couple questions (recall)

[jgranniss]

Well, I have just decided I am going to start the dream journal again and see if I get better results than last time when I tried it. My question for this is, say I do get better dream recall, what does this do for my LD practice? Should I look at it every night before I go to bed? -jgranniss

[Burns]

You'll be able to recongize common dreamsigns and patterns in your dreams. Sometimes if you're aware that you commonly dream about a particular thing, you're more likely to become lucid the next time it happens. It'll also tell you when would be a good time to do a reality check. For example, I always have dreams where I can't dial a phone properly. So any time I fumble the numbers in real life, I do a reality check. This has gotten me lucid several times. By doing reality checks for something that you commonly dream about, you have a better chance at becoming lucid than if you were just doing random RCs during the day. Quality over quantity. Plus, keeping a DJ is just cool, in my opinion. Sometimes I like to go back through my DJ to dreams I had several years ago. I'm blown away at the dreams I'd completely forgotten about, but when I read it, it all comes flooding back and I can picture the scene crystal-clear in my mind again. Really cool.

[jgranniss]

thx alot! I dream about running alot... will it work if every time Im running then I RC? Oh, by the way, are u adopting??

[yellowknots]

I have a question that pertains to this kind of. Why do devices fail in dreams?

[Ev]

"Keeping a dream journal is a pathway to many abilities some may consider to be "unnatural"...." Like Burns said, by keeping a dream journal you will learn more about *your* personal dreaming, patterns, dreamsigns, and a lot of other stuff. You will learn more about yourself and will be able to manipulate your dreams better, even without lucidity. For example, I can wake up after each dream or wake up in the middle of a dream because on some deeper level I know that I'm observing a dream.This happens because I have tons of dreams written down in my dream journal. Sometimes I even look over the scribbles and remember some cool stuff. Just knowing more about dreams allows you to maintain more control over the dream once you become lucid, cause if you keep a record of your dreams, they are no longer unknown and uncharted territory, you know what to expect and what things. About devices (a bit offtopic) In many dreams devices fail because there's no internal mechanism and no physics to rely on. For example when you see a digital clock in a dream, all you see is a box and some LCD digits. The digits change not because of the quartz crystal oscillations, but because your mind expects the clock to change somehow. Your mind tries to make it behave coherently, but with some parts of your brain asleep it's a damn difficult task. The best it may try to do is fake a power outage (clock changes rapidly then the display goes black). Imagine that you are flipping a light switch in a lucid dream. Because the switch is in no way connected to the light bulb in a dream, simply flipping the switch will not provide the desired result. You may view the act of flipping the switch as a kind of a ritual - if while flipping the switch you focus your intent on making the lights turn on and actually will for them to turn on, you will have much higher chance of lights turning on and staying on....