Thread: NyxCC's workbook

An honest review

One of the reasons why I decided to start a workbook here is because I had been slacking in my practices in the last few months. It's time for me to stop finding excuses of why I am not doing the practices and commit myself to testing all the ideas I've had but never fully followed through.

Ideally, I want to frequently put a few short term goals here and work towards their completion. I'm really excited to finally start a workbook where I can hopefully better track my performance and conduct a few experiments. That's it for now! Goals to be updated soon.

This is a really great idea, Nyx!
I hope this workbook will help motivate you to achieve these goals!
I can't wait to follow your progress.

PS. You have inspired me to start updating mine again! I always do better when I write down my goals and see evidence of myself improving.

Thanks, Dreamer!

PS. You have inspired me to start updating mine again! I always do better when I write down my goals and see evidence of myself improving.

That's awesome! Looking forward to reading your updates. Let the cross-inspiration begin!

Ok, let me quickly write down the main goals for now, so that I can start working on them.

Goals 25 Nov - 31 Dec

[~x] 15 Proper wbtbs (days) -----> 10/15 (SR 9:10)

20 natural wake MILDs (days) -----> 1/15 (SR 0:1)

[ ] ----> Figure out most effective technique for micro-wbtb/natural wakes - pending

[~x] 10 Autosuggestion days ----> 9/10 (SR 1:10)

[x] Try out the illogical thoughts process to speed up falling asleep at bedtime and report

[ ] Be more observant with bed time process and report

Dream control goals

[~x] Monitor DC interactions - be more aware of the whole process ----> can be ongoing, focus on DC control

[ ] Try out some lucid sports

...To add and complete more goals later


Updated as of 13 Jan Dec incl., see post #16

Report 1 on using illogical thoughts to induce sleep (26 Nov)

So, I was having some difficulty falling asleep and decided to try out the method. At first, I was trying to make random semi-meaningful sentences and phrases "They came for the food; People sitting on road, etc.", then switched to more meaningless stuff and finally went on to random generation of a set of any three words, sometimes with a slight association between the words "hobby batman train", "milk bread wall".

One of the early effects while trying to generate these words was that I started having mini memory flashbacks of real scenes from the past. This sometimes happens to me when reaching a clear but conscious state of mind and the memories are real ones rather than imaginary.

As I continued with the exercise, a number of past dream memories, again real ones started mixing with the life flashbacks. These weren't very vivid and would last a second or so as I was fully concentrating on the word exercise.

I was getting somewhat tired of continuously generating random words and also my awareness was beginning to slip away. At this point, I noticed the emergence of other random scene flashes, but those contained novel or rather different (not real dream or life memories). This is not new to me as I had on other occasions observed that the more towards unconsciousness I would drift, the more of these different scenes I get, while when my mind is fully aware and quiet it tends to get more real memory flashbacks. No idea what this is all about.

Anyways, the interesting part was that as I was struggling to generate a new set of words, I would begin to get a random flashback scene before each word (now a mix of true past places and some unknown random places), and my mind would actually scan the scene for an object or action and use it in the word set! And this would go on for every word or sometimes two words would come from the same scene. It a was really cool realization when it happened the first time, then I let the process continue. I wasn't fully asleep at this point and took a step back towards wakefulness to review the process. Then continued a bit more with the word generation, eventually got tired and stopped and fell asleep.

Looking forward to playing with this again!

Nice, you started one @NyxCC!

Thanks blazingnyancat!

@NyxCC
Your Welcome.

I am interested to see how this goes as well! Looking forward to the updates, Nyx.

Quick follow up on the illogical thoughts method.

27 Nov - Mind was quite active and it took some time to get into the rhythm. Eventually images followed by words syncronized similarly to the first try.

30 Nov - did a few mins of the tech only, images were less vivid this time. Drifted to sleep a bit after stopping with exercise.

Natural wake mild - had number of vivid dreams and did a brief review after each wake, but it took less than I would want, so not counting this as + 1.

