Reboot, Refocus, Reread, Reflect!

After a particularly long dry stretch in March and April (not entirely unexpected considering it coincided with a particularly intense international business trip with the usual accompanying dose of jet-lag), I've decided that I need to refocus my efforts on lucid dreaming, and getting lucid a lot more in particular. Dream recall has remained pretty good, but average DJ entry detail has shrunk considerably. In my first year I could spend 1-2 hours a day transcribing the DJ voice recorder notes from the night. Now, I almost never record during the night, preferring instead to maintain a mental running list of dreams across wakings. I think that is a good workout for memory and recall, but it requires a lot of mental energy during the night, and time that could probably be more profitably spent on maintaining/resetting intent to get lucid, and doing other night-work things like WBTB and WILD attempts, and SSILD. It also results in much lost DJ detail, and less time during the day spent thinking about dreaming.

After a couple days of highly focused and consistent day work and intention, I've had now several long nights of VPAL (vivid, present, alternate-life) dreams. Last night in particular had 7-10 wakings, each time with a new set of dreams to recall and review. Several were incredibly VPAL level. Day work and recall has always been strong for me, but night work admittedly has been fairly weak. Night work yields results, and so I must put much more energy there. That requires being well-rested and getting to bed on time, another historical weak point for me.

So. My plan includes re-reading the classics (LaBerge's ETWOLD, Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep) and re-arranging my practice to follow their recommendations. I've already started ETWOLD, and (re-)discovered great nuggets of LD wisdom right from the start. LaBerge is really big on goal setting and tracking, and that's something I've always been pretty weak on. The last time I set a solid goal in February, I had 6 LDs in 10 days and got multiple TOTMs, a pretty inspiring result.

I think part of the issue with not achieving as much lucidity as I'd like (other than the obvious focus and motivation factors) is that I've become so familiar with the dream state over these almost 3 years of LD practice, that it's not surprising to me any more to wake up with the memories from 3-10+ dreams every night. Also, my dreams have become increasingly mundane and un-dream-like: while 2 years ago I would often have "wild and wacky, bizarre" dreams at least as a part of every night, in the last year or 1.5 years my dreams mostly consist of having believable adventures or just hanging out with people in mostly waking-like situations. Oh the dream signs are still there, to be sure, but they're increasingly more and more subtle. It will take a very highly honed reflection ability to get that "lucid spark" going again consistently.

In terms of my Unified Theory, Attention and Recall are pretty high, but Reflection seems to be lagging a bit. So I plan to re-instate the Tholey/LaBerge "intention/reflection" moments throughout the day, like I did at the start of my practice. I'll bring back daily prospective memory targets, and also paying a lot more attention to things like focus/intent.

Focusing on dreaming before bedtime has yielded excellent results, so I'll leave time in the evenings to stop work and get off the computer, and read LD materials and think about dreaming and set intent and expectation for the night.

I'll update my status here in this thread, sort of a repeat of my "2015: year of..." thread for 2016, except almost half of 2016 has passed already.

I will have lucid dreams tonight, or very soon!

I think I am in the same boat with you, at the moment. I'll be watching to see how your progress goes. And that did not sound creepy at all . . . . :disconcerted:

This sounds like an excellent plan for you FM! I believe, with all of your great base of knowledge, experience and refocus going forward, that SSILD can do wonders for triggering reflection for you in your dreams following the cycles. It is amazing some of the obvious stuff I miss when I don't use it and the more subtle things I catch when I do use it. If you aren't feeling SSILD, then MILD could be your answer for an extra boost. You got this my friend! :)

This has reminded my brain that it needs to refocus as well, your plan seems pretty good, I think reflection and honest self assessment is pretty key to advancing with meaningful progress. Good luck with your journey :).

Hey, FM: If you want wild, wacky, memorable, bordering on nightmarish dreams, take some 5-HTP. That stuff will elevate your dreams into the realm of Tim Burton style strangeness.

Thank you all for the nice wishes! And YAY, I in fact got a lucid this morning. It was a battle, including a touch of insomnia (wakefulness seems to go hand in hand with effortful intent for me), on a morning with an early morning alarm no less, and I made it back to sleep using my relaxation breathing techniques and a touch of SSILD-like cycles (I "projected myself" into the visual and audio spheres). So effectively, I did a WBTB.

It was already excellent, and shaping up to be even better (nudge nudge wink wink) in just a second, and that was just the moment when my wife chose to wake me up! ARGH!

I finished reading the DILD portion of ETWOLD last night before bed, reading carefully through the Combined reflection/intention technique and MILD, and skimming through the rest including a bit of the WILD chapter.

Yesterday I made the little "Is this a dream?" card LaBerge recommends and carried it around in my pocket during the day and periodically took it out and read it.

Here's the DJ entry:

Nice to see that effort paid off for you. Clearly it's the four "R's" that you named in this thread plus one additional: "Resolve." Maybe that's where I've been letting myself down of late, as I've gone from Late April until now with not a hint of lucidity, yet my dream recall has been unusually good.

