Thread: ExothermReacton's workbook

Seems like I am making another entry here after more than 10 months have passed. In that time I had ups and downs with lucid dreaming. Sometimes I couldn't attain lucidity at all and at other times it nearly felt natural to simply do so.
What is really interesting is that some basic skills never get completely lost. When I started lucid dreaming I wondered how people could remember so many detailed dreams and now I remember dreams without putting effort into it although I haven't tried to lucid dream for a while.

This is one of the most encouraging things I noticed. No matter how often I interrupt my lucid training. Some skills just stay with me all the time, becoming something I don't have to practice so forcefully like I used to do. Looking at some other well-known lucid dreamers on these forums indicates something similar. People asked them "How much time do you put in lucid dreaming practice per day?" and they are like "About 10 minutes at max". Still they have succes.

Just some random thoughts of me. I will try to track my progress here a bit more!

Welcome back! Have you thought about what kinds of things you can do to stick with the practice, even if it is just 10 minutes a day? I hope to see you stick with it and posting here regularly. I really wish I had stuck with it when I was young!

This may sound a bit too easy but what has helped me at times is just to "soak in" some moments. By this I mean just experiencing the moment and feel the atmosphere, have a look at the forms, the lightnign etc. around. I do not overanalyse though as you are often taught when beginning with lucid dreaming. It may be great for short term succes. At free days I was nearly permanently aware and had a decent lucid after that. Sadly, it is useless in the long run as nobody can keep up this level of awareness for a long time.

My problem and the reason why I dropped lucid dreaming a few times was that I failed to find the small degree between awareness and staying relaxed. I guess, I could do more with lucid dreaming as I learned the first steps pretty quickly but the learning curve increased drastically because of this.

But I am positive that it is just a matter of staying with lucid dreaming for long enough. People say it takes 20 days to get acustomed to a new behaviour. So I plan to post here every day for a while, even if nothing of interest happens.

May I ask how you approach lucid dreaming? I know that everyone has to find his own way as we are very individual in that area but maybe I am just missing out a few basics or with big luck your approach works fairly well for me and I can adjust it to my favour. This is what I did all the time basically. Adjusting well-known techniques to make them fit me. It just takes a few weeks that I have to stick around.

Totally forgot to say that there are very few things that make me lucid with a near 100% chance. For example meeting a person who is dead in reality makes me lucid all the time or if I can't remember things dream characters tell me although there is no way I could forget that (With other words it didn't happen at all and is purely made up). Well, those situations are rare but work even when I am not into practice.

Last night was not to special but I noticed something interesting. Vividness and recall don't seem to be connected as strongly as I thought. I remembered whole plots of the dreams but I only associated one or two images with it. So, although my senses werer very fuzzy my memory worked fairly well.

Had a significant boost in vividness last night. The dreams felt surprisingly real so I take that as a sign that I am doing things right so far.

Originally Posted by ExothermReacton

May I ask how you approach lucid dreaming? I know that everyone has to find his own way as we are very individual in that area but maybe I am just missing out a few basics or with big luck your approach works fairly well for me and I can adjust it to my favour. This is what I did all the time basically. Adjusting well-known techniques to make them fit me. It just takes a few weeks that I have to stick around.

In the simplest of terms I work on self awareness during the day and then use WBTB at night - which is a huge boost to the chances of becoming lucid. When I started I would mostly only do WBTB on the weekends, almost always using SSILD. Let me know if you have more questions.

Originally Posted by ExothermReacton

Had a significant boost in vividness last night. The dreams felt surprisingly real so I take that as a sign that I am doing things right so far.

That is a great sign!

I apologize for the slow response. I was out of town.

Originally Posted by fogelbise

I apologize for the slow response. I was out of town.

Don't worry, people have lifes and it is good that way!

Last night was great for me and fairly interesting. I had lucid in that I could actually do a bit of stuff. Most interesting was the way I got lucid though. I woke up in an unknown room with a few friends around me already talking. Taking a look at the clock I saw that it was 2:24 (it didn't specify am or pm). That was a strange time! It was totally bright outside so it couldn't be 2:24 am but I would never sleep until 2:24 pm either. I remembered the last thing I did before being here, which was going to sleep (well, I had one or two dreams before but I couldn't remember them in the dream itself) and I knew what I should be doing after waking up today, which was getting up early to go to university. In other words, nothing made sense anymore and I was 99% sure that it was a dream. To test it I simply walked outside and made a "little" jump that turned out to be 4 meters high. A friend followed me and we just jumped around the roofs of the houses. I intended something different for the night actually but most of the time I get caught up in the first thing that is fun.

