Hello friends!

Thank you so very much for taking the time to help new lucid dream practitioners like myself! It's wonderful that there are people who give their time and energy freely to help others learn to make the most of their dreaming life. I am incredibly grateful for your generosity!


Motivation:

Although I hope to find enjoyment and adventure, my main motivation is to use lucid dreaming to help me become a more happy, aware, awake and kind human being. Specifically my aim is for dreaming practice to enrich my waking Buddhist practices, such as mindfulness, kindness, generosity, meditation and cultivating wisdom, as well as helping me grow psychologically.

Reality Checks:

- Hand test. I look at my open hand, quickly flip it, then look carefully to see if anything has changed or if there is any weirdness.
- Nose pinch test.
- Thumb through palm test

I learned the hand flipping test from the book 'Dreams of Awakening'. I have seen some sources say to just look at your hands carefully and see if anything is strange, but flipping seems more effective in theory as seeing your hands changing shape is more explicit than them just looking wrong, which may not convince you in a dream (correct me if I'm wrong!). I am also doing the nose pinch test afterwards or sometimes on its own. I like that you can do it in bed in the dark and it is more discrete in social situations! Finally I have started also trying to put my thumb through my palm since it's very quick to do.

My current game plan with reality checks is to introduce them in a balanced way into my daily life. I want to make sure that they are not forced and that I am actually enjoying the process; if there's anything I've learned about anything it's that you don't keep things up if you're not enjoying them! As a result, I'm finding that not rushing into reality checks is helpful. I don't try straight away to convince myself I could be dreaming (as there is usually some internal resistance around this idea!) Instead I first establish mindfulness of my body and begin to become more aware of my surroundings, until the question 'am I dreaming?' feels more natural and sincere. Since discovering the forum a few days ago I have also started saying a mantra after each reality check, 'next time I'm dreaming, I joyfully realize I'm dreaming!' I added the word 'joyfully' to help me get more excited and enthusiastic about the possibility of becoming lucid

At the moment I am stuck in the house most of the day due to having a minor operation, and I don't seem to see much that could be considered strange very often. I have mostly been doing reality checks just whenever the idea pops into my mind and it hasn't been 10 seconds since the last one! That said, I have sometimes managed to convince myself that some fairly normal things are potentially dream signs e.g. 'oh look! A bird in a tree! That wasn't there before!'

Since reading a little bit on this forum, I have begun to appreciate even more the importance of detailed awareness with reality checks. It makes a lot of sense! And I am also very happy as it gives me more motivation and opportunities to practice mindfulness every day! Thank you!

P.S. Since I started writing this post a few days ago (I like to take my time!) I have read the SAT and ADA tutorials and have since been making awareness a much bigger part of my reality checks and my day time experience in general.

Dream Signs:

The following are the most common signs I have noticed over the last 4 weeks of dream journalling:

Locations
- Being in the village I grew up in. Very common!
- Being in the remote countryside. This can be on a country trail, in a field, around mountains, or quite commonly being in a building or urban site that feels far from civilization and is surrounded by countryside.
- Bedrooms. I often find myself in bedrooms, usually rooms shared with other people. They nearly always look quite different to my actual room, but I often think they are mine in the dream.
- Hotels/hostels/large living spaces. So many of my dreams I seem to find myself in some big building complex where either all the people live there or are staying there as if it's a hotel.

People
- Old school friends, with two in particular appearing frequently. It's amazing that I rarely think about these guys in day to day life yet they feature so much in my dreams!
- My ex girlfriend.
- An anonymous female companion. This is an interesting one. I often seem to have a female companion with me who is like my 'dream partner', keeping me company and joining me on adventures, sometimes offering advice or guiding where I go. Sort of like Doctor Who! It's almost like she's another aspect of myself. I've never seen her face, but sometimes (maybe as a result of trying to see her) she takes the appearance of my ex girlfriend (but still retains the behaviour of the female companion).

Emotions
- Worry, concern, stress. When it occurs this tends to be much stronger than my average waking experience of worry.
- Excitement and joy.
- The feeling of things coming to an end. This can be just a sense that whatever is happening now is about to end, like the end of the day, or a more emotional feeling akin to what you might feel at the end of a long holiday.
- Confusion and forgetfulness. Either feeling that thing don't make sense or feeling fuzzy and drowsy like I'm on sleeping pills but don't know it. This has become much more common recently, which is hopefully a good sign that I'm starting to become more aware in my dreams!
- Fear. It's rare that I have the kind of terror you might experience in nightmares, but mild fear seems to pop up regularly.

