Buckey's Workbook

[Buckey]

Hello, I'm Justin and I just recently started getting into the world of dreaming. I first read about it a few years ago, but never really thought anything of it. But, I've recently re-discovered it and I'm now actually going to try my best and attempt to achieve lucidity and better dream recall. Since I've started my quest to lucidity (January 30th, 2013 - yeah, I'm REALLY new), I've been trying to do a lot more research on it and get down a general good practice to help achieve better dream recall and lucidity. Right now I'm thinking my recall is what needs to be worked on the most, but as of right now I'm not too sure how I should go about that (I do of course keep a dream journal by my bed). Stats since I started on January 30th, 2013 Recalls: Non-Lucid: 1 Lucid: 0 Questions Question #1 I'm honestly confused on which type of awareness technique I should be doing. Could someone please shed some light on this? You have the awareness method in Puffin's DILD Guide (can't post links. ), and then you have the self-awareness method by Sageous (and he even mentions it's better than ADA). So can anyone help with this? I added this from your other post: Am I doing enough throughout my ordinary day to put myself on the track to my first DILD (also first lucid dream in general)? Awareness and RC checks For one, I follow this self-awareness RRC (chose this over the ADA technique) by Sageous. I do 1-2 of these self-awareness checks every hour. I ask myself: "Where was I five minutes ago? Where was I an hour ago? Where will I be in five minutes? How does the environment effect me? How do I effect the environment?" - These are the exact questions I ask myself in my mind. I also try to switch up where I'm at when I do these checks, so it's not always the same answers. And of course, I follow with (within a few minutes of the RRC check or right after), I do two regular RC checks. Dream Recall Everyday I wake-up, I try to sit in bed and recall if I had a dream (I usually only do this if I had a dream to remind me of doing this). If I didn't, usually I'll forget to even record down "Nothing" until a few hours later. However, when I do have a dream, I to tend to write it down after thinking about it for a few seconds in bed before I get up. So, that's my brief run-through of my attempt at furthering my dream recall and attempt at lucidity. Do you guys personally have any suggestions regarding this daily schedule? I'm not too sure if I'm doing enough to ensure I'll obtain lucidity or not. My biggest fear is that I'm not doing enough to get my recall better (remembered one dream since I started training on my lucidity & recall about a week ago). Thanks, Buckey

[gab]

Welcome to DILD class, Justin! Ok, you are right, we need to work on your recall. But that's actually really easy. All you have to do is think about your dreams, about what you would like to dream about, daydream some, think about how happy dreams, dreaming and lucid dreaming makes you. RECALL Write as much of your dreams in your DJ. Even if all you remember is just one word, for example a feeling, or color, write it down. It can be something as small as "we were someplace", or "something about blue", or "happy feeling". If you don't remember nothing at all, write "my memory is great and my recall is getting better every day". Don't write anything negative, like "No dreams". You can repeat some mantras. DILD is actually MILD + awareness + RC. "I remember my dreams" is a great mantra to repeat a few times during day and as you falling asleep. "I wake up after every dream" is a mantra to use, if you want to wake up after dream, so you have a very good chance of remembering it and writing it down. You can also drink some water before bed and each time it wakes you up at night. There is a good chance you will wake up right between the sleep stages and you will remember a dream. This is my favorite method and I remember at least 3 dreams a night. AWARENESS The awareness methods are all different, but as I'm sure you see, they are all about being more aware of yourself in relation to your surroundings during day. You can read all of the tutorials and then either use one of them that you like better, or use little bit of each. The main thing is not to be going through your day like on an auto-pilot. You can spend a whole day in your class without noticing posters on the wall, what was your best friend wearing, etc. Well, you may notice them, but if you were asked to descibe them, you perhaps could not. Here is little bit more about everything I just mentioned Collection of techniques for DILD. You can start practicing for a DILD even before your recall is up. If you get a lucid, I guarantee, that you will remember it. Keep your enthusiasm up, have intent (stronger than wish) to have a LD now, not in a future. Please, post your questions here and will take it from there. happy dreams

[Buckey]

Thank you for the great post as always, gab! Will definitely be using the new information to my advantage. May I ask why you recommend drinking water to help with recalls?

