Quote Originally Posted by FryingMan View Post
In my own practice, I've had the most dense LD occurrences when I was highly motivated in the DV competitions. Far far outside my non-competition frequency (two months of LDs packed into in a week and a half, happened in *both* competitions I've participated in!). That can't be coincidence, as others experience vastly elevated frequency in the competitions as well.]
There's a reason for this, and it has to do with an element of prospective memory theory.

The urgency or importance factor of the event is a major factor in determining the success rate of prospective memory. Researchers have codified the various stages of importance as "wish", "want", "must", "aught", and "will." At the higher end of the scale, when a test subject considered the event extremely important, the encoding would be the equivalent of "I will remember to recognize when I'm dreaming." This would produce a much higher success rate than, for instance the bottom of the scale where the event wasn't considered important and the encoding worked out to; "I wish to remember to recognize when I'm dreaming." Note that these are not mantras, but rather a way of describing the effect the considered importance of the event has on prospective memory encoding.

LaBerge noticed this importance effect when his LDing attempts in the sleep lab resulted in far more successes than his attempts at home. However he did recognize it had to do with the importance if the event, but didn't get the connection to PM encoding.

I was doing basically zero PM exercises, but I was doing a great deal of elevated awareness work through most of the day.
Elevated awareness drills are effectively PM exercises. They have a major impact on PM functionality.

I'm quite aware of the role expectations play in lucid dreaming success rates. In my opinion this is more than likely because expectations majorly influence prospective memory.