Shadowtech's Omnilucidity Experiment

Hi everyone! I'm back after a long period of inactivity on Dreamviews (pretty sure noone noticed anyway...), but a long time ago I came across Shadowtech's technique to become lucid 100% of the time(?) which apparently involves constantly monitoring your blinking and/or breathing.

I tried to do it with breathing at first (again, long time ago), but I quickly found that Conscious Breathing was not only difficult to permanently monitor, but also exhausting and painful. I stopped after a week or so with no success in inducing lucid dreams.

Now I'm trying it again with blinking. I just started yesterday. At first I would just do the exact same thing I did with breathing, just try to keep it in the front of my mind all the time. It didn't really work for the same reasons. But I quickly thought outside the box and decided for one of the following two variants:

1. Visualize a flash of red light (like taking damage in an FPS) right after you blink.
2. Count your number of blinks every day.

​The idea behind both of them is that you're associating every blink with a very simple task, but one that requires conscious interference. Very subtle, but present. So theoretically this should make me omni-aware of every time I blink. Yesterday, indeed, it did work almost flawlessly, with just one single blackout period for ~2-3 minutes when I completely forgot.

I'm working with the red light technique. Today in the morning I tried the counting technique but I lost count when I had a sequence of really fast blinks. Warning to anyone who attempts to use counting, the number is larger than you might think, I got to 170 within the first hour of my day even when my eyes were closed most of the time. I imagine it can easily be 2000+ per day.

The idea, of course, is that whenever you notice you haven't blinked in a really long time, you're very probably dreaming, so just do a reality check. If you can remember the last time blinking because it was literally seconds ago, you're quite probably awake. With the counting technique, you can also have the following variant: if you remember what the number of the last blink was, you're awake, else you're dreaming.

So anyway, I'll use this thread to track my progress and we'll see how quickly I'll be able to have lucid dreams using this technique, I imagine it'll take quite a long time but be so fulfilling and rewarding in the end that it'll be worth it (using Shadowtech's testimony). Anyone can benefit from the data collected in this experiment. FOR SCIENCE!

Look, people, you can write in this thread too, it's not like it's my private domain or something.

Day 1

Started out really nice. I woke up at 7 AM and remembered a dream, stayed in bed with eyes closed, remembered to do the conscious blinking, and although I tried to procrastinate opening my eyes, eventually I had to. Still tried to keep my eyes closed most of the time. Soon I fell asleep again and recalled a second dream, much more detailed and vivid. Neither was lucid though. But then again, I'm coming back to practice after a long hiatus so I kind of expect it anyway.

Anyway, throughout most of the day I was able to consistently keep consciously blinking. I did start out the day trying to count my blinks, but I was stunned when I lost count because of a very fast sequence (like 3 within a second). So I moved to just visualization.

Halfway through the day I switched the visualization from a red periphery around my field of vision to a red dot in its center. I found myself having to de-focus my vision every time in order to imagine the periphery. Changing to a dot in the center solved the problem.

About 2/3 ~ 3/4 through the day I started to get tired from the blinking and from then on I had some minor blackouts (for a few-teen seconds) and two major blackouts for about a minute each when I just completely forgot to blink consciously. My left eye started to hurt a little.

I'm not expecting anything special to happen tonight. I got around 4-5 occasions to reality check because either I noticed it was difficult to blink or I noticed I hadn't blinked consciously for some time (blackouts). But the point of this technique isn't to generate many reality checks, on the contrary, the blinks are reality checks themselves so in theory the actual reality checking should only happen in dreams, ideally.

I noticed a disturbing thing: When I blink consciously I get the standard multitasking interference, I find it hard to blink consciously and simultaneously do some other task. As a result, when I actively do something like typing, I end up not blinking for long periods of time (~10 seconds) and it feels a little painful before I have to stop and blink and visualize the dot. Although I'm glad it happened because it means my blinking is becoming conscious crazy fast. With breathing I didn't have such success even after a week, whereas with blinking, this is just my first full day and it has already become mostly conscious! The effects on my dreams may come much faster (within a week or two???) than I originally predicted (within a month or two).

To keep something on your mind is to keep it in your short-term memory. However, if something is not in short-term memory for about 30 seconds, that something has to come from your long-term memory. For example, when you're keeping blinking on your mind during the day, you're keeping it in your short-term memory. When you remembered to focus on blinking after your blackout period, that memory you remembered came from your long-term memory. Something reminded you to focus on blinking.