[gab]

Thank you for the great post as always, gab! Will definitely be using the new information to my advantage. May I ask why you recommend drinking water to help with recalls? Oh, sure, sorry, I wasn't more clear. It's the simplest thing, really. You drink water, it wakes you up to use the restroom. Good chance it wakes you up right after REM, because that's when we have a micro awakening anyway. So if you wake up shortly after your dream, you remember it and you can write it down. I have a piece of paper on bathroom sink and I just skrible as many keywords or short sentences as I can. Then I have another sip of water and we do this again in 2-4 hours. Let me know if you need help with scheduling your daily schedule of mantras, RC, and other stuff, or help with anything else. Happy dreams

[Buckey]

Oh, sure, sorry, I wasn't more clear. It's the simplest thing, really. You drink water, it wakes you up to use the restroom. Good chance it wakes you up right after REM, because that's when we have a micro awakening anyway. So if you wake up shortly after your dream, you remember it and you can write it down. I have a piece of paper on bathroom sink and I just skrible as many keywords or short sentences as I can. Then I have another sip of water and we do this again in 2-4 hours. Let me know if you need help with scheduling your daily schedule of mantras, RC, and other stuff, or help with anything else. Happy dreams Just gonna quote my post in the other thread Before I go to bed, I say the following several times (and a few times throughout the day): "I will have a lucid dream tonight." "I will remember my dreams." "I will wake up after my dreams." I'm also still doing my self-awareness checks for about a minute in length 1-2 times every hour. Edit: Also generally get about eight hours of sleep per day, and more on the weekends. And of course, I'm going to start drinking a decent amount of water.

[gab]

All those mantras are good. If I can only suggest, to use present tense. Our mind doesn't recognizes future. It's either now, or some other time, just not now. And you want to get lucid and wake up and remember your dreams now, at the earliest opportunity, and not sometimes in the future. Carry on now

[Buckey]

All those mantras are good. If I can only suggest, to use present tense. Our mind doesn't recognizes future. It's either now, or some other time, just not now. And you want to get lucid and wake up and remember your dreams now, at the earliest opportunity, and not sometimes in the future. Carry on now Ah, good tip. So along the lines of: "I'm having a lucid dream." "I am remembering my dreams." "I am waking up after my dreams." Also, your water trick worked pretty good last night, although I think I timed it off a little and couldn't fall a sleep before it hit me. I just remember having to go to the bathroom really badly, haha. ;P

[gab]

Haha, you can't win them all. Nature wins. These are some of my mantras. You can make your own. They don't need to be grammatically correct, as long as they make sense to you, they have a good flow, are easy to remember and recite. I lucid dream. I remember my dreams. I wake up after every dream. I wake up at 5am. This is my favorite mantra. I started out with this one and it gave me my first 20 or so lucids. The beauty of this one is, that you can make it rhyme with your breathing. "Next time I'm dreaming - on inhale I realize I'm dreaming" - on exhale. When you do this, make sure you have a nice and natural breathing pattern, nothing forced, and then add mantra to it. Sometimes you will notice, that you trying to adjust your breathing to the mantra. That's not good. Breathing has to stay natural. So stop the mantra, get a nice breathing rhythm going and add the mantra again. When your mantra rhymes with breathing, if will pick up an interesting quality. Like a self-hypnosis. Don't worry, you will not be hypnotized. All it means, that your mind will get into very receptive state and what you tell yourself then, will have extra power. It will go straight to your higher self. If you don't care for making it rhyme, you can add this to the mantra - "I look at my hands" You do this, when you also practice RC by looking at your hands and counting fingers. This was and still is my favorite RC and it's hillarious to see my amazement when I count more than 5 fingers on one hand. :] This is how it all goes during day - 1. Ask yourself the awareness question "wow, am I dreaming?" Recall an emotion while you ask it - as in "holly crap, I'm dreaming". 2. Look around you and expect a band of pirates or space aliens jump up from behind a corner, or something else. 3. Look at your hands (palms) at chest hight as if you saw them first time. Expect them to change. Try to make a finger grow 20 feet (or anything else). Count your fingers and don't be sure, how many you will count. Expect it to not be correct. 4. Put your hands down, and start with mantra "next time I'm dreaming, I look at my hands and realize I'm dreaming". When you say I look at my hands", bring your hands up again and look at them. Notice the details on your hands. Do this a few times. Then do a few different RCs. 1. Plug your nose and expect to be ale to breathe. 2. Gently put your thumb on a palm of the other hand and try to gently push it through. As you doing this, be looking at the edge of your palm, with thumb pointing at you. So when you angle your hand, you can see the palm or the back of your hand with just a tiny movement. 3. Tell yourself "if this was a dream, I would levitate" and fully expect yourself to start going up. If you can, jump up a little to see if you stay up floating. 4. Try to change something. "If this was a dream, that wall would be blue, that chair would be a car, etc." While doing all this , expect it to all work, because you are in a dream.

