Solpic's Workbook

Hello everyone, I'm Solpic. I'm a college student and I've known about and have been on and off practicing lucid dreaming for a couple of years. Near the end of high school and the beginning of college I have slacked off significantly but due to some personal revelations over winter break, I came back into it with a renewed enthusiasm.

In the past couple of weeks I have gotten my dream recall almost back to its best, where I can remember two or three very detailed dreams a night (meaning about two pages of writing for each dream in my dream journal). However I can definitely see areas where I can improve my dream recall; I could definitely remember even more specific details about my dreams and I also feel like I'm not always remembering the dreams in their entirety, I feel like I only remember the latter half or third of a dream. In the past I have experimented with WILD, but have never had success with it except for with the DEILD technique, which has given me a couple of lucid dreams but due to the simplicity of the technique it isn't something I necessarily want to diligently work on. Lately I've been working on tuning my sleep schedule for WBTB and using the MILD technique. I'll usually wake up after about 6 or so hours of sleep, give or take an hour, and practice MILD. One thing that I am extremely good at is waking up exactly when I want to, for example last night I decided to set my mental alarm for 7:30, when I woke up in the morning and checked the clock after writing down a dream, the time was 7:35. Right now I would say I get lucid about two to three times a week on a good week, but I can usually never last more than a few minutes max before waking up.

Lately I've also taken up the practice of meditation for a lot of reasons but one of which is to hopefully increase my awareness to help with lucid dreaming. I'm making this workbook to hopefully be a bit more diligent and log my lucid dreaming practice and interact with people who are actual lucid dreamers since there really isn't anyone I know personally who practices lucid dreaming.

Welcome to DILD class!

That Intro reads like a resume for teaching position here at the Academy :)

Your recall sounds amazing. Of course, it would be nice to remember all our dreams, but for lucid dreaming purposes, you have more than enough. But it's sure nice to keep them in DJ for an interesting read later.

So do you get all your LDs from MILD? It is by itself powerfull technique, no doubt about that, especially, if it's giving you 2-3 LDs a week.

But you are right, daytime awareness plays a huge role in LDing. It can help us realize we are in a dream, keep us in there longer by teaching us to concentrate on what we are doing, have more detailed and better quality dreams.

If you are inclined to add daytime awareness and RCs to your practice, check out this article Collection of techniques for DILD. But it's ok, if you wanna stick with MILD.

Great explanation of daytime awareness is here in WILD (sageous) - self awareness article. You may wanna read the whole thing. It's a new tutorial and it may rekindle your interest in WILDs. It's good to know all the major techniques, because you just never know, when you get some of the WILD/DEILD sensations and you can take advantage of it.

Another class here that teaches awareness is Dream Yoga (sivason).

So read up if you wish, and post your progress here. And the forum is great to post experiences and ask question and just chat with fellow LDers. Most of us here have nobody IWL who shares our love for LDing, so this is pretty much the only place where we can talk about our little hobby. Happy dreams:alien:

Thanks for your detailed response. I think for now I'm going to stick with a combination of MILD and meditation as my main techniques, because it has been working fairly consistently so far, I think I just need to fine tune it and stick with it. Also I tend to get really excited about new techniques and drop the ones that I have been practicing successfully to try out new things; I think consistent practice, uninterrupted by school, sickness, or too much partying is what I need right now.

Until recently I never really realized that I was getting my LDs from MILD and they weren't just spontaneous. I realized this because every single time I lucid dream it's always because I spontaneously know that I'm dreaming and when I became lucid for the first time because of a reality check, that contrast made me realize that the MILD technique was actually working for me.

However, I am going to be looking into using dream signs to become lucid a bit more right now. It certainly can't hurt any of the other techniques that I'm doing. The only reason I wasn't doing it before was because all of my dream signs are contextual, which makes them incredibly difficult for me to spot (out of probably almost 80 to 100 lucid dreams, I think one was because I noticed the context of things was wrong, did an RC, and became lucid). Recently though, I saw a thread on reddit about contextual dream signs that made me realize there might still be hope in spotting them.