Themes
- Trying to get home or trying to get to my bedroom. This is more common towards the end of a dream it seems, but I have had whole dreams where I'm trying to get back to my bed!
- Video games. This is either me playing a game, or me inside a video game like in a virtual reality. Most often, at some point things in the dream transition into 'video game mode', where reality follows similar rules to games, often a specific one I used to play, and often I see myself in 3rd person here. Then at some point I might 'zoom out' and it's like I was actually playing the game instead of being inside it. I don't play video games any more, yet this seems to happen a lot!
- Extreme sports, both participating and watching.
- Watching a film or story from the inside. This is similar to the gaming one. I'll be witnessing a story unfolding that has nothing to do with me, then either I at some point enter the scene and become part of it or it turns out that apparently I was watching the whole thing on tv.
- In a transport vehicle like a car, van or train. I don't do this very often in waking life these days (I tend to walk or take buses!)

Short-Term Goals:

- To establish a sustainable, progressive and enjoyable daily dream practice that synergizes with my Buddhist practice.
- To become sufficiently aware of my sleep cycles and establish a regular sleeping routine that incorporates WBTB.
- To find a basic induction technique that feels suited to me from which to establish a foundation.
- To be able to confidently stabilize lucid dreams after the 'aha!' moment.
- To become more aware of my dreams signs and start noticing them during the day.
- To cultivate my prospective memory skills.

Long-Term Goals:

- To be able to use lucid dreaming to 'commune with my subconscious', as a means of psychological integration and growth.
- To be able to do Buddhist practices in dreams, such as meditation or visualisation.
- To have lucid dreams on a reasonably regular basis.
- To be able to perform WILDs with reasonable consistency.
- To one day encourage and help others to take up lucid dreaming!

Lucid/Dream Recall History:

My recall has been surprisingly good relative to how it was, ever since I just started going to sleep with the intention to remember my dreams and write them down. I very quickly found myself waking in the night with sometimes quite detailed dreams on my mind. A future problem I foresee is keeping up the motivation to write all my dreams down. At the moment my motivation is high, but when I start my new job and have to stick to a wake up schedule the prospect of spending over 30 minutes of my night and morning writing may not seem as appealing!

I had my first lucid dream (that I can remember at least) about 6 years ago, a few days after reading about the idea and spending those days doing reality checks. At that time I lost motivation to continue, but since taking up the practice about 4 weeks ago after reading Dreams of Awakening, I have had 5 lucid dreams, albeit very short ones! The first one was actually incredibly significant, as upon becoming lucid I was immediately held at gun point by a man who burst into the room. I realised that he was a shadow aspect of myself and so I started hugging him, telling him I loved him! After hugging it out he turned into light and we merged together. The day after (whilst awake) I realised how I had not been accepting a certain undesirable aspect of my self and on top of that, that it felt much easier to actually accept it with kindness right then. So that was a win!

My other lucid dreams so far have been quite similar, in that they seem to occur right at the end of a dream and so I seem to already be waking up when I become lucid. In one, the room contained a powerful storm, which soon lifted me off my feet as the room fell apart. In another, I was lifted off of my feet by an intense energy and whooshing sensation. In the last one, I could feel my mind being drawn away, and I felt like I could hardly control my balance as I was trying to interact with things as if gravity wasn't working properly. I have heard this is common, as the mind becomes more critically aware as it transitions into waking which makes lucidity more likely at the end of a dream. I think as well I need to improve my stabilisation skills, as in one dream I tried the spinning technique (which I had decided to do if I became lucid) which caused me to lose awareness but have an incredibly vivid false awakening afterwards.

Current Technique:

Before finding this forum I had experimented with a few techniques over the past 3 weeks from 'Dreams of Awakening' and 'Are You Dreaming?' by Daniel Love. For about a week my technique has been fairly consistent and roughly consists of falling asleep mindfully, mostly by grounding myself in physical sensation, whilst making an affirmation or setting my intention to realise I'm dreaming when I'm dreaming. Since discovering the forum I have begun using the mantra whilst falling asleep. I have also been doing a WBTB every night, mostly from naturally waking up but sometimes from an alarm.

Wake up Times:

The first week I started dream journalling I was on a solitary retreat without a clock so I had no idea what times I was waking up in the night. Shortly afterwards I had an operation under general anaesthetic, which takes a while to leave the system (it's still working it's way through now it seems!). As well as this I am physically healing which seems to be using up energy and I'm sitting around most the day which likely is having an effect on my energy levels too. As a result, my sleeping patterns have been fairly erratic!

That said, I have been recording times I wake up in the night as well as using a sleep cycle app 'sleep as android' to see if it could offer any further useful information. My sleep cycles seem to roughly be 90 minutes give or take 10 minutes at the start of the night. In the morning hours (between 5 and 9), I've found that the time between falling back to sleep and waking from a recalled dream is usually about 50 minutes. Does that mean my cycles are shorter in the morning?

Gosh, this has been quite an epic first post! Sorry! Congratulations and thank you if you made it to the end!