Thread: Mindfulness - An Alternative Approach to ADA

Ah, ADA. The technique we all love to hate and hate to love. From pretty much the second it was posted to the forum it was astonishingly popular, and has been touted as the Ultimate technique for pretty much these last three years. I got my own first lucid dreams with the technique and had joined the forum shortly before KingYoshi had posted it. However, pretty much everybody apart from its creator has been overwhelmed to at least some degree. There’s a good reason for this: ADA is overwhelming. In fact, the way it’s layed out in Yoshi’s tutorial is fairly unrealistic, and I doubt even he maintains it to that extent 24/7. Despite the huge rewards offered by the technique I, and many others gave up with it.
If maintaining complete sensory immersion all through the day is impractical, particularly for LD beginners, where does that leave us? ADA shares a lineage with another lucid dreaming practice, dream yoga. My dual explorations of meditation for the purposes of coping with anxiety and dream yoga for LD induction led me to realise the similarity between ADA and Buddhist mindfulness. ADA has already been practiced for thousands of years from Hinduism through to Buddhism, in which it is simply seen as an extension of the awareness achieved in seated meditation. In fact, the practice done on the cushion is seen as practice for the real work of mindfulness in everyday life.

Meditation as ADA preparation

To get yourself started read this meditation guide: How to Meditate | Aloha Dharma
Remember that there is no way to “fail” at meditation. The point is not to “empty your mind”, the very point is to be distracted and then return to the object of mindfulness. The repeated work of being distracted and returning to the object is mindfulness itself. If you could sit with a completely still mind you wouldn’t need meditation or ADA at all because you’d be a mindfulness master who could lucid dream every night!
Even if your actual meditation feels turbulent and with poor concentration, when you stop and go back to your daily life experience seems somehow more vivid. This is the use of meditation.
Long term meditators have been found to undergo physical changes in the brain in the amygdala, the part of the brain associated with fear, anger and anxiety through the process called neuroplasticity. In this way mindfulness makes physical changes in the brain to be more aware. Really all techniques do this, but indirectly, through repetition. Meditation allows you to see the process in action and program lucidity directly.

Object-oriented ADA

Mindfulness of sensory experience all day is quite a feat even with the help of meditation. Hukif was perhaps the first LDer on the forum to make mindfulness of what is absent from dreams a constant RC, concentrating on the feeling of gravity on his body IRL to make his body and the whole day into one big RC, and lucid dreaming daily as a result.
Here is a list of phenomena I have found lacking dreams, it is by no means complete:
1. Gravity
2. The feeling of clothing
3. Temperature
4. Feet on the floor
5. Ambient noise
6. Light sources
7. Visual snow/floaters
8. Tinnitus
9. Air Pressure (wind, breezes, draughts)
10. A sense of the breath

Further Reading:
http://www.dreamviews.com/beyond-dre...rspective.html
http://www.dreamviews.com/beyond-dre...ight-yoga.html
http://www.dreamviews.com/wild/12557...mentals-q.html
Puffin's DILD Guide - Lucid Dreaming - Dream Views
http://www.dreamviews.com/induction-...d-secrets.html
Advanced lucid dreaming: part 7 - YouTube