Thread: DreamingNow's Workbook

Update

I'm not sure if my workbook thread is still active!

I haven't been posting in this workbook for a long time, just because I have been busy with school and other things. I've still been working on improving my LD practices during this time though.

I just about always remember at least one dream per night, sometimes even three or four if I wake up multiple times during the night. I record my dreams on my phone using the Awoken app each morning. I have had a handful of lucid dreams in the past several months, but they have all been very short. I usually wake up a few moments after attaining lucidity. In my most recent lucid dream (from a few days ago), I realized I was lucid and my vision started going dim. I tried focusing on my other senses to stabilize the dream (I know spinning is a technique many people use in a situation like this also). I ended up having a False Awakening, but I did not do a RC and did not realize I was dreaming!

I have been doing about 10 RCs each day diligently for the past few weeks now, but I seem to have difficulty with using techniques as I fall asleep. I have tried using the MILD technique and dream incubation and other similar techniques that require focus on a specific goal or intention or visualization, but I always seem to get distracted as I fall asleep. Sometimes it takes me a while to fall asleep when I am concentrating on something, including an intention like when using MILD, etc., and I think this makes it more difficult for me to focus.

Are there any day or night exercises/ practices to improve my focus so that I can concentrate on a technique fully as I fall asleep? Also, is there another class on DreamViews I should enroll in or anything like that?

Thanks so much! I really appreciate any advice!

Welcome back! As long as you're active, your workbook is also active .

Regarding focus and execises, I would suggest doing small visualization sessions during the day and try to keep that up for, say, couple of weeks or a month at least. Your focus should improve. You can also try focusing on the input of one or more of your senses, for example, hearing and keep your attention on it for as long as you can.

Originally Posted by NyxCC

Welcome back! As long as you're active, your workbook is also active .

Regarding focus and execises, I would suggest doing small visualization sessions during the day and try to keep that up for, say, couple of weeks or a month at least. Your focus should improve. You can also try focusing on the input of one or more of your senses, for example, hearing and keep your attention on it for as long as you can.

Thanks for the great advice NyxCC! I have been trying to practice the exercises that you described daily for the past week, and last night I had a LD! It was only a couple of minutes long, but that is probably the longest LD I have had to date. It is also the most vivid LD I have ever had- I can clearly remember one part where I was standing outside in my backyard. I could feel the breeze against my back and the warm sun on my face. I reached down and felt the grass, and I was amazed by the fact that everything around me really was just a dream.

I will keep practicing the exercise you suggested, and thanks again !

That's fantastic, congrats! Sounds like a really nice ld.

May 30

I have not had a LD in almost a month, but I feel that I am getting close. I have been maintaining the same daytime awareness techniques I have mentioned in my most recent entries (mainly RCs), but these past few weeks I have really made an effort to increase my awareness during each one, and I feel that this has made a big difference in my overall level of awareness during the day. NyxCC, thank you for the great advice you gave me about daytime visualizations. I have done that a few times and when I do I think it really makes a difference with my focus at night. Unfortunately, I have not been doing it as frequently as I would like. As school and exams will be over in a few (hopefully short!) weeks, I will have much more free time, which I plan to use to really focus more on LDing and visualization.

I have not made much progress during school weeks, which I believe is mainly due to the fact that I have to get up to an alarm and that I very rarely get a full 8 hours of sleep on weeknights. Because of this, most of my longer dreams have been on weekends. I also realized another issue that makes it more difficult for me to have LDs during the week is that my nighttime practices on those nights in particular are usually very poor. I usually finish homework very late, and by that time I am so mentally and physically exhausted that all I want to do is go to bed. Because I have not taken any time to think about dreaming, when I go to bed my thoughts are still very active and are centered around schoolwork and things like that. This really makes it difficult for me to focus on any technique.

On the weekends I am a little more calm, and this 3-day weekend was an extra treat. During the weekends my nighttime practices have been better. Last night, I listened to the DV podcast about DILD and MILD just before bed in order to get myself thinking about LDing. To the best of my memory, I think that all of my LDs have been DILDs or the result of using the MILD technique, but my level of lucidity was always very low. After I finished the podcast, I went to bed with a mantra and a desired dream scene in mind. I cannot recall now how much I was actually able to keep my attention on these, thought I most likely was not as attentive as I would have liked to have been. I woke up naturally about 6.5 hours later and decided to try a WBTB focusing on the same things that I had tried to focus on when falling asleep at the beginning of the night. I got out of bed, drank a little water, and walked around the house for a couple of minutes. At this point it was already pretty light out, which I think makes me feel more "awake" much more quickly than if I wake up and it is still dark out. I went back to bed on my back. I put my sleep mask on to block out the light, and I also put my headphones on and played an audio clip of white noise at a low volume that I often listen to as I fall asleep. I felt pretty awake for some reason though, so I decided to do the 61-point relaxation technique that LaBerge discusses in ETWOLD. I noticed several times while doing this that I had gotten distracted by random thoughts, but I was able to bring my mind back to the task at hand. I consider this a positive for me, because in the past, when I have gotten distracted, I may not notice at all and may completely forget about the task at hand. I finished the relaxation technique and then I began visualizing the scene I wanted to dream about. I have noticed recently that a frequently-appearing dreamsign of mine is the presence of a person whom I know but who recently moved further away. As a result, I do not see her nearly as often IWL anymore, but she is in my dreams quite often. I have told myself that I will do a RC everytime I see her, but this has not been very effective because I do not see her IWL that much.

