Question: Can someone define for me what exactly having multiple dreams per night is?

Been wondering about this. I'm pretty new at lucid dreaming, using dream journals, induction techniques, etc (although I've had lucid dreams before), and most if not all the websites describing this mention that during a night, people can have multiple dreams in one night (granted they sleep long enough I'm assuming).

I'm asking because people say that if you can remember every dream you had in a night, your chances of lucid dreaming is greatly increased, but I'm having trouble with what exactly that means. Last night I remembered about 2-3 of them, but my sleep was sporadic, and I'm having trouble figuring out if that means I'm doing good or not. Generally, when I wake up from a dream I can recall the immediate events of that dream, and as I go back, things get fuzzier, but I usually only remember one dream, or so it seems.

So here are my real questions:
What separates one dream from another in a single night?
When people say that I should be working towards remembering multiple dreams per night, do they mean I should be able to remember all of these dreams in a string, or do they mean I should be able to wake up in the middle of the night and remember the dream I just had?

It can be kind of hard to keep 2 or more dreams apart. Whenever I write in my DJ, I often doubt whether it was 1 dream or 2. I usually think back on the subjects. If they seem completely unrelated, the chance is pretty big (not 100%) that they were 2 dreams. If they go over in eachother somehow, it's probably 1.

About the 2nd question: both are good. As long as you remember multiple dreams, I don't think it really matters whether or not you remembered them at the same time. Whenever you wake up, make sure to write the dream(s) you remember in your DJ. Waking up a few times in the middle of the night is a good thing for LD. It allows you to remember more dreams (if you wake up and go back to sleep you will have likely forgotten your first dream(s) when you wake up again) and it gives you chances for WBTB's.

Hope this helps :)

PS. Are you dreaming?

At this point it sounds like being able to remember multiple dreams without waking up in the middle/after them is a lot more advanced than remembering multiple dreams a night because you kept waking up. At the very least, my dream recall seems decent. I've already dabbled into lucid dreaming off and on in the past, and since, although I didn't use a dream journal, I would try hard to remember my dreams every night. I think that helped a lot. Only recently did I start recording my dreams on my phone with a voice recorder after I listened to a "hypnotic lucid dream induction" over night and had a DILD the same night (although I woke up almost immediately, and I'm not sure if spinning brought me back in or if it just prolonged my waking up. Unfortunately it didn't work twice, and many nights of attempts since then, I still haven't had another one on my own.

So far I've tried binaural beats, which I was kept completely awake throughout and the hypnotic inductions (basically an audible voice saying "The next time I dream, I will become lucid" and various other suggestions, much like in the MILD technique), but that only kind of worked once, and the times I tried it after were failures. Right now I'm doing it in a more traditional way, with a voice recorded dream journal and having my phone set off an alarm every 2 hours with the message "Are you dreaming?". I then look at my hands for abnormalities, look at myself in them mirror for abnormalities, flip light switches on and off, squeeze my nose to see if I can still breathe through it, and attempt to fly by jumping in the air, all the while trying to ask myself in my head or out loud "am I dreaming?". Unfortunately it's really hard to take yourself seriously when you're pretty darn sure you're awake, I just wish I could be seriously skeptical about whether or not I'm dreaming... but I suppose the point is more to make questioning your environment a habit so it'll have more of a chance to happen in the dream. Then when I go to bed I lay down, relax, then tell myself "My dreams will be vivid. I will wake up after every dream and recall every detail." That might have helped last night since I remembered 2-3 dreams instead of just the one I usually remember, but I think it's just because last night I was a bit restless. Either way, using the MILD technique seems to be making progress.

Does anyone have any tips to improve my technique? I'd like to keep on trying with the MILD, but I'm wondering if I should alter my mantra, since it makes no mention of lucid dreaming. Should I focus on lucid dreaming every night, or should I put all of my efforts towards dream recall? How are my reality checks? I'm open to any suggestions you may have.

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What separates one dream from another in a single night?

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I separate them from when I wake up and go back to sleep, so the first dream I wake up from, will be the one I first journal.

Quote:

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When people say that I should be working towards remembering multiple dreams per night, do they mean I should be able to remember all of these dreams in a string, or do they mean I should be able to wake up in the middle of the night and remember the dream I just had?

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Wake up in the middle of the night and remember the dream you just had is one of them, but remembering them once you wake up in the morning is another one, it all is decided by you really, your standards and that stuff.

So I guess I'm doing alright then. That's good. Unfortunately the last night of the MILD technique sent me into more sporadic sleeping, so either this MILD technique I used with the mantra "my dreams will be vivid. I will wake up after every dream and recall every detail" is working too well or I'm having other issues. A couple times last night I woke up with a flop sweat. I could recall my dream, but it wasn't lucid and I was strangely disturbed. It also took me an hour to fall asleep, repeating a different mantra (one centered around lucid dreaming) and envisioning a dream I had that night after accidentally falling asleep on my chair. It didn't work at all, I had completely unrelated dreams. I'm hoping this is some kind of hump that I need to get used to.

If there's nothing else anyone has to say, then thanks for the help guys, for some reason no one ever clarified this on any of the many lucid dreaming articles I found.

I always have multiple dreams a night (sometimes up to 6 depending on how long I sleep) but generally I don't really recall all six of them but I know I had them. It's more like 1-3 a night that you will remember and if you don't write them down then they will likely fade from your memory as the day progresses. If you are having multiple dreams a night and remembering most of them then you are on the right path. Don't get upset if you don't remember ALL of them, it happens. -Chase

p.s. The best way to fall back asleep is to lay still, don't try too hard with a mantra. A simple, "I'm dreaming!" as you fall back asleep should help.

The problem is, I have trouble focusing on one thing. I've often contemplated whether or not I have ADD or if I just bore easily. Several times during my pre-MILD meditation, a song kept popping into my head and I would have to force it away. When I finally decided that I was relaxed, I went on with the mantra and occasionally it would come back, disrupting me. I fear if I don't keep repeating the mantra in my head until I fall asleep, my last thought will be of something my mind wandered off to. Also, like I said before I accidentally fell asleep in my chair for a few hours and then woke up, so I think I might have been too awake to fall asleep easily. I'm also pretty new to inducing LDs, so I guess I shouldn't expect too much of myself, though that's kind of hard when you should be going to sleep with the mind set "I AM going to have a lucid dream tonight".

Also, when I'm trying to fall asleep in my bed I often have to change positions every ten minutes, since my body starts to feel "tired" of one position if I stay like that for too long. Is this bad? I read in a user WILD tutorial that moving every ten minutes is okay and may even be better. There was also a mention of tensing your muscles up momentarily before attempting to sleep to help keep your body from aching. Is it more important to lay still or is it more important to be comfortable?