My Slow-Burn Strategy and Ongoing Progress

Hi, I'm new here! I've received a lot of benefit over the past year or so from discussions on this site so I thought I'd finally contribute myself. I've had short periods over the last several years of attempting to lucid dream, and usually it goes pretty well. The problem is that while lucid dreams start happening pretty quickly, the results are not ever 100% consistent or reliable, and usually involve methods that bring too much disruption to my day-to-day life. Nowadays I'm a 'The Mind Illuminated' meditation practitioner(Stage 5 on good days for those who are curious), and the ADA(All Day Awareness) method appeals to my priorities.

So I'd like to share my current simplified 'slow burn' strategy for something similar to ADA or Dream Yoga, and update with progress reports. I wanted to create a simple but thorough way to progress in ADA without burning out, as this is a practice you have to be consistent with to really see the results. I hope this is the right place for this thread, if not please tell me how to preserve it in a different location instead of just locking it or something haha. I also hope this will spark some discussion. And those with any experience, please give advice as to how this method could go wrong or be improved. Here is what I am starting:

1: Morning Practice
Spend a few minutes trying to remember as much as possible from the dreams you had the night before. Set the simple intention to pay detailed attention to your surroundings, and yourself, throughout the day.

2: Daytime Practice
Look for an oddity, anything that seems 'off', that could potentially tell you that you are dreaming. If you find something, genuinely consider that you could be dreaming for all you know, and in a quick and subtle way increase awareness to see if that is the case. If not, make a note in your phone of the oddity and number it. The goal is not to do this all day, as that would be too hard at first, but just to notice at least one more oddity than your 'high score' for any given day. So at first with a more limited and untrained awareness you'll only have to discover a couple oddities, but as time goes on you'll need to pay greater and greater detailed attention to your surroundings.

For example, maybe you look out your window twice one day and both times you see the same people drive through. Or you notice that it's a warm day in February. If you notice one of these when it happens, not in retrospect, and you respond by upping awareness to check if you are dreaming, then you can count it towards your daily record. Maybe give yourself a reward for beating your high score. This should be a simple and fun practice that does not overly strain the mind.

2: Nighttime Practice
While lying in bed, set the simple intention to remember your dreams and to know that you are dreaming when you are(anyone got a better way to word that?). Rest your attention on your body and everything you feel, and intend to maintain mindful awareness while watching the progression of dullness as you fall asleep. This technique of resting attention on the body while being aware of the progression of dullness comes from Culadasa, the author of The Mind Illuminated. When you wake in the night or morning, make an effort to remember what you were dreaming.

As far as dream recall goes, does anyone have a better way to review dreams that does not involve much intrusion into sleeping soundly through the night or getting going in the morning? Often if I try to record my dreams, even with just a voice recorder, I have trouble falling back asleep and I can't afford that with my schedule. It can also take a lot of willpower to make myself think through and record my dreams while half-asleep. I, however, have tried to design each part of the practice to support dream recall in some way. Even from the daytime practice my dream recall should be improved, as a result of building the mental habit of paying attention to the details of my surroundings.

Thanks for taking the time to read this! Would anyone like to try this with me as I give updates on how it's going? And can someone tell me if it would be better for me to give updates in the comments or by editing the main post?

Hi Simpleton, it will be interesting to watch your progress!

I think at some point editing the post will become impossible due to a timeout, not completely sure, but updates are almost always best put into a reply, as that way the full history of your journey will be easy to follow. Having a stream of replies for updates is a major advantage of forums over chat platforms like discord.

As for opinions on the practice, I'll just say that everyone's different. What sounds good in theory doesn't necessarily work for everybody in practice.

I've had very good success with LaBerge-ian / cognitive approaches (MILD, critical reflection, dream recall, WBTB). I'm a huge fan of dream yoga, especially as formulated in "The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep." (TYoDaS) It makes sense about waking lucidity affecting dreaming lucidity. I agree in theory with just about everything in that book. In my practice of it, though, I haven't seen the results, I'd hoped for. TWR (author of TYoDaS) says to keep practicing, even if it takes a long time to see results. I figured 10 months of every day all day practice should have been enough to at least see an improving trend, but instead after an initial spike of lucids, they trailed off and all but dried up, leaving me with an (to me) unsatisfying rate of one or maybe two LDs per month, if I'm lucky. Since my ultimate goal is to get to nightly LDs, it just felt like it was too far away with this approach. (I will add I was NOT doing the night-time DY practice, only the daytime focused foundational practices....this may have had a big effect on my results, without WBTB).