[Buckey]

Haha, you can't win them all. Nature wins. These are some of my mantras. You can make your own. They don't need to be grammatically correct, as long as they make sense to you, they have a good flow, are easy to remember and recite. I lucid dream. I remember my dreams. I wake up after every dream. I wake up at 5am. This is my favorite mantra. I started out with this one and it gave me my first 20 or so lucids. The beauty of this one is, that you can make it rhyme with your breathing. "Next time I'm dreaming - on inhale I realize I'm dreaming" - on exhale. When you do this, make sure you have a nice and natural breathing pattern, nothing forced, and then add mantra to it. Sometimes you will notice, that you trying to adjust your breathing to the mantra. That's not good. Breathing has to stay natural. So stop the mantra, get a nice breathing rhythm going and add the mantra again. When your mantra rhymes with breathing, if will pick up an interesting quality. Like a self-hypnosis. Don't worry, you will not be hypnotized. All it means, that your mind will get into very receptive state and what you tell yourself then, will have extra power. It will go straight to your higher self. If you don't care for making it rhyme, you can add this to the mantra - "I look at my hands" You do this, when you also practice RC by looking at your hands and counting fingers. This was and still is my favorite RC and it's hillarious to see my amazement when I count more than 5 fingers on one hand. :] This is how it all goes during day - 1. Ask yourself the awareness question "wow, am I dreaming?" Recall an emotion while you ask it - as in "holly crap, I'm dreaming". 2. Look around you and expect a band of pirates or space aliens jump up from behind a corner, or something else. 3. Look at your hands (palms) at chest hight as if you saw them first time. Expect them to change. Try to make a finger grow 20 feet (or anything else). Count your fingers and don't be sure, how many you will count. Expect it to not be correct. 4. Put your hands down, and start with mantra "next time I'm dreaming, I look at my hands and realize I'm dreaming". When you say I look at my hands", bring your hands up again and look at them. Notice the details on your hands. Do this a few times. Then do a few different RCs. 1. Plug your nose and expect to be ale to breathe. 2. Gently put your thumb on a palm of the other hand and try to gently push it through. As you doing this, be looking at the edge of your palm, with thumb pointing at you. So when you angle your hand, you can see the palm or the back of your hand with just a tiny movement. 3. Tell yourself "if this was a dream, I would levitate" and fully expect yourself to start going up. If you can, jump up a little to see if you stay up floating. 4. Try to change something. "If this was a dream, that wall would be blue, that chair would be a car, etc." While doing all this , expect it to all work, because you are in a dream. I really can't thank you enough for taking your time to provide me with this information, and as always: thank you! I'm curious now, should I do the hand RC you just told me about? I've been doing the test to see if I can push my fingers through my palm and then right after that doing the nose breathing test. But, it sounds like your RC technique is better suited for the maximum effectiveness of the mantras. Any feedback regarding this? Thanks.

