What Worked For Me Last Night.

[Moonbeam]

I have been trying to do many RC's during the day, going for as big a quantity as I can (thanks to ivey for the suggestion). These are for the most part not "quality" RC's, I don't analyze all the reasons why I know it's not a dream, as I have done a lot of in the past, just an automatic finger-count, palm-poke, and nose-plug; then as soon as I remember I do it again. Kind of like a weird twitch. I am wearing my watch on the wrong arm to remind me and it works pretty well since I notice it all the time. I had a lucid, I guess it was Sunday night, the first day I started doing this (today is Wednesday). Last night, before I went to bed, I was trying to decide what to read, and I feel like I have been neglecting everything but LD lately. I wanted to read something else, so I said, outloud to my partner, something like "Forget about it, I'm sick of trying, I don't even care if I have a lucid dream tonight!" (I got the expected response of "whatever, crazy lady"). Soo... I have the biggest night of LD I've ever had, with long lucids in which I remembered some goals, and successful dream re-entry, and WILD with vibrations, and multiple lucid FA's. To the point where I'm ashamed to say I yelled "No!" just to wake myself up. (See my DJ for details if you want.) I am not sure what to learn from this: I don't know if it is the excessive RCing, or the denial of caring, or both. Maybe saying it out loud was important, I don't know. It is hard to isolate the variables.

[Snowy Egypt]

Wow... COOL!!! I'm gonna try that and see what happens.

[Aesir]

Most likely denial of caring, as you put it. It's been mentioned a lot that when someone is trying too hard and forcing themselves to have an LD, it pretty much always results in failure...so if you're doing something like that, the solution is pretty much just to take a break, stop thinking about LDing, stop caring, indeed...and the dreams will come on their own.

[Moonbeam]

Sometimes it does seem like the harder I try the less I get. But the really frequent RC's are helping, I think. I repeated everything yesterday, no luck last night. I probably knew I was lying and I really did care, so I didn't believe myself. I think I'll continue with the frequent RC's tho.

[dreamship]

I wish I could continue certain dreams. I was reading my older dream journals- still typing them into the computer for CDROM storeage - and I noticed that a few dreams I have been trying to dream-continue are really old. My mom can dream of the same subject all night practically and continue the dream. I hope I am like that as I get older. Anyone meditate? Does that help? Have you tried it? I guess it is just practice, practice, practice, practice, and trying to be calm at the same time. If I try to reality test too much I get a wierd thing going in my head as in, it gets hard to try to tell myself exactly what it is that makes this reality and this a dream, have you experienced that? LaBerge, in his book, commented that you start noticing dream like qualities of reality. I have not read the last chapter in all the years I've had the book because it seems more New Agish and Buddhist. I am not against Buddhism- I read the Dalai Lama's books-, just don't believe that this world we are in is a dream which is what I think Buddhists are hinting at though, and I have asked, none of them can prove anything.

[Moonbeam]

Hey thanks for reminding me of this, I've forgotten what it can be like! I don't have much trouble proving it's reality when I do RC's, I just always forget to think about it during dreams. I think I'll revive this method today. A new month, time to get going on that task. I wish I would ever get good enough to move beyond the taskof the month; at least get that done early in the month and try to do some other things too.