I used to dream journal and devote a lot of time to it and lucid dreaming. However, now I get up early in the morning, every minute of extra sleep counts, so I don't have time to do it. Has anyone succeeded in lucid dreaming without keeping a journal? How did you do it?
P.S. Please no hate, I am not new to this and I know the importance of it. However, I just don't have the chance to do it now.
You can re-remember your dreams a few times in the day to carry them to the night, to remember them one last time, along with other memories of the day, before you fall asleep and enter the world of dreams, to remake new memories again.
I personally enjoy using memory temples to store my dreams for the day. But these days, I use a journal.
I think my dream recall isn't necessarily any worse when I'm not journaling but doing the DJ does help me solidify my dream recall a bit better than if I hadn't done it at all. I imagine you are already familiar with this yourself, though maybe your dreams are more innately memorable anyway, in which case, how much the DJ matters really does depend on your personal context I think.
I don't LD often enough anyway to give you a very relevant answer I suppose, but in my relatively green opinion, if you have good prospective memory or are able to keep intents well enough, at first glance, I don't see how the absence of a DJ would directly impact your ability to dream lucidly.
It's definitely hard to juggle our responsibilities with our lucid dreaming hobby. Everyone knows that first-hand. The best solution I can offer you is to simply make the time to journal. Set your alarm 5 minutes early - it shouldn't take too long! Alternatively, simple jot down 'prompts' that can jog your memory at a later stage throughout the day so you can journal once you have time.
As for your actual question, I find that once you build a basic level of dream recollection, you can coast for a couple weeks using the recall you've acquired for yourself. It's kind of like working out your muscles. If you curl weights for a few weeks then your bicep will grow, and you will retain that strength for a couple weeks even if you stop lifting the weights. Sooner or later though, you're going to need to pick up the weights again, or the muscle will be subject to atrophy.
Although I keep a dream journal handy to write in, most of the time I don't have the motivation to write in it. But I can become lucid without writing in a dream journal. I use the autosuggestion technique.
Autosuggestion requires hardly any time or effort. It involves just going to bed, planning what you want to do during your next dream and going to sleep. It's not always the most effective technique, but it can work, so it's better than nothing.
I can consistently have at least a couple of lucid dreams a week using only autosuggestion.
I think I should elaborate on my previous post to make it more clear, as I don't exactly do autosuggestion in a strictly traditional manner.
First, I feel like in the context of trying to become lucid, when people say they want to "improve dream recall," they are often most concerned with improving the ability to potentially write down dreams upon waking from them. In other words, they are most concerned with the ability increase to awareness during more dreams so they could potentially become lucid during them. I agree with DarkestDarkness that if you're able to keep intents well enough, the absence of a DJ won't directly impact your ability to dream lucidly.
I like to be able to potentially write down 3 dreams a night. If I find I am consistently not able to potentially recall dreams upon waking up from them, then I prioritize able to consistently be aware enough during my dreams to potentially recall them. To do this, just before going to sleep, my plan (intention) I set before going to sleep is to notice the next dream I have so I can potentially recall it. I do this by telling myself, "I want to notice the next dream I have." I then go to sleep, and if I find it is taking me too long to fall asleep I'll reset the intention and try again to go to sleep.
Traditionally, intentions would phrased in present tense, but I think the meaning and motivation behind the intention is what makes it work rather than the tense of it at the time it was made. For example, if somebody intended to catch a bus at 9:00 AM tomorrow, to make that intention effective, they wouldn't necessarily have to phrase it as "I catch the bus at 9:00 AM tomorrow." Also, in the context of lucid dreaming, I feel like if I phrased an intention in present tense and the intention wasn't working over time, I might feel like the intention is a lie, making me lose motivation, making the intention less effective, ect.
Once I am able to consistently potentially recall dreams, I focus more on setting an intention to become lucid. I do this a few ways, depending on what I feel like, but I'll set an intention to become lucid and/or to achieve a dream goal, using the same "I want to XXX" structure. I might keep or drop my intention to notice the dream depending on how confident I am.
If I really confident, sometimes I just set an intention to achieve a dream goal. Because a dream goal is motivation for lucidity and the intention to become lucid is motivation for lucidity, I could use a dream goal as my intention for lucidity.
So, before going to sleep I tell myself something like, "I want to be lucid and I want to be a dolphin" and go to sleep, being sure to reset my intentions if I feel like it's taking me a long time to fall asleep.
When this method works during a dream, I often don't consciously know what makes me lucid during the dream. It's as if I subconsciously realize I'm dreaming before consciously realizing I'm dreaming. I think doing this would require picking up on subtle clues from the subconscious that I'm dreaming, like a thought or expectation. Being able to do this might come with practice and experience, but I suspect I wouldn't be able to do this as well without the help of the intentions motivating me to do it.
Yay, Dolphin is revealing his master ninjutsu, so one question for you. What is the difference between autosuggestion, intention and affirmation not as general but specially in your case, just for clarification to what you say so far and what you mean by" reset my intention", how you reset it?
In my case, autosuggestion is the attempt to motivate myself to lucid dream through my intention.
My intention is what I want to do during my next dream.
My affirmation is the positive motivational support behind the intention. It's assuring myself that I can lucid dream and telling myself to go for it and try to achieve my dream goal. This is meaning behind the intention.
If it takes me a long time to fall asleep upon initially setting my intention, I reset my intention in the same way by simply telling myself what I want to do during my next dream before trying to fall asleep.
Thanks Dolphin for the additional explanation.:)
First of all, thank you for such a detailed response. Would you advise me to first practice recalling dreams in the morning and then practicing lucid dreaming when I get to that 3-dream-per-night mark? I can recall small pieces of dreams atm. I was in a much better shape several years back. I was thinking of doing something similar to your approach. I wanted to meditate on the idea of becoming lucid. Before bed, I plan to maybe spend 15 minutes on meditation and then go straight to bed. In the morning, I'll write down interesting dreams and mentally go through all of them. That's the plan as of now. What do you think about this plan?Quote:
Originally Posted by dolphin
When I refer to being able to potentially recall 3 dreams a night, I'm referring to quantity, not quality. Being able to recall small pieces of dreams is fine. The idea is giving yourself multiple chances a night to lucid dream, as opposed to just one chance a night. If you could recall one thing that happened in a dream, that dream was a chance to lucid dream. Starting to practice lucid dreaming at the 3-dream-per-night mark would be ideal, but you could also start at 2-dream-per-night mark.
Your plan sounds good to me. When mentally going through your dreams, try to learn from them. For example, try to see if your practice is having an affect on your ability to reflect on what is happening during the dream. Also, in case you don't already, have a dream goal in mind for when you become lucid.
EDIT: When dream journaling, you could also recall signs of dreaming you missed during the dream and during your meditation, you could imagine yourself becoming lucid from those dream signs and set the intention to become lucid from similar dream signs in the future.
So you are not using any wbtb, even natural awakenings during the night?
Edit: Actually I was doing something similar into my first year of adult practices, instead of autosuggestion it was called self-hypnosis through affirmations, maybe it was the same thing, I just go through my first dream journal.