Thread: Quantity vs. Quality - A little disheartened, here...

So...in perusing this site, I came across the stickied thread "Dream Recall Compendium." Not two paragraphs into the thread (which, since it is stickied I guess means it is considered reasonably authoratative and believed to contain generally accurate information) I came across this quote under the heading of dream recall quantity:

"Rock Bottom: Generally less than 1 dream per night. Rock bottom is where no one wants to be."

Wow. How disheartening. In the one month's time I've made an effort at dream recall after five decades of not ever practicing this skill, I've gone from hardly EVER recalling a dream to one every three nights, with TWO dream recalls in each of the past two nights in a row. In terms of categories articulated in the Dream Recall Compendium I'm closest to "Rock Bottom". Learning this did nothing for my confidence that I'll ever attain lucidity.

OTOH, in terms of Quality, I seem to fall into the skilled category as my dreams seem to contain an above-average amount of detail, and I can recall the vast majority of those dreams I do manage to remember.

So...how does my situation impact what techniques I should practice, if at all. Does anyone who has been in my situation have any recommendations? Reading that thread was the first time any text at this site ever made me feel disheartened.

Frank

You might not like it but it's true. Dream recall is the very foundation of lucid dreaming. It helps you remember your lucid dreams (no point in having LDs if you're not gonna remember them), and also familiarizes you with your dreams, including dream signs which can be used to become lucid. Remembering details is good but not very useful when you can only remember fragments or a dream once in a while.

Techniques you should practice? Well, quite frankly you should mainly just focus on dream recall until you get decent at it, at least 2-3 dreams per night, then you can start worrying about techniques. Though if you want you can work on your awareness while you're building dream recall, just so you won't be wasting time.

Hey Frank,

everything regarding dreams is a bit relative, so there are no rules set in stone. Confidence is very important so feel free to bend interpretations to allow you to see the positive side of things. This is crucial!

While recall is indeed important, you can actually ld even if you don't have a great recall. I'd say my recall is average but there are huge deviations from day to day (especially if my sleep schedule goes down the toilet but not only because of that). I've had success lding on days with 0 recall by using wbtb, so this tells me recall isn't everything. Right now normal dreams recall's a bit in the background, I just do my best to recall lds.

Personally, I'd suggest a few things to boost recall as well as keep you in optimal shape for lding.

- Regular exercise - while this may not be as obvious, regular exercise has huge benefits for sleep, dreaming, lding, etc. It helps your brain function better, improves quality of sleep, and even helps you grow neurons and helps maintain neurotransmitters in optimum levels.
- Good nutrition during day and possible mini-pre bed snacks to supply needed nutrients for recall or lding
- avoiding bright lights/screens before bed time
- regular sleep schedule and good amount of sleep
- daily awareness - here there's a broad range of things you can do to boost your awarness from meditation, to mindfulness exercises, RCs, ADA, etc., be in the here and now
- autosuggestion - mantras before bed or make a record and listen to it, you can put anything in there like "my recall is getting better" or "I realize that I'm dreaming", etc.
- drinking some water before going to bed - this will cause a natural wake where it may be easier to recall a dream

Hope that helps!

Thanks, NyxCC and all who responded. I'm at the very beginning of my journey towards having an LD. I'd be quite pleased with recall of one dream each and every night if I could attain that as a short-term goal, with a longer term goal of doubling that. Turning on the light, sitting up, finding my glasses and immediately writing as much detail as possible is an effort, but not an insurmountable one. To tell the truth, I'm amazed I've come as far as I have in such a short time, since the first couple of weeks I had no guidance whatsoever, and hadn't yet stumbled onto this forum. Initially I was relying only on what I could glean from Youtube. I'm 110 pages into Stepen LaBerge's book, and I expect to see some improvement in my dream recall once I've read (and perhaps re-read) the techniques and figured out what I need to concentrate on to get to my stated goals.

Fifteen Dream journal entries (I withheld two from this forum that were a bit personal) in 28 days averages out to one every other day. I'm seeing an increase in the frequency lately (four dream recalls in the past two days) which, coincidentally is how long I've had Professor LaBerge's book.

I really appreciate your constructive advice, NyxCC and will try and get more exercise and try and increase my daily awareness. The other items I pretty much started doing once I found this forum about a week ago. Goodness knows I could do more in all areas, but like most people, I'm motivated to do only as much as gets the job done. I see the amount of dedication the serious members devote to their LD skills, and I know in my heart I will need to ramp things up a bit more if I am going to share in the LD experience. My first task is to know what to do and how to do it properly...and then do it. The last thing I want is to have to unlearn something I've begun to do improperly.