December is here: Time to get serious!

added daily autosuggestion to goals list: min 3 times to count

To sum up:

- WBTB
- Natural wake MILD
- Autosuggestion

Quick update as I have been doing mental accounting on the goals and may lose track. Progress on wbtb 4/15.

Natural wake MILD: did a number of natural wake milds but am coming to the conclusion that what I'm doing is not being very productive. With the exception of one mild at micro-wbtb that turned into a wild/deild by chance, there isn't much effect of this practice (or rather the way it is done at that time) when it comes to my mini wakes. I'm changing the goal to figure out a good use of natural wakes and will be experimenting more, rather than keeping track of attempts in terms of numbers.

Autosuggestion: I remember to do this almost every day, but not as often as I would like to. May not be a bad idea to make a checklist.

*Goals updated*

When you say "natural wake MILD, " how long are you staying up? How long are you practicing MILD? Is it LaBerge's MILD, or the DV "mantra MILD?" How focused are you as you fall asleep?

I'm trying to use natural wakes/mini-wbtb as complementary to normal wbtb and days with no opportunity for longer wbtb. I usually wake up naturally, visit restroom, then go back to bed going over my previous dream or any dream that I can recall. The problem with mini-wbtbs of course is, you tend to fall asleep more quickly, so I end up with a rather lame (LaBerge/Naiya) MILD - recall dream, ok these are the dream signs, I become l-u-c-i-Zzzzzzz.

My focus at that point certainly isn't at its best. I'm thinking I will try to emphasize the future aspects more and incubate a lucid scenario straight away, rather than spend time to recall the previous dream and fall asleep in the process.

Update
Autosuggestion has finally kicked off now that I put down a simple checklist in writing.

Wbtb 5/15 (Success rate 4:5). Overall good, but have done it less frequently than planned. With 17 days left and the holidays, meeting the target may be more challenging. Still, will give it my best.

A few natural lds, one that included animal control.

Mini report on DC interaction (goals): Dog obeyed commands more or less correctly, with my thoughts being immediately translated in the resulting actions.

End of year/December/goals review

Recall: my recall was about average before the holidays. During the holidays recall dropped to its poorest levels of the entire year.

Lucidity: Interestingly enough in spite of the poor recall during that time, I stepped up the wbtbs to meet my targets which resulted in a number of lds (those were harder to recall than usual, but still pretty good).

Wbtb - 10/15 wbtbs from goals, 9 wbtbs led to lucidity, one couldn't fall asleep. Also, one successful micro wbtb.

Autosuggestion: on and off about 8-9 days of autosuggestion, only one ld attributed to those (plus remembered goals without wbtb!)

19 Lds for December

Dream control - a lot of free styling, which is ok, but would like to include more tasks in the future to ensure keeping lucidity for longer in all lds.

DC control goals: apart from the dog control, two more successful DC controls - mostly on the movements of DCs, those were incorporated with a delay of about a second from the moment of thought. In all cases the DCs were enthusiastic. (+1 more for Jan)

Goals for Jan to be added soon.

I just realized that by the time I post my goals for Jan, it will probably be Feb!

Here are a few intermediate ones to work on:

[ ] Improve sleep schedule

[ ] Some yoga sessions and watch for effects on dreams. (Increased yoga practice before those distracting holidays coincided with increased vividness, so I want to see if it makes a difference again).

[ ] Autosuggestion - more!!!

[ ] Wbtbs

[ ] Post some lds!

Not going to add any special dream control goals at the moment, though I expect to give some tasks a try.

Great job, Nyx. Glad to see you're keeping up with this! Do you do autosuggestion before bed? Also, what is stopping you from doing it more? Congrats on the LDs over break, as well!

Looking good, nyx! I'm intrigued that you found yoga practice increased your lucidity. I've been toying with the idea of throwing in a little yoga into my workouts somehow, so this made my ears perk up a bit.

