to some extent a pattern. I was always striving to achieve a vague end goal of living a dream life, having adventures and completing some rather lofty lucid goals. With each attempt I would have some epiphany believing I had finally figured out what was holding me back, go in full force, learn a thing or two but eventually get frustrated and/or burned out and step away from it for awhile before being drawn back to it again, a little bit wiser and more mature but with the same determination and vaguely defined goals. I want to make a note of how vague my goals in lucid dreaming really are most of the time as I think this might be important to cracking the problem at hand.

What makes this unique is it seems for the first time the cycle has broken. For the first time I have no idea what direction or drive to give myself that might convince myself that my goals are attainable. (Last time, my big epiphany was that hard work and dedication were more important than a refined and complicated technique. I was frustrated with five and a half years of failure and decided I wanted a technique that was a blunt instrument of force and change rather than a sharpened and precise blade.

I feel as though it might have been the chart itself that led me to fail. The chart gave a grizzly and honest insight into how poor and scattered my efforts into lucid dreaming really were and how much shorter term cycles of waxing and waining interest had an effect, but never fulfilled its goal of motivating me to clean up my act and showing me how my effort nets positive results. The fact that on the nights that I did see lucidity or at the very least heightened recall were often not correlated with the days that I had the most success in completing my three daily goals wasn’t helping me to stay motivated.

Learning Skills

It always seemed to me like lucid dreaming was like learning any other skill. I’ve developed other skills alongside lucid dreaming. (In fact I began my Taekwondo lessons within a month of learning of the basics of lucid dreaming, and I sometimes suspect this caused the two skills to become all mixed up in my brain and resulted in my dreams involving a lot of martial arts sequences.) After all with other skills I’ve been able to, with a fair bit of self discipline, get myself to a respectable level.

In the six years since I began lucid dreaming I’ve been in Taekwondo classes, and I am now preparing to test for a black belt. Though in Taekwondo I get enjoyment out of going to almost every class, except the odd day where I’m really distracted or focused on something completely different, and the progression of belt ranks has not been my focus so much as simply becoming more disciplined and developing fitness.

More recently, upon starting the first incarnation of the chart and meditation method I began a jogging routine. I wanted to develop better cardio (and lose the baby fat that taekwondo had did a number on, but not yet managed to finish off.) And while I saw myself improve in cardio very quickly with my running routine, lucid dreaming stayed stagnant, even though it was getting daily effort and focus on my part. I began to enjoy so much going out jogging, seeing myself improve. It became a sort of self-powering positive force. You realize you are improving and then get more motivated and keep pushing yourself to work at it.

But lucid dreaming, at least in my case, has not been improving like learning a normal skill. If anything, I would say my ability to lucid dream has depreciated in the six years since I began lucid dreaming. I can recall my first lucid dream. (The one involving meeting Manei on the beach.) More clearly than I can recall any dream in recent memory. Now I realize that is basically trapping me in a negative loop in where I recognize that my ability to lucid dream is depreciating and therefore is reflected with even more muddy dreams. This might be what sets it apart; lucid dreaming’s dependence on your mental state and focus on it. I can go for a run when I’m angry or emotional and still improve; I just focus my anger into running and I still see improvement, but, at least in my case, non-positive emotions of anger and self frustration cannot be put in any useful way towards lucid dreaming.

I remember seeing a post on another forum in where they talk about Jedi and Sith meditation in the Star Wars cannon in where Jedi meditation is all about letting go and being at peace in everything you do, and Sith meditation is more about using emotions (generally anger) to motivate you toward your goals. When I’m developing an athletic skill, being focused on anger is great, much better than being peaceful. The problem of course being that in lucid dreaming, you can’t be emotional, or your dreams will reflect that emotion.

I know I’m leaving a vacuum as to what exactly motivated my lucid dreaming efforts as far as emotions go. This is important and I’ll come back to it.

