Thread: How do you count DEILD's in LD count?

Ah chaining dreams is one of my favorite ways to have many lucid dreams in one go and longer overall lucid dream experience. I would count each DEILD dreams as separate dreams even if some are continuous as your level of lucidity varies in each. It might be hard to tell sometimes. There are times during DEILD where I entered one without much lucidity but still had recollection of previous dream. Then on the following DEILD I have proper lucidity but I had trouble recalling earlier dreams. Sometimes when dealing with 7+ chains it can get confusing. I usually won't go beyond 7+ as it becomes hard to retain earlier dreams. Essentially it doesn't matter if you re-enter same dream environment. You can treat it as an extension of previous dream or a separate dream. It's up to you.

I'm pretty sure, Charles, that there are no hard & fast rules about that LD count, and there are certainly no LD Count Police to make sure you count properly.

I personally consider DEILD chaining a good way to sustain one dream I'm particularly into, so I would probably count the chained-together dream as a single event... of course, that would be if I counted them LD's all, which I don't, because it really doesn't matter.

So I guess the answer here is that you should report in whatever way makes you comfortable, or feels right to you; there is no wrong (or right) way to do it.

I agree that there are no “official” guidelines for counting dreams, and I'm quite sure everybody doesn't all do it the same way.

I've heard it argued both ways. Some would say that each event in a DEILD chain is a separate dream since there was an awakening (or at least some kind of brief break from dreaming) in between each, and that's reasonable, I think, but if I had one of those and carried out more or less the same setting, “plot”, or set of goals in each, I'd probably label it as all one “dream” in my DJ, if only because that seems like the logical way to organize it in terms of how my mind remembers and thinks of the experience as a whole.

I happen to be in the camp or people that sort of enjoys (for whatever reason) counting their own dreams and LDs, but I try not to get too caught up in it, especially since I know that it's impossible to have an accurate count anyway. I've had LDs in my childhood that were never properly recorded, so I really have no idea how many I've ever had. All I can really know is how many I've recorded, and even that's uncertain because it's often unclear where the “boundaries” between dreams are anyway (let alone how to define them). I still think the counting is a nice way to encourage myself by seeing how far I've come along over the years and to get a (very rough) idea of progress in a general sense, but beyond that I try to avoid the temptation to worry about it too much.