[gab]

It's always good to do more than one RC, since you never know, which one will become your minds favorite. You know, when you get the hint of awareness and something tells you to do RC, I never get to pick which RC I do. It's always automatic for me. My brain picks them for me. So it's fun to watch, which one will show up and with how many days of delay after I start practicing a new RC. And it's always good to throw in a new one once in a while, to make it interesting for your mind. So If you want to add the hands RC, go for it. But keep doing the thumb/palm and any other that you like. You do them at the same time. 1. awareness question 2. look at hands and count fingers as RC #1, without mantra 3. do rest of the RCs 4. then you say your mantra with looking at hands Makes sense? And you welcome

[Buckey]

Seems like my dream recall is still nearly the same. I only remember a small piece of one dream, and sometimes nothing (like today). I'm doing my dream journal and I do lay in bed trying to recall any dreams or dream pieces.

[gab]

Are you writing something positive in your DJ even if you have no recall? Like: "My memory is good and my recall is getting better every day". "I love my dreams" Read some dreams from others DJs and think that you want to have cool dreams like that too. Reply to DJ that has a dream that really impacts you. But you know, yesterday i had no recall at all either. Don't worry, it will get better.

[Buckey]

@GAB: Yes, I usually write something along what you suggested: "I didn't remember anything, but my recall is getting better and better." ~~~~~ But I've been working more and more on my ADA. I've downloaded a program called "Cool Timer", and every 30 minutes I do a reality check. I question if I'm dreaming, sort of with the excitement put into it like you suggested. I try to picture everything around me as if it's part of a dream, and I try to force this "dream feeling" on myself. My first RC is to push my right-hand fingers through my left palm, and then I move on to the nose plug test. And every hour (every two RCs, basically - which calculates to an hour) I use this new "Cool Timer" program to countdown for 5 minutes; for the whole time, I'm practicing my ADA and improving on it. Then when the little alarm goes off, I stop. ;P It's really nice having a timer and I can keep up with everything. It keeps me more motivated for some reason...just having a timer to keep me on track. Hope I develop my ADA quickly. (speaking of ADA, while I was practicing it in a 5 minute session I actually noticed one of the light bulbs out in my bathroom. I'm curious to know how long it's been like that. ;P)

[gab]

@GAB: Yes, I usually write something along what you suggested: "I didn't remember anything, but my recall is getting better and better." My idea is to not write anything negative. Whatewer you think or write, your mind is paying attention and when you write didn't remember, it thinks that's what you want. Not to remember. When you want help from your mind, you have to think about it as if it was already happening now. (speaking of ADA, while I was practicing it in a 5 minute session I actually noticed one of the light bulbs out in my bathroom. I'm curious to know how long it's been like that. ;P) ADA does that to you, you will start seeing things now But that's great, that's what you want. So this happens in your dream too and you will suddently notice, you are in a dream.

[Buckey]

ADA teaches you to be aware, that's true. But how does it help you to become lucid within a dream? Seems like it's just getting you to notice everything, but not actually knowing the differences....since you're just noticing more and not actually questioning it.

[gab]

This is how I see awareness helping getting lucid. Do you have days, when you just spaced out, not really paying attention to your surroundings? When you walk out of the classroom and someone would ask you what was one of your classmates wearing, would you know? What posters are on walls? Was the back window opened, or closed? When you take a bus/train, could you describe the scenery, your fellow passengers, what color were the seats? This is how most of us go through the day. Like a zombie, as if on auto-pilot. Then when in a dream, why do we expect suddenly to notice? We don't notice things during day, why would we notice in a dream? But, if you start noticing things during day, it should help you to start "seeing", noticing things in a dream and be more aware of who you are, where you are and what are you doing. So noticing stuff in ADA is important, but also thinking about it, as you say. What am I doing right now, what am I about to do, what was I doing earlier? Be aware of self in relation to surroundings. I started doing this awareness/RC thing - I just look at something and say to myself "that's strange", while I envoke a feeling of surprise. Eventhough it's not. My life is quite mundane, not much strange things happening. But I have gotten lucid twice because I noticed something strange.

[Buckey]

I'm now back into this with even more free time.

[gab]

Good luck!