Learning from the past

As I introduced this post, I am not discarding past knowledge, but rather de-programming and deconstructing my ways of thinking and attempting to troubleshoot the problems. There already seems to be a lack of motivation and proper goals set. In my other pursuits, my goals have always been clear cut. Jogging? Run a 5k in 22 mins. Taekwondo? Get a black belt. Art? Senior gallery show at my college, and start a webcomic. I don’t want to say that setting a very clear cut goal for myself will magically fix everything, seeing as none of my past “epiphanies” really seemed to do that. Now I recognize I’m about to dive headfirst into a mental minefield of schemas that will probably destroy my ability to lucid dream in the near future, but I feel that doing so is necessary in the long run for fixing the problems that lay ahead.

I will call these epiphanies since they seemed like such things at the time, they seemed like such massive revelations that would quickly resolve everything and tie up all loose ends, allowing me to attain the level of lucid dreaming that I had always wanted.

In learning to lucid dream I’ve programmed myself to think that certain things will greatly effect my odds of lucid dreaming; in where they probably will since I think that. I begin to think that having or not having one particular technique or thought process is a make-or break for lucid dreaming, and that not having it will mean I’m screwed. Really, what I just wanted to do was break down my previous epiphanies and see what merits or faults I think they hold with my present state of mind. I’ve already broken down that most recent epiphany that “There is no secret technique, only hard work and dedication.” and why it ran into problems.

Henceforth I present my previous epiphanies and realizations in roughly reverse chronological order.

-“It’s all in your head”

I recall coming up with and subscribing to the notion that lucid dreaming was something that was all in my head, and that to be good at it, all I simply had to do was believe that I was good at it and choose to do it, since there was no skill curve, and it really was just all in my head. Though this didn’t seem to work and was actually built upon by my hard work philosophy believing that with concentrated and regimented applied effort I could attain regular lucidity.

Continuing on this, my though process was very centric on the idea that lucidity is not a goal but more like a choice. I began feeling this way because at the time, I was having a lot of semi-lucid dreams and beginning to develop an underlying feeling that I was constantly lucid, but simply not choosing to bring that lucidity to the front of my mind. I still feel like this logic is present in my dreams; that I always have the potential to become lucid yet sometimes lack the mental fortitude to think clearly enough to bring that lucidity to the forefront, and that I need some kind of enhanced willpower and awareness to actually beak through from subconscious lucidity into true lucidity. The feeling and situation I am in when these dreams arise is somewhat difficult to describe, but I could somewhat equate it to sitting in a really long boring high school math class and daydreaming. You’re not really mindful of your reality and probably not really mindful about what you’re daydreaming about. You’re just daydreaming and allowing said daydream to go wherever seems most interesting.

I remember being in this state of mind often equating lucid dreaming to breathing rather than a learned skill like I would later on. I thought to myself that breathing is something people do all the time, but most of us don’t really keep ourselves aware of it; just like dreaming. But you can very easily become aware of your breathing to where it becomes a conscious action (You, reading this, probably just became aware of your breathing.) But you can’t be mindful of breathing all the time, it takes your focus away from tasks at hand, and to focus on another task as well as being mindful of your breathing takes a lot of focus. That perhaps best describes how I felt I was grasping at lucidity.

-Creativity and Happiness vs Logic and Reasoning

This epiphany is unique in that it was the only one that actually came to me within a dream, in where a dream character told me to focus on creativity and happiness rather than approaching dreaming logically.

I came up with several interpretations of how to apply this notion. One was to begin drawing dream related artwork. Another was to write “fake dream journal entries” as an applied visualization exercise and to be utilized for motivation. Another was just simply to remain optimistic in the face of adversities like garbage dream recall and muddy or nonexistent lucidity. Needless to say none of these philosophies or techniques helped as much as one might have expected.

Obviously this notion was reconsidered by the time I got to my chart and meditation method, a decidedly logic and quantitative focused way of focusing on lucid dreaming.

-Something in the dream is holding me back

Generally when there is some kind of problem or issue people like to have a scapegoat. Someone or something they can peg the problem on. In this case I began thinking that there was some barrier or entity within the dream world that was holding me back.