Frank

Originally Posted by NyxCC

Hey Frank,

everything regarding dreams is a bit relative, so there are no rules set in stone. Confidence is very important so feel free to bend interpretations to allow you to see the positive side of things. This is crucial!

While recall is indeed important, you can actually ld even if you don't have a great recall. I'd say my recall is average but there are huge deviations from day to day (especially if my sleep schedule goes down the toilet but not only because of that). I've had success lding on days with 0 recall by using wbtb, so this tells me recall isn't everything. Right now normal dreams recall's a bit in the background, I just do my best to recall lds.

Personally, I'd suggest a few things to boost recall as well as keep you in optimal shape for lding.

- Regular exercise - while this may not be as obvious, regular exercise has huge benefits for sleep, dreaming, lding, etc. It helps your brain function better, improves quality of sleep, and even helps you grow neurons and helps maintain neurotransmitters in optimum levels.
- Good nutrition during day and possible mini-pre bed snacks to supply needed nutrients for recall or lding
- avoiding bright lights/screens before bed time
- regular sleep schedule and good amount of sleep
- daily awareness - here there's a broad range of things you can do to boost your awarness from meditation, to mindfulness exercises, RCs, ADA, etc., be in the here and now
- autosuggestion - mantras before bed or make a record and listen to it, you can put anything in there like "my recall is getting better" or "I realize that I'm dreaming", etc.
- drinking some water before going to bed - this will cause a natural wake where it may be easier to recall a dream

Hope that helps!

Hope you don't mind, Nyx; gonna put this in my workbook for future reference (quote of course!).

yep, I have the same problem.
I used to write all my dreams down for a month and still only had 3 nights per week in which I dreamed (but I did learn to have several dreams per night)
my best achievement was about 10 dreams in a week. So after 3 months I got to rock bottom

but I thought your dreams get more intense when you're lucid dreaming? (thus more memorable)
maybe that was a wrong information, but 2 years ago I was told you should be able to remember a lucid dreams minutes or hours after you wake up, even longer if you write them down.
I always believed 1 dream a night is pretty good and if it's an LD you remember it more easily

The one thing to keep in mind is that different people progress at different rate, but any progress is wonderful and should not be disheartening. For example, I came back to lucid dreaming after twenty years of not practicing, and I used to be good twenty years ago, so frankly I expected faster progress than this: since February 2013, I have had 9 or 10 lucid dreams. However, what counts is progress, and I have definitely made progress: of those LDs four of them happened in the past two months and my last two which happened on one night were the longest and most interesting thus far in 2013-14. My recall fluctuates right now it is at only a dream or fragment recalled every two or three nights, but at its height I can recall several dreams in one night. My last couple of LDs though happened when my recall was not at it's highest and neither was my memory in general - I was surprised that I was able to LD then. The thing is that with lucid dreaming there are no hard rules. While it is true that in general one needs to reach recall of at least one dream a night, but that is in general: there are exceptions to this, and recall frequency is just one of many factors. Everyone's experience is slightly different, so your success may come at a different rate and time and preparation level than what is usual. The main thing to keep in mind is to strive to make progress, and don't give up or become disheartened - self confidence is as important as recall to lucid dreaming.

Another vote for "it's all relative." Stay positive, enjoy your dreams, that's what it's all about, that smile on your face in the morning when you recall your wild/wacky/fun/interesting/etc. experiences of the night.

Keep reaching for more and more recall and you'll remember more and more over time, it's a skill that builds with practice (like just about everything).

The best time to record (even brief key words can be enough to trigger the full memory in the morning), is immediately after waking from a dream. I got lazy last night, and although I spent some effort at every waking to run mentally through all the remembered prior dreams to keep their memory fresh until morning, at my last waking of the morning they all vanished except the one I just woke from . They were fun/funny too so I'm a bit miffed I didn't make the effort during the night.

Try using a voice recorder: it works in the dark, it's 10x or more faster than writing, no deciphering chicken scratches in the morning. Then transcribe to a written journal after you get up.

JoannaB: Again, thank you for your upbeat response. Thank you also for disclosing your own personal experience, which I see somewhat parallels my own in that we each had a long hiatus during which our respective dream lives took a back seat to our waking lives. I am greatly encouraged by your success, and I wish you much more in the future. I'm up to chapter six in "Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming" and I'm hoping that between the advice and encouragement from this forum and the guidance and practices set forth in the book, it won't be too long before I have an LD of my own.

FryingMan: LOL! Love your screen name! Made me think of Burning Man.

