jacko's Workbook

[jacko]

Hey I'm jacko. I've became fairly interested in lucid dreaming and tried pursuing my goal of having a lucid dream a couple of times before, but I was not disciplined, nor persistent enough. A few weeks ago, while coming down from a cannabis high while sleeping, I had a lucid dream. It had been many months since I had really thought about dreams. However, my dream was very short lived, and I hardly remembered it. Now I am here to stick to my goal of becoming an experienced lucid dreamer. I am very interested, and I have a fairly large knowledge of different LD topics. I am fairly active over at reddit on /r/luciddreaming as /u/beesknees-trees. I like to answer a lot of beginners' questions even though I have just a few very shaky LD experiences. I like to stick to a sleep schedule which is approximately 10:40 pm - 7:40 am. Reality Checks: Question Reality How did I get here? What have I been doing since my last reality check? (Think backwards until I reach last RC) Attempt to stick two fingers through opposite hand and nose plug I do RC's after sporadic awareness, instinctively every so often, and also anytime life just strikes me as odd. Dream Signs: Friends Girlfriend Cannabis Short Term Goals: Recall at least one vivid dream every night Be self aware during the day w/ sensory awareness and RC Long-Term Goals: Have multiple substantial and meaningful LD's a week Lucid/Dream Recall History: I have proven myself to have the ability to remember multiple (3 or more) vivid dreams per night Just had my first lucid (10/27/15) Current Technique: Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming Self Awareness

[jacko]

Also: I am hungry for book recommendations. Anything with at least a loose connection to Lucid Dreaming! Thank you

[jacko]

I have some questions about my Dream Journaling methods. I often use my Iphone's Voice Memo app to record dreams. I have early class on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, so I usually don't have time to write down a lengthy dream in my journal. I hand write dreams all other mornings of the week. If I wake up in the middle of the night after a dream I usually voice record it, so I can quickly return to sleep. A lot of times I will transfer dreams from my voice memos to my dream journal after the fact. I like to have at least something down for each day in my journal. Today I recalled only one super long dream, and I had class, so I voice memo'd it. I didn't want to hand write the whole thing so I put down a quick breakdown in my journal. What are the downfalls to voice recording dreams? Does anyone have any good critiques of my method?

[rcarter]

Regarding literature, I recommend "Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming" by Stephen LaBerge, more or less the go-to book for a good overview of the topic. Also, H.P. Lovecraft's "Dream Cycle" is awesome (if you can stand his purple prose, that is). Actually, my nickname is a reference to Lovecraft's alter ego. An anti-recommendation (if that's a thing): Steer clear of Castaneda. I've read some of his work a few years ago. There's a lot of shady New Age stuff in those books and ultimately they were more hindering than helpful for me.

[jacko]

Regarding literature, I recommend "Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming" by Stephen LaBerge, more or less the go-to book for a good overview of the topic. Also, H.P. Lovecraft's "Dream Cycle" is awesome (if you can stand his purple prose, that is). Actually, my nickname is a reference to Lovecraft's alter ego. An anti-recommendation (if that's a thing): Steer clear of Castaneda. I've read some of his work a few years ago. There's a lot of shady New Age stuff in those books and ultimately they were more hindering than helpful for me. Hahaha thank you very much! Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming is very popular, but I have yet to get my hands on it... None of the libraries I have access to have it, for some reason.

[jacko]

So, I just noticed that my workbook has 106 views... I'm not sure if I am supposed to post in this thing as much as I have, but I guess I'm not too worried about it. I was thinking... if this many people are looking at this thread, maybe I should post something actually interesting here. Something purposeful... So I'm here to inform you of a fairly rare (as far as I know) dreaming phenomenon. Maybe someone else has a better name, but I call this phenomenon, "Simulated Lucidity". Simulated Lucidity is when you dream of becoming lucid in your dream, without ever actually becoming aware that you are dreaming. It is very strange, and when it first happened to me I woke up and thought that I had actually become lucid. So I was at a basketball game waiting in line to get tickets, and suddenly my dream character realized he (I?) was dreaming. He instantly started spinning around to stabilize. That was it. I had read so much about becoming lucid, and read a lot about stabilization methods and such. So I dreamed of becoming lucid and instantly stabilizing. It sounds dumb, but somehow I had no idea I was dreaming. I just continued on with the dream. I went and sat on the bleachers and watched the game. I experienced this two or three times. Today I exported my old dream journal off of the app "Awoken". It's an android app and it is decent for keeping dream journals. I'm very happy with it for the cloud function because I just exported all of my dreams off of my old phone and onto a text file. I stored it as one DJ entry here on DV. So if you want you can actually go to that entry and type "simulated lucidity" and find a couple of dreams. Warning: My old DJ is ugly and I didn't describe it in very much detail, but I remember it vividly. I found one other person who for sure witnessed the same thing. https://www.reddit.com/r/LucidDreami...enon/?sort=top Here I comment as /u/beesknees-trees.