This first manifested itself as a complex series of dream plots involving my dream guide requiring me to complete some trial in where upon completion a “weighted belt” that had been steadily mounting would be removed and I would be able to lucid dream to my full potential. Of course once this extremely contrived dream plot concluded and the weighted belt was supposedly removed, I saw no long-term effect to my ability to lucid dream.

Later I would engage in a second dream plot in where some entity had to be defeated in order for me to be able to lucid dream at my full potential, but that had a similar result; no long term effect on my ability to lucid dream.

-Engagement and active thinking is the key

I once built my lucid dreaming routines and goals around the idea that being actively aware and trying new things would hold the key to attaining regular lucidity. This was one of the times that I was arguably way more active and social on the forums, and most active in learning about lucid dreaming in general.

I subscribed to the notion that dreams generally reflect what you are actively thinking about at the time, getting the idea that when you are learning or interested in some new knowledge you tend to dream about it. I remember when I was first becoming invested in things like a new TV series or video game and finding it overtaking my dreams. Yet older media that I am already familiar with tends not to make many appearances in lucid dreaming. Given that, if I could continue to steadily engage myself with new lucid dreaming concepts and keep fresh material flowing, I could continually lucid dream.

-WBTB/WeeBTB is the key

There was a time that I was very successful at lucid dreaming and closer to my goal than I had ever been before. This was when I became heavily invested in using the WBTB and WeeBTB techniques. People talk a lot about WBTB and DEILD being great, and they are, but the were not what I was looking for to achieve nightly lucidity, simply because it’s very easy for me to get burned out on these techniques. One can only wake themselves up at 4:00am on so many mornings before they become burnt out or their sleep schedule begins to alter so that a 4:00am awakening results in you being awake and staying that way.

-The Symbol

Remember this? This was my attempt to cheat at lucid dreaming. This project was a titanic failure. The premise of this was simple. To engrain this symbol into my mind as a trigger for lucidity and a reminder to reality check by placing it around in the waking world. This meshed nicely with at the time I was living in the dormitories at college and needed a means to mark what was my property.

Though disappointingly the symbol only appeared in my dream once after about three months of the project, and that was only because in the dream I was semi-lucidly making an effort to explain the nature of the project to my dream guide.

-MILD is the key

The first time I cycled out of lucid dreaming, I came back in with a renewed interest in MILD, thinking that autosuggestion would help. Like my symbol method, this meshed nicely with something new that had been introduced into my lifestyle at the time; Driving. Driving afforded me long stretches of time in where I was alone in the car, and these were perfect for reciting mantras as nobody else was around to judge me repeating “I am a good lucid dreamer; lucid dreaming is easy.” a dozen times, and the time was hardly useful for any other pursuit.

-+-

So by stepping back and observing this what do I recognize? The first thing is that there is a cycle of waxing and waning interest in lucid dreaming that is something I do not experience with my other interests and hobbies.

I am very reluctant to jump to conclusions as that may just mean another cycle of attempting something only to find my results and motivation diminished and slide into another low point, but I am tempted to say that regulating my motivation and applied effort to attempt to stretch from cycles of high and low activity to a continuous ongoing regimen of moderate activity might be a potential solution, though the option is on the table?

The second thing that I recognize is that these repeated attempts all entail increasingly complex and muddied philosophies, and means to achieve them. This would correlate nicely with the increasingly muddy lucidity, and blurry line between lucid and non-lucid dreams that has developed over time.

And the third thing that I recognize is that I am closed - mindedly regarding all of these as failures. Though I still tend to carry over and consider strong suits from previous attempts at lucid dreaming and attempt to bring them into a new light. Whether this means I am learning from my past mistakes or just repeating them over and over with minor variation is difficult to say. Sometimes I mourn the fact that for so long I have struggled with this goal of achieving nightly lucidity, and feel as though if I were to be able to start over today, knowing everything I know now that I would easily succeed, given how much effort I am applying, and I’m tempted to blame my past failures as building a very powerful and engrained negative schema around myself in all directions.

In essence what I feel I am doing is giving up and quarantining techniques because of a failure. Once I’ve seen that a technique can fail, it’s all that I focus on, and therefore the technique becomes useless, and slowly but surely I’m losing confidence in every conceivable lucid dreaming technique, and constantly raising the bar for myself in terms of the amount of effort I feel as though i need to put in in order to be successful without actually increasing in skill or drawing any closer to my original goal.

