Hey. I had my first spontaneous unintentional lucid dream late 2015, and a while afterwards started training my mind to have them more frequently. I was fairly successful, worked super hard, and had several LDs in my second month of training. I was in China at that time. Now, I'm back in the UK, and with work and life changes, lucid dreaming dropped off. I was still keeping a dream journal, and I have had one or two lucid dreams without really trying, but my heart wasn't in it for some time.

Anyway, now I'm back in the game. I thought I'd start a work book here to help track my progress, make a note of what works for me and whatnot.

I know that daytime activity has a big effect on nighttime activity, but there's often a lag of days or weeks before a crossover occurs.

Here's what my day work consists of:

Dream Journaling
I usually write down my dreams as soon as I awake from them. If it's in the middle of the night and I'm tired, I might write a few keywords rather than full sentences. I don't keep any other notes with my dream entries.

Daytime Awareness
I believe my first lucid dream was directly influenced by the mindfulness practice I was doing at the time. Essentially, it's coming to the present moment and examining closely what's happening right now. I might just focus on one sense, like touch, or other time I might process the context of my situation, i.e., know that I'm currently at work speaking to a colleague, just to see if it seems legit.

Mantra
I've just started doing this. Throughout the day, say to myself "I am dreaming." When I say this (usually mentally) I'll bring myself into the present moment, as above.

Meditation
I try to meditate daily for at least 30 minutes, one or two hours before I sleep. My method is to sit comfortably somewhere, close my eyes, and follow my breath. Whenever I notice that I've lost focus of my breath and I'm following some thought, I bring my focus back to my breath. I can go quite deep in some sessions where I might spend minutes in mental silence. Regardless of whatever benefit this has to lucid dreaming, I love meditation for this alone. Being in that emptiness is real respite from the noise of life. I also noticed that meditation somewhat improved my recall.


In the past, when I had a lot of success, I would keep a spreadsheet of a bunch of stats, such as LD count, regular dream count, hours slept, time meditated. I'm not sure if I really want to do that again though, because despite it being somewhat useful, when you can see that you've gone a whole month without a single LD, it's pretty demotivational.

Anyway, I shall be updating this workbook a lot. Thanks for reading!