My waking self is completely transformed, I feel, from the DY practice, however, in a very positive way. I just have not seen the manifestation in dreams.

On the other hand, we here on the forums have a member who stuck with it (DY) over several years, diligently, and with his own style of meditation (based on tummo), has achieved something close to omnilucidity -- lucid in every dream every night.

I will probably return to DY, at least for the waking life benefits if nothing else. But I'm going to dedicate this year to the tried-n-true cognitive approach that worked so well for me in my initial practice starting back in 2013.

BTW I started reading "The Mind Illuminated," and doing some of the practices from the book. I like the author's take on some things (not all). I was probably somewhere around stage 4, maybe as you write stage 5 on a good day. I stopped its form of meditation though, after I found that it caused me wicked difficult insomnia -- I couldn't turn off my active observer. I've read that this is a common complaint with mindfulness meditation practitioners. The only solution I saw was "just get good rest, don't worry about sleep," which for someone who is interested in having a lot of dreams every night, is not very comforting.

I'm afraid I don't have good news about dream recall. I found it responds best to wakefulness in the night. I do not like wakefulness at night, because of my tendency towards middle of the night insomnia. It's so strange, because I fall asleep fast at bedtime, but after about 4-5 hours, if I don't just immediately aim for sleep, I'm risking not falling asleep again for the rest of the night. This happened just last night in fact: I woke from a long and very interesting (if somewhat disturbing) dream, and I decided to spend time with it to commit it to memory, and in so doing I burned up apparently my last vestige of drowsiness, and I just didn't make it back to sleep again. It's the same thing with WBTB -- there is no denying it is highly effective, I just don't like it!!!!!

The only thing I can suggest is trying to keep your notes as brief as possible, or just learn to live with the lesser details that come with waiting until the morning's final waiting to record something.
Another approach is not to do "full recall mode" every night, but a few nights (every other?), and emphasize sleep over recall on an alternating schedule. Keeping up with dream journaling is always important, though, whatever you decide about recall.

Building your recall in other ways could also help: like journaling your waking day in the evening, so that you achieve a "around the clock" practice of remembering your experiences.

Anyway, whatever you decide, stick with it, as consistency and dedication are what brings the best results, in time!

I appreciate your reply and all of your suggestions! I will probably update once a day for the first week and then give a weekly update for a while after that, possibly doing monthly updates after that so as to not spam the forum.

I have also read both EtWoLD and TYoDaS, have them both on my kindle. I have probably read through the four foundational practices a dozen or so times by now. Maybe even though I have MUCH less experience in lucid dreaming, I could help give a different perspective on meditation in TMI in the context of Dream Yoga that might prove useful.

Even though lucid dreaming is not mentioned in TMI itself, the changes that occur throughout the stages lead, in theory, progressively into the kind of mind that naturally dreams with lucid awareness. In fact, people have reported that they automatically have started lucid dreaming around Stage 8. You might wonder why I don't do the TYoDaS foundational practices. Reason is that at my current stage of meditation in TMI(4 and 5), I understand enough about how the mind works to know that it wouldn't bring good results. The kind of Gross Distraction that you are dealing with in Stage 4 is the kind that will make doing the foundational practices throughout the day an uphill battle, and even when you get into Stage 5 ON the cushion, you will probably be dealing with a lot of Gross Distraction OFF the cushion. I plan on starting TYoDaS foundational practices when I have developed the habits(closer to Stage 7 of TMI) that make them almost effortless to perform.

Though I can't speak from experience regarding this, I doubt that constantly perceiving the 'mind-generated-ness' of reality is the best habit for encouraging lucid dreams. It makes more sense to encourage a habit more along the lines of 'constantly paying attention to surroundings in the context of the awareness that you could indeed be asleep.' Reason for this is that while I know that reality is of the same substance as dreams, I'm not trying to tell if my reality is a dream in that sense in order to achieve lucidity, but to tell if my reality is a dream in the sense of being a reflection of my subconscious projections rather than of external reality. Perceiving the dreamlike nature of waking life by itself doesn't seem to help in discovering that I am, in fact, not awake.

As you get closer to Stage 6 practice you can try to keep attention fixed in the present moment throughout the day without a break, I did this before for days at a time before a serious unusual life event took away all of my routines. This is the point I think where TYoDaS foundational practices become useful for me, and I think its why he talks about Zhine(might've gotten that wrong, working from memory) first, but I don't think that he covers concentration sufficiently. In Stage 6 you develop Exclusive Attention, and in Stage 7 you develop Effortless Attention, and both of these make Dream Yoga practices, once again in theory, exponentially easier. This is why people in Stage 8 report effortless lucid dreaming even without practicing Dream Yoga.