I did the exact same as you last night. I know I woke up remembering at least one dream (I remember the time on the digital clock, 3:11 am) over and above the final dream recall of the night, which happened at 4:30am. For that one I did turn the light on and write down. At the time of the earlier one I was too warm and comfy under the covers to get up and write so I could remember. It's good to know that it happened, even though I've lost the benefit of any dream sign that may have been identifiable in that one. What I find incredible is the folks who can remember 10 or more dreams per night - evidently without writing them down. That is a true superpower! My problem is once I'm awake, it can take me up to one hour to fall back to sleep, depending on my current state of concern over events in my life. Recording more than one dream per night would severely impact the overall time I actually sleep...and I wouldn't function well at all if I did that more than a night or two in a row.

Frank

At my peak (which I'm for some inexplicable reason not at right now), I could record 16+ dreams in a night. That's about 4 dreams per waking and 4 wakings. That wasn't constant, but not infrequent. Now my "high average" is around 10 if I wake up multiple times and record. With record once in the morning it can be around 6-7 if I successfully recall a few from earlier wakings. Well it's not inexplicable: I stopped the frequent waking, as I too experienced insomnia with the middle of the night wakings, particularly the ones later in the morning. And I just sort of feel like sleeping most of the night now. Fast dream recording with the voice recorder is the way to go, just give some key words and get right back to sleep. There is no doubt: waiting until morning loses detail on the earlier morning dreams (well at least for me), and risks forgetting them altogether (like last night, grrr, they were fun, too, wish I remembered them).

In LD practice, learning how to fall asleep reasonably quickly is essential. Heck, learning how to fall back asleep *at all* is essential. I had many many underslept nights in the beginning once I started the middle-of-the-night practices of SSILD, MILD, WILD, etc. The purpose of these practices is to *raise awareness* which is basically antithetical to unconscious sleep.

Let me say though that unless I'm working really hard to squeeze every last moment out of the recall for a waking, simply recording and going back to sleep never caused insomnia. Only with the start of LD activities like MILD, SSILD, and so on did I experience lying awake for long periods during the night (which I came to dislike!).

Quick summary for learning how to fall back asleep: relax, relax, relax. Do not "try to sleep," simply let your mind and body relax and float away, sink deeper and deeper, and nature will take it's course and you'll sleep. The paradox of intent: once you *stop trying to sleep*, that's when you fall asleep!

I can't emphasize enough the value of learning how to turn off your mind, release all bodily tension, and sink into relaxation in order to fall back asleep. And (as much as I don't like it), WBTB seems to really help some people boost their LD counts. It doesn't have to be long, if you like me find you wake up quckly. It just has to be enough to grab some awareness while you're falling back asleep to boost the chances of lucidity.

FryingMan: LOL! Love your screen name! Made me think of Burning Man

Heh it's actually a pun from Heroes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6wKbERrzf8

OK...so last night I tried a completely different approach to recording my dreams. I merely jotted down a phrase - a "title" that seemed best suited to the dream I'd just awoken from. Also, before bed, I consumed a cup of green tea with a bit of honey in it. I read somewhere that this was beneficial to dream production/recall. Anyway, I ended up with six phrases or titles to describe the dreams, but, unfortunately, none of the phrases (only five of which are legible) sufficed this morning to produce any meaningful recall on the content of the first four dreams. Total fail.

Also, I encountered a phenomena I'm not sure even qualifies as a dream. It started out as a dream with a very attractive young woman standing beneath a large tree in a very provocative dress with a deeply plunging neckline, but then I think at one point it transitioned into a more or less somnolent fantasy, which I then mentally continued voluntarily, because the dream went in the direction I wanted it to go. Not surprisingly, it involved some sexual content (not a lot) but enough that I wouldn't feel comfortable discussing with my wife if it had happened in real life! I am at a complete loss as to how to characterize that one, which was number five out of six. It seemed to me I had a goodly amount of control over the events in the dream, yet I wasn't "lucid" in that I was not aware it was a dream. Consequently I'm wondering if I partially woke from the dream and just continued the sexual fantasy. Does this phenomena strike a bell? Have a name?

The last dream, which involved some movement on the part of a small insect which called my attention to the floor where a computer chip and SD card were lying, was clearly a dream, and the one I remember most vividly and completely.

So...unless I make a huge commitment to losing sleep by waking up, sitting up, turning on the light, and writing down a substantial part of the dream, my dilemma seems to get right back to the title of this thread. Quantity or quality. Absent any compelling opinions from the experts on this forum, I'm leaning towards simply recording one, maybe two dreams as thoroughly as possible in order to identify dream signs, which appears to be my best hope of gaining lucidity ATM. Those of you who have the ability to remember double-digit dreams - that seems utterly miraculous to me! Like a super power.