@ Threecat

Thanks! I try to do this type of autosuggestion during the day, it's a little combo I vary over time. About a year and a half approximately I got really great results that could be traced to my autosuggestion practices (specific non-wbtb DILDs of my mantra coming to me in the dream), but I have been slacking with this ever since. It's a mix of looking at my hands, repeating a mantra and now I also incorporated goal review to this. Takes like a min or so, theorethically could be done anywhere. The issue, of course, is remembering to do it, much like with RCs. One thing that helps me is to have a little checklist within sight (desk, drawers, etc.). If you have any ideas how to do these more often, please do share!

@ CL

Thanks! It coincided with an increase in vividness, though I haven't counted the (unexpected) lds that could be influenced by it. Will certainly keep close track of those now.

Let me know how it goes if you give it a try! Oh, by the way, talking of fitness and brains, I came accross the info that creatine helps boost brainpower. Do you use this supp and have you noticed any related benefits? I might grab one next time I'm at the store.

Hey NyxCC!
I like your workbook and I'm looking forward some more updates, specially the "Yoga" part, hehe. I've started not so long ago, but I'm still too new to LD for noticing any difference.

Originally Posted by NyxCC

Let me know how it goes if you give it a try! Oh, by the way, talking of fitness and brains, I came accross the info that creatine helps boost brainpower. Do you use this supp and have you noticed any related benefits? I might grab one next time I'm at the store.

Hey Nyx! That's a great question. I used creatine for a few years but I've actually stopped for the last several months. I never paid any attention to whether or not this had any affect on how well my brain functioned, but I've not noticed any major differences so far...?

Maybe this has helped me establish a new baseline and I should rotate it back in to see whether it makes any difference!

If I notice anything one way or the other, I'll be sure to let you know!

Originally Posted by CanisLucidus

Hey Nyx! That's a great question. I used creatine for a few years but I've actually stopped for the last several months. I never paid any attention to whether or not this had any affect on how well my brain functioned, but I've not noticed any major differences so far...?

Maybe this has helped me establish a new baseline and I should rotate it back in to see whether it makes any difference!

If I notice anything one way or the other, I'll be sure to let you know!

Cool! Maybe it will pay off even more now that you stopped taking it for a while. Here are abstracts from some studies below. The interesting part is that it may have more effect on vegetarians or people that are not as exposed regularly.

Originally Posted by Oral creatine supplementation improves brain performance

Creatine supplementation is in widespread use to enhance sports-fitness performance, and has been trialled successfully in the treatment of neurological, neuromuscular and atherosclerotic disease. Creatine plays a pivotal role in brain energy homeostasis, being a temporal and spatial buffer for cytosolic and mitochondrial pools of the cellular energy currency, adenosine triphosphate and its regulator, adenosine diphosphate. In this work, we tested the hypothesis that oral creatine supplementation (5 g d(-1) for six weeks) would enhance intelligence test scores and working memory performance in 45 young adult, vegetarian subjects in a double-blind, placebo-controlled, cross-over design. Creatine supplementation had a significant positive effect (p < 0.0001) on both working memory (backward digit span) and intelligence (Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices), both tasks that require speed of processing. These findings underline a dynamic and significant role of brain energy capacity in influencing brain performance.

Originally Posted by Psychology Today: Your brain on creatine

So let's look at these papers, shall we? In both the cognition study papers, healthy college students were recruited (colleges being both a good source of research volunteers and vegetarians) and divided into creatine or placebo supplementation groups. The British study compared vegetarians and vegan young women to omnivores, the Australian study used only vegetarians and vegans, but had a crossover design (all subjects got both placebo and creatine along the way). Both studies did various measures of cognitive and memory testing (number of words you can remember from a list read to you, how many F or P words you can say in two minutes, how many numbers you can repeat backwards from a string of numbers read to you, recognizing strings of three even or odd numbers in a series of numbers read at 100 per second). The British study added a measure of reaction time (subjects had to press a button corresponding to a light as fast as they could once it was lit). The Australian study was six weeks, the British study was five days, and both used 5g creatine monohydrate as the supplement and dextrose (glucose) as the control.