As for insomnia as you progress, its something I experienced the last time I worked through the stages of TMI and now I understand how to prevent it. It comes from not compartmentalizing or contextualizing your practice to certain situations, and knowing where to place your attention. Sadly this wasn't covered in TMI but in Q&As that he did later on. People in Stages 5 work so hard to overcome even Subtle Dullness that they forget they need to encourage dullness at other times, and a lot of people are left with a high amount of focus and introspective awareness that they can't turn off(which is fine) and not knowing where to place that focus when its time to sleep. Also, I have heard from others that this issue naturally resolves itself as you get past Stage 6 and the habits of the mind 'rebalance' themselves once Subtle Distractions are dealt with. Most of my insomnia from this kind of practice anyways would always come from doing a WBTB and not being able to sleep again, once going days in a row(working full time) with only around 4 hours of sleep each night...

Regarding dream recall, I did notice a sharp increase in what I remembered last night with my current practice. Hopefully it continues to increase, in the meantime I'll be debating over how to want to record my dreams...or if I want to record them at all(I got a thing for privacy lol). I'll post a simplified update in a separate reply.

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Originally Posted by FryingMan

Hi Simpleton, it will be interesting to watch your progress!

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So here's my first update:
-Yesterday I noticed 2 oddities.
-Last night I did the falling asleep practice for the first time and fell asleep somewhat quickly.
-In the morning I remembered 6 distinct dream scenes with maybe half a minute of coherent story for each. Two of which I actually remembered later on due to random associations.

Day 2 update: Noticed three oddities yesterday, and remembered 5 non-lucid dreams with a little more detail/length than the previous ones.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Simpleton

I appreciate your reply and all of your suggestions! I will probably update once a day for the first week and then give a weekly update for a while after that, possibly doing monthly updates after that so as to not spam the forum.

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You're welcome, and thank you for your thoughts in return!

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I have also read both EtWoLD and TYoDaS, have them both on my kindle. I have probably read through the four foundational practices a dozen or so times by now. Maybe even though I have MUCH less experience in lucid dreaming, I could help give a different perspective on meditation in TMI in the context of Dream Yoga that might prove useful.

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Yes the four foundational practices chapter got very dog-eared :). I kept re-reading it until basically I had every single mini-practice suggestion he mentions totally memorized.

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Even though lucid dreaming is not mentioned in TMI itself, the changes that occur throughout the stages lead, in theory, progressively into the kind of mind that naturally dreams with lucid awareness. In fact, people have reported that they automatically have started lucid dreaming around Stage 8. You might wonder why I don't do the TYoDaS foundational practices. Reason is that at my current stage of meditation in TMI(4 and 5), I understand enough about how the mind works to know that it wouldn't bring good results. The kind of Gross Distraction that you are dealing with in Stage 4 is the kind that will make doing the foundational practices throughout the day an uphill battle, and even when you get into Stage 5 ON the cushion, you will probably be dealing with a lot of Gross Distraction OFF the cushion. I plan on starting TYoDaS foundational practices when I have developed the habits(closer to Stage 7 of TMI) that make them almost effortless to perform.

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I don't remember the TMI stages very well. I basically never get gross distraction any more. I'm able to remain in lucid presence more or less continuously throughout the entire day. However, I do live a relatively calm life in the country most of the time. (Conversations with people are when I still blank out and come back to myself afterwards, realizing I've been non-lucid for the entire conversation!).

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Though I can't speak from experience regarding this, I doubt that constantly perceiving the 'mind-generated-ness' of reality is the best habit for encouraging lucid dreams. It makes more sense to encourage a habit more along the lines of 'constantly paying attention to surroundings in the context of the awareness that you could indeed be asleep.' Reason for this is that while I know that reality is of the same substance as dreams, I'm not trying to tell if my reality is a dream in that sense in order to achieve lucidity, but to tell if my reality is a dream in the sense of being a reflection of my subconscious projections rather than of external reality. Perceiving the dreamlike nature of waking life by itself doesn't seem to help in discovering that I am, in fact, not awake.

