Thread: How MILD Really Works

By that I mean that a "dream" isn't something you can "go" in space, normally we have lots of things associated with a memory, one of the biggest of which is location.

A dream can be in a location though, for example from experience I've had several dreams which repeat certain locations, fantasy or otherwise. If you keep seeing the same / similar house or some fantasy setting in multiple dreams you can think of that as being a single location, but your next dream might be in an entirely different location.

Also even if the location is the same as a previous dream you might still be too busy to actually notice it, which is why awareness is still needed.

Ultimately I think perhaps all techniques are useless without enough awareness, you need to at least get to a point where you are "present" in the dream and know that things are happening around you, you might not realise it's a dream but at least when you wake up you definitely know "yes, I was in a dream just now and I was doing this and this". Then next time you might actually remember that you're asleep and this is a dream.

Which is why remembering dreams is the first step to LDing!

Or perhaps it might be better to say that being mindful of our dreams / that we dream is the first step to LDing, because "remembering" has the connotation that something has already happened, but what we really want is to get used to being present during the event. So if we can be aware during one or two dreams every single night, even if we don't realise it's a dream, that's probably already 70% of the battle and techniques like MILD will simply make up the other 30%.

There's a post that might be of interest to you, Memm. I will see if I can find it.

Originally Posted by Memm

Ultimately I think perhaps all techniques are useless without enough awareness, you need to at least get to a point where you are "present" in the dream and know that things are happening around you, you might not realise it's a dream but at least when you wake up you definitely know "yes, I was in a dream just now and I was doing this and this". Then next time you might actually remember that you're asleep and this is a dream.

Which is why remembering dreams is the first step to LDing!

Or perhaps it might be better to say that being mindful of our dreams / that we dream is the first step to LDing, because "remembering" has the connotation that something has already happened, but what we really want is to get used to being present during the event. So if we can be aware during one or two dreams every single night, even if we don't realise it's a dream, that's probably already 70% of the battle and techniques like MILD will simply make up the other 30%.

yes, Yes, YES! 1000 times yes. We are not alone….I have reached this conclusion as well, Sensei calls this notion "dream awareness." The other major face of awareness being "state awareness" -- realizing we're awake or dreaming. Put the two together and you get lucidity (in life and in dreams).

edit: the other important "aha!" to take from this is: how can you expect to be "present" in the dream state, if you're not present in the waking state? Embracing the moment continually when awake is the gateway to doing so in dreams...

Originally Posted by FryingMan

edit: the other important "aha!" to take from this is: how can you expect to be "present" in the dream state, if you're not present in the waking state? Embracing the moment continually when awake is the gateway to doing so in dreams...

I totally agree with this. I think that too many people rely too much on techniques, without making changes in their way of thinking and lifestyle in waking life.
The perfect example are the natural dreamers who are dreaming lucidly almost their whole life without using some techniques.

Great posts Memm, really interesting to know how MILD actually works. Can we combine this with dream signs in some way though? Like for example one of my frequent dream signs is classmates, can I go to sleep visualizing and thinking "I need to dream about my classmates engulfed in green flames riding kangaroos made of colorful candy" and associate that with lucidity or something like that?

Originally Posted by Forg

I totally agree with this. I think that too many people rely too much on techniques, without making changes in their way of thinking and lifestyle in waking life.
The perfect example are the natural dreamers who are dreaming lucidly almost their whole life without using some techniques.

Definitely agree with the two posts above, there are many people who try tons of techniques and then complain nothing works for them, while their awareness is total crap. I think we need to rely less on techniques and more on being mindful and aware during waking life.
Also, what I feel is important to acknowledge when practicing such lucid mindsets is the fact that most people have been sleepwalking through their whole lives. For most of us, there's over 20 years of this constant absentmindedness that we must put an end to and replace with mindfulness. That's not a simple thing that happens overnight, to say the least, so we should be patient and consistent in this practice of literally changing a lifetime old mindset. And it's really not just about lucid dreaming, those who practice mindfulness often notice how different and actually alive they and everything else around them feels when they are being truly awake.

Dream signs are already a mnemonic so of course you can! The whole point of a dream sign is that it's meant to act as a mnemonic to remind you that what you're experiencing is a dream, if the sign itself isn't weird enough making it weirder and visualising will definitely make it stronger.

I also completely agree that to a lot of people the entire concept of mindfulness seems new, I think as kids we are usually quite mindful because we are curious about everything but that slowly gets worse as our minds get more clouded with stress and anxieties. Eventually if you tell an adult that they need to relax and be more mindful they can give you a whole list of reasons for why they want to continue being stressed and serious, even if it's not good for LDs or health.

Originally Posted by Memm

Dream signs are already a mnemonic so of course you can! The whole point of a dream sign is that it's meant to act as a mnemonic to remind you that what you're experiencing is a dream, if the sign itself isn't weird enough making it weirder and visualising will definitely make it stronger.

I also completely agree that to a lot of people the entire concept of mindfulness seems new, I think as kids we are usually quite mindful because we are curious about everything but that slowly gets worse as our minds get more clouded with stress and anxieties. Eventually if you tell an adult that they need to relax and be more mindful they can give you a whole list of reasons for why they want to continue being stressed and serious, even if it's not good for LDs or health.

I see, thanks.

And yep, that's pretty much how it goes, sadly.

If you dreamed about the same location every night without fail would it be easy to become lucid almost every night?

There must be some folk who are lucky to dream about the same destination so regularly that they become lucid easily.

I give my dreams credit for being creative - they manage to create a new location for my dreams every night!

