Thread: Who Writes A Diary? Do You Thing Waking Live Journalling Is Good for LD?

As the title says - I used to do as a child and later for several periods - but last time is some years ago.
How is it with you?
Do you think, this would be a sort of awareness or memory practice - or have any other effects on LD?


Edit: This post from 2008 was all I found for now:

Originally Posted by Helvellyn

Having had a huge block to writing a dream journal and recall, I started doing a waking life journal. this has got the dream journal going again, and i'm back on recording 3-4 a night. just thought i'd share what i found helpful. i really think a wj alongside a dj will help overall for lucidity, my personality integration and eventual inner peace... with only one life, laziness is just no longer an option.

Yup, I write a diary. I summarize my goals, my plans, my methods for achieving certain tasks (I even draw), but I don't talk about non-lding material, except the rare reference (had a busy/bad week, so didn't work well). It's very helpful because it aids me retaining certain principles that I'm working on, such as awareness, and ofc, it's amazing for what it does for me in terms of self-evaluation.

Oh, and I also develop new dream control ideas there xD

Ah!
I was already convinced to start one - thanks for the confirmation-motivation, Zoth!
smile.gif

There's not enough options. I can't see a day journal being of much use unless you have some intent of tying it into lucid dreaming. If you write about how aware you were and how that made you feel then it will definitely have an effect. In fact I could see it having an extremely positive effect, I find writing my intent on paper very effective.

But that isn't exactly standard practice in a day journal. Most people wouldn't choose to interpret their day in such a manner, focusing on how aware they were etc

I guess a better alternative than a normal journal, would be a journal where you analyze the weird things you saw in the day, or how many times you reality checked, and when you forgot about it (Like what zoth does)
Although interestingly a good way to kick start your motivation for such a journal would be to incorporate into a normal day journal .

I might try my lucid day journal for a while, it actually sounds like quite a good idea

Journaling itself can have some pretty good results. According to some studies, it helps you recall good things a long the way, and for lucid dreaming, that can boost motivation quite a bit.

I also like to do an awareness exercise that Sageous encouraged me to do (or keep doing). It's pretty good for both recall and awareness, and it fills loads of pages of my diary. It goes like this:

I leave home to work. By the moment I step outside my door, I enter "awareness" mode: I feel the world around me, and pay attention to every detail, without necessarily thinking "am I dreaming?" constantly. The goal here is to simply absorb as much detail without loosing the sense of myself. Now here's the interesting part: I pick several targets on very specific locations, and use them as "check points" in my awareness walk. An example would be:

- bla bla bla bla guy with orange shirt near the gas station....
- bla bla bla bla blue car shows up when I cross the road...
- bla bla bla bla I feel anxious when arriving at bus stop because I'm a little late for work

Now the goal is to create this mental map with the help of my spacial memory. When I arrive work and got time for a break, I grab my diary and narrate my awareness walk with as much detail as possible. Thanks to those "check points" that fit into spacial memory, this task allows me essentially to recreate a 30 minutes episode without much effort. It's like I'm "re-living" the past, and if I repeat the exercise enough times, I can easily arrive at my bed with a pretty structured idea of what I did/felt/saw/hear the entire day. It takes effort yes, especially writing down so much, but it helped me a lot in my early days of lucid dreaming: I started doing this with dreams, and recall just went boom (because instead of trying to recall the whole dream, I worked in the basis of check points that would then allow me to remember everything around them).

I've started doing this again a few days ago, so let's see how it goes. Oh, and of course later on you can use your own diary to try to recreate this awareness moment: I use it all the time when I'm stuck with an ordinary and non-changing scenario (like night shifts: super boring and bad for awareness because I'm the office for 8 hours).

Thanks zoth, that sounds awesome. I would love to give it a try.

Agree with the above replies. I keep a day journal, though it's not particularly focused on lucid dreaming. I started journaling as an adult but before I started lucid dreaming so my journaling habit serves other purposes. For me, it's more about personal thoughts, coping with stress, and recording mundane happenings of the day. When I first started lucid dreaming and a few occasions since (dryspells) I journaled more on the subject. Nowadays, I think it helps my lucid dreaming in an indirect way, in that it helps me to sleep and to manage my mental and spiritual health. In the first entry of the morning I typically reflect on the quality of my sleep from the previous night and anything noteworthy about my dreams, but that's about it.