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I've been around the LD rodeo long enough to know that one can theorize on what does and what does not promote lucidity more or less efficiently until the cows come home, and it's more or less not fruitful: each person needs to find what works for them, and stick to that. Everyone's psychology, brain, behavior, sleep, and dreaming are different and unique. TWR's framing in TYoDaS deeply resonates with me -- it just hasn't produced the results I'd hoped for. In the first edition of the book, he writes, (in the 4fp chapter), "Using these practices makes everything that happens a cause for the return to presence...." and that seems perfect! I had achieved this or close to in in waking, it was just taking its sweet time manifesting in dreams...
He also writes, "There is no stronger method of bringing consistent lucidity to dream than by abiding continuously in lucid presence during the day." I agree with this. It may be strong, but it's definitely not the fastest...
The cognitive approaches have many benefits: you're training your mind to recognize dreams, what dreams are like, and to prompt a prodding from your subconscious when you're dreaming that "hey, you asked me to tell you that you're dreaming, well, here you are in a dream!"

But I will agree with you that TWR does not go into detail about HOW this practice produces lucidity. I think he expects the practitioner to trust that it will, and to do it and get experience with it and to reflect on the experiences.

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As you get closer to Stage 6 practice you can try to keep attention fixed in the present moment throughout the day without a break, I did this before for days at a time before a serious unusual life event took away all of my routines. This is the point I think where TYoDaS foundational practices become useful for me, and I think its why he talks about Zhine(might've gotten that wrong, working from memory) first, but I don't think that he covers concentration sufficiently. In Stage 6 you develop Exclusive Attention, and in Stage 7 you develop Effortless Attention, and both of these make Dream Yoga practices, once again in theory, exponentially easier. This is why people in Stage 8 report effortless lucid dreaming even without practicing Dream Yoga.

As for insomnia as you progress, its something I experienced the last time I worked through the stages of TMI and now I understand how to prevent it. It comes from not compartmentalizing or contextualizing your practice to certain situations, and knowing where to place your attention. Sadly this wasn't covered in TMI but in Q&As that he did later on. People in Stages 5 work so hard to overcome even Subtle Dullness that they forget they need to encourage dullness at other times, and a lot of people are left with a high amount of focus and introspective awareness that they can't turn off(which is fine) and not knowing where to place that focus when its time to sleep. Also, I have heard from others that this issue naturally resolves itself as you get past Stage 6 and the habits of the mind 'rebalance' themselves once Subtle Distractions are dealt with. Most of my insomnia from this kind of practice anyways would always come from doing a WBTB and not being able to sleep again, once going days in a row(working full time) with only around 4 hours of sleep each night...

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Interesting, I'd like to know more about this. I found that even initial bedtime for me was affected, and normally I'm out like a light in just a few minutes at initial beditme.

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Regarding dream recall, I did notice a sharp increase in what I remembered last night with my current practice. Hopefully it continues to increase, in the meantime I'll be debating over how to want to record my dreams...or if I want to record them at all(I got a thing for privacy lol). I'll post a simplified update in a separate reply.

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Recall reacts pretty quickly if you maintain strong intent to notice wakings and recall dreams. The more you reach for dream memories, consistently, the more your mind makes those neural pathways more efficient, to the point where it delivers long streams of detailed experiencial memories any time you beckon for them -- it's really amazine. It just takes consistency over time, and really enjoying the process.

Day 3 update: Noticed 3 oddities yesterday, and had my first lucid dream from the method today! This is after a dry spell of maybe a few months with only one or two lucid dreams. It was a DILD and I have no memory of a moment where I 'became' lucid. At one point in the dream I stop and go 'oh yeah,I've been lucid dreaming, I need to remember to take note of this later!' There was an implicit knowledge or assumption during this that I had already become lucid once or twice before during the night, but I can't remember those now.

I was just floating around in my house for the fun of it and then remembered my intention to work on stability and vividness when I do become lucid. I saw myself in a mirror and the lighting was bad so I decided to turn on all the lights, but ended up creating a nightmare scenario from the classic 'try not to imagine a white elephant' trick...so I spun in the air in order to change the dream scene but woke up instead. What happened was I turned on a bunch of the lights, looked at one of the light switches and thought 'don't turn back off...', and of course after a moment of silence it turned off on its own and the house shook. I think next time this happens I'm going to try LaBerge's suggestions for dealing with nightmares.

Edit: After this I will probably start doing just weekly updates so as not to spam.

Day 7 Update:

Shortly after my last update we had a false alarm for a natural disaster right after my bedtime, and a lot of drama and stress ensued. Fell a bit off the wagon both in LD and meditation practice but I have still been practicing.

I have been noticing around 4-5 oddities most days. Also, I have been trying to positively reinforce the habit of always looking for oddities whenever my brain reminds me to do so throughout the day. It's starting to get a little easier to remember to do this. Another change is that I have started doing reality checks after noticing an oddity, instead of just 'expanding awareness'.