Guess, it is about training to get more vividness and more memory of dream goals. At the moment my vividness feels a bit like being a bit sleepy. So it is easy to forget about my goals and sometimes I make fairly stupid decisions.

My approach is probably best described as mindfulness. I work on becoming a lucid person, 24x7. Being aware in the moment of experience, being aware in the moment of response to experience, with the subtext of identifying and remaining aware of my state ("am I dreaming or awake?"). That plus intent to lucid dream, meditation (I'm very sporadic still at this point), trying to WILD while falling asleep, and reaching for dream recall every time I find myself awake.

Thanks for explaining your approaches, you two! I nearly forgot about SSILD to be honest although it is such an easy technique actually. Meditation might be interesting as well. Not sure if WILD is my thing. I had a few random successes with it but not more. The problem is that I naturally think a lot and that is what you DON'T want to do when WILDing. Might give it another shot anyway.

Yes I suffer a similar affliction of having a very active mind. I tend also to wake up very quickly. Which is why WILD I think eludes me for the most part. Meditation is the answer, I believe, assiduously developing a mind that can be come completely still at a moment's notice. The best WILDers also have mastered the ability to completely relax body and mind at will. These are good things to work on!

Most of my LD's during my first 3 years of adult practice came as DILD's after performing SSILD, so I really love it. If you connected with it at all, it may be worth continuing.

Originally Posted by ExothermReacton

Last night was great for me and fairly interesting. I had lucid in that I could actually do a bit of stuff. Most interesting was the way I got lucid though. I woke up in an unknown room with a few friends around me already talking. Taking a look at the clock I saw that it was 2:24 (it didn't specify am or pm). That was a strange time! It was totally bright outside so it couldn't be 2:24 am but I would never sleep until 2:24 pm either. I remembered the last thing I did before being here, which was going to sleep (well, I had one or two dreams before but I couldn't remember them in the dream itself) and I knew what I should be doing after waking up today, which was getting up early to go to university. In other words, nothing made sense anymore and I was 99% sure that it was a dream. To test it I simply walked outside and made a "little" jump that turned out to be 4 meters high. A friend followed me and we just jumped around the roofs of the houses. I intended something different for the night actually but most of the time I get caught up in the first thing that is fun.

Guess, it is about training to get more vividness and more memory of dream goals. At the moment my vividness feels a bit like being a bit sleepy. So it is easy to forget about my goals and sometimes I make fairly stupid decisions.

Congratulations on the LD!! If goal memories don't pop into your mind immediately, I see nothing wrong with having fun!

Yes, for me, it seems that vividness and clear memory of dream goals come with higher level lucid dreams. Those higher levels seem to coincide with times when I am experiencing stronger self-awareness. I follow the type that Sageous teaches. Let me know if you need a link to his self awareness lessons. There are other factors that can affect the level such as: the way in which your lucidity was triggered in a DILD, coming into the dream aware (either via WILD or from a transition), your recent level of presence in your regular dreams (general dream awareness) and probably many other factors that I am forgetting or haven't discovered yet. The bottom line is that you can definitely improve that over time and even in the shorter term with harder work. I tend to not put in a lot of "harder work" but rather focus on the parts of the practice that I enjoy. I do end up putting in a decent amount of time into lucid dreaming or things related to it because of my love of lucid dreaming…so it doesn't really feel like work any longer.

I also wanted to say that I like FM's approach because it can produce faster results in your waking life. I have become more mindful more as a side effect of lucid dreams I have had and my lucid dreaming practices, but putting mindfulness front and center can produce quicker results in waking life mindfulness while also being great for lucid dreaming. Everyone that keeps at it seems to find the path that fits them best and probably vice versa! (Those who find the path that fits them best, tend to keep at it.)

Let us know if you have any questions.

Would be nice if you could post the link about self awareness as I didn't practice it much yet (at least not on purpose).

Sure, here it is http://www.dreamviews.com/wild/13181...prep-part.html

(It's under the WILD lessons, but it is great for lucid dreaming in general.)

The guide included one major idea that is so obvious but gets overseen so easily. Everyone is talking about dream control and how to achieve it but to be honest, we all have it already. We create the dream so we control every aspect of it. What people do, what things look like etc.. The only difference is that this kind of control is subconcious, nothing we think about. So all we need to do is basically linking our concious control with the subconcious one. All in all a very helpful guide. Thank you!

