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I have been fairly successful recently in my luicid dreaming journey. The past month I have had 2 lucids, backed with terrible dream recall somehow. Anyway, my first ld I gained control of, but the overall dream was foggy even after trying to stabilize. My next lucid was incredibly foggy, and I ended up just giving up because it was so incredibly non vivid. So, is my problem just bad recall or something different?
Your problem is probably a mixture of bad recall and a lack of stabilization. Probably. I have to say though, most of my lucid dreams haven't been very vivid, and it's never bothered me. Perhaps you should learn to work with what you've already been given. Just an idea: you could ask the dream to make itself more vivid, or you could ask the dream how you might make it more vivid.
One dreamer had recommended paying close attention to real life. For instance, to pick grass or a leaf up and examine it in real life very closely. After trying the paying attention to detail in real life method my dreams have been 80 percent more realistic and I have had more concentration and stabilization. Best part is it only took about a week for this method to help improve my lucid dreams. It took some only a couple of days.
Yes, you might try the ADA (All Day Awareness) method to help with this. I need to read through the tutorial again but IIRC a good part of it is basically what Diamondec said, and I remember having pretty fast results as well. I seem to remember around that time is when I first became able to read text in dreams to an extent (instead of just looking like alien language), and the environment was a lot more realistic and stable. I'm talking specifically about my non-lucid dreams, but I see no reason it wouldn't carry over.
When you're in a dream, shout "CLARITY" and rub your hands together. Touch everything around you to ground yourself in the dream.
It gets better overtime. Find your signature stabilization technique and master it. Mine is spinning. I find that if I spin with focus I'm returning to a real life vivid Ld.
Some of it could be recall, but sometimes dreams simply can be foggy sometimes. I've had a few “blurry” or “half-there” LDs before where I noticed they were like that during the dream itself (so it wasn't simply a matter of poor recall). And sometimes I've had dreams with virtually no imagery at all. My strategy is to try to enjoy and explore the dream anyway and not worry about it. In a lot of cases, ignoring the problem and just focusing on getting involved with the dream will cause it to stabilize and become clearer. And even if not, it's still possible to have a valuable, fun experience exploring and experimenting even if the clarity isn't quite top-notch. The lack of realism might even help enhance lucidity just by making it really obvious that it isn't waking life.