Since blinking is not usually in your short-term memory 30 seconds before the dream, the initial memory of blinking during the dream usually has to come from long-term memory, just like after a blackout period.

Maintenance rehearsal involves keeping something on your mind without thinking about the meaning of it or connecting it with other information. This is good for keeping something in short-term memory, but it is not very good at developing long-term memories. Elaborative rehearsal, on the other hand, does involve thinking about the meaning of the information or connecting it with other information, and is better at developing long-term memories because it allows more things to remind you of what you want to remember.

It sounds like this technique is mainly based on maintenance rehearsal. The technique will work better for DILD if it is based on elaborative rehearsal. Associate blinking with many things rather than just a few things so that more things can remind you of blinking.

Certainly, very true that.

I noticed that the blackout periods ended with myself simply spontaneously realizing I'm blinking. In all cases. Therefore I'm reminded to keep blinking all the time either because I've done it recently (as it is most of the time) or because I just detected myself doing it.

I don't know what it's like in dreams, because I actually never verified blinking in a lucid dream. I only know that I can open and close my eyes in lucid dreams, and that closing them often leads to a premature awakening. I refrained from using breathing because I learned that I can control my breath in a lucid dream. For a very long time I was extremely puzzled how that was possible. Now I know, I think it has to do with the fact that my nose isn't affected by sleep paralysis because otherwise I wouldn't be able to breathe while dreaming. And so when I control my dream nose I also control my real one, whereas the same is not true when I pinch my nose in a dream because that requires my hand to move, and it is sleep paralyzed.

Anyway, I suppose in my dreams I will spontaneously notice I haven't blinked in a while, I'll do a reality check, and I'll find out I'm dreaming. This is how I got out of my blackout periods every time. Not by associating it with a certain event, but simply spontaneously, not a long time into the blackout. But you're certainly right when you say that it would be worth associating more events with blinking to try to reduce the length of blackout periods as much as possible, and hence, also minimize the time between gaining self-awareness (i.e. the perceived "beginning of a dream") and gaining lucidity in that dream.

In a dream, the context of the situation is often very different than what it was prior to the dream, so there is much less to remind what we were doing before the dream. This makes it difficult to spontaneously realize what we haven't been doing in a while during the dream. This is why it is helpful associating more things with blinking to give us more potential conscious or subconscious reminders of blinking during the dream.

By associating blinking with other things, I mean things like knowing situations when you tend to blink fast, notice the blinking of others, notice what you tend to think about instead of blinking, try to recall any difference in blinking during dreams. Associate many things with blinking.

The more you associate with blinking, the easier it is to remember blinking.

I'll let this be both a response to dolphin and another entry.

Day 2

I think I just achieved both a piece of extreme progress and an extreme obstacle.

The thing is, it's only Day 2, and I blink basically only consciously now. Not a single blink can escape my awareness, be it followed by visualization or not. This is amazing, I never thought it would be this easy.

The problem is, I stop blinking whenever I do something else because I'm completely unable to multitask that way. This means I blink heavily for periods when I'm not occupied with doing something else that requires a lot of processing power. Specifically, talking makes me stop blinking. I get instantly reminded to blink again whenever I stop doing that engaging thing and get back to a kind of "brain idle" state.

Dolphin, I don't imagine it will be difficult to get reminded I haven't been blinking in a while, because I'm constantly reminded of this whenever I start doing something that distracts me from blinking. I imagine that my dreams might consist of me doing something cognitively engaging, then something less cognitively engaging, at which point I'll be reminded that I don't need to blink -> reality check -> lucidity. This is just a theory, of course, but I'll try to verify it very soon. My dreams are full of less cognitive activities such as observing or sometimes simply idling, so that will almost definitely have a chance of happening.

Never mind, scrap that, I'm close to giving up again and I probably will.

Giving up after two days?

Sensei: Yes, unfortunately. I am giving up after 2 days. https://www.dreamviews.com/general-l...ml#post2229464

Just reading about this technique and it just rings so wrong on so many levels. Sorry but it just seems "suicidal",... I understand LD requires commitment, but would you trade your soul and sanity for LD? No thanks.