Thread: Zaqwsx170's Workbook

Hello!

As expected, MILD didn't give me magical instantaneous lucid dreams. But that's where persistence will pay-off. I have a new set of MILD targets for the day, along with my typical reality checks.

So I was thinking before that it was something wrong with my phone that was causing the alarms to not go off, now I realize it was just the alarm application itself that I was using: it freezes my phone. I woke up at 4am without an alarm, and (unfortunately) was more concerned with why my alarm hadn't been going off rather than recalling my most recent dream, so I lost that one. I remember very little of it. So I deleted that one. That app was nice just because it had a feature that required you to do arithmetic to get the alarm to stop, but if it freezes your phone there's no point.

I had very good recall on one dream last night though. Kind of a nightmare, but not so horrific.

My ultimate goal (that will probably take a few years to accomplish) is to be able to have lucid dreams anytime at will, and I guess also to be able to recall ALL of my dreams, not just the 3-4 I manage to record by setting alarms. I don't know how best to approach those, but we'll see. Another few weeks of just doing what I'm doing with dream recall and reality checks, MILD, and general awareness should pay off in some way.

EDIT: One thing I need to do more than I haven't been doing much of is reading back through old dreams I've recorded. I'm going to do that, and explicitly note things/events that should have made me realize that I was lucid. I think that's a good habit to get into. It's kind of part of MILD as well.

Originally Posted by zaqwsx170

EDIT: One thing I need to do more than I haven't been doing much of is reading back through old dreams I've recorded. I'm going to do that, and explicitly note things/events that should have made me realize that I was lucid. I think that's a good habit to get into. It's kind of part of MILD as well.

I had never though of doing that, but I think it's one of the best ideas! My goal now is to do that every ten days!

Sorry, it's been a few days. I was working on a group project due the next day, and everything most of my group members sent me was just utter garbage. So I had to scrap it all and start from the beginning. So I lost a night of sleep. Lol. I was being very good about reality checks and awareness before that, now I feel markedly worse. Which is very bad actually, because when you're dreaming is when you're most tired and most unaware, so it's completely unacceptable to stop being aware just because you're tired.

But now I'm back. Gonna head to bed soon, wake up at the 3 hour mark and do a WBTB.

I'm sorry to "hear" that, Zaq! I hope you get back on track soon (maybe it's happening right now )!

Unfortunately not, as my poor scheduling has led to me having to cram for a physiology test.

Tomorrow night, and subsequently though, yes.

Ah, studying always screws things up, huh? Well, I hope you did well in your test AND that you're having better luck tonight!

Well all right. Had my test today. It went well. However, i've only gotten three hours of sleep each of the past two nights, so...we'll see what happens tonight.

So it's been about a week since I've recalled a dream. My past 5ish nights of not getting enough sleep have led me to do my math alarm and then promptly fall asleep again. But I can fix that today with some practice, so it shouldn't be a problem for tonight. Need to get back on track.

Ouch, a week with no dreams. I had that once and it wasn't fun at all. Set your alarm to go off once or twice when you know you're in REM during the night or morning and you should have a dream or two. Good luck!

Good advice Matte. Two nights ago I had a night where I got plenty of sleep, and I had what I felt was good dream recall, about three solidly long dreams.

IMO using a alarm does somewhat make it harder to remember dreams, as I've noticed that my dreams frequently take place in a lot of different places, and it can be hard to remember many of them from a single dream because there's just almost no connection between the different scenes at all. But while I think it's a little easier to remember all the scenes if you've woken up without an alarm, I can still usually remember a fair number of the different scenes from individual dreams if I lie there and try to remember long enough. Really just a mental skill/habit.

Well meh. I recalled a little bit of one dream just after I woke up, two hours after I intended to. Didn't recall any during the night. I'm going to go back to using my math alarm, because otherwise I just shut the alarm off and go to sleep.

I think...that it's for the best if I just stop using alarms to wake up during the middle of the night. I think the alarm inhibits most of my recollection. It will probably take some time for me to adjust properly to getting up multiple times throughout the night just by mental will, but we'll see. I'll post back in the morning with weekly goal.

I had maybe 1.5 L of water at 130am right before I went to sleep. I woke up at 3:00am with an overwhelming urge to pee and remnants of memories of a dream about enchiladas.

So I've decided that I'm just going to go back to waking up with alarms during the middle of the night. It's been two weeks, and I haven't had much/any success with various combinations of drinking water, meditating about the autosuggestion phrase before bed, and doing autosuggestion throughout the day. I guess I'll join Matte's competition thing, because I definitely need some impetus to get beyond dream recall. It's been a while.

I think I am a relatively deep sleeper (excuse!), which has given me some trouble in all of this. Initially I had been trying to move as little as possible while waking, but that hasn't worked very well for me so far. I'm going to try and make it a habit to get out of bed a little and stand up for a few seconds when my alarm goes off in the middle of the night. Might hinder recall, but otherwise I just go back to sleep and have no recall anyways... I haven't really made any progress in 4 months. I think the main issue is just my schedule being erratic. I've been trying to fix that recently by working a lot (lot lot more...like 13 hours a day) every day so that I'm not crammed during midterms.

I know im kinda popping in randomly in your workbook but i feel alot of your problems. I'm in a doctorate program with finals coming up and i know what its like to have dream recall shunted by it. i've starting trying Naiya's techniques before going to bed and so far its been working very well. Basically it just involves clearing your mind of all the problems of the day before you go to sleep and putting them into a figurative lockbox beside your bed. With how your schedule sounds, i think it would help you.