Thread: Zaqwsx170's Workbook

Hi and welcome to class! If you can you should stop using the alarm once you get into the habit, you don't want to do it on queue but rather when you feel like a reality check would be good. Overall it sounds like a good plan! If you haven't tried out the WBTB technique I suggest you do, it's very effective for most people. If you don't see much results from what you do, don't be afraid to take a different approach.

How good is your recall as it is now? Starting off with improving recall is a great idea if it's not that good.

If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask! Welcome once again

Excellent advice, matte87.

(mild success! brief lucidity attained.) Night of 10/26: Went to sleep at 9:30pm, set my alarm for 3:00 am. Woke up, sat at my desk and read about lucid dreaming for 20 minutes, and then went back to bed. I was trying to do a Wake Back to Bed. I couldn't sleep for another 40 minutes (4:00 am) and then I had a dream, went lucid, got super excited and then woke up. Then I got out of bed and went to my desk to start recording my journal, and I woke up again. False awakening...so then I recorded my dreams without moving much from my bed.
Issues: -Have trouble getting back to sleep after waking up at 3.

Nice! If you're having trouble going back to sleep, try shortening the WBTB. Some people only do tiny WBTB's. Now a days I can do a 1 minute WBTB really, I only need to wake up and start doing some mantras or visualizations for the WBTB to be effective. If you still can't go back to sleep, try doing the WBTB at 4½ hours after going to bed instead of 6. You want to choose any of those as they're the best times to do it on.

Always RC whenever you've been lucid and wake up. I've missed a few FA's that way. Keep on dreaming!

hey there zaq (hope you dont mind me calling you zaq)

Welcome to the class... Hope you have fun

Haha, no I don't mind.

My recall of my dream last night (which was not WBTB or anything special, because I had a test bright and early in the morning) was rather vague and hazy, but it was of a longer period. I remember coming up with some laptop/wire machine that does something special and showing it to a professor, and I woked up a friend and told him I actually hated computer science (not what I'm studying, but I like it) and he went to work. Then I had a discussion while standing in a field of ice (like there was a 5 foot deep field of ice, and the ice went up to my shoulders) talking to my old philosophy teacher while periodically eating the ice.

<.<
>.>

Lol. Today's friday, so I'll be better able to do a WBTB or something interesting.

Been having some trouble recently. Friday night I did a 5-minute wake up then back to bed, and I recall only the barest of fragments of a dream. Saturday night I set alarms for 1.5, 3, 4.5, 6 and 7.5 hours after going to sleep, and I didn't get anything. Lol. Uncertain if my alarm even went off. Hm...the WBTB method seems very valuable, but I think that this week it is most important to focus on dream recall. So for the next 3 days I'm just going to set my alarm for 4.5, 6, and 7.5 hours after sleep. I'm using an android app that plays a light melody as the alarm, and automatically shuts off after 3 seconds.

And out of curiosity, how good can recall get? I was just reading Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming, and Laberge said that its commonly accepted that we forget our dreams if we don't awaken after the REM period and record them or cement them in our memory. So my question is, can you guys remember multiple dreams by only waking up once at the end of 8 hours of sleep, or do you always have to wake up periodically throughout the night?

Yeah it sounds like a good idea. Don't feel too much pressure though, that will only kill your recall. I've recalled 10 or more dreams on several occasions when I've slept more than 8 hours. Using supplements often result in having more dreams aswell. You can't have an unlimited amount of dreams from one night, so the more you wake up after each REM period the more you recall. Keep on improving your recall but don't stress yourself and feel pressure of having to wake up after every REM cycle. It's not after the first three cycles that you spend a decent amount of time in REM. Whenever you feel like it, only try to recall during the morning and even having days off is never a bad thing.

Keep it up!

Excuses, excuses. Nothing but bad reasons for not keeping up with my dream work. Been pretty busy. I just changed my email status to receive email from other members, so if you see that I haven't updated this thread in more than a day or so, PLEASE PESTER ME WITH EMAIL. The main issue is that I get really busy, and then sleep time gets compromised (i have to be IN class in less than 6 hours...).

Still good to know you haven't given up

Haha. I don't intend to. Being able to lucid dream would just be...incredible.
I'll post back in the morning with my recall. I'll WBTB after 3 hours. I have trouble doing the BTB part if I wake up at 4.5 or later.

Lol

Apparently the alarm went off, but I didn't remember it. I had very solid recall of a dream when I finally woke up in the morning though. I think I've come up with a dependable way to solve my alarm problem, based on

How to Get Up Right Away When Your Alarm Goes Off

with two different alarms. WBTB tonight.

Ooh that website is cool! How is it working for you? How was your WBTB?

Yeah, tell us of your progress!

Hey guys! I've been using the method on that site to some success. To summarize, that article says that one way to get up immediately when your alarm clock goes off in the morning is to practice getting up to the alarm the night before, and then in the morning it will be instantaneous. It works like a charm. So the issue I was having with waking up in the middle of the night to record dreams was either:
I) I use the alarm I've conditioned myself to wake up with, and I jump out of bed and then have trouble remembering the dream.
II) I use some other alarm, and 3-hour or 4.5-hour asleep me just kind of ignores it and goes to sleep.