No lucid dreams since the last update. My recall has been usually 1 or maybe 2 vivid dreams with moderate amounts of detail, length, and coherent narrative. Last night I tried a WBTB, and what I did during it was read through the first foundational practice in TYoDaS(concerning daytime awareness of the dreamlike nature of reality). I went back to bed doing the normal mindfulness practice and ended up with 4 long and vivid dreams remembered without any note taking.

I have changed the intentions I set or say whenever I lie down to 'My intention is to be lucid in all of my dreams, to know that I'm dreaming when I am, to have many lovely experiences in my dreams tonight, and to remember all of my dreams.'

Finally, my theory around this lucid dreaming practice has been expanded a bit. I think that looking for dream signs and doing reality checks are only effective to the extent that you really think you could be dreaming. The more you accept that possibility, the more effective reality checking will be. So I've been trying something to help undo that natural assumption of being awake, by trying to argue to myself WHY I think that I'm awake, and seeing if the logic holds up. For example:

'I'm awake because everything is vivid.' Well I've had plenty of vivid dreams.
'I'm awake because everything is stable.' I've had plenty of dreams that are stable as well.
'I'm awake because I can remember back and see how I got here.' Sure, but I've also had countless dreams with a long coherent story, containing extremely convincing memories that I access in the dream. I've had dreams with 'built in' memories from far in the past that turned out to be false on waking, and I'm sure my mind has the ability to make up memories to 'fill in the gaps' during dreams.
'I'm awake because nothing seems off.' Nothing at this moment, but if you look well enough you'll find things that are 'off' even if you ARE awake.
'I'm awake because I wasn't able to breath through my nose.' I have had dreams where reality tests fail like that and I had to just keep trying to get them to work.

The mindset I'm trying to have now is 'You can at times confirm with certainty that you are asleep, but you can never be sure that you are awake. Until you can confirm that you are dreaming, however, live as though what you are experiencing is the external world, or waking experience, so that you don't do anything stupid.'

Day 14 Update:

There isn't a whole lot new going on, which is I guess fine since this is a slow-burn strategy after all. No lucid dreams since day 3, which is fine as well. My daily oddities noticed were slowly increasing, but I saw that they were mostly oddities that my subconscious noticed and made me aware of, instead of coming as a result of actively looking for them, which is the habit I am trying to build. So even though I want to reality check for all oddities, I added a criteria that in order for an oddity to be counted towards my score for the day, it needs to be something I found while I was already actively, or consciously, looking for something that could tell me I'm dreaming. Now my high score is 2.

Recall is somewhat consistent, remembering around 1 mid-length dream or more per night. Although last night instead of remembering one long one, I remembered 5 or so tiny fragments of completely different dream scenes. I haven't done much of the last exercise from the day 7 update, but I do want to find time for it. Also, now when I wake up I try to reality check and record a sentence or two of what dreams I remember. If this happens during the night, I try to reset my intentions and do MILD before falling back asleep.

Day 25, end of February update:

I have had 3 lucid dreams since the last update. The first was a DILD, can't remember becoming lucid. Had 2 false awakenings inside it, caught neither but did a fake DEILD after both and was able to enter the dream location that I visualized. Second was a DILD, noticed something strange while interacting with someone and did a nose plug check to get lucid, lasted only a few seconds. Third was a WILD, it was a long lucid where I did new dream controls such as manifesting a person, restoring senses, increasing vividness, changing a building into something else, and teleporting using technology.

My strategy has been changed and simplified a lot over time, so I thought I'd just repost it here, this is all that I'm doing right now:

Day:
-Look for dreamsigns. Reality check when you notice one.

Evening:
-Do MILD variation.

Falling asleep:
-State your intention: "I want to notice when I wake up and remember my dreams. The next time I'm dreaming, I want to recognize that I'm dreaming."
-Let yourself fall asleep. Keep attention anchored on what you feel with your body while watching dullness progress into sleep with your awareness.

Waking:
-Reality check, then dream journal.

I have also had an intensive meditation practice going unrelated to lucid dreaming, so I'm sure that has helped a little in giving me extra awareness during dreams. Next update will probably be at the end of March.

March 20th:

I've had 5 lucid dreams so far this month. My strategy has been further refined; right now all I do is dream delve when I wake up, day delve in the evening, and try to maintain the conscious intention to look for dreamsigns and critically reflect all day. This is the last update, all future updates will be made in a discord group for a few different reasons, including convenience and more engagement there.