WHY do mantras work?

I understand that repeating mantras before sleep helps with LDs. Why? Personally it never helped me, I suspect because I end up on something else at the moment I sleep. I find that reality checks and coming to awareness through the day is the best help for me.

Anyway, to the point - even if you DO manage to keep at the mantra as you doze off, you end up with 4.5-6 hours of non REM sleep. Surely by the time you get to REM your mind would have been somewhere doing something other than remembering the mantra you were repeating 6 hours ago?

you silly goose, ya see, mantras can only be succeeded by believing!

mantras tell your mind what its going to do, and if your mind listens, mantras will work. your mantras may not be working because you may not be remembering enough to know, but i have no idea. i find it easier to take mantras in steps. start off with "i will remember my dreams." do that for a while until youre remembering dreams alot. then move on to "i will lucid dream." and so on. mantras are to convince yourself, and also to focus on what you want to do.

In grad school we studied memory and cognition, and back then there were considered to be two ways to learn something. One was by sheer repetition (e.g. the way you repeat a phone number over and over in your head until you've got it) and the other was related to depth of meaning... so something new could be learned in one pass if it had meaning (e.g. you get burned when you touch the hot stove, you learn that stoves are hot, you only need to do that ONCE and you've got it).

I see doing reality checks as facilitating learning through depth of meaning (e.g. the more seriously and thoughtfully you do each reality check, the more you learn the skill leading to lucid dreaming). And I see mantras as learning through repetition (not a whole lot of depth there, but you're still developing skill through many repeats).

I do both. What the heck. They seem to work better if I do them as I fall asleep.

Mantras and MILDs tend to work better when combined with WBTB.

As to why they work: Magic. Clearly.

Mantras only work if your subconcious catches the meaning. It is the one that gets your lucid in the first place. I use mantras that are subtle, that don't mean anything for my conscious mind, but what I have taught my subconscious to remember as "I will have LD", for example.

It shouldn't be in the future tense though. If you have a mantra going "I will lucid dream", then when is that? Tomorrow? Next week? It's not definite. You need a mantra that is in the present, it has to be affirmative, and it has to be clear. My one that I'm working on is "I recognize dreamsigns when I'm dreaming". So my brain knows that when I'm dreaming, which is every night, I will recognize my dreamsigns, because I already do, in the mantra: "I recognize". Not I will recognize or I have recognized, but I do recognize.

That mantra is one of the examples from the mantra tutorial on here.

In what way are you doing the mantra? I find that if you just say or think the words with out feeling they dont have effect. They work alot better when you have fun with them and can just meditate for 10mins 20min 30mins with out even thinking about the time that has gone by. (all u need is 5-7mins of focused fun :-D) Personally i like to say the mantra in A melody until i get to place where im having so much fun i dont want to stop. You'll find that the longer you do the mantra with feeling it will start to take on a life of its own, youll just think the word or phrase effortlessly or sometimes the phrase will change. just have fun and have different mantras with the same purpose... lucid dreaming. namaste

Placebo effect. You have to, in a way, trick yourself into fully believing that your next lucid will be right around the corner. What you say or how you word the mantra isn't as important as the mindset.

it's not about the mantra, it's about the intent.
just as others have said

Mantras put it into your brain, and repeating it gives the brain a clue that it's important, a clue that it's important, a clue that it's important. When the brain is dreaming, it is going through what it did in the day, and analyzing it. If it finds something it thinks is important, it may put it in your dream to see how you react to it. When you leave DV for the day, the biggest memory you will have of it will be "clue that it's important" because I repeated it ;)