So I basically just practiced using the light alarm to just shut the alarm off on my phone, and take my journal and pen from the night stand. So I have two different conditionings. Lol. Works pretty well for me. I've found that trying to wake up at the 6-hour mark to record dreams is a bad idea, because then I just can't go to sleep. So I've had pretty good success at recording ~2 dreams a night for the past few nights.

So now that I have that, I'm going to start the week 2 challenge, which is to do a proper WBTB.

Awesome! Sounds awkward with the alarm thing … Heh :3 good luck with your WBTB!

Nice! Whenever you jump out of bed like that your recall gets affected in a negative way. You want to lie still with your eyes closed and just let the memories come to you. Although that can be hard and you risk falling back asleep Keep it up man!

Hello again. Sorry, it's been a while. My final exams came up and...sleep was kind of a scarce resource. Sorry. I'm back though. I've been having a lot of trouble with dream recall in the last week though. Probably the main issue is my screwed up sleep cycle. Going to sleep at 6am is probably not healthy for dream recall or lucid dreams...I think I will spend this week focusing on dream recall to get back on the wagon, then continue with your challenges. Do you guys use an alarm at all when waking up in the middle of the night to record dreams/get up for a wbtb, or is it just intention?

Welcome again! Good luck on increasing your dream recall. You can do it

To record dreams and to do a WBTB I find it better to use autosuggestion or drinking 2 or 3 full glasses of water.

Yeah it's definitely your sleep schedule and all the stress, don't worry about it. By being anxious about not putting enough effort into it or worried about your recall going down, it'll just go down further. I do it by intentions, but you can set an alarm if you know your cycles. Between 90-100 minutes per cycle.

Hey guys. Sorry I've been gone (again). I have been maintaining a dream journal with 1-2 dreams a night for the past 2 weeks, so I'm going to start doing WBTBs starting tonight. I'll post back tomorrow morning.

It's been somewhat more than 12 hours since my last post. Lol.

Updates:

-Using water to try and wake up in the middle of the night usually worked fine, however my two issues with it were just that it didn't always work for me (sometimes even when I drank a ton of water) and even then I would only really wake up once during the night.

-So what I've been doing is kind of what I mentioned earlier, using an alarm. A lot of people have said that an alarm is a dream killer, but my alarm is just my cell phone and I actually just keep it charging in bed with me, so I don't have much trouble with inhibiting dream recall. I even have it set to require me to do arithmetic for the alarm to turn off, and I still feel like it doesn't give me much trouble with recall.

-I use this voice recording app for my cell phone, which makes things even easier. So I don't ever have to even get out of bed or move much at all to turn off my alarm and record my dream.

-I used to have trouble getting back to sleep with WBTB or things, but now I've gotten the hang of things. I used to think too much about my day while going to sleep, now I just kind of meditate while lying there. Helps a ton. I used to like...set an alarm for 3am, and then not be able to go to sleep until 6.

-So my dream recall has gotten pretty good with the aid of my cell phone, though if I were doing all of this 10 years ago I would be pretty hopeless, which is probably...not so good.

-I've been attempting WBTBs maybe 3 times a week for the past 3 weeks, but I haven't had much success. I will wholly admit that I have really just been going through the motions with WBTBs: I've been getting up for a bit in the middle of the night, but I've hardly been doing any intentionality, or reality tests at all during the day.

One other issue I'm (going to start) having is that of school. I mentioned above that I use that Steve Pavlina alarm clock method thing to get out of bed easily in the morning. That might get kind of confused with the alarms I use to wake up during the night. It hasn't been an issue for the past month and a half because I was on winter break for a while and the first few weeks of the semester are never a big deal, but I'm going to definitely have to start getting back on track with waking up early in the morning.

I feel like it sounds somewhat ridiculous to try and have two different alarms conditioned to do different things, but...hopefully it works out well. We'll see.

For the past two nights though, my cell phone has been randomly shutting down in the middle of the night and not playing alarms. I wake up in the morning, and the phone is just off. And when I turn it on, it shows that none of the alarms were triggered. So...I'll try to figure that out today.

I think I'll keep doing WBTBs on weekends, but it's probably going to stop being practical on weekdays as much. What would you guys recommend I do for now? MILD?

Hey, just saw your Workbook, zaqwsx170! There's an alarm you can install on your computer, it's very light and you can put a song or something to play. If you edit it to be really short, you don't even have to move to stop it. I found out about it here: www . dreamviews . com/f79/**crazyinsanes-wild-tutorial-**-87710/

Hey everyone!

Today I hit all my MILD targets (exploring the world of lucid dreaming has this section on MILD, and it recommends you spend a week training your mental muscles to remember to do things without external stimulus) and generally was pretty good with reality checks and telling myself periodically throughout the day that I'll have lucid dreams tonight.

Tonight I'm going to set alarms for 3, 4.5, 6, 7.5 and do MILD. I'm still in two minds about whether I'm going to continue using alarms consistently, or whether I'll try and stop using them, but...it seems to work pretty well so far.