Thread: Centroid's Workbook

Originally Posted by Centroid

Hi guys!

No LDs yet, minor dry spell (how can I even say this, it's only been a week since my last LD, haha), HOWEVER, some really awesome dreams, and I'm really happy to have them in my DJ!

A dream I couldn't stop smiling about:
I dreamed that an amazing video game just went out, and so I texted a friend about it. I woke up and texted him back: never mind, it was just a dream. Then I woke up for real!

Anyway, I was reading Sageous stuff, and while going through the 'The WILD According to Sageous Q&A' posts I had a revelation: I was doing the RRC all wrong! During my practice, which lasted maybe a few weeks, I was spending some time thinking it all out etc, when I should have been looking for the sense of 'wonder' at my interactions, and my RRC should have been much shorter. Sageous also suggested to do the RRC after a normal RC, and this makes a lot of sense, because in waking life, the RRC grounds you in reality, while in a dream, the RRC is perfect for increasing lucidity (after it was confirmed by an RC), because you understand that everything is YOU, and it probably helps a lot with dream control too.

I'll do this then! RC + RRC at least once every hour. Also, I need to stop only reading the original post of every thread, and skim the rest of the posts of the thread, as the OP often says really important stuff he missed in his first post. This is what caused me to misunderstand a really good technique.

Other things to note:
Dream recall is good.
MILDed a few times, although I haven't WBTBed much because of a ten-hour jet lag.

That's definitely a good position to be in, to feel like 1 week is a dry spell. With the right focus and persistence these "dry" periods will become shorter and less common.

Isn't that an interesting experience…just imagine how many FA's we probably have and just never notice that we did something that we can later prove we didn't do IWL.

That is a great thread! You will probably find new things in such threads each time you revisit them.

I like your plan and good luck with the jet lag!

Hi!

I hope everything is going well for you all.

School started a few days ago for me, every teacher saying things like 'this is year is gonna be tough' or 'we don't recommend doing any extra-curricular activities'. So I'll most probably be very busy.

However, I don't intend to end my LD practice just yet, don't worry! I wake up early 6 days a week (around 7:00), and go to bed between 10 and 11. I can sleep in on Sundays though. Therefore, I'll only be able to WBTB once a week. On week nights I need as much sleep as I can get, although I still want to have intentional awakenings and practice reaching out to my dream memories and mentally going through them to memorize them (and quickly tag them when I wake up for school).

During the day I'll still keep working on my self-awareness, which I started practicing seriously not very long ago (focusing also hard on avoiding 'auto-pilot', although it might be a bit complicated during tests Nevertheless, many of my dreams were of tests (actually pretty funny when I woke up, all the questions were nonsense...). I'll see what happens.

These days dream recall was pretty bad, only a few fragments when I woke up. This is probably due to a bad sleep schedule because of jet lag. Now I'm recovered I think, so I hope it's gonna be better now!

Also, I had quite a few FAs, but couldn't catch any of them... although I clearly thought 'this is weird' on one occasion, but simply dismissed the idea, I woke up like: NOOOO!

Also, I had something I wanted to ask: which intentions should I focus on at weekday bedtimes? Wake up and recall my dreams? Become lucid/self-aware? Mix both of them, or alternate them maybe? And should I do one long WBTB (maybe one hour long even, open to experimentation), or multiple short ones (Micro-WBTBs Sensei-style)? It's kinda like trying to hit a target with a bow; shooting one arrow but spending some time aiming, or shooting lots and lots of arrows but without aiming much, if that made any sense? Maybe even do both...

Also, I was thinking a bit about Sensei's dual-awareness ideas (lucidity = general dream awareness + state awareness). Maybe general dream awareness is the self-awareness Sageous talks about, and state awareness is LaBerge's prospective memory? What are your thought about this?

Thanks!

Originally Posted by Centroid

Also, I had something I wanted to ask: which intentions should I focus on at weekday bedtimes? Wake up and recall my dreams? Become lucid/self-aware? Mix both of them, or alternate them maybe? And should I do one long WBTB (maybe one hour long even, open to experimentation), or multiple short ones (Micro-WBTBs Sensei-style)? It's kinda like trying to hit a target with a bow; shooting one arrow but spending some time aiming, or shooting lots and lots of arrows but without aiming much, if that made any sense? Maybe even do both...

Since it sounds like you will be very busy, you might want to alternate: several nights setting intention for recall until you feel like recall is going good and then switching to setting intention to become lucid. Most people find a longer WBTB to be more likely to produce a lucid dream, but everyone is different. You can always mix in times where you experiment with mini-WBTB's to see how they work for you. I think that you are making a good decision to save WBTB for that one day that you can sleep in. If you can maintain some level of level of practice through this busy year, perhaps it can give you that extra lift each morning...that edge that most of your classmates just won't have (picture that joy you feel after waking from a good lucid dream or even a good non-lucid dream). With all of the above advice, go with your gut though!

Hi Centroid! Just keep working consistently on self-awareness as much as you can. Keeping an eye out for when you've slipped into auto-pilot is a great way to do that. More and more, notice when this has happened. Do this consistently and you'll very quickly start to "feel" when this has happened, allowing you to return to lucidity (waking or dreaming!) sooner and sooner, and hopefully eventually, remaining lucid all (or most of) the time.