I think success in lucid dreaming, like just about everything, isn't so much about learning new skills but rather taking skills you already have and applying them to lucid dreaming. In that sense, I think journaling is effective for a great many things and lucid dreaming is no exception. At the very least, it's a place for daily reminders. It's a good outlet for planning, reflection, and creativity. It's also good for counting and measuring things every day so that you can notice trends or recurring patterns over time.

I'm thinking generally, but anyone can apply these to lucid dreaming. Here's a few activities I do with my journal:

- Pick a topic and write about it. Explore your feelings and creativity. Let your mind wander on it. You'll often surprise yourself with new insight.

- Pick a goal and plan how to achieve it. Start with the general desire and your reasons. Then break it down into specific and realistic details of time, actions, etc. Use your journal to track your progress every day.

- Pick a habit and commit to repeating it for a set time, like a month. Use your journal to remind yourself of it every day, record your success, and encourage your commitment. If you slip, explore the causes in writing and use that to re-commit to success.

- Pick something to measure every day. Could be your mood, how long you slept, your level of motivation, etc. Notice how it changes everyday and how it might be related as either a cause or effect of other aspects of your life.

I don't day journal, but sounds like an great idea. I will use it to keep track of my awareness and prospective memory training , but these exercises are simple enough to only count how many times you did them during the day, because I combined them in a way that make them easier and effective. pick prospective memory targets,anything you like, then when a target is spotted, do ADA to see any dreamlike weirdness, then do Reflection-Intention. Maybe just counting them is efficient. I personally evaluate my progress by setting short-ranged goals about these (like do 10 reflection-intentions every day for this month) and count the daily hits, then bam, I achieve my goal and increase my awareness and prospective memory training.But still, a day journal is a good idea, but for maintaining and increasing my skills,I would rely on the frequency of the technique, and increasing its frequency.
Note: ADA should become an all time habit,thus its name, so increasing your ADA sessions will make you get used to doing it more in and of sessions, which is what you want to happen.
Hope I helped StephL, and all
Peace!!!

Great answers - thank you!
I was having something like you describe it in mind, sisyphus - not only a diary, but also a base to think about things, plan ahead and analyse the proceedings.

Maybe even just write something from time to time - gather snippets.
I also like the idea of measuring subjective or objective parameters - maybe even make scales and a colourful graphs!
Cool idea!

My motivation does not lie in LD in the first place - rather I want more insight into my waking life - and clear insight, which I can revisit.
Memory does play lots of tricks - for example - I thought, I hadn´t had a lucid moment for quite more than a week - felt rather like two - but upon revisiting - it was exactly 7 days.
This project now - I chalk up under positive side-effects of LDing, by the way.
Not sure yet, if it will be one overall book for all these aspects - and with the DJ/LD stuff, which is private included.
Maybe I´ll write in different colours, which I love doing anyway.

I am convinced, that this does heighten awareness in general - and also prospective memory - since upon something happening/showing up in my mind - I keep it in mind in order to put it down later.

For a while I have been following the "Getting Things Done" method by Alan Carr.
Which actually is - among other things - meant as alleviation for prospective memory urges.

What is left, is something extremely practical: Filing cabinets with always having tons of empty folders and lots of space left - there go all my official paperworks - but also plans, ideas, projects.

And the cool thing is - the system is so, that you feel free to write down one word for one folder (slim ones - not hanging - they take away too much space).
So you have your idea out of the way of other stuff, you need your mind for.
But you know, you will find and access it in seconds - to later maybe brainstorm on the same paper or develop something from it.

What I let slip - unfortunately - is the habit of the reviewing/developing/going about plan-accomplishing in a methodical way - the actual method.
But I love my residual system.



One thing nags me with journalling in general - the "how to".

I am much faster typing (10 fingers) than writing - but I feel more connection to what I write out per hand - also can remember it much better..
But I am too lazy to hand write a private DJ - I usually do not type it out on pc either, after listening to my dictation - rather posting something here.
For a project, where I had to write a lot - I got myself a good micro and installed a good word-recognition software - and ended up typing it anyway..
I wasn´t interested enough to train it on me and learn how to properly use it all.
Wouldn´t work for my DJ mumblings, though..

