Rut? No, it's worse than that.

So I used to be REALLY into LDing, I practicing it for about 3 months and became good enough at it to have about 1 every two weeks (only DILDs). But I was practicing WILDs as well, and every WILD attempt I had ended in SP; but sadly nothing more than that.

That was about 4 or 5 months ago then I started college, and I just seemed to have fallen out of it. I don't know why, but to wrap things up my question is this:

What method should I begin practicing, if I had those capabilities but have lost a degree of dream recall (as I haven't keep a dream journal for the past 4 or 5 months)? I was thinking MILD, but I was making a lot of progress with WILDs; but I think I should try something easier than WILDs (see how they're the most difficult of induction methods).

Any advice or feedback would be nice, preferably from somebody who's fallen into a serious rut like this; and has recovered. How did you revitalize your interest in LDing? That seems to be my problem, a static melancholy has evolved towards the whole subject of LDing.

It's your interest...it's gone down the tubes and anxiety. Dream recall from my expereince is governed by anxiety levels...the more anxiety you have the worse the recall and you sleep through your dreams because of distraction from anxiety. Atempting to have lucid dreams poses anxiety because of fear that your efforts will go to waste and yes it's a rut. The more your dream recall worsens the more anxious to want to improve and it gets worse and worse until the mind sleeps through each and every dream. I do not WILD but from my some similar expereince of using light cues to achieve the same thing...I created STRESS a nice rut. I stopped the light and stopped all rigourous methods and my dream recall started to improve by itself. In your case your anxiety could have come from your college...it programmed your mind to be anxious even when it's over it's still on that's Y you noticed the dream recall had detiorated. As for what to practise....I'd choose the light stuff...MILD I mean physical intentions like there's a light switch in your room...use a small torch to shine at it at spaced intervals like every few seconds and everytime you shine at it think to yourself...."This light switch I'm gonna use it to check if I'm dreaming." Do it until you can do it in your mind without actually shining the torch light.

IMJ

I wrote a bunch of goals out with my boyfriend. We stuck the goals up on our bedroom wall.

One of the goals was simply - **LUCID DREAMING**

I haven't done any LDing or kept a journal or anything in FOREVER, but ever since I wrote that and put it on my wall about two weeks ago, I've been going NUTS trying to LD, recall dreams and have really great, vivid, beautiful dreams in general.

Sometimes just saying something out loud, or writing it down, helps to move towards that goal.

I've also been collecting images from all over the internet, that I think will help inspire me to have really amazing dreams. It's been so much fun getting this collection together, that I am GIDDY when it's time to get to bed to watch my slideshow of images. I set it to some great music, take some B6 and melatonin, and off I go...

Hope some of this helps. :)

If you practice visual meditation before sleep I would think you can coax an LD or two out rather quickly ;) as dreams AND 'visual meditation' (visualizations) occur in the same area of the brain called the secondary visual cortex. Good luck to you.

Thank you all for the responses.
I have noticed that my anxiety could use a bit of reduction :P So I think I'll just work on that to start with.
For the image slide show thing, I'm not sure that's really for me; as I have a bit of insomnia (sometimes being awake for 70+ hours at a time with no caffeine, stimulants, or any other variables in effect). So playing a slide show, probably wouldn't help me whatsoever; but I take melatonin currently, with noticeable but little affect.
Visual meditation sounds like a great idea, I don't know why I haven't thought of that myself haha. I mean I practiced some visualization in some of my meditation sessions; but never have I focused on visualizations as a major key point.