I've spoken a lot with Sensei and general dream awareness means awareness OF our dreams: understanding the concept of dream, realizing you do dream, a lot, every night, paying attention to your dreams, and recalling them. State awareness means just that: "am I in the waking state or the dreaming state?" Self-awareness (especially as Sageous defines it) includes state awareness, so is a super-set of state awareness. I personally tend to split out state awareness from what I think self-awareness is. It's all about how you slice the semantics. Many of these terms involve aspects of the others. Self-awareness and access to memory in particular are closely inter-related.

Hello fogelbise and FryingMan! (and fellow students! &#128521

I'm sorry I haven't posted here in a very long time, and I hope you're all doing well!

I've been very busy, and every day is a race to finish my homework and revisions to have enough sleep. Last year I was sleeping for an average of 9 hours, but these couple of months saw it go down to 7-8 hours. It's still okay I guess, and I can catch up in the weekend (although I can only sleep in on Sundays).


From the past six months of having lucid dreams, I have learned the following:

-WBTB is extremely effective.

-I have had some success with visualization/incubation while doing MILD, but the success faded after this became routine and a bit boring tbh. I also needed to do it for at least 30 minutes for it to be effective.

-I usually have FAs after SSILD, and sometimes spontaneous DILDs.

-I tried many different things during the day: intention-setting, incubation/visualizations, prospective memory training, self-awareness, critical thinking, mindfulness. It's not easy to know what works for me or not, but the things that I actually enjoy doing are: constant mindfulness (avoiding auto-pilot), self-awareness (through RRCs mostly) and critical thinking (with RCs).


--> What I do now:

-SSILD (after 5-15 min WBTB) 2-3 times on Saturday night.

-RCs and RRCs (5-10 each, doing one then the other) during the day (for self-awareness and critical mindset).

-I recall my dreams when I wake up every day, for about 5 minutes, although I haven't written it down recently, because life gets in the way and I want to sleep enough. What do you guys think? I haven't noticed my recall going down yet, it's still pretty good (1+ dreams, usually 2).


--> Results so far:

-I have had a week with 4 LDs, and some with none.

-Average LDs/week: ~2, while two months ago it was ~1.

-I have an LD from doing SSILD (done 3 times in one night) about 75% of the time (would be more if I caught every FA). So that's great, but the only problem is that it's impossible to do during a school night because it would make me sleep deprived, which I think would not be beneficial in the long run.

-I usually have one spontaneous DILD during the week, probably due to the day-work.

-I have had 13 LDs since I last posted here (I still need to update my count). Out of those, 8 lasted less than ~5 minutes (then I either woke up or lost lucidity). In the remaining 5, 3 of those were low-lucidity where I did some stuff but I wasn't really understanding what being lucid was exactly. So I did have 2 longer and stable lucid dreams! I did some cool stuff, like flying in space at the speed of light (amazing experience)! I explored a few planets but didn't encounter any forms of life... In the other lucid dream I skied for a while and flew around the snowy mountains a lot too. These were very fun experiences, and they make me realize that I'll never want to quit!

-When I have longer, more stable and more frequent lucid dreams I'll use them more for things like rehearsal, or learning, to make my life better But I still need to work a lot on stabilization and making the lucids more lucid and longer, as well as more frequent.

Thanks for your help!

It's great to hear you are doing well Centroid!

Originally Posted by Centroid

-WBTB is extremely effective.

-I have had some success with visualization/incubation while doing MILD, but the success faded after this became routine and a bit boring tbh. I also needed to do it for at least 30 minutes for it to be effective.

-So true!!

-If you ever get bored of SSILD you may find that MILD feels fresh again after a break. You could switch between them to keep each of them feeling fresh. You many not need to though…I used SSILD for ~3 years straight. I then switched to MILD, only because I found I enjoyed it, over the last 8 months or so but I have been itching to switch back to SSILD again.

--> Results so far:

-I have had a week with 4 LDs, and some with none.

-Average LDs/week: ~2, while two months ago it was ~1.

-I have an LD from doing SSILD (done 3 times in one night) about 75% of the time (would be more if I caught every FA). So that's great, but the only problem is that it's impossible to do during a school night because it would make me sleep deprived, which I think would not be beneficial in the long run.

-I usually have one spontaneous DILD during the week, probably due to the day-work.

-I have had 13 LDs since I last posted here (I still need to update my count). Out of those, 8 lasted less than ~5 minutes (then I either woke up or lost lucidity). In the remaining 5, 3 of those were low-lucidity where I did some stuff but I wasn't really understanding what being lucid was exactly. So I did have 2 longer and stable lucid dreams! I did some cool stuff, like flying in space at the speed of light (amazing experience)! I explored a few planets but didn't encounter any forms of life... In the other lucid dream I skied for a while and flew around the snowy mountains a lot too. These were very fun experiences, and they make me realize that I'll never want to quit!

Very nice results! I also saved most WBTB's for the weekends early in my practice until I got to a point where I was getting good sleep with WBTB, but that was mostly through being able to get to bed earlier. There's nothing wrong with saving it to the weekend and you are getting nice results just that way. I agree that WBTB's during the week may not be beneficial at this time due to your studies and sleep schedule.

-When I have longer, more stable and more frequent lucid dreams I'll use them more for things like rehearsal, or learning, to make my life better But I still need to work a lot on stabilization and making the lucids more lucid and longer, as well as more frequent.

It helps to try not to worry about stabilization and just enjoy the lucids with a confident attitude like "I got this!"

Thanks for your help!

You're welcome. Thank you for saying that. FM and I like to see the students excel!

Jeez, really nice progress Centroid !

Did you try setting the intention to notice the natural awakenings during the night (micro-wakings between the sleep cycles) ? It's a good way to improve your DR without messing with your sleep !