Hi Aqua, and welcome to the DVA DILD class!

It seems you have a pretty good handle on what you should be doing. Have you read any books like LaBerge's Exploring The World of Lucid Dreaming? If not, I'd recommend adding that to your reading material, it has a lot of good stuff in it. I got my first LD after one month of following LaBerge's program, and so have many others, it definitely works. He concentrates on DILD (MILD), and that I think is the best place for beginners to start.

There are 3 main components to lucid dreaming: 1) building high awareness/memory, 2) building high dream recall, and 3) proper timing. There are many many other things that come into play as well. You mentioned stress. I also have bad recall on nights when I'm stressed -- it's a good practice to leave your waking life worries behind when you get into bed: tell yourself that the best thing for your waking life responsibilities is to have a restful night (full of dreams!). Maybe use a day journal to note down all the things you need to do the next day before getting into bed, and do your best to forget them entirely when you get into bed.

When you wake up, don't start thinking about your day and all the things you have to do. Leave those thoughts until you actually physically get up out of bed and start your day. This way you'll train you brain over time that "in bed equals dreaming time and dream recall time!"

You've made some great progress on the dream recall already! Let's work on taking it to the next level: LaBerge recommends working only on recall at night until you reliably remember 1 dream every night for at least 7-10 nights in a row. At bed time, set intention (means repeat a statement to yourself and really believe it, feel how important it is to you), like: "I remember my dreams....I remember my dreams....I remember my dreams..." for several minutes. To build a lot of recall you may also want to experiment with setting intention to notice the wakings during the night: "I notice wakings during the night, remain still, and recall my dreams."

You can start day awareness work right away, though. It takes time to keep a continuous mindfulness. The best thing to build it is a strong desire to do so, constant practice, and patience. Our minds naturally seem to want to "zone out" a lot. We just need to learn to recognize it. We're not trying to "fight" it, only to pay attention quietly to notice when it happens. The more you pay attention, the more you'll find the times when you lose your mindfulness. When you do notice this, don't be upset, be happy! Noticing when you've been zoned out *is a moment of lucidity!* Celebrate those moments, be happy about them. Quietly bring your attention back to yourself and what you're doing. And just repeat this over and over and over. Over time, you'll find yourself "paying attention" more and more, and zoning out less and less.

It is awareness that prompts us to RC, not the other way around, so for more RCs, you need to be paying attention more, and thinking more about dreaming and if you're dreaming "right now" all through the day.

Daytime awareness and dream recall are related: once you start paying attention to waking life, you'll start paying attention to dream experiences as well, and once you do that it will be easier to recall your dreams.

Do you use an alarm in the morning? Alarms can be pretty rough on dream recall.

Other things like: getting enough sleep, regular bed times, and even getting enough exercise and eating a healthy diet can help with dream recall.

So as my first suggestion, I'd like you to set intention at bedtime to recall dreams, and when you find yourself awake, give yourself time to quietly stay still, eyes closed, and ask yourself "What was I just dreaming about?" Keep your mind quiet and receptive, and see if you start getting images or flashes or even whole dreams. Being excited and positive about remembering dreams really helps.

Also have a look through my >>dream recall tips<<, there's more detail in there about how to get really good at recalling your dreams.

So try that out for starters, and get back to us here in your workbook on how it's going!