Hm, hm - equipment/material/tools are in general important for me - everything I can make into a toy, I like playing with - that will work.

How do you guys and gals journal?

Turns out I already do "day journal", but in my own statistical mathematical organized way. I would rather call it "Plans & Progress Journal(PPJ)". It's basically four parts. Daily statistics- Graphs and charts- goals- Notes.
1.Daily statistics: I keep track of my daily frequency of RC, ADA, etc. And for prospective memory training, a fail and success rate of spotting daily targets.

2.Graphs and charts: I write my frequency of RCing, prospective memory improvment,etc. In neat and easy charts and tables.

3.Goals: Where I set short-ranged as well as long-ranged goals.

4.Notes about my performance, effectiveness of the techniques, and anything notable that needs consideration or improvement.

I can't imagine practicing LDing without my PPJ. It makes me very much improved, and lets me sleep at night, because I know I did good. Better than being lost in your own progress. Lol I know that name sound funny. I recommend everyone to own a PPJ. I find writing down details is an unnecessary effort, since it's hardly relevant to the progress and practices themselves, and if there is any important thing unrelated to the statistics, it goes right into the Notes section.
Again, hope I helped, and forgive any of my boldness, I am mathematical, can't be but exact.
Peace!!!

I like to use a small notepad for my diary. Not only it's easy to carry around, but unlike having it in a computer, I can access it at any time. This with the added benefits of writing vs typing, but I personally think that in this particular case, it doesn't make much difference and you should use whatever you feel most comfortable with.
The best part of it is when you finish one notepad and see all the stuff you've wrote in it. I still go to to the middle pages of my to study a certain aspect of lucid dreaming, and this wouldn't be possible if I hadn't been committed to writing my impressions about all techniques/discussions that I felt were important. That's the main reason why I can be bothered with a diary: I'm writing about things that fascinate me, and words flow easily, regardless of being a new schedule for exercises, or writing a new guide for DreamViews, or even planning my next ToTM. Or you know, making myself wake up. If you procrastinate with lucid dreaming, your brain will preserve your ego by coming up with excuses (I got no time, I was tired, it was an hard week). But if you get in the habit of noting down your goals/exercises, and be honest in your evaluations as why you didn't practice awareness as much as you should, or slacker with DJing, your brain will have no alternative but see that you essentially procrastinated, and that feeling of realizing your own failure will make it boost your motivation.

I see that we share yet another interest: productivity I'm currently reading How to Become a Straight-A Student: The Unconventional Strategies Real College Students Use to Score High While Studying Less by Cal Newport, for my next set of self-study courses He has a great blog and honestly I find the man one of the most knowledge authorities in terms of fighting procrastination, studying/working, deep focus (this helped me loads for awareness exercises), and just identifying the best strategy to achieve something I want.

edit: That PPJ idea seems great LouaiB. I always wanted to grab some statistics for my weekly progress, but never got around to actually do it.

Journaling is a way to organize the "techniques and skills" part of LDing.
I think LDing is 4 parts:
1.techniques and skills
2.will power
3.motivation
4.confidence
Journaling is great for part 1.
Training will power is also very important(definetly stops any laziness)
Journaling is very important to maintain part 1, and without that organization, you would be lost and feel impowered, thus demoleshing your confidence, making you frustrated and unmotivated. So you can see how important being organized(Journaling) is for your LDing life. You know, a general can't have a war without knowing everything in the battlefield( but LDing isn't that hard )

I used to have a diary, but people found out about it and started making fun of me, so i stopped... but i had to do it, because my memory used to suck so much... and it helped me feel less lonely. It's a really good idea, maybe i should start again

It is one of my motivation as well, that I would like to have a better biographical memory - sometimes I notice that I don´t know, in which order certain things have taken place - or am not sure anymore, what was said during an important - especially if it was an argument - exchange with somebody.
Memory plays amazing tricks sometimes.
Good luck with hiding it away Leo - maybe do it on your pc and secure access especially - if not encrypt it in the first place.

I started one - but in the moment only headwords on happenings - it´s a beginning, though.