I had an interesting experience last night. For some reason I was unable to remember ANY of my dreams last night but then about thirty minutes after waking up I realized I had a strong conviction that I had a very successful lucid dream last night, which didn't really make any sense to me because I couldn't even remember any of my dreams from last night. When I thought about it a bit more, I realized that if I did have a lucid dream, I probably would have flown, because that is something that has been really interesting to me lately in lucid dreams. So I sort of imagined what it would have been like to be flying and then parts of the dream came back to me. I had definitely flown for over a minute without crashing into anything, which is a first for me, and I distinctly remember some details about the flying like the straps on my parachute (yes I fly with a parachute) but for the life of me I can't remember what happened before or after that 10 to 20 second clip in my mind of flying, despite this conviction that I have that the LD was pretty successful in terms of vividness, control and length.

That sounds awesome. Parachute - hehe, that's a good one. Once I flew as if I was sitting in a reclining chair.

What probably happened, you woke up for a micro awakening after your lucid (I always do), but perhaps you said meh, I'll remember it when I wake up in the morning. good thing it came back to you. It's always a treat. :alien:

Haha that sounds interesting but a little bit frightening. I don't know how comfortable I'd be flying feet first. But I don't think I explained clearly what I meant. I fly wearing an unopened parachute because I have a tendency to go really fast or get really high in the air and then look down, get scared and fall out of the sky. The parachute stops me from dying and waking up.

Yeah I'm thinking I either woke up and fell back asleep or more likely is that since I was flying so well I just got really excited with it and lost lucidity and didn't wake up directly from that dream. The only reason I say this is more likely is because I'm an incredibly light sleeper, possibly on the level of insomnia, and if I woke up from a dream I would stay up for at least 15 minutes, especially if it were a lucid dream.

Anyways last night I made some progress, although I didn't have any lucids. I was able to remember a couple pages worth of a very long and detailed dream from one of my earlier REM periods within the first 4 to 5 hours of sleep, which is a goal I had for myself, because whenever I would do WBTB after 4 to 5 hours of sleep I would only remember fragments. Also, I was able to remember a slightly later REM period dream in its entirety, whereas I usually don't remember the beginnings of dreams. Finally, and this was the most exciting thing for me, I came really really close to entering a DEILD this morning.

I woke up from a dream but I didn't quite realize I had woken up from a dream until I realized I had a recollection of a dream and hadn't opened my eyes for a while, so I concluded I must have just woken up from it. So I stayed still and kept my eyes closed as per the standard DEILD procedure and the sleep paralysis fun began! There was a crazy light show with my eyes closed, I felt vibrations and strange pressures all over my body, but everything was still black, where out of the few couple of times I've ever done DEILD in my life the dream scene has always formed visually without me having to do anything. But then I remembered about the two types of DEILD entry, where the second one you have to kind of lift your dream body out of your sleep body and figured this is what my mind wanted for me right now. I was fairly nervous because I usually don't have enough control in dreams to force myself to levitate, but now that I think about it, this might be a sleep paralysis technique and not a lucid dream control technique (if it is, the implications of that are incredibly interesting, the fact that your body actually needs you to visualize leaving your sleeping body). But anyways, I focused on levitating out of my bed, and sure enough, I felt my legs lift at least 5 feet off the ground and swivel over the my right. However my head stayed down. At this point though, I kind of lost concentration and started thinking about the scary aspects of sleep paralysis and the sensations ended. I tried to get back into sleep paralysis but I wasn't able to. Either way, I'm pretty happy about this because I haven't been able to or tried to DEILD in forever and it's nice to know that safety net type technique will still work for me. Also sleep paralysis is so much fun for me.

That parachute trick is pretty neat. It can help people ease their fear of flying, or should I say falling.

Good job on your recall. Just thinking about you wanting to remember your dreams better and writing them down can help tremedously.

Nice DEILD attempt and mostly remembering to stay still. With DEILD, I usually have visuals to enter, but keep in mind, that DEILD is a short WILD, so any method of entering LD could apply. Sensations and types of entry into WILD. Good luck:alien:

So I had some successes last night. I wasn't very optimistic because I had spent most of the weekend partying and had literally remembered nothing but a single fragment for the entire weekend. Additionally I was experiencing a bout of insomnia and wasn't able to fall asleep until at least 5 am. However I managed to have a short LD where I did just about nothing. The cool thing was that the location of the LD was the same location as a normal dream that I had just left. At first I was about to just go crazy flying around and doing stuff but then I remembered to stabilize the dream but for some reason the stabilization made me wake up. I posted a thread about it because I finally had a realization about why it might have me wake up (that sort of waking up because of stabilization has happened before). However even though that LD was kind of terrible, I almost pulled off a DEILD without realizing it. I hadn't opened my eyes or moved after waking up from the LD because I didn't want to forget what happened. It had been about two minutes and I've never had a DEILD that didn't happen within the first 10 seconds or so after waking up so the idea was completely out of my mind. However at around two minutes I started feeling the unmistakable physical sensations of a DEILD and I was so surprised that I kind of jolted out of my bed and forgot most of the LD, but still, I've found out that even if the DEILD doesn't happen immediately I can get some sort of faux-DEILD if I wait just a little bit. I'm guessing that I was at the end of a REM cycle and that's why I wasn't able to do a normal DEILD but since I literally didn't move at all my mind and body thought I was just still asleep and moved on to the next REM cycle. I'm looking forward to increasing my DEILD chances with this new realization.

About DEILD - it's only DEILD, if you stay in REM. And if you move or open eyes, that's a signal to your body you are awake and it will end that REM. But if that REM has ended for whatever reason (moved, it was the end of a sleep cycle), you can still go for a WILD. And since your body is still very relaxed, it will be shorter than normal WILD.

I love DEILDs, so good luck with that.

Do you think now you associate certain stabilization technique with you waking up? If so, you can try different stabilization technique, that's not tainted with your belief.

:alien:

Yeah that's also what I was thinking. I know my mind has a tendency for self-sabotage, which becomes especially pronounced in my lucid dreams, so I'm probably just going to stay away from that stabilization technique for a while. It's pretty common for my mind to actually create monsters in my lucid dreams shortly after I become lucid.

That's interesting. Try to think during day how you control your dreams and all you need to do is think something and it will happen. It may start happening in your dreams, even in non-lucids. make a plan what to do when you see a monster, how you gonna tell him 'hey man, you are a good guy and I love you". I did think like this and I remembered to do it in a lucid and to my surprise in non-lucids as well.

Haha that's a cool idea. If it becomes a problem again I'll definitely give it a try. I've kind of gotten my mind wrangled a little bit through meditation and other methods so it hasn't been a problem for a while.

So last night I had a pretty good lucid dream. I honestly didn't remember most of it because lately my dream recall has gone down the drain but I woke up and I knew that it had been a pretty good LD. There were some really important ways I could have it better however. I completely forgot to stabilize and take a moment to calm down at the beginning so it wasn't super vivid and I wasn't really thinking straight through most of it. Also, super facepalm here, after about 5 or 10 minutes in the dream I got bored with the environment I was in and decided to wake up from the LD, thinking I could just DEILD back into a new dream scene. Needless to say, that didn't work out and I just woke up thinking that I'm an idiot; although my control is terrible in some areas I know how to easily create new dream scenes within an LD. Something interesting about that though was the way that I woke up was that I went into my room in the dream, lay down in my bed and closed my eyes and then I woke up, which was cool. Also, although I didn't have a problem with monsters or scary people in this dream, the beginning was almost ruined by a hot teacher (sex always always wakes me up and attractive girls sometimes follow me around in my dreams as another form of my mind trying to sabotage me). However, in this dream, and this is an example of how I wasn't entirely thinking straight, I used the rather unusual method of telling a DC to restrain the hot teacher while I ran away. It worked, which I thought was pretty funny.

So I've decided after a long time of pursuing other methods that I should come back to the vanilla DILD with MILDs and RCs. I had been trying SSILD for a while but I didn't like the fact that I would almost always need an extra hour and a half of sleep when using it, and I also am not a big fan of waking up in the middle of the night, because I usually feel less rested the next day. At this point in time my recall isn't fantastic, but it's not horrible either. I can usually remember my dreams but not many details of them. I would say my biggest strength is my overall awareness, although it's not necessarily awareness of the dreaming state. That sounds pretty weird, but what I mean is that I meditate a lot, and that gives me spontaneous lucid dreams, but whenever I actually do a technique I almost always have lucid dreams. Like with SSILD or MILD in the past, it pretty much worked for me the first night. So I'm pretty confident about the future using MILD, RCs, and dream recall.

