I am scrapping the bottom of the barrel for vivid dreams.

For the past month and a half or so, I've been struggling with making my dreams vivid.

before you say "Just keep a dream journal", I'll have you know that I keep a dream journal and i write in it every morning even if i don't recall a dream or not. Dream recall is not the problem. The problem is that my i don't feel present within my dreams, and the vision within the dreams is very blurry and out of focus like a camera.




One thing that I've done to increase dream vividness is ADA. I wrote in a notebook, "Every time i see the color pink, i will do a reality check." In an effort to increase my prospective memory, witch i think is the secret to remembering how to do reality checks in your dreams, and to do techniques like MILD and DEILD. Every time i saw the color pink anywhere, I kid you not, I did a reality check and really questioned my reality. I even looked for the color pink and expected to see it somewhere within my waking reality, witch in turn gives me all around awareness of myself and my environment. When i got to dreaming however, i noticed a slight increase in vividness within the environment in my dreams, but it still looked like i was looking through a very unfocused camera through my peripheral vision.

Another thing I've tried is to turn off all light 1 hr before bed. I find that this is very hard to do with a calm mind because i'd just rather be on my computer or on my phone than sitting in a dark room for an hour.... pretty boring and irritating to me. it didn't work either because I still didn't have an increase in vividness. Probably if I actually gotten used to doing this (witch won't happen anytime soon) and stopped stressing out about it, MAYBE i'll see an increase, but idk man.

Last thing I did that worked the best was to get very comfortable in bed, went to sleep before 9 o clock (staying in unison with my circadian rhythm), and i kept the thought of my previous dream in my head and i really contemplated why i had that kind of dream. I would think all day after a reality check "why the hell did i do this in my dream" or "i'm trying to understand why this happened in my dream." I would be really connected to my dream world by doing this and it was going great. I had 2 nights of consecutive lucid dreams but after the third day it didn't work.

Hell I even tried eating mangoes before bed to give me vivid dreams, and the same thing applied... non vivid dreams



I'm also going to try these tips that people have been suggesting on the forums like:

"Think through your day backwards in fast-rewind mode within a few minutes before you go to sleep each night. It takes a little effort, dedication and concentration, but I promise that you will start remembering your dreams in exquisite detail."

and

"Have confidence. I'm not kidding, go to bed tonight and think "wow I'm gonna lucid dream tonight it's so easy" and stuff like that. Works most of the time. But you really have to get it in to your head."

but I need serious help, I don't want "maybes" and "im not sure, but try these" type of reply. (i'm not trying to be rude, but this is a serious concept to me within my dreaming life.) I need certified answers from people who went through the same experience I am going through that have achieved vivid dreams.

Thanks for reading

(P.S I can't use melatonin supplements, because that goes against my lifestyle :(, believe me I would pop a pill right now if i could... )

As far as making non lucid dreams vivid, it has been hit and miss for me. Sometimes they are, sometimes they aren't. Although you could try to get more sleep, or perhaps take a nap in the middle of the day.

For lucid dreams, try really focusing on items in your dream. Your hand, the walls you are by, the ground. You could try shouting or spinning, these can all make a dream more vivid.

There are other supplements you can take which are more herbal also.

I’m afraid I don’t have any suggestions that are more definitive than the one’s you’ve already been getting, but I do have some different ones, and for what it’s worth, they’re based in personal experience, and even a little bit of science.

The way people mostly talk about awareness techniques that help induce lucid dreams, they make it sound like a purely cognitive, detached kind of attitude, but I suspect there’s an emotional component to it as well—at least, when it results in success. If so, just following procedures in a mechanical way, no matter how well you follow them—especially if you’re a strong-willed, goal-oriented person who’s devoting all your energy to them!—it might just be another kind of self-sabotage. Trying less hard might actually help you establish the kind of connection with your surroundings that would result in vivid dreams.

This would be horribly difficult to prove, of course, but if you look at studies of (non-lucid) dream-imagery, it does tend to occur more for people during the emotionally intense periods of their lives, or people who just experience their emotions more intensely in general. There’s a dream researcher called Ernest Hartmann who’s done a lot of research on this, and anecdotally, it seems to hold pretty well, and I can certainly vouch for it myself.

Not that I would encourage intentionally making your life more stressful or anything—if you’re interested in any of the arts, pursuing that interest might do the trick. Especially if you’re interested in something visual, which also stands a chance of giving your subconscious mind more interesting images to work with.

(Deleted because Dreamviews evidently likes all my posts so much it wants everybody to see them twice.)