MILD failure

If you're motivated you are supposed to do MILD properly. Wake up, recall, spot dreamsign if one there, visualise seeing a DS in next dream, repeat an affirmation three millions times before going back to sleep etc. But I've been thinking about what happens if you "fail" MILD - that is, you fall asleep at one of the stages. It leads me to ask the question of what happens if you fall asleep at the recall stage. Is recalling - and recalling, generally - an ideal mental exercise that makes you likely to become lucid in your next dream? Or would something else be better?

Also, assuming for the moment that recalling the previous dream is an exercise likely to lead to lucidity in the next dream, are there some types of recall that are better than others? I've realised the type of recall I've always done could be called "chronological recall", where I try to recall the dream events from the beginning (or as near to the start as possible) to the end of the dream. What if I did a type of recall I could call "static recall" - where I just freeze my focus on one point of the dream? So the idea is that you focus on just one moment - maybe the very last memory of the dream? You try to recall as much as you can about the "final frame" as though you were back in it, not moving about in the dream, but standing still and scrutinising as much as the scene as possible. Would this attitude carry over into the next dream?

I actually use what you call "static recall" when I do choose to MILD. Recalling the whole dream while repeating your affirmation seems difficult :)

Thanks TC.

I've found in recall that placing an emphasis on sensory and emotional details (instead of plot and chronology) has a positive impact on dream vividness and lucid percentage. I think one's attitude should be that you are "investigating" the previous dream, not just retelling the sequence. So I think that at least partially overlaps with your idea of static vs chronological recall. One habit that works for me is to spend more effort on painting the scene: the lighting, the colors, the mood, how did I get there?, is it familiar?, and so on. In chronology, reckoning those details might have been spread over a period of minutes in the dream. But when I recall the scene, I try to collect those details at the beginning to set the scene, and then go on to the plot.

So I think that of all the activities in a MILD routine, the "investigating" is the most important part because I suspect it stimulates your critical thinking and primes you to pay attention to detail in the next dream. Even though the previous dream is in the past, the process of recall is still an inspection of a novel situation that should engage your curiosity.