Thread: Bharmo's Workbook

Nice work getting lucid, Bharmo!
Would you like us to change your name in the workbook title?

Originally Posted by ~ Dreamer ~

Nice work getting lucid, Bharmo!
Would you like us to change your name in the workbook title?

Hey, thank you so much, that would be great!

Updated to Bharmo's Workbook.

Originally Posted by ~ Dreamer ~

Updated to Bharmo's Workbook.

Thanks Dreamer!!
Oh, and the full dream is here:
http://www.dreamviews.com/blogs/bhar...portals-62108/

I keep working at my day time practice, which has organically evolved to a mush up of Paul Tholey's Combined Technique and Sageous RRC. Some days I'm a bit more distracted than others by Real Life, but I'm working on it every day. My recall is quite good (for me) with an average of almost two dreams recalled per night. I've had interesting NDs lately, and today woke up from a dream where I met with my last teenage crush IRL before I met my wife, and re-lived those feelings. I like dreams with strong feelings, as they make me feel I did not just drop dead for 8 hours, but rather went into some interesting adventures!

Oh, BTW, past "crushes" are not a recurring theme for me, but I'm visiting the area where I grew upfront a couple of weeks, and I'm getting varied and strong emotional day residue from that, I believe.

Originally Posted by Bharmo

I keep working at my day time practice, which has organically evolved to a mush up of Paul Tholey's Combined Technique and Sageous RRC. Some days I'm a bit more distracted than others by Real Life, but I'm working on it every day. My recall is quite good (for me) with an average of almost two dreams recalled per night. I've had interesting NDs lately, and today woke up from a dream where I met with my last teenage crush IRL before I met my wife, and re-lived those feelings. I like dreams with strong feelings, as they make me feel I did not just drop dead for 8 hours, but rather went into some interesting adventures!

I know what you mean, Bharmo! While I feel somewhat ambivalent about very poignant emotional dreams, what I really enjoy most is the very strong experience of "me" really being there and observing, thinking, reacting, doing. Such "vivid awareness" is much more valuable and enjoyable to me than simply just "vivid dream environment"

Wow, you're right, although I still have lots of room to improve on that "me" being more there.
I'm happy you brought negative emotions up. You know, I had an intense nightmare 3 nights ago, it was pure, uncontrollable fear (the dream itself was not that bad, but somehow my fear escalated)

I had done lots of daytime and nighttime work, but when woke up from the nightmare I did not want to go back to sleep for 30 minuts, for fear I would go back to the dream, lucid or non-lucid.
Actually, I was more scared of becoming lucid if I went back to the dream (which I felt I was going to) and was paranoid about getting my worst fears come up with lucidity, with me being 100% there because of lucidity.
But the experience was somehow positive, as in the morning I thought a lot about that 100% irrational fear I went through, and realized that eventually I will have to confront those fears, and the more "lucid experience" I have under my belt, the more prepared I will be to face it.

I wrote this yesterday in my phone's notes app but could not post it here:

Since I set my goal of shape shifting into a coati I've been wondering how would feel to transform, but today I let my fantasy go further and imagined how *being* a coati would feel like and I was really excited!
I can't wait to have that wonderful experience!!!

And last night I had this short LD!
http://www.dreamviews.com/blogs/bhar...nucopia-62342/
I'm happy even if it is a "micro LD" because right now my main priority is getting my frequency up, and I believe this post shows that having exciting goals is a main factor.

This post from Sageous was very interesting for my practice:

tl;dr: These techniques do not do essentially the same things. Like a regular RC, a critical state test is a valuable tool, and would work well if done just before a RRC: the state test might bring you to lucidity ("Hey! This is a dream!"), and then the RRC might open you up to the potentials of lucidity ("This entire world is me; cool!"). A critical state test is more interested in the function of awareness than it is in the acknowledgement and acquisition of self-awareness and memory. The two techniques are similar in that they are both meant to aid lucidity, but they are not essentially the same because they do two very different, though certainly complementary, things.

I've been combining (or trying to combine) Tholey's Combined Technique with Sageous' RRC, so I thing I will try to describe it here in my workbook in more detail in another post, and see if it makes any sense

Last night had a non-lucid profound experience, something that will make me think about some specific aspects of my life for a couple of days. Even though I save that for myself, the end of the dream was quite Inception-esque, and I find it quite funny:

After some emotionally intense experiences (where I missed a few very clear DS's, like odd bathrooms and wearing totally inappropriate clothing) I was walking back home on my own at night, but someone called me to join them at a house. I went there and a very interesting sexytime situation came up. Just as sexytime started, I was like "Wait, after all that happened, now this? I think I should RC" but just as Dom at the end of Inception did not wait to see if the spinning top toppled but just joined his family, I looked at the sexytime situation, thought "whatever" and joined the party Nevertheless, the sexytime went on for one or two minutes and it woke me up Then I realized how badly I missed that opportunity to get lucid, but I was not too upset as I got thinking about the first part of the dream.

