Moosehawk's Workbook

[moosehawk]

About me Hello! I'm Moosehawk, a 23 year old app developer from the U.S. I heard of lucid dreaming for the first time just a little over a month ago and ever since have been trying to improve my waking awareness as well awareness in my dreams since. Before that, I've only ever had one lucid dream in my life that lasted about 2 seconds and I ended up in waking sleep paralysis and a scary as hell falling sensation. I used to experience sleep paralysis quite often as a teenager. I always felt like I was going to die, and it wasn't until recently that I've learned to love the experience. My progress so far I've been keeping a dream journal since July 17th. In the last half of July, I recorded an average of 1.7 dreams a night with 2+ nights that I experienced either no dream or only fragments. In August, I've improved my dream recall to an average of 4.3 dreams a night so far and the quality is getting much better. I've experienced 4 lucid dreams so far: A false awakening LD that was triggered by a light switch not working. I woke up immediately after lucidity. 3 more lucid dreams that all happened on one night about 2 weeks ago, although they were all only partial lucidity with little control. 1 was an accidental WILD (I fell backwards into darkness then woke up in my bed in a dream), the other 2 were DILDs possibly from MILDing. I immediately began trying to become lucid using WILD since I usually fall asleep in either seconds or under a few minutes at most. I've since given up on that since my schedule doesn't allow for any loss of sleep (or else I'd only be working and sleeping all day), plus since I've started becoming more aware in my waking life I've found out that my household is actually really noisy (noise has ruined my WILD attempts on several occasions). So with that, I'm DILD or bust. Where I am now For the last 2 weeks I've been attempting MILD. It's yielded 2 LDs so far, but both were within an hour of each other and were relatively short and low lucidity. For the past 3 days I've been practicing ADA. When I go to bed, I do a little stretching and relaxation then I just sit either on the floor on in my computer chair and do some visualization and repeat a mantra to myself. I go to bed, do WBTB @ 4.5 hours, 6 hours, and on the weekends, 7.5 hours. My WBTB time doesn't have much structure; sometimes I stay up 5 minutes, sometimes it's 30 minutes, but I always spend the time doing something LD related. When I go back to bed, I repeat my mantra to myself and visualize myself becoming lucid usually in my most appealing dream that I had that night so far or from the night before (this is MILD right?). Sometimes I can repeat the mantra once and I'm already out, and other times I can repeat it for a while but my mind drifts off to other places and by the time I bring myself back I feel like I can re-concentrate on my intention to become lucid. Where I need help I think my most glaring area right now is how I perform the MILD technique, although if this is read by anyone else, please feel free to point out any glaring mistakes above! A few questions: I've been changing up the mantra I use night-to-night. I just haven't found one that feels "right" yet. Am I allowed to change it, or should I find one and stick with it? I have trouble with staying awake sometimes to perform MILD, even after staying awake for 30 minutes! Can I perform the technique sitting up and then continue it as I lay down, or should I work on controlling my efforts while laying down?