Certainly it is interesting and well-thought out, can't wait to see the "ultimate" post!

Let me say that I have experienced my own "monkey moments," but not every LD has had them, or at least not to such an obvious degree
  • I'm in my childhood home/neighborhood (usually I never "notice" this in the dream while non-lucid, I realize it later from the visual memory after waking up)
  • can't pick up cards, can't count something (I set intention to recognize this after it happened several times and got LD #2 from this, a good one)
  • DC tells me out of the blue "I love you"
  • bizarre/scary/startling scenes
  • crazy/bizarre sports: basketball, racquetball, baseball, billiards
  • the landscape is wrong or undergoing bizarre transformations
  • flying (I've had more and more of NLD flying dreams during LD training, flying is always my reflection/intention dream action, and finally had a few [low lucidity] flying LDs recently)
  • close up view of some object or mechanism, I think about it, how it works, how to use it, etc.
  • I'm with old friends I haven't seen in years or only very rarely.


as a nod to Sensei's "Who? What? Where?" recall technique, I realized these are the major facets of dream signs: location, activity, people. Where am I? What am I doing? Who am I talking with/interacting with? For each of these there are questions that, given sufficient cognition/memory ("awareness units"? AUs?), should make us lucid: Does this <location/activity/person> make sense (is it behaving as it should while waking)? Do I recognise this <location/activity/person>?

This underlies my latest take on LDing: trying to "catch" every dream. (Almost) every dream has that monkey moment, be it strong or subtle, "all" I have to do is notice them!

But it's not so obvious the most effective way to encode these questions. That's a lot of words/high-level thinking to summarize, especially to cover all the bases, as you note, Nailler. If one had the ability to ask those questions then basically you're already lucid! So it seems a bit of a catch-22: you need to ask these questions to become lucid, but you need to be lucid enough to realize you need to ask them!

There was a time a few months back where every single night I was located in my childhood home/neighborhood for at least one recalled dream. I decided that I would do daytime MILD (encoding PM triggers basically I think you could call it) using the visual memory of those dreams and using waking life visual memories. And the results were pretty good: 3 LDs that I "caught" in/around my childhood home (only one was "good", the other two felt like beginning of dream lucidity that faded to black right away after realizing I was dreaming). If I could catch this one every time I'd have pretty darn frequent LDs, it's still holding at several per week at least.

I also realized that incubation efforts could be spent on those subjects that were dreamsigns to boost their frequency and so that MILD using those targets would "hit" more often. I have not pursued that in earnest however with my time spent on ADA/RC.

So now I'm still working on general awareness, but with the notion that I'm always evaluating the "Who? What? Where?" without all the verbalization of the questions, just trying to "feel" them.

It will be interesting to see if your "new & improved MILD" covers any of these bases.

I have also generally come to the conclusion that I need to return to the "LaBerge" system, or at least include its basics again (PM triggers). My first LDs were pure LaBerge and PM I believe, my LDs occurred on the days where I had a high number of PM targets and I hit a lot of them.

Improvement in MILD could just be through showing enough examples of dreams to your brain, so that "the next time I'm dreaming" can be properly evaluated over a wider variety of dream scenarios.

Anyway, looking forwards to what's next!