Hi. New to the board, but have been playing around with LD for about 10 years. Had an observation to make about dreamsigns.

My biggest difficulty with dreamsigns is that typically the more subtle and intelligent part of my brain is a little sluggish while I'm dreaming. I'm like someone that has to read tabloids to find anything interesting to think about. I thrive on sensationalism. I tend to accept the most outlandish things as basically okay. I can be chasing an eight-armed alien through the subway with a machine gun and never think to ask myself, "Is this normal?"

So what happens is, I've got all these dreamsigns lined up that I've determined from my dream journal will occur frequently (my brother will show up, I'll dream about a cat or a dog, I'll be at my grandparents house at some point, etc. etc.). But they are (by definition) not sensational. They are not (by definition) unexpected. If they were unexpected, they would not be on my list of regularly occuring dream events. So, being a sensationalist while asleep, I don't notice them. I just don't notice them.

How can you compete with the eight-armed alien? The alien I notice. My brother, not so much. He's just sort of "there." I remember he was in the dream when I later wake up. But it's an after the fact sort of noticing. I don't notice my usual dreamsigns WHEN I'm asleep. Just later. What I notice when I'm asleep is the exotic stuff. The stuff I can't reliably predict dreaming about.

I have a theory that if someone could induce a certain type of sensational dream reliably, say, a dream about a giant tiger, and make that the dreamsign, that would work.