So what is the goal and why?

So I think thus far I’ve done a pretty good job of outlining the issues that I’ve had over the past six years with attaining nightly lucidity. It’s not the most through direction and there are places I could go into more detail if I had the patience.

And as far as goals go, it’s a pretty vague one, since a lucid dream, as I’ve stated is difficult to define and the line has become a bit grayed with time. Early in my lucid dreaming career, I found it very easy to determine if I was lucid or non-lucid. But that line has slowly become very blurred. Many of my non-lucid dreams feel vaguely lucid and many of my more lucid dreams are muddied with non-lucidity.

For the sake of argument let’s say that nightly lucidity entails a more clear lucid dream. But that goal is kind of empty. It’s like saying that you want to be fit enough to run a mile every day, and not have to be in recovery so long as to you can run that same mile at the same pace the next day.

I’ve always stated that I would focus on attaining nightly lucidity before I began seriously turning to a list of lucid dreaming goals that has frankly become a bit monstrous over the years, for I did not want to dedicate an extended stretch of time to getting myself to a very high level of lucid dreaming only to run out of things to do a few weeks after attaining nightly lucidity, but my goals have become lofty and also muddied and that is why I find it very important for me to “restart” and set all of these goals aside. Obviously I’m going to take the time to outline and list them here at some point so as to not forget them, but I have to recognize that as of right now I am not actively attempting to attain any of them.

Moreover attaining nightly lucidity or at the very least coming close to it would offer me a much more scientific means to explore the intricacies of the impacts of techniques. I had planned to do this once I had achieved a stable schedule with my chart and meditation method, that after perhaps about a month of preforming the routine regularly I could scientifically introduce variations (over a two week time period) and possibly refine the routine overtime, with the problem being that the base routine netted detrimental results.

Once again, on the vague and muddy nature of things, I maintain a self awareness of how long and rambling this post is. This speaks as a testament to how complex and difficult I view this problem (if you could even describe it as a problem.) as. If I could describe things more simply, then I would. Simple problems need simple solutions, but as a problem grows increasingly complex, as this one has, and there is no clear or definite answer in sight.

In the next few posts, I would like to break down my goals and motivations, as they are something that I do not have the time or patience to cover right now. Goals are key to understanding why nightly lucidity is so desirable and motivation is a talking point that I would also like to cover since, not to add to this already messy and complex parable that I have laid out, but I believe it is pertinent.

You know it's bad when you can't do much more than array your problems and discuss what happened.

Random dreams from the past couple of weeks.

I was in the show Naruto (An anime I have not watched and hold very little interest in watching.) Now I've seen somewhere IWL that there are two Narutos that exist at the same time, an old one and a young one, and both of them were attending school, albeit at different grade levels. The focus was on the young one who constantly got bullied by the other students because his hair was yellow and apparently that was an unlucky color. He was standing under a large oak tree outside of a building that looked like a small elementary school, maybe only big enough for three or four classrooms on the inside, with the other kids around him.

I went over to one of the students who was causing the bullying, who happened to have black hair. I tried to talk him out of it, asking him how he would like it if he was the only student who had black hair and everyone picked on him for it. He then started crying because I made him feel guilty, and hitting my leg and I told him to stop or I would tell the principal. At this point I became aware that I was supposed to be the teacher and was responsible for all of these kids.

Of course as soon as the anxiety about my responsibility kicked in the dream went haywire. One of the kids got stung by a bee and started crying, and I had to administer her epi-pen but she was kicking me because she didn't want the shot. Another kid stole cookies out of several kids lunches and got a sick stomach, and started crying. Once the other kids realized their deserts were gone, they all started crying as well. The kids reduced in age and kept finding more and more reasons to cry, and before I knew it I was surrounded by ~20 waling babies.