My dreams have gained some craziness in the last night. I usually have quite a lot of them but missed them in the last time. Just to give you a taste of my favourite one of this night:

Dark creatures are invading the park I am in. It seemed so peaceful but I could hear how they quickly moved around the hedges leaving a windblow behind them. There was a small pond in front of me and a pantheon-like building behind it. As I had no time to waste I just ran through the shallow pond and stepped in to the pantheon. To my surprise I had found a secret mechanism that lowered the ground under me very slowly. When I was at the bottom a weird hall awaited me. It looked like an overdimensional toy room just that there was an endless void in the floor here and there. What I had found was the secret base of the creatures and their leader was.... a giant tentacle with a huge eye in it. It wasn't even floating but hanging from the ceiling using strings. It was cursing something inunderstandable.

I really had to smile when I woke up.

Just to make sure if I got the "self awareness" part right. What I do is basically regularly asking myself what I did before and what I am about to do as a first step. Then I go over to the part where I observe how the world around me influences me and how I influence the world. Something like "The wind is cooling my face, the people walking by me notice me for a while, I am moving the pebbles under my feet."

Is that how it is meant to be?

I wouldn't worry too much about "getting it [self-awareness] right." As long as you're focusing on paying attention to your experiences, and reflecting on them, and working in memory , you're pretty much doing what you need. I for one don't jive with the "influencing" part of this description of self-awareness. A much better summary for me is "*I*....am *here*.....*now*...having this experience."

To begin with, even just working on learning to realize when you've zoned out (gotten lost in thoughts or activities) is profitable.

Originally Posted by FryingMan

I wouldn't worry too much about "getting it [self-awareness] right." As long as you're focusing on paying attention to your experiences, and reflecting on them, and working in memory , you're pretty much doing what you need.

Agreed…I believe FM came to his position after a good number of months of practice. I know I came to mine after a good number of months of working with Sageous' guide. When I first started working with self-awareness I didn't really "get it" the same way that I do now and I am sure it is something that I will continue to grow with. If you do what FM says in the quote here for long enough, you should come to a point where you find your own way to connect to the basic idea. One idea I connected with earlier on was to really stop and to really look around in "wonder" when doing these self-awareness check-ins.

Thank you! That helped me a bit to create a concept on my own. So far one good result is that I get generally more aware in my real life. Hard to believe how many big or small things you normally ignore as your brain says "I know that already, who cares?". Seeing effect in real life should at some point cause effect in dreaming. At least I hope.

Yes fogelbise puts it very well: you need to stick with some form of it long enough for something to "click" inside you and feel a connection. It's almost impossible to put into words, you just need to experience it! Keep it up, and work to continue detecting and defeating that "autopilot" enemy!

Seeing effect in real life should at some point cause effect in dreaming. At least I hope

Absolutely! And I like to call it "waking life" -- dreaming life is just as real!

The Tibetan dream yogis consider this the sequence: 1) awareness in the moment of experience, 2) awareness in the moment of behavior (response to experience), 3) awareness in dreams. You can't jump ahead in this sequence, each one must be mastered in turn. (For consistent awareness, sure you can have LDs here and there along the way).

As I realized that competitions greatly motivate me to practice lucid dreaming I thought about setting up my own lucid dreaming game after the current competition is done. I dreamed about the game and I liked the concept after waking up quite a lot. It is a copperative game with an unlimited number of players in that all go on a journey and try to progress by completing tasks.

I may even start sign ups to gather a few people already. The thought is very motivating so it is always worth a try I guess! This might be a good way to practice and share results with other lucid dreamers.

Sounds good to me! I'm always looking for fun multi-dreamer motivating activities!

Had one of my better lucids tonight. The "What did I do before?" question is so powerful when it works. I was walking around in a city and I was wondering after a while how I did get there so fast although I was in my bed a few minutes ago. That was enough to realize I was dreaming as there was no way I could be here right now. After making my test jump I even remembered a dream goal: The super speed task from the competition. Now the "I control everything anyway, just in an unconcious way" concept was super helpful. Subconciously I control myself to have a certain maximum running speed. So I just linked my concious will to it and accelerated myself by telekinesis basically. I was running but my feet didn't do the most acceleration it was the mental power I applied on myself.

All in all the new things I learned in the past weeks have been so effective and I thank you for helping to this point! It is hard to decide though what I want to especially work on now that I am nearly back on track. I wish for more vivdness but also more stability. On the other hand I want to expand the control I have. There are so many choices and I am sure that there will be always something to do.