[jacko]

Question for the teachers here. Or anyone else knowledgeable on the subject. So I want to become good at MILD, and become good at being aware all day. I think that this would build the foundation for me to be a skilled LD'er. Am I wrong? Also, as recommended by Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming, I am practicing my prospective memory. Should I scrap that, and go for MILD techniques linked to in Lesson 2? I have good recall. Would it be a lot to ask for someone to give me a checklist or guide to building the foundations for great MILD/DILDing? I'm already meditating. Should I start with dream yoga? DDA? Should I only do the dream yoga visualization techniques. I just feel kind of clustered. Any help is appreciated. Thank you guys!

[rcarter]

Should I start with dream yoga? Just a quick answer before I go to work. In my "spiritual phase" I have been a member of a local Tibetan Buddhist group for four years, so I feel somewhat qualified to answer this. From a Buddhist perspective, Dream Yoga is a very advanced technique. Typically, a meditator starts with the "preliminary practices" ("Ngöndro") that consist of four or five steps, depending on who you ask, and take years to complete. After that, a pupil will ask the teacher to recommend advanced practices. Some do the Ngöndro again, others (the majority of lay people in "my" tradition, which was the Kagyü school) start a special kind of "meditation on the teacher" ("Guru Yoga"). And then there is a series of meditations that is very hard and time-consuming to practice, called the "Six Yogas of Naropa". It consists of six stages that build on each other. Dream Yoga is the fourth of six stages. So naturally, I think some people on this forum are getting ahead of themselves. As a skeptic, I'd say skip the Dream Yoga'ing unless you are on some sort of spiritual quest you really need to get out of your system right now. Like everything else in Tibetan Buddhism, it's weighed down with tons of folk religion and needlessly complicated mysticism. If you just want to LD and not become ethereal or fly around (yeah, Tibetan Buddhists will tell you that is a thing in waking life), I'm sure the professors here can recommend some less complicated techniques that yield the same or better results. Edit: OK, back from work. About the "dreaming about lucid dreaming" thing: I've had that as well. In fact, I think it's pretty common. The mind is preoccupied with the concept of lucid dreaming, but it's handled like any other preoccupation - with an appearance in a non-lucid dream. Glad you found a copy of the LaBerge. Do you think that prospective memory and MILD are mutually exclusive or is it just the redundancy? About feeling clustered - I do a lot of stuff at the moment as well, but it's more of a testing phase. I think I'll stick with the techniques that work best for me, and the rest will peter out over time. Dream Yoga... well, you've read my opinion about that. Maybe take it with a grain of salt, I guess. DDA, according to the guy who opened a thread here, is a variation of MILD, so I'd just do either of the two that feels best for you. It might conflict with ADA practice, though. Does anyone have experience with that?

[jacko]

Hey rcarter, I'm sorry my response is so very late. I'm very thankful for your correspondence. I read your comment a while back, and I guess I got kinda swept up by life.. (I don't have any good excuses). When I was referring to dream yoga, I was referring to the DV Academy dream yoga course. I looked it over and the beginner lessons, as well as visualization training which is one of the DVA listed MILD tutorials, seem to be stepping stones for meditative practice to build awareness. I'm really doing a lot to build awareness. My long term goals is to be someone who LD's almost everynight. I think awareness is probably the most effective way to get there. Lesson 3 is on awareness, and under meditation it says to refer to the dream yoga course, so that is why I was pondering it. It's probably not as hardcore as your Tibetan Buddhist practices. And to clarify, I didn't actually get my hands on Laberge's book , but someone posted his MILD section here on dream views. Thank you for your opinions!

[rcarter]

Hey rcarter, I'm sorry my response is so very late. I'm very thankful for your correspondence. I read your comment a while back, and I guess I got kinda swept up by life.. (I don't have any good excuses). Hey, no problem. That's why forums are cool, you can answer whenever you can really take the time to sit down and type a good response. When I was referring to dream yoga, I was referring to the DV Academy dream yoga course. I looked it over and the beginner lessons, as well as visualization training which is one of the DVA listed MILD tutorials, seem to be stepping stones for meditative practice to build awareness. I'm really doing a lot to build awareness. My long term goals is to be someone who LD's almost everynight. I think awareness is probably the most effective way to get there. Lesson 3 is on awareness, and under meditation it says to refer to the dream yoga course, so that is why I was pondering it. It's probably not as hardcore as your Tibetan Buddhist practices. I'm aware that the way I present my opinions on religion and metaphysics can sound a bit hostile. However, there are a lot of very different people here with different views on life and motivations for lucid dreaming, and it's far from a "one size fits all" situation, so don't let my opinionated ranting discourage you from taking whatever approach is right for you. Meditation in general is great - it's gotten me good results in waking life, and people here report it's good for dreaming as well, so I just incorporated it into my awareness practice. And to clarify, I didn't actually get my hands on Laberge's book , but someone posted his MILD section here on dream views. If you're OK with ordering it used, it's on Amazon for 30 cents or so.