Thus my goals right now are to just get really established into a MILD practice, make sure I do RCs throughout the day, and make sure I thoroughly write down my dreams in the morning.

Welcome back! gab is still around, mostly working on other parts of the forums. I don't consider DILDs vanilla at all. Most of my LDs are DILDs and I find that they give me so such a variety of scenarios for me to become lucid in. Let us know if you are having any challenges that we can work through together and we will try to help.

Yeah I guess that is one really nice thing about DILDs, you always end up in an interesting dream scenario instead of your bed. In the past week I've started to become a bit more consistent with my DILD practice, although for various reasons, work and dietary changes, my sleep has become less consistent. However I think it balanced out a bit because in the past week I think I've had about 5 LDs, although none of them lasted more than a minute. One of them was kind of a WILD too, which was pretty crazy because I never have really WILDed before, it just kind of happened. I am a little bit worried about how bad I am at stabilizing, but I figure that will just get better over time, especially as I get more consistent about having LDs. Right now I'm doing the whole examine one tiny detail really closely for a while if the dream feels like it's falling apart, which has worked wonderfully, I think the main problem is I always try to have sex and then wake up. If only I could will myself not to try to have sex. My dream recall has stayed pretty much the same, I feel like that's mostly because I haven't been getting consistent sleep though.

Out of curiosity, what technique do you use for DILDs fogelbise? I've been using naiya's simple MILD technique as well as RCs during the day, and I think meditating helps a lot too.

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Originally Posted by solpic

However I think it balanced out a bit because in the past week I think I've had about 5 LDs, although none of them lasted more than a minute...I am a little bit worried about how bad I am at stabilizing, but I figure that will just get better over time, especially as I get more consistent about having LDs. Right now I'm doing the whole examine one tiny detail really closely for a while if the dream feels like it's falling apart, which has worked wonderfully, I think the main problem is I always try to have sex and then wake up. If only I could will myself not to try to have sex. My dream recall has stayed pretty much the same, I feel like that's mostly because I haven't been getting consistent sleep though.

Out of curiosity, what technique do you use for DILDs fogelbise? I've been using naiya's simple MILD technique as well as RCs during the day, and I think meditating helps a lot too.

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Congrats on all of those LDs!! You are back indeed!!

First and foremost, do your best to not worry about stabilizing. And you already are making great progress on this front. I don't mean, don't do anything to help you stabilize the dream. I mean just don't think of it as "stabilizing." Just consider the action as something that you always do at the beginning of your dreams and practice it during the day. That last part basically involves imagining "What if this WERE a lucid dream right NOW!" and slow down, examine a tiny detail as you mentioned and imagine what you will do next (any goals or just fun). You can do this whenever you think to do an RC. I have a sex many times without ending the dream, so I feel that is a very common myth. That said, it may be partly lodged in your schema and you may want to focus on other things in your dreams and come back to that later when as much as you can.

My technique for DILDs includes SSILD (I saw your challenges with it and have some ideas if you want to try it more), the extended RCs mentioned above in the day practice exercise - imagining that you are lucid, self-awareness work, WBTB, dream sign list mantra-like reminders to look out for them, and self-induced faux startle to increase awareness during awakenings. Speaking of self-awareness, this link really helped me get to the next level with it:
http://www.dreamviews.com/beyond-dre...rspective.html
Especially some of the examples given further down in the replies.

Let me know if you have any questions! :)

I would be very interested to hear what you have to say about SSILD, I'm definitely not done with it - I just think I need to approach it in a healthier way, i.e. keep a consistent sleep schedule most of the time and then only do SSILD on weekends or something, at least until it stops keeping me up.

I think extended RCs are awesome, and whenever I've kept up with them it's always helped me get lucid. A couple of the practices I've noticed that were the most effective are as follows:
1. Going over the events of the day to see if it's logical that I'm in this situation at this moment
2. Really thinking about where I am and what I'm doing
3. Pretending I'm in a LD or ND and imagining the world through that perspective

and I'll have to get back into actually practicing my stabilization technique during the RC like you said, because I have had success with that before as well. Right now I'm just trying to focus on getting consistent with everything, because that's my biggest problem lol. Inconsistent sleep, inconsistent DJing, inconsistent RCs, and inconsistent techniques.

What do you mean by faux startles?