Anyway, I'm happy with this dream overall, I have food for thought and I was at the brink of lucidity!

Nice! You may have made the right decision, non-lucid sexy-time can go on indefinitely for me, while lucid ST usually has a time limit of a few seconds .

Wow! Got lucid last night!
http://www.dreamviews.com/blogs/bhar...r-cycle-62454/

Got lucid *again* last night!
Here is the dream: http://www.dreamviews.com/blogs/bhar...hansson-62480/
I believe this is my first time getting lucid two nights in a row. I hope this tears down some psychological barriers on my perceived difficulty for getting more frequent lucids!

I wanted to share the approach to lucid dreaming I've personally committed for the next 9 months. I might fine tune it, but will not change to any other technique. I would like to make a thread about it in the future, just in case it helps other people, but I wanted to start with a draft, so here we are.
I'm going to bulletpoint the technique and explain the function I believe it performs (I'm re-ordering it and adding a few personal touches):

0- If our dream recall is not good, we should employ techniques to improve it. Obviously, dream recall is vital for lucid dreaming. The paper I have does not go into details, I think this step is very clear, and DV has lots of resources on this respect.

1- We must set an intention to test our state when we are in situations that are characteristic of dreams, like when something surprising or improbable happens, when we experience powerful emotions, when we find ourselves in (or think about) a situation that is recurrent in our dreams. This sets an intention to question reality that will eventually carry out to our dreams, and also strengthens prospective memory.

2- This step is split in the original technique, and I also find convenient to split it in three parst:
2a- Every time we find ourselves in those situations, we should ask ourselves if we are dreaming. We further train our awareness of our state of conciousness
2b- While we ask ourselves the critical question we should imagine that everything around us, even our body, is a dream. Imagining that everything is a dream can mean IMO imagining that everything is a creation of our mind, and therefore, that everything is affecting and affected by our mind. This step makes us more familiar with the fact that while we dream everything looks perfectly real and therefore we need to be very careful when trying to assess our state.
2c- At the same time we should remember recent occurrences, and see if they are unusual or if we have memory lapses. This is a very effective RC, and trains our memory, one of the lucid dreaming fundamentals. On the other hand, steps 2b and 2c are slightly similar to Sageous' self-awareness exercise (aka RRC) There is obviously some important differences, but I believe they might be a good training (even if not as good as the RRC) for developing self-awareness.
2d- I often include some affirmation at the end of step 2 in order, to strengthen my intention. I also include step 4 here sometimes.

3- We should go to sleep thinking that we will become aware that we are dreaming while we are dreaming. We should not apply effort of will. This step adds auto-suggestion to the mix, that's why we must avoid "effort of will". As LaBerge notes if we want to apply effort then we better resort to MILD which uses prospective memory rather than suggestion.

4- We should have a goal to perform when we get lucid. Even simple goals will do. This adds an extra element of intention, and having goals is a good way to keep motivation up. I often imagine myself achieving my current goal at the end of step 2.


TL;DR:
Skills trained or tapped by this technique:
0- Dream recall
1- Intention, Prospective memory
2- Awareness, Self-awareness, Memory
3- Auto-suggestion (can be substituted by MILD)
4- Intention, Motivation

So I'm again going through a busier period of time, and had a trip which gave me jetlag for a few days. My practice has slowed down quite a bit, but as I said this time I'm fully committed to it.
10 days have passed since my last 2 LDs which I didn't expect, I wanted to believe that I would get 1 LD per week now But I need to think that is just normal given my trip and stress, and I'll get my frequency up as I keep working!

You're a lucid dreamer! Stay positive! Eventually sleep, dreams, recall, and self-awareness will unite again for lucidity! Keep up the day and night work, it's called "work" for a reason, sometimes you don't feel like doing it, but remember the awesomeness of lucidity and use that as your motivation. It comes and goes in waves, but as long as your base level of ability of recall and awareness is always growing, the "highs" will come more and more frequently and the "lows" will get shorter and shorter.

Thanks, man! Let's keep on working!!

Had a mini-lucid last night! My 50th LD was not as amazing as I had planned, but after a 3 week dryspell and all the stress and chaotic sleep schedule I'm happy that I had a LD at all. I'll post it later.

And here is the LD:
http://www.dreamviews.com/blogs/bhar...rim-ost-62825/

Yay! Congrats on breaking the dry spell and on your 50th ld!

Thanks NyxCC!

This:

Originally Posted by Bharmo

Hey guys! I'm camping on an isolated area for the next 6 days, so will be offline for like a week.
I'll miss Sensei's lessons meanwhile, but I might get a lucidity boost because of the different environment and having more awakenings... Or maybe I'll be more distracted, who knows...

I believe other years I've had LDs on this same trip. Looking forward to it!!

Have a great ld time!