Meditation is negatively impacting the quality/lucidity of my dreams?

No real reason to put too long and wordy of a post, but I've been at it long enough to say with confidence that meditation is negatively impacting my recall and lucidity.

Over a fourteen day period, I meditated 8 of the 14 days and had 5 lucid dreams in that timespan (I'm counting layer one experiences.) Only one of those lucid dreams took place on a night that I had done meditation the previous day. I even had two recall-less nights following days that I had done meditation. Recall-less nights are a very rare occurrence to me.

I also charted all of December 2016, though that data looks marginally better for meditation (Cause I did less of it :P). I had 7 lucid dreams over the course of the month and meditated on only 12 of the 31 days. Only 3 of the lucid dreams happened to be on nights that I had done meditation. Also I don't think I'm counting any layer one experiences here. In december, the few lucid dreams that I did have were of higher quality.

My meditation routine is simple. I generally have two phases to my meditation. In the first phase I will clear my mind through counting and focusing on breath. When I first began practicing meditation over the previous summer I would count down from 100, then count down from 30 to settle down. But lately, I've found that to be excessive and so I halved the amount of counts to 50 and 15 respectively, but still return to the 130 if my mind is particularly busy. The second phase of my meditation tends to vary more. I either choose to sit in silence and meditate on the stillness, or choose to focus on a subject or theme.

I would do this routine twice a day, with it taking usually around 15-25 minutes to complete. But if the subject or theme is something I want to focus on for an extended period of time, they can go for longer. Generally morning meditations were silent or had a theme tailored to the day, such as focus, patience, or avoiding distractions and wasting time. Meditations done at night would have themes related to lucid dreaming, such as dream recall or stabilization. I was planning for these to give way to visualizations of lucid dreams that I would have once I started getting lucid more consistently, But since they've been so horribly ineffective and it seems impacting me negatively, I haven't yet had the reason to step away from meditations focusing on dream recall and attaining lucidity.

I've also included good old fashioned Reality Checks into the mix. I don't need to say too much outside of the fact that I've been logging them. I made the benchmark of five but on days when I'm motivated, often do more, and I do many that I never get around to logging. I also keep track of betime, generally shooting for <11:00pm. The reason I'm keeping this brief is that generally the days that I have been motivated to meditate are the same days I doc a lot of reality checks and go to bed on time.

You will also notice that I am not meditating every night, and that's because I'm hardly motivated to keep up this routine with it producing such poor results. I'm not posting my charts but the routine comes and goes for about four or five days at a time. (Four or five days of good meditations, RCs and consistent bedtimes, followed by four or five days of being unmotivated, inconsistent, if any meditation and RCing and a rodeo bedtime, upon which I decide I should try again and the whole thing starts over.) To some extent, I recognize that the effects of a regimen like this might not be immediate and that I should probably try sticking to my guns for more than a week. In fact, I see a drop off almost immediately, within two or three days where the quality of dreams starts getting worse.

If I were to place a realistic expectation on this routine, I would expect of myself that after two or three days, instead of the quality of dreams dropping off, it would start improving. I might not get lucid only a few days after starting, but I'd have some better recall and see some more stable non-lucidity. (But I haven't) Sure i've still got my fingers crossed every night that I'll get lucid dream.

So I need to know from you gurus, why am I getting these backwards results, and what can I do to turn this around?

(wound up being kind of a long wordy post anyways :P)

Hi JadeGreen,

I recall few years ago I did a quick correlation study of my own lds, plotting the number of lds I had vs the hours of meditation during that month over at least a year. Overall, the results showed no correlation between the two variables. What does that mean? While I believe that meditation can be benefitial for lding, it still remains one of many factors that affect our ability to lucid dream as well as our recall. In addition, it may be that greater amount of practice or over longer period would be needed to reach the dream yoga mastery results that often get ascribed to meditation.

Finally, the type of meditation one does probably also will have different effects on the brain and dreams. My meditation practices when I did the study were more of the non-visual type of meditation. I would recommend experimenting more with visualization and creating awake dream scenarios - imagine a particular location and try to sustain the images for as long as possible, also focusing on finer details. Continue practices for at least a month and see if this makes any difference for your dreams. Also, beware of any additional practices that may affect your results.