Also I think the biggest helper for me is meditation, when I meditate, especially before bed, I tend to have tons of LDs, but since I'm either not DJing, not planning any sort of stabilization, or not getting consistent sleep I either don't remember them, wake up right away, or just don't sleep enough or soundly enough to even have dreams. But whenever I start to have consistent sleep I pretty much have LDs spontaneously, it's just that using techniques as well tends to drastically increase the amount, and as I mentioned DJing and stabilization practice through RCs or something are necessary for quality. So I figure I'll just stick with meditation for my self awareness, unless I get to a point where I feel like I've committed enough effort in my other practices and should be reaping more results.

Learning how to LD has been incredibly frustrating for me because I've spent so much time learning about different techniques and what-not, and it never fully dawned on me until recently that if I simply got consistent sleep and stuck to one technique I would get results. I feel stupid but at least I'm making progress now.

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Originally Posted by solpic

I would be very interested to hear what you have to say about SSILD, I'm definitely not done with it - I just think I need to approach it in a healthier way, i.e. keep a consistent sleep schedule most of the time and then only do SSILD on weekends or something, at least until it stops keeping me up.

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Exactly what I had in mind. You can learn how to make it work for you on weekends or anytime you can sleep in. It may not be for everybody, but I think it has a good effect on quite a few people. I adjusted the way that I did the cycles after some time and I think that process of experimentation and adjustment helped me to get to sleep easier most of the time. To borrow from a recent PM description, I do a rapid SSILD cycling going through each of the 3 senses with each breath (visual breathing in, audio at the top of the breath where the ringing in the ears sound is easiest to focus on, and feeling while breathing out). I do this around 5-7 minutes.

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I think extended RCs are awesome, and whenever I've kept up with them it's always helped me get lucid. A couple of the practices I've noticed that were the most effective are as follows:
1. Going over the events of the day to see if it's logical that I'm in this situation at this moment
2. Really thinking about where I am and what I'm doing
3. Pretending I'm in a LD or ND and imagining the world through that perspective

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Excellent practices in my view! :)

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and I'll have to get back into actually practicing my stabilization technique during the RC like you said, because I have had success with that before as well. Right now I'm just trying to focus on getting consistent with everything, because that's my biggest problem lol. Inconsistent sleep, inconsistent DJing, inconsistent RCs, and inconsistent techniques.

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Very good. This shows once again, that with some background knowledge, we know the answers if we just take some time to uncover them.

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What do you mean by faux startles?

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This is still experimental but there seems to be a correlation between carrying heightened awareness into dreams if I have higher than normal awareness during WBTB by using these "faux startles". If you try it, you may also want to save it for the weekends. If you are prone to nightmares and you don't like them you may also want to avoid this. For me, it doesn't seem to trigger nightmares, but I seemed to mostly eradicate truly scary nightmares through lucid dreaming when I was a child. Anyway, it involves trying to startle myself while I am up out of bed during WBTB with a "what was that at the edge of my peripheral vision?" forced startle and whipping my head around to check "what was that?" I know it sounds goofy and like I said, I am still experimenting with it. It also seems to come with a reduced effect from repetition probably because it becomes more and more obvious that I am forcing it and it isn't really startling me at all anymore. I probably need to change it up to continue effectively experimenting with it.

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Also I think the biggest helper for me is meditation, when I meditate, especially before bed, I tend to have tons of LDs, but since I'm either not DJing, not planning any sort of stabilization, or not getting consistent sleep I either don't remember them, wake up right away, or just don't sleep enough or soundly enough to even have dreams. But whenever I start to have consistent sleep I pretty much have LDs spontaneously, it's just that using techniques as well tends to drastically increase the amount, and as I mentioned DJing and stabilization practice through RCs or something are necessary for quality. So I figure I'll just stick with meditation for my self awareness, unless I get to a point where I feel like I've committed enough effort in my other practices and should be reaping more results.

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Sounds like a good plan.

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Learning how to LD has been incredibly frustrating for me because I've spent so much time learning about different techniques and what-not, and it never fully dawned on me until recently that if I simply got consistent sleep and stuck to one technique I would get results. I feel stupid but at least I'm making progress now.

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Some give up before getting to where you are at, so you are doing good. :)

*If you like the info in this or prior posts...or anywhere on DV, don't forget to hit the like button below any such post. :)