As I was falling asleep during the WBTB, I imagined a dream scene that she was in. I imagined seeing her and realizing I was dreaming, and while I did this I kept reminding myself, "When I see her, I will realize I am dreaming and become lucid". I kept this visualization up for quite a while, but I had a significant amount of difficulty returning to sleep. I remained on my back trying to remain motionless for over an hour, but then this started to become very uncomfortable, so I took my headphones off and turned onto my side. Not long after doing so, I fell asleep.

When I woke up after that, I remembered two very long, detailed, but nonlucid dreams. In one of them, I was in a large, crowded building, and I was looking for the person whom I had been visualizing in the dream scene as I fell asleep during the WBTB. I had the feeling that I needed to find her for something important, but I could not recall what exactly. Unfortunately, I never found her and ended up getting distracted by something else, and I did not do a RC and did not become lucid. I wonder, had I found her, if that would have prompted me to do a RC and thus become lucid?

My plan for the next few weeks is to focus on the same desired dream scene every night (and during WBTBs) and to remind myself during the day and at night "When I see her, I will realize that I am dreaming". I think that the repetition may help me to better focus on this goal. Also, I will play around with the timing of my WBTBs a little more to find a better balance where I can fall back asleep more quickly. I wonder if it would be better to use an alarm to wake me up when it is still dark out (maybe after 4.5-5 hours of sleep instead of 6.5) and do a WBTB at that time instead.

Great update dreamingnow. It looks like your practices are becoming really solid so keep up the good work! The non-lucid dream where you were on the verge of finding your dream sign was a very close call.

Best of luck on your final exams and looking forward to the next updates .

June 11

Have not had a LD since my last update, and my dream recall this past week has been unusually poor. I think this is because I have averaged around 6 hours of sleep per night, and I woke up in the morning to an alarm clock and had to get up immediately. It got so bad that several days I woke up without having the faintest idea what I had been dreaming about, which is very frustrating for me.

I was able to sleep late today, though, and my dream recall was much better. I woke up early in the morning remembering a full dream, but I fell back asleep without writing it down. When I woke up a few hours later, I could still recall the general idea of the dream, but not in as much detail, and I also remembered another full dream.

I only have a few more days of finals, and then summer! I am hoping that I will have much more time to focus all of my efforts on LDing with exams out of the way, so that I can really improve my frequency and quality of LDs.

I have the same problem with school. My dream practice really came to screeching halt when I started graduate school. It just takes up so much mental space. One thing that helps me is not reading my textbooks in bed like I used to. I'm happy it's summer now! Good luck!

Originally Posted by dreamingaze

I have the same problem with school. My dream practice really came to screeching halt when I started graduate school. It just takes up so much mental space. One thing that helps me is not reading my textbooks in bed like I used to. I'm happy it's summer now! Good luck!

Another reason summer is so great!

I'm guilty of the same thing- I'm always reading in bed, and I think that sometimes this can make it more difficult for me to fall asleep at night. I'm going to try not doing anything I'm my bed except sleeping, so hopefully when I retire for the night I will be able to quickly fall asleep!

July 4

I believe that I am making progress in my journey as a lucid dreamer. The frequency of my LDs these past 3 weeks has been higher than in the past- I have had 4 LDs (all DILDs), including one just last night. I had not had a LD in the 6-week period before this.

It seems that I may have accidently acquired an unwanted schema that lucidity triggers either me waking up or a FA. In the earliest of these 4 recent LDs, I had a FA immediately upon realizing it was a dream, and I lost lucidity.

In the second, I became lucid, recalled my goal, but then had a FA before I had time to carry it out. I "woke up" in my bed, but I became lucid again because the mask I had been wearing over my eyes felt weird and I felt my body floating above the bed. I pulled off the mask, and then immediately woke up for real (did an RC to confirm it).

In the third LD, I became lucid and had a short period of time (maybe about a minute) where I was lucid and was attempting to carry out a preset goal. I somehow lost lucidity, because when I finally woke up for real I recalled the LD and then an unrelated non-lucid dream after it.

And, in the lucid I had last night, I had only a few moments (around 30-45 seconds) of lucidity, where I focused solely on taking in the details of the dream and increasing its vividness by engaging my senses. I then had a FA and lost lucidity.

I plan to combat this problem by doing a RC before I get out of bed upon waking up in the morning. Even if it is in the middle of the night and I am not recording a dream, I will still do a RC. I have been trying to do this the past few weeks, but not very diligently- I will often get out of bed and start my day because I do not want to be late, thinking "I'll do a RC later." From this point onward, I will not get out of bed until I have done a RC and reached a conclusion about whether or not I am dreaming.

My daytime practice these past two weeks up until yesterday has been very poor, with very little thought of LDing during the day. Starting today, I am getting back into my habit of doing a minimum of 10 mindful RCs each day.

Nice! Congrats on all the lds! The out-of-bed RCs are a great way to help catch more FAs and I think they can bring extra lds in general especially if you make them a habit.