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Originally Posted by NyxCC

Hi JadeGreen,

I recall few years ago I did a quick correlation study of my own lds, plotting the number of lds I had vs the hours of meditation during that month over at least a year. Overall, the results showed no correlation between the two variables. What does that mean? While I believe that meditation can be benefitial for lding, it still remains one of many factors that affect our ability to lucid dream as well as our recall. In addition, it may be that greater amount of practice or over longer period would be needed to reach the dream yoga mastery results that often get ascribed to meditation.

Finally, the type of meditation one does probably also will have different effects on the brain and dreams. My meditation practices when I did the study were more of the non-visual type of meditation. I would recommend experimenting more with visualization and creating awake dream scenarios - imagine a particular location and try to sustain the images for as long as possible, also focusing on finer details. Continue practices for at least a month and see if this makes any difference for your dreams. Also, beware of any additional practices that may affect your results.

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I find that when I do a whole scenario such as closing my eyes & envisioning myself flying the route to my husbands work area in a building I used to work in helps quite a lot. I then come back using the same route used in real life. Flying over lights, noticing stop signs that I don't need to heed & going through doors is a great help. I really liked your post.

I use jigsaw puzzles for meditation. I recently looked to see if it had any scientific merit since I just stumbled upon it myself as an enjoyable activity. Apparently it is scientifically proven to help w/ meditation. I use it will a music station called "The Bridge" through my Hopper3. It plays 70's music which is just jam packed w/ lucid dreaming music & is soothing & spiritual all together. I highly recommend this technique. I have also put candles, angels & like stuff in my area so that it became my meditation space which is very important for meditation.

I haven't quite gotten to your level of lucidity yet, but I find that whenever I meditate before bed, and it doesn't even have to be a full meditation session, I would at least have four dreams that night.
Maybe you are associating meditation with other factors that might be hindering your ability to lucid dream.

The meditation hardly ever works, if you try and use it to something specific.

For me the meditation and lucid dreaming are both the same natural way to explore the consciousness - realizing how to awake when not sleeping is quite near with realizing you are dreaming when sleeping. I do 1-2 hours vipassana meditation daily and few retreats per year. That means very dry meditations: no visuals, no mantras, just being present. The same strong unattached presence is also the foundation which makes me realize I am dreaming. I spontaneously started lucid dreaming after few years of meditating daily. I did had some earlier experience though.

You seem to have a lot of things going on. For me THAT would be the correlate with lesser lucid dreams. I would just keep it all much simpler, give more time and love to all those practices. Measure in years, not days or months. You need to trust your meditation practice for it to be able to work. It helps to have a meditation teacher.

Well an old thread but here's something I wanted to say. When I was listening to an interview with Andrew Holecek, he talked about how the reason the mind "shuts off" at night for many people is that their minds get too tired during the day. But the reason Tibetan Monks and Dream Yoga practicioners can have their "mind awake" all night is that they don't have the same habitual mental strain.

Like for example I tried All Day Awareness a week or so ago, and didn't do it perfectly. But I thought the amount that I did would boost my dream recall and lucidity a lot. However, I actually found that I had a difficult time recalling dreams. And On days that I just listened to more audio and didn't try so hard at ADA, I had more LD's, more vividness and more recall.

Now that I read this thread I think its because I was doing it with a lot of mental strain. Same with meditation. If it feels like, it takes a lot of force, or will power, it might be more of a "white knuckling" meditation. This is more likely to tire out the mind, so that it doesn't have the energy to become lucid or recall dreams overnight. It just runs out of "mental energy" (or "psychic energy") and won't really "work".

Andrew Holecek compares it to doing bicep curls all day, then trying to do bicep curls that night. The biceps just won't go.

I also noticed this with waking life recall. When I did a lot of "mental strain" on waking life recall, it also had the inverse effect. But when I could just let myself take it easy, and just do it imperfectly, I had an easier time with my dreaming that night. It must be because I didn't expend so much mental/psychic energy or "will power". Or it could be, who knows!

Anyway its been over a year since the OP wrote this, so I'm sure they have figured it out by now. But I just really enjoyed the topic because I think it is important distinction for my own practices. "White knuckle" meditation versus just relaxing, letting go, and letting the mind become still and calm.

I never would have thought of that if not for this thread! I was actually doing this "white knuckle" meditation and ADA recently and wondering why it wasn't working. You're a genius!

No I did not figure that out even more than a year later... I never even considered that. Way to necro a year-old thread with some actually very useful advice. Thanks :)