I became lucid as the anxiety was about to climax and realized that this wasn't my responsibility, or anybody and acknowledged that it was just a dream about an anxiety. I started to walk away as the dream faded out, not wanting to be bothered to acknowledge each of the children's individual needs. I thought the crying children would vanish as I walked away and recognized my anxiety but they didn't. The older Naruto jumped in front of my path and confronted me for leaving them behind.

-+-

I was with Marcus. I think we were at his house and he was playing Spore and I was watching. He had heavily modded the game to be better in many ways, explaining some of the dreamlike and nonexistent features of the game that I did not recall from playing the game back in high school. He started a new game as a cell, but didn't name the planet he was on the right thing, so he had to start over on another planet.

When he did, I noticed the planet was around a binary star system. (Starting a game around a binary star is not something you can do in regular Spore, I recall that much.) Most of the mods he had created revolved around making the game cooler, more realistic and more in depth that the original.

He showed me the creature stage where he was playing as this six legged monster. He was talking about how plants around different stars would need to be different colors to absorb the different wavelengths of light, and that planets around red dwarfs would have plants with black leaves because they could catch all available light. He then showed adding in this fern-like plant with black leaves.

He then cheated his game to space stage where he had made the most mods. He showed me how the home solar system he was in now had asteroids and comets that you could visit and set up small bases to mine and research, planets could become tidally locked, and could have multiple moons. You could 'colonize' gas giants and harvest resources there.

He started flying through space and went to a solar system around a small red star and colonized it, then zoomed out and showed me the galaxy. He showed me how there were some endgame items you could now unlock for your ship that allowed you to create custom stars and planets.

-+-

I was playing airsoft with Jack but somebody on the other team was using a gun with real bullets and shot him in the head. Somehow even though there was a big bloody hole in his forehead he got back up like it was only a minor injury.

-+-

I got a text from Manei and became semi lucid. She said that she saw a stray cat get hit by a car and that she needed my help to take care of her kittens until they could get into proper foster care. I drove over to her house which in the dream was in the same neighborhood as my friend A's house, and very close to it, but was only one story. In the hazy semi lucid dream logic I remember wondering to myself why I didn't visit Manei more often even though I always wanted to have more lucid dreams.

I don't recall the remainder of the dream's plot because outside of her showing me how to bottle-feed kittens nothing else really happened.

-+-

A very lengthy dream about me accidentally hitting a guy's car and making a dent it, and the other guy drove away.

-+-

A long dream about installing a Kerbal space program mod that added a planet in orbit around the homeworld with an atmosphere.

-+-

This was the dream from two nights ago that motivated me to get back into this.

I had a dream that started of somewhat similarly to my very first lucid dream. I dropped from several stories up and landed on a beach, already reasonably lucid. Some false memory details about the dream came back to me in where Manei and I were going to the beach, and we had swimsuits, towels, a beach umbrella and the likes. Marcus was there too wearing a Hawaiian shirt and he brought a folding table and chairs.

The beach was different though, it seemed completely original to the dream and didn't resemble any beach I've ever been on in waking life. I felt disoriented and looked only to find a small parking lot with some cars in it and notice that there were a few dream characters scattered about, though the beach was by no means crowded. I studied the dreamworld briefly reflecting upon how much I liked the fact that the dream had constructed an original environment rather than re-using my house or my college for the bazilyionth time.

Manei turned to me and said in the voice of one of my old friends from grade school. "Aww man, I wanted to go skinny dipping, but there's a fat guy in the water." (she gestures to a man standing waist deep in the water who looked a lot like my maternal grandfather but fatter.)

I said back to her, fully lucid "Skinny dipping isn't about your weight. It means you go swimming naked."

The dream went into some scenes that I cannot recall particularly well of surfing on the water and using my fire jets to propel myself. I recall later on Marcus set up the card table to where it was so close to the shore that in sitting on the chairs around the table the waves would wash over our feet. The three of us began discussing why my lucid dreaming effort has dropped off since my meditation stopped. When I brought up the meditation,

Marcus replied "Meditation has created 1,011 faulty dreams. Deficiency of applied effort 403 times pi percent."

I entered into a virtual reality simulation where everything was neon green cubes and black, and things looked like the movie Tron, but I don't recall much else of what happened.