Motivation and Goal Setting
Motivation was always a funny thing when it came to lucid dreaming. I always found it sort of strange that people complain about being unmotivated to lucid dream, but when I think about it, it sometimes starts to make sense. Lucid dreaming is at least in some ways like most skills in where you practice and improve over time.
I’d be inclined to compare it to exercise and getting in shape, since it often seems to me like stretches of consistent practice produce the best results and stretches of inactivity result in you gradually slowing down. And like exercise people always want the results, the flat belly and toned arms, but nobody ever wants to do the work to get there. I’ve always made an effort to make the work of attaining lucidity fun but rarely had much success.
I sometimes wonder if it’s even possible to be unmotivated for something that you to some degree want to do. Somebody who plans on going to the gym but decides not to is doing so through the economic principle opportunity cost, only we’re dealing in the person’s time, rather than their money. They want to go to the gym, but they want to do something else more. Work on lucid dreaming is much the same way. I want to go to bed at 10 and have a really long and satisfying lucid dream, but I also want to stay up until midnight and play video games. And given that even if I go to bed on time and say mantras while I’m falling asleep, I only have a partial chance of actually having a lucid dream as I’ve had many experiences in where I attempt to undertake something like this only to wake up at 7:00am without a shred of dream recall to show for it.
So simple risk analysis takes over and I figure I have a 100% chance of making use of my free time and enjoying it by playing a game, or a 25% chance of enjoying it on the off chance I lucid dream. It’s pretty easy for the rug to be pulled out from underneath lucid dreamers in that regard, especially ones attempting regular nightly practice, and perhaps this is why so many people find themselves unmotivated. It’s not that they’re unmotivated to lucid dream, it’s that other things are more motivating. Though I would argue that reviewing one’s goals from time to time can be a very good way to keep focused on priorities.
Now of course say one was locked in solitary confinement without any games, or really any distractions whatsoever, most anyone who was familiar with even just the basics of lucid dreaming would probably become pretty proficient pretty quick, given they had no alternative usage of their time other than to commit their energy to perfecting their lucid dreaming technique.
Regardless, one of the things I wanted to do here was list all of the goals that I have set for myself since forever. Now this is not an exhaustive list, because some of the goals are very personal.
So obviously the goal was nightly lucidity to start with. Now I actually made this goal only about a few weeks after I became invested in LD. One funny specific about the goal that I have adhered to is that it only needs to be one lucid dream per night. When I set this goal I was relatively unfamiliar with chained lucid dreaming and the idea that you could have multiple lucid dreams in one night, and when I did learn about it, I decided to refine the goal to say that lucid dreaming every night but only once per night was my goal; with more lucid dreams being considered just “frosting on the cake.”
After that I would say my goals fairly cleanly subdivide into two categories; goals that would relate to self betterment and have a more serious tone, and things that I wanted to embark upon simply for the enjoyment of experiencing them within the dream world. Since the self-betterment goals will Segway nicely into my next topic, I will list my more superficial goals first.
I mentioned this on chat with MadMonkey a few nights ago; but I’ve always imagined wanting to go to some kind of dream-rave or music concert. I’m not a very auditory person and visuals are often what drive my dreams forward, but I’ve heard some fairly interesting dream-music in the past and would like to study it via a musical concert.
Upon hearing of the discovery of the trappist-1 system, I had the idea of flying to the system and checking out all seven of the planets for myself. I’ve flown at FTL speeds before in dreams, so this goal would be pretty easy to accomplish.
Development of dream spells is another one. When I came up with the idea, I made a short list of spell words that I wanted to try and utilize in the dream. As of today, every spell I originally created. (Semper Stabelem, Tesseractus, Feminosa, Mascusona, Cohete Bombad, Cohete Pyrosa, Ageionirus, and Vestimente, with a few others that I made up on the fly) have all been tested and the three-pronged approach to dream control. This overlaps with some other dream control oriented goals such as learning the last two elements, Air and Earth.
I once had a fantasy that upon learning some secret holy grail of lucid dreaming I would begin regularly doing the dreamviews Task of the Months. If I ever ran out of things to do I could start working backwards doing every single task of the month ever posted. Granted somebody who had attained nightly lucidity and was as lucid as I am envisioning could probably tank through the entirety of dreamviews TOTMs and TOTYs since 2004 comfortably in a year, given they completed each month’s worth of tasks in one night. TOTYs are generally multi parters. This would not be something that would be done all at once, obviously. Really I’ve always just kept such a ludicrous idea in consideration in the back of my head whenever I try and argue with myself that I would quickly become bored should I attain this level of lucidity.
Progression of narrative. In having knowledge of my dreams, they follow a narrative through the main characters. It’s not a very original or cohesive narrative, but there is one there. One I might find satisfaction in progressing and improving upon with new dream characters and storylines. Writing down a cohesive version of this narrative is one of my goals for an upcoming rant of this nature.
Shared dreaming. I always felt as though this concept could only be truly explored by somebody who had attained this level of nightly lucidity. I’m somewhat of a skeptic of shared dreaming but I remain open to the idea that it is a possibility. Regardless if I had limitless nightly lucidity at my disposal, I might find this an interesting subject matter to explore.
Though honestly that’s about it for the list. In my years of intermittent lucidity, I have taken care of most of these more superficial, wish fufillment type goals hence why I have difficulty fully fleshing out the list.
The second half of my goals are largely personal and I do not feel comfortable discussing them on this forum. Therefore these goals will be censored and kept to my private copy of this document, except for one, for the sake of example. This of course being my habit of finger biting. This is equal parts goal and hypothesis. I have had this habit since I was a toddler/baby and never really broken out of it, no matter what I tried. (I’ve even tried using that stuff that makes your fingernails taste bad, and still the habit persisted.) I envisioned that I could somehow dive into a dream and deprogram the habit subconsciously. How exactly this would manifest would vary. (I seem to recall one user suggesting that I manifest the habit as an opponent and defeat it in combat, given my propensity for dream combat.)
Regardless these are the goals that I have had more difficulty reaching; mainly because they require more focus and a higher level of lucidity than I am currently attaining on a semi-regular basis.
Semi Lucidity
Something that I noticed that I believe I pointed out in my previous rant without going into too much detail about was my instances of semi lucidity and how dreams are continually blurring the line between lucid and non-lucid and somehow it seems that I am both lucid and non-lucid at the same time. Last night’s dream provides an excellent example of this. Notice how from moment to moment my actions can be attributed to lucidity, non-lucidity and evidence unclear, impractical thinking.
I also cannot recall if I talked about feeling like I’m always subconciously lucid but not always choosing to act upon that knowledge and having the fortitude to bring that lucid into the forefront.
*checks previous rant*
Yeah, I did talk about this. In fact, I’m not really sure how to expand upon it.
Anyways, more ranblings from the back of my brain.
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