Thread: Clarity and Detail

OMG, I used to have that happen all the time when driving my car in a dream! It would turn into a bike and have gears and be such a pain.

Honestly, the only thing that cured me of that was buying my current vehicle, an SUV. I don't know why it always happened with my previous car, except that maybe I really enjoyed the acceleration, and I connected that feeling with how I used to feel when riding my bike.

As for dream detail...I started taking naps, and sleeping in shorter periods, and my dream recall has been steadily going up. Likewise, my recall has improved, and my attention to detail is phenomenal! Sleeping in my bed for a long period led me to lose dreams, and forget important events, but naps and sleeping inclined in a chair in my living room has led me to some incredible experiences.

I'm sure some of this is covered under the topic Dream Recall, linked from the main page. I quote:

The brain tends to erase memories of the previous dream during the intermediate stages between REM sleep. Thus, to salvage the memories of your dreams you’ll need to wake during or immediately after the REM periods, while the dreams are still fresh in your mind.

So, shorter sleep periods can equal amazing dream images and recall, both of which are good.

I think this is a perfect example of having low awareness of your actions and the world around you. Think about it a bit like an autopilot - when you're driving your car or riding your bike you are simply just repeating your mental task that says 'time to drive now' and off you go without any thought. This is why your mind is able to simply forget what you were doing, but it knows you were doing something like that so it plops you from your car to your bike!

The solution to this in my opinion is to practice some meditation or awareness. Learn to become focused on what is going on around you, to pay attention to all of your senses and live in the moment. There is a couple of guides around DV about awareness such as King Yoshi's All Day Awareness (ADA) Technique, which can also be used in short bursts throughout the day (sporadic awareness technique). These techniques, in my opinion will help a lot with your problem of things changing when you're not paying attention to them, you'll also notice your dreams will tend to have a much more linear flow

Thanks! I'm going to read that Technique. What you're describing sounds like Lucid Living. I've been trying to be more aware of my surroundings- for example when I'm on a walk I'll sum up my environment as I would a dreamscape and everything becomes more vivid and I notice things I previously overlooked. However, when I do that I tend to loose that vivid lucidity after about five minutes because I have a bad case of ADD (the lucid dreamer's worst nightmare, I guess). I love your signature picture, by the way. Did you make that?

Oh, I have no trouble with Dream Recall. I actually have near-perfect dream recall- it's been that way all my life. It's nice to know that I'm not the only one who experiences this problem! What's so frustrating is that, for example, I'll make a lightsaber appear and it won't stay the way I want it to- it's always becoming shorter and I have to constantly focus on making it normal-sized. Or when I found a samurai sword and drew it from its sheath; the blade became floppy like rubber and I couldn't fight with it. One of my goals is to have a realistic medieval sword fight and make the scimitar of my dreams perfectly. That'd be amazing...