stream lining and refining induction, as simple as possible with the highest likely success rate.
so in the spirit of making things bare bones and simple, yet still the utmost effective, i have come up with an idea. not tested (except for CAT which it could be argued is all i have here) but lets see if it goes anywhere. i'm starting again from a two year span of no practice at all so we'll see if it works for me and others. this should be something that one who knows nothing of lucid dreaming could step right into and have success within a month or two:
1. learn reality checks (reading text a few times, holding nose and breathing, etc.).
2. begin CAT (method is in wiki section under DV tutorials), follow all tips (lots of reality checks during early wake up times crucial).
3. write down your dreams every time you wake up, especially on the "sleep in" days.
it seems this should start lucid dreams within a month. you are forcing REM rebound in a time when your mind is programmed to be totally awake and doing reality checks. seems like it should take a huge amount of the guess work and chance out of the whole deal. even the initial struggle with dream recall. in my experience REM rebound dreams are the easiest to remember. then you take out the random times of reality checks. normally you could be anywhere any time doing them and it's up to many factors if you do them while dreaming but this way your body and mind know you always do them at this exact time every single day and it's all during rebound.
pros: fairly sound and should have a high success rate with comparatively little effort. as opposed to random things such as dream journaling, reality checks, setting alarms to wake up in the night so you can try to WILD, memory exercises for MILD, etc. all at once. you end up with a mass of tasks that, if they don't lead to lots and lots of lucid dreams, become tiresome. this also circumvents the need to do odd things like waking up at intervals of 90 minutes to record your dreams and try to WILD back to sleep and what not. on the sleep in days you can just sleep through the night and wake up after your 8 or 9 hours!
cons: the sleep schedule! mine is totally random as it is. some nights i go too sleep at 2am, some nights 12am, some nights when i have to work in the morning i go to bet at 9pm! i wake up between 8am and 10am. so sticking to a rigid sleep schedule is going to be difficult but i feel it will be worth it as the only frustration i had before was with inconsistent success and i believe this method will be fairly consistent and therefore make it worth the struggle. also the sleepiness of only getting 6.5 hours of sleep on the odd days could be circumvented by sleeping 9 hours a night instead of 8. that way when you get up 90 minutes early you're getting 7.5 hours of sleep which is a fairly well rested night for most people. i'm going to shoot for going to bed at 12am and waking up at 8am or 6.30am on early days.
that's it. i've read exploring the world of lucid dreaming by stephen laberge and howard rheingold four times over the past ten years. i've tried WILD, MILD, DILD, dream yoga, and others. my success rates have always been all over the place, but success nonetheless. i read ewld, jump around with different techniques, have random success and no clue as to what works the best because of reading the mass amount of (wonderful and indispensable, thanks laberge and rheingold!) information quickly and being overwhelmed by it, albeit in a good way since it leads to success. nonetheless, i'm looking for the most simple possible method that i can do for the rest of my life and come back to easily and quickly should i fall off the dream wagon.
critiques and ideas welcome. i would love to hear anyone elses ideas and results on any kind of streamlined and very simplified practice.
i want something that takes very little time and even less reading and learning but that is still highly successful to induce lucid dreams.
as a point of contrast one could dream journal lazily and just do autosuggestion at night and maybe have a lucid dream here and there, perhaps a few per year on the low end or one per month or so for the high. this is an easy and stream lined method but with a low success rate. i've already contrasted difficult and not streamlined techniques above.