Ah man, I pride myself on my alliteration abilities (see!?) and I missed "resolve." Yep, that's in the mix, big time. Is this a dream?
p.s. dreaming supplements make me feel pretty unwell in general (5-HTP is one, also wormwood, yuck) so I've stayed away from them for a couple years now.

Sounds like you have the resolve issue covered, my friend! Now it's MY time to ratchet up the "desire factor" by an order of magnitude. Going to be following this thread to see where it leads. I anticipate it will be full of good vibes and success stories in short order. :chuckle:

Good thread! I kind of feel like I've had a bit of a dry spell too the last month or so. Not totally dry, but it just feels like my frequency and strength of LDs has been rather lower than par lately for some reason. For now, I'm mostly trying to renew my focus a bit on having more of a constant eye during the day on possible dream signs/questioning my reality. Also I'm trying to continue improving the “night-work” periods of brief awakening, even though it's a bit tricky since for some reason I seem to be “conking out” and falling back asleep after journaling a bit faster and more abruptly than usual lately.

I did get a rather nice lucid NREM moment a few nights ago and rode into a LD from it in which I seemed to take my time and engage in more mindful thought/reflection about what I was trying to do than usual in my LDs, so that seems like a step in the right direction. :)

Good luck!

"Success is not an accident...success is actually a choice, [a choice to create the habits for today] that are on par with the dreams that you have for tomorrow."

"You have to want it like you want to breathe."

I've had some amazing nights of dreaming recently. Last night was another "all-night long dreaming night," very vivid, so many scenarios and scenes and situations, beautiful, scary, exhilarating, detailed, ...just amazing! I had a semi-almost-lucid moment in the final dream where I recognized a dream-like scenario very clearly but somehow I let it slide by. But still that's the closest I've been for a long time, so I'm stoked!

I've been re-reading The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep, and re-discovering so much wisdom and incredible insights on the nature of lucidity therein. I plan in fact to adopt the TYoDaS practice as my primary practice for now. I think it explains perfectly well why I'm not lucid a lot more. Here is one of any number of amazing excerpts:

Quote:

---

This is the sequence: awareness in the fist moment of experience, in response, in dream, ... One cannot just start at the end. You can determine for yourself how mature your practice is: as you encounter the phenomena of experience, examine your feelings and your reactions to the feelings. Are you controlled by your interactions with the objects of experience or do you control your reactions to them? Are you thrown into emotional reactions by your attractions and aversions, or can you remain in steady presence in diverse situations? If the former, practice will cultivate the presence needed to free you of ... reactivity. If the latter, you will increasingly develop stability in awareness and your dreams will change in extraordinary ways.

---

LD #186 DJ Entry

Not the best night of dreaming, and the LD isn't all that impressive, but hey, I got lucid, and I'm very hopeful this is a sign that my renewed practice is on the right path.

I started with 10 minute forceful zhine sessions, moved up to 15 minutes a few times, and just now I did a 15 minute session followed by a short break and another 10 minute session. My mind is fairly stable during these, mostly I'm trying to avoid jerking my eyes slightly and did much better this time. I was getting some fairly wild open-eyed HI by the end of the 15 minute session. Almost no blinking in the 15 minute session, but a lot during the following 10 minute one.

Had a short LD last night, got lucid but lot it pretty quickly. Tons of dreams, though, some moments remembered vividly. Need to refocus also on recall!

Pretty dry all of June, but with generally fairly good recall. Practicing Illusory body/world and mindfulness most days, but nothing much at night, no WBTB.

Then I started reading Andrew Holocek's new book on LDing and Dream Yoga. I got to the mindfulness meditation chapter last night and it's brilliant, he really makes the spot-on observations about the relationship between mindfulness/attention/lucidity and mindlessness/distraction/non-lucidity. I get very excited as it resonates very strongly with what I believe about the nature of lucidity and how best to train it. His brief discussion of the "Lion gaze" is very instructive ("gaze of the dog": follows distraction [the stick thrown away from it] vs. "gaze of the lion": ignores the distraction and instead looks right to the source of it, the thrower)

Then I go to bed doing some of the Dream Yoga visualizations (red pearl in the throat, a red "AH" in the throat)

Then I get a near WILD at about 3 hrs into the night!
2016-07-14 near early WILD [remarkable!], long insomnia, late semi/almost-lucid - Dream Journals - Lucid Dreaming - Dream Views

I'm so excited by this I can't return to sleep (unfortunately!) I make it back to sleep eventually and get a near-LD, but the later dreams are more distracting.

Holocek has a really great way of phrasing things, and pointing out what's important. I think a fault in my practice is that it has become too serious. Lightening up, trying to recapture the "child's mind," seeing dreams as fun, will go a long way towards more frequent lucidity.

He finishes his mindfulness meditation chapter with: "So you want to be lucid at night? Meditate during the day." OK if that's not going to get me to daily meditation, nothing will!