I've had a good amount of success in the past inducing lucid dreams by simply reminding myself of my dream goal before going to sleep (a few or more per week on average but not every night)
The technique you propose is closely related to a technique known as autosuggestion because it involves noneffortful suggestion rather than effortful intention. Laberge shares the autosuggestion technique in his book Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming:
While remaining deeply relaxed [when going to sleep], suggest to yourself that you are going to have a lucid dream, either later the same night or on some other night in the near future. Avoid putting intentional effort into your suggestion. Do not strongly insist with statements like “Tonight I will have a lucid dream!” You might find that if you don’t succeed after a night or two following such misplaced certainty, you will rapidly lose faith in yourself. Instead, attempt to put yourself in the frame of mind of genuinely expecting that you will have a lucid dream tonight or sometime soon. Let yourself think expectantly about the lucid dream you are about to have. Look forward to it, but be willing to let it happen all in good time.
Laberge shares commentary on autosuggestion:
The distinction between effortful intention and noneffortful suggestion is interesting and perhaps explains some of my early experiences with trying to induce lucid dreams on demand. The first several times I tried to have lucid dreams in the laboratory, I was using autosuggestion and I found that trying too hard (effortful intention) was counterproductive. This was frustrating for me because I was required to have a lucid dream that very night, while sleeping in the laboratory. It was not enough to have the several lucid dreams a week that autosuggestion produced; I needed to have them on the nights I was in the laboratory. However, after I developed the MILD technique, I found I could try hard and always succeed. This was because MILD involves effortful intention. With autosuggestion I had had a lucid dream on only one out of six nights in the lab; with MILD I had one or more lucid dreams on twenty out of twenty-one nights spent in the sleep laboratory. It should be clear from this that (for me, at least) auto-suggestion is less effective than some other lucid dream induction techniques, such as MILD. However, due to its noneffortful nature, it may offer modest advantages for anyone willing to accept a relatively low yield of lucid dreams in exchange for a relatively undemanding and effortless method.
Laberge shares what he learned about memory, which lead to his development of MILD. It is useful to know more about memory when trying to improve memory.
Once I knew that I was trying to remember to do something (that is, become lucid) at a later time (that is, when next I’m dreaming), I was able to devise a technique to help me accomplish that. How can we manage to remember to do something in a dream? Perhaps we should start with a simpler question: How do we remember to do things in ordinary life? In everyday life we remember most things we have to do by using some sort of external mnemonic or memory aid (a grocery list, phone pad, string around the finger, memo by the door, etc. ). But how do we remember future intentions (this is called prospective memory) without relying on external reminders? Motivation plays an important role. You are less likely to forget to do something that you really want to do. When you set yourself the goal to remember to do something, you have made the goal one of your current concerns and thereby have activated a goal-seeking brain system that will stay partially activated until you have achieved it. If the goal is very important to you, the system stays highly activated and you keep checking to see if it’s time to do it, until it is time. It never becomes fully unconscious. But the more typical case is when, for example, you decide to buy some tacks the next time you go to the store. This is hardly important enough to keep on the front page of your mind, so you go to the store and forget about your intention. That is, unless while at the store you just happen to notice a box of tacks, or even a hammer which brings up tacks by association. This reveals the other major factor involved in remembering to do things: association. When facing the challenge of remembering to do something, we can increase the likelihood of success by (1) being strongly motivated to remember and (2) forming mental associations between what we want to remember to do and the future circumstances in which we intend to do it. These associations are greatly strengthened by the mnemonic (memory aid) of visualizing yourself doing what you intend to remember. Thinking of lucid dream induction as a problem of prospective memory, I developed a technique designed to increase my chances of remembering my intention to be lucid: the Mnemonic Induction of Lucid Dreams procedure, (MILD).
This process of making a memory easier to remember by associating what we want to remember with other things is known as elaborative rehearsal. If the goal is to make a technique as effective as MILD while requiring less effort, then it should have a form of elaborative rehearsal. A constant circumstance in our dreams is our existence. Maybe we could associate our dream goal with our existence somehow as an easier form of elaborative rehearsal. That way, when we notice our existence during our dream it's more likely to remind us of our dream goal. May as well, since remembering our dream goal during our dream wouldn't be as useful if we didn't notice our existence, since this would imply a lack of lucidity.
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