Age and Lucid Dreaming

[pdunc]

I was wondering if anyone knows of any studies concerning age and dreaming/lucid dreaming? I'm sure that there must be some changes in brain chemistry as you age and I'm wondering how it would affect dream recall and lucid dreaming. I'm 64 and although I have recently had fairly good luck with lucid dreaming, I've had a lot more difficulty with dream recall than I had years ago. Not sure how my age will affect my becoming more accomplished at LDing.

[dolphin]

From what I read, the ability to quickly solve new problems steadily declines after young adulthood but the ability to learn and recall knowledge does not.

[gab]

There was a thread here recently about LDing and age. I will post if when I find it. In the mean time, brain is a muscle. It can be trained. My recall is about the same as when I was younger. Perhaps even better, because now I make an effort to recall them. I always loved my dreams, but I have not learned about possibility to train myself to better recall, until I found DV. If my recall starts to decline with age, I'm gonna throw a fit : D. But I'll also do everything in my power for that to not happen. By thinking about dreams often, trying to recall them first thing in the morning, not rushing out of the bed before I do so. Keeping a dream journal to let my mind know, that dreams are important to me. I would suggest to start a dream journal, pdunc. You can do it here on DV. If you are experiencing lull in your recall, it will come back I'm sure, since if tends to fluctuate. Even when we seemingly do everything the same way every day. I think it depends a lot when during the dream cycle we wake up. If it's between the cycles, right after the REM and the dream ends, or when we wake up from a dream directly, that's when recall is the best. But only if we don't wake up startled by alarm or something similar. We all wake up even if only briefly, right between the cycles. Train yourself to realize those moments and either write down some keywords from the dream, or tell yourself the dream with words. Don't just replay the images of it. Use words, that way it gets transferred to waking life memory and it becomes more permanent. It's still possible to lose that recall, if we didn't wake up between dreams enough.

[pdunc]

Thanks gab and Dolphin. Guess I've been getting lazy by not keeping up with my written DJ. Didn't seem to need it as I was having great success having LD's. But I guess the clarity of my LD's which I have complained about would improve if I don't shortchange working on the clarity of my NLD's. So much mental and emotional work! I probably would have stopped trying to have LD's by now if I hadn't had several already and found them to be so much fun! It's frustrating when you attempt to LD and are unsuccessful, then have to wait a whole day or several days to try again as I have had to. I am in hopes that going through all this early work and having more LD's will eventually lead to having LD's more easily in the future.