Because glucose administration has been shown to (immediately) increase cognitive performance (5 (link is external)), all the cognitive testing was done fasted and on a day with no supplementation.

The results? First off, everyone, vegetarian or omnivore, on placebo or creatine in the British study did worse the second time around on the memory tests (maybe they got bored?). But compared to the placebo group, the omnivores in the British study were about the same as the creatine supplement group (omnivores have been shown to benefit from a maximum of 20 grams a day at first then maintenance 2-5 grams per day supplementing for athletic performance), suggesting that us animal flesh eaters have a physiologically appropriate amount of phophocreatine reserve in the brain for interesting tasks such as pushing buttons in response to light stimuli and complicated mental tasks that involve the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus.

The vegetarians in the creatine group did much better than the vegetarians in the placebo group on the second battery of tests involving word recall and measures of variability of reaction times. More simple mental tasks didn't improve in the vegetarians or the omnivores, suggesting, interestingly enough, that complicated thinking burns more energy than uncomplicated thinking (so do smart people burn more calories? I'm not aware of any research to that effect, in fact I thought there wasn't much of a difference, but we'll look into it ...). In some of the measures, vegetarians were higher than omnivores at baseline, by the way, and in general the memory tests between the two groups did not vary at baseline—the vegetarians just seemed to benefit much more from creatine supplementation.

In the Australian study (using only vegans and vegetarians), creatine supplementation had a significant positive effect on working memory (using backwards digit span) and intelligence measures requiring processing speed. Various cognitive tasks that were worse in the placebo vegetarians compared to creatine vegetarians are similar to those that are affected in ADHD, schizophrenia, dementia, and traumatic brain injury. In addition, people with the Apoe4 allele and therefore more vulnerable to developing Alzheimer's seem to have lower brain levels of creatine.

Anyways, to my update. I got my caps and started taking some before and after the workout. During that time I was a bit exhaused and stressed out, so no ld daywork or wbtb. Got a few unexpected random lds on three nights following the workouts (also did meditation during the day prior to one of the ld nights). So not really sure if this is coincidental or related to the creatine intake.

Still need to follow through with the rest of my ld goals.

Wow, thanks for all of that great info, Nyx! I'm definitely going to join you on this post-workout creatine experiment!

Do you do your workouts reasonably close to bedtime, so that's when you take the creatine too? Have your workout days correlated with lucid dreams in the past?

My one problem is that I tend to be busier on days when I strength train simply because it's hard to fit everything in. So I'll need to make sure to be disciplined about my bedtime to reap all potential benefits!

Cool, looking forward to us getting fitter and smarter!

Wow, thanks for all of that great info, Nyx! I'm definitely going to join you on this post-workout creatine experiment!

Do you do your workouts reasonably close to bedtime, so that's when you take the creatine too? Have your workout days correlated with lucid dreams in the past?

My one problem is that I tend to be busier on days when I strength train simply because it's hard to fit everything in. So I'll need to make sure to be disciplined about my bedtime to reap all potential benefits!

Not too close to bed time and before dinner. I can relate to your problem though, on some occasions I go to bed too late to able to wbtb. Apart from that, yes, there has been some coincidence between workouts and lds though I haven't investigated this in depth. At any rate, we know that workouts are good for the brain so they should have at least an indirect impact on lding and who knows maybe even a direct one? Have you noticed more vivid dreams on post work out nights or lucidity yourself?

Speaking of vivid dreams, my mini update: Been having very vivid dreams the last few days. The vividness culminated into a few short lucids - the colors were absolutely insane and I just hit lucidity at that point with no apparent trigger. I think this was due to some highly elevated chemical moments in my dreams. No supps pre bed on both nights, one post workout, no wbtb. Those were pretty short so this summary will do, still have other stuff in the backlog to post at some point. Busy week.