One night and you're calling it quits? I think your #1 issue is not what you're doing or not doing, but how little time you give to try things out, a fairly negative outlook, and a lack of willingness to keep trying things until you get them to work to satisfy your goals. You need to think in terms of month-long experiments (at a minimum). Oh, and again, you may want to try a voice recorder: voice is faster than writing, usually very clear so easy to understand in the morning, so you get more details out faster while they're fresh in your mind, and it works in the dark. You may also want to spend a *little* more time thinking about the dreams and associating the various scenes with the title you've come up with.

Investing in learning to fall back asleep once mentally stimulated can also pay major dividends: you can spend a bit more time on recall, and still manage to get back to sleep.

Originally Posted by FryingMan

One night and you're calling it quits? I think your #1 issue is not what you're doing or not doing, but how little time you give to try things out, a fairly negative outlook, and a lack of willingness to keep trying things until you get them to work to satisfy your goals. You need to think in terms of month-long experiments (at a minimum). Oh, and again, you may want to try a voice recorder: voice is faster than writing, usually very clear so easy to understand in the morning, so you get more details out faster while they're fresh in your mind, and it works in the dark. You may also want to spend a *little* more time thinking about the dreams and associating the various scenes with the title you've come up with.

Investing in learning to fall back asleep once mentally stimulated can also pay major dividends: you can spend a bit more time on recall, and still manage to get back to sleep.

Hmmm...maybe you are right about needing to try the voice recording. Please don't think that I'm not motivated or not trying hard. It's just that I need to be considerate of the other people in my household. It's not as if I live or sleep alone, so how often and for how long I am up at night when others want to/need to sleep greatly affects other members of my family. I guess I should have explained that. The justifications and rationales for abandoning last nights' attempts at multiple dream recall was not only predicated on the perceived lack of productivity for me personally (although you are right, one night's experience is not meaningful). I only wrote down MY end of it, not my wife's complaints from last night. I guess I should have explained the impact it had on her.

Man, the more serious I get about this, the more complicated it becomes.

I literally had the same problem with my first DJ
but somehow I managed to have a dream every night since I joined DV and started meditating again
that's something I highly recommend: meditation. (especially with mantras)
my quantity got better pretty quickly: Night 1 - nothing, Night 2 - fragment, Night 3 - several fragments, Night 4 - 2 short dreams, Night 5 - 4 short dreams
(gotta admit, very short dreams)
apparently meditation hasn't improved my vividness/quality, but since you've said your quality is good anyway, you could try it

but I wouldn't force myself to dream... just take it easy and enjoy those you have. Try some ways to improve it, but don't fret if they don't work

Yeah sharing a bed makes it harder, no doubt. Keeping a fan on in the room helps to muffle the voice noise a bit, I record under the blankets and turned away from my wife and whisper. Once in a while I lose some recall because of too much breath noise or being too quiet. I've had decent luck with mental notes during the night and only recording during the morning, but sometimes you lose a lot that way. Gotta spend more time training that old memory I guess.

Well, I owed you an explanation since you have been incredibly gracious about giving advice. After I saw your response I realized it must have seemed like I'd spit in your eye and discounted the valuable advice you had taken the time to dispense for my benefit. I am a noobie after all and it must get tiresome to make the effort to help people with the same issues over and over. I apologize if I upset you in any manner. This is just something I'm going to have to work on/work out with my wife of forty years.

p.s. maybe invest in a really comfy couch if you don't have one already . Everyone needs their own "lucid hideout."

Originally Posted by FryingMan

p.s. maybe invest in a really comfy couch if you don't have one already . Everyone needs their own "lucid hideout."

Well, the wife and I discussed things at length. She was very tired when she got home from work, so it was decided that she would sleep in one of the many spare bedrooms in our house, the one that was once our son's bedroom when he lived with us. We decided (and she is fine with) her doing this for the rest of the week. She went to bed at 8:00pm since she was so wiped out. I slept in there too until 9:00pm and left her bed after she fell asleep. I slept alone in the master bedroom, but had a terrible time falling asleep since I'm so used to having her next to me. It was after 12:00 when I finally dozed off. I'm usually asleep by no later than 10:00pm.

I had several dreams (all non-lucid) that I managed to record, the last one of which was quite horrendous, although I wouldn't call it a nightmare. I posted it to my dream journal. Tonight I hope to have in place a system to do voice recording. Because the discussion and decision to sleep separate and apart came after dinner, I wasn't prepared last night. Interested parties can see the dream journal for the nasty dream. If you are squeamish about blood, don't go there.

Frank