So I haven't updated over the weekend, but that doesn't mean that I haven't been active. Instead of giving a night by night account of what I've been doing since Friday, I'll just summarize what I did.

I noticed a pattern with the binaural beat recordings and how my dreams respond to them. Whenever I fell asleep while listening to them, I had the same problem as I had in the above post - sleeping heavily, not being able to remember my dreams, etc. But if I managed to keep myself from falling asleep and listened to them for about half an hour before switching them off and going to sleep naturally, my sleep routine went back to it's usual pattern where I wake up closer to the REM phase and seem to have a greater chance of gaining lucidity.

So since Friday, I tried listening to the binaural beat recordings in bed, but in a way that kept me at least semi-awake. I would listen to it while lying on my back with the duvet pulled down, or something else like that, that would keep me awake. After about half an hour, I would take out the earplugs and just go to sleep as normal.

This seemed to have an interesting effect on my dreams. I did not wake up in the night after a REM cycle like used to, but my dream recall increased. On both Friday and Saturday night, in my dreams had the vivid quality of a lucid dream. However, instead of realizing that I was in a dream, I always thought that I was in a futuristic videogame that allows all of your senses to be immersed in some kind of alternate body within a virtual reality simulation. So I had the same sense of being able to do (almost) anything, like in a lucid dream, even though I didn't know that I was dreaming.

This stopped happening last night, but my dream recall was better than it has been for a while. I'll keep this going, and see where it takes me.