Originally Posted by Bobblehat

If you dreamed about the same location every night without fail would it be easy to become lucid almost every night?

There must be some folk who are lucky to dream about the same destination so regularly that they become lucid easily.

I give my dreams credit for being creative - they manage to create a new location for my dreams every night!

I think so. But it still requires access to memory to remember the implication of the location, and heightened self-awareness to notice! I dream about my childhood home very frequently, and when I put in daytime MILD-like visualizations to associate that location with dreams, I got lucid a bunch afterwards. I need to do that again!

p.s. other than that one waking-life location, my dreams locations are all otherwise dream-only, yes, also different every single night and every dream even.

Originally Posted by FryingMan

I dream about my childhood home very frequently, and when I put in daytime MILD-like visualizations to associate that location with dreams, I got lucid a bunch afterwards.

Can I ask you to say a bit more about that? What would you do exactly?

Originally Posted by Bobblehat

Can I ask you to say a bit more about that? What would you do exactly?

Sure thing.

I bring back up the images of the dream. I imagine myself there experiencing the dream again, and while I'm replaying it I mentally verbalize intentions "I'm dreaming! I'm dreaming! This is a dream! When I'm in this place, I AM DREAMING..." over and over and over. It's the same practice as visualizing prospective memory targets: imagine the look / feel / sound/ smell / emotions of the target you want to recognize/remember and associate it with "I'm dreaming!"

I think this is also a form of incubation, so it's sort of a two-birds-with-one-stone practice.

I had a spontaneous LD last night and I think it was because I was in a real-life location that I know I definitely won't be at for at least the next 3 months, I have always found real-life locations the easiest to get lucid in as opposed to fantasy locations, maybe because they're easier to associate with or more logically dependent, or both.

I often become lucid during FAs in my bedroom. The key to become lucid from regular dream signs like this is to keep it on the back of your mind. If it's off your mind and you're missing your dream sign, the best time to get it back on is when you're falling asleep via mantra/auto suggestion.

This was sooooo useful, thank you! ♡

Here's a thread that might interest you, Memm:

http://www.dreamviews.com/induction-...technique.html

The key point there seems to be this:

The effectiveness of this technique really relies on your ability to mentally visualize a building or area, and the objects within it. This would be most effective if you can take note of a common area you are in your dreams. For instance, if you are a student who often times finds himself in school in his dream, then you should use your School as your memory palace for Dream Signs, and place the reminders there.

So, if you are going to your grandad's house regularly in dreams and say, go to the sink, you can place a "memory peg" at the sink - which could be something like a demon reminding you to ask yourself if you're dreaming and do an RC.

Sounds good, I expect that would work if you have a lot of repeat location dreams.

Something to consider is you can use your body parts for loci (locations) as well, so each finger on a hand for example, that might work as something location independent, but you have to be fairly conscious of your hands in your dreams for that would to work, I've tried it before but couldn't quite make it happen, might work with more effort or for someone else though.

Yes, I've tried it with the hands. I dropped the experiment after a couple of days because of "lucid burnout" (I'd thought of nothing but LDing for a a few months and my brain had taken a battering) but I didn't expect it to work for the reason you said - my hands don't feature very much in my dreams. The question "would using the hand as a loci 'location' incubate more hand-involving dreams"? is there though.

NB: The rest is speculation - abandon hope all ye who enter here:

The Truman show sphere

The sentence you used: "Dreams are not a location and they change frequently" got me thinking about if you could kind of artificially make it seem like all your dreams are at the same location (I think, IIRC, that you meant something else by that sentence, but never mind). If your NL dreams are outside and are not obviously at some place from waking life (by this I mean you couldn't point to the location of the dream on a map in waking life (this can get tricky, because you can dream about a park that doesn't resemble a park from your WL but you can be quite specific about the location of the park on a WL map)) then could you act as though your dreams (I'll call dreams that don't obviously occur at some location from waking life "generic location dreams") are all at the same location? The best way to explain it is, you treat it as though your generic location dreams all occur in some big sphere - just like one in the Truman show. Then you could start to use locations in some way. In my case, maybe I could observe that all my alien invasions begin at the same location of the "sky" of the sphere and use that to remember to do an RC, or I could use some kind of visualisation and place "pegs" all around locations of the sphere that remind me to RC?

Generic room

So, the Truman sphere idea would cover outside locations, but what about inside? For this I could perhaps use a "generic room". Similar to the Truman sphere idea, a generic room would be a room that keeps appearing in my dreams, but a room whose location cannot be pointed to on a waking-life map. (It's "somewhere in the ether"). There could be a few ways to go with that:

Mini- dream cartography: This could be used as a more specialised version of dream cartography; instead of mapping the whole "world" of your dreams, you'd just be mapping the generic room.


Loci-locations: You could put reminders to RC at different locations of the room. For example, if you regularly use the door in the generic room then you could have a monster jumping up and down shouting, "It's a dream! Do a reality check!"

A lucid area: You could treat a specific area of the room as a "lucid area" where you have to go to get lucid. You could pay special attention to that area during recall to reinforce the idea.

A lucid level: Instead of treating a specific area of the room as a lucid-area, you could treat a specific level (altitude) as a the lucid area. You could associate lucidity with events that occur above head height? Or at the ceiling?


Problem:

Of course, all that is meaningless if your sleeping mind doesn't realise that you're in your "generic place" and treats every new location outside or in a room as though it's a new location. It might be worth noting though, that without any conscious intention to apply the "lucid location in generic room" idea I've been paying a lot of attention to specific areas of rooms and buildings in my non-lucids - in particular the far right end of the room, which I've considered as a possible for a "lucid location".