[jacko]

Thank you! I actually just ordered it from amazon. Should be here in two days

[jacko]

So I got pretty damn good at recall just within a couple of days of practicing it. Within a couple of days of me starting to care about my dreams again I was able to remember 3 vivid dreams a night for two nights in a row. I did this by meditating for 20 minutes very close to bedtime, and then using the mantra, "I want to wake up after every dream and remember my dream. I know I can easily do this." I used this mantra at the end of my meditation session, and also before I went to sleep. Then I decided to stop using the mantra (I still meditate) because I started working on MILD techniques. The problem is, I completely ceased waking up multiple times throughout the night. I only remembered the dream I had just before waking up. So now I think I will take a week to focus just on recall(with awareness and such). I'm hoping that I can make waking up after a few dreams a night a permanent thing. Not only do I want to remember more dreams, but this will set me up with a ton of WBTB's. Is it possible to do recall mantras with MILD techniques and mantras?

[jacko]

In the above post (#12) I said that I was going to focus solely on recall for a week or so. I posted that last night. This morning I had my first lucid!!! I do talk about one above in my original workbook post but I am not counting that one because all I remember is the place (kinda) and that I realized I was dreaming. I describe my dream in my DJ here. Funny how I had my first lucid when I just decided to focus on recall for a while! Thanks to all the great people on this forum that make this possible.

[inheritedlaughs]

Awesome, congratulations!

[jacko]

Awesome, congratulations! Haha thank you! I get jealous whenever I read your workbook cause it seems like you are somewhat of a natural!!!

[Patience108]

Congratulations Jacko!!! And many more to come

[rcarter]

Congratulations! Celebrate and stay diligent.

[NyxCC]

Hey jacko, congrats on the ld! Good job so far. My only advice regarding any improvements while lucid dreaming which is always relevant no matter what the ld count is to think less and act more in the dream. It's as simple as that - you are already in the world of your thoughts, so no need to add extra thoughts (unless you are trying to summon something). What you want to do is to engage fully in dream and one does so by acting in it and by engaging one's senses (also no matter if they are fully functional or not). Hope this helps!

[jacko]

Hey jacko, congrats on the ld! Good job so far. My only advice regarding any improvements while lucid dreaming which is always relevant no matter what the ld count is to think less and act more in the dream. It's as simple as that - you are already in the world of your thoughts, so no need to add extra thoughts (unless you are trying to summon something). What you want to do is to engage fully in dream and one does so by acting in it and by engaging one's senses (also no matter if they are fully functional or not). Hope this helps! That does really help. In my time I have read so many posts and tutorials and listened to many podcasts, but I have not heard that advice before. Thank you!

[jacko]

I received Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming a couple of days ago. I like it a lot so far, and I am going to be going through the book and seeing where that gets me. I will be doing this with the addition of meditation and reverse reality checks for self awareness. I will post my progress.

[jacko]

Well, I am back. No excuses. I just got lazy. It's funny too because, if I recall correctly, the last dream I had before I stopped working on Ld'ing was a lucid. I will put my lucid in my DJ and talk about it here once I get my shit together. Not quite sure how long it's been since I last journal-ed anything. I got back in the mood by listening to an episode of the lucid4life podcast. It's fun to listen to people talk about LD'ing and I wish they were still making episodes. Does anyone know why they stopped? I know they are on DV somewhere. Anyway, a big thanks to those guys. (You can find the podcast online or on Itunes by the way.) So anyway, I'm going to get my recall back up and running tonight, and then move slow and steady towards success. Maybe I need a dream buddy; someone to keep me liable. I'm usually pretty disciplined (distance runner, wrestler) but I guess I've shown myself to not be the best on keeping with my LD goals. I'll probably be updating some stuff up top. Mostly Goals. "It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop." -Confucius

[jacko]

You can read about my second lucid dream here. I had a fairly low level of lucidity, where I maintained the knowledge that I was dreaming, but didn't really think through any of my decisions or have a huge amount of control. I took NyxCC's advice and started acting right away. This led me to kind of "break free" and feel myself come into my dream body.

[NyxCC]

Well done jacko! Congrats! About the lucid4life podcast, feel free to leave a comment on their thread or a wall message on Xanous' profile. He's still around and would be happy to hear any thoughts you have on the series. Maybe you have any ideas about topics you like to hear about in the future.