Thread: ZAD's Workbook

Huge status report/recent thoughts post incoming.

Had three more lucids this morning, but as has been usual lately, they were pretty short and I didn't have much of my daytime consciousness present to remember my goals. I really want to sit down in my dreams and anchor myself so I can avoid both A) doing anything crazy too soon, and B) letting myself go along with the dream's narrative. I've also been finding that dream sex is almost inevitable when I become lucid (this is not the case in regular dreams), which is frustrating.

Some things I want to try:
Sit down and anchor myself completely at the beginning of my next lucid
Once anchored, order my subconscious not to wake up until I say so
Identify when the dream begins to fade, and do simple sums

As I'm rounding past 60 LDs since August, I'm realizing that I have the patterns and habits mostly down to get a good number of lucids per week, and that I need to shift my thinking from only "I need to get lucid tonight!" to also "I need to be ready the next time I become lucid". I'd really like to be lucid every night, but I think eventually I have to strategize sort of like "bulking and cutting" in fitness. In DV terms I guess bulking would be "Attaining Lucidity" (increasing your raw LD frequency), and cutting would be "Dream Control" (increasing the quality of each individual lucid in length, clarity, my own capabilities, etc.).

I've also been suffering with shoddy recall lately due to a lapse in DJ discipline which I want to remedy with another stab at using the method of loci. I've tried memory palaces and the peg system in the past for dream journaling, but haven't met much success with either of the two. Because of this, my aim this time is to combine them.

For instance, in the peg system you would use "run, shoe, tree, door, ..." to represent the numbers one, two, three, four, and then create a strong image/scene associating the element (gun) with the thing you want to remember (eggs), so in that case you would picture a gun shooting a bullet right through the egg, and imagine how easily it would break through the shell, how messy it would get, etc. (the grosser/more vivid the better). In the memory palace you simply place representative items of the thing you want to remember in select places around a place you know well or an imagined place, then take "walks" through the palace to remember and enforce the memories.

To combine the methods, I'm modifying a suggestion by redditor /u/JacksonD7 who's performing the AILD tests over there, who uses a palace made up of a ten-story building. Each of the floors is small and has three doors labelled "who", "what", "where", and put relevant people, places, items etc. in those. So for the combination method, I've decided to make the floors themed to align with the peg system. The first floor is an armory filled with guns on the walls, the second floor is a walk-in shoe closet, the third floor has greenhouse windows and is filled with house plants and bonsais, etc.

My hope is that this works better than either system in isolation. Better than the peg system because when I wake up after having these dreams and want to stay asleep enough to go back to bed, the part of my brain that would usually be able to create a vivid image linking the two things is not very active. Better than the method of loci for a similar reason, because encoding key people/places/things into items that I can place in the palaces uses the aforementioned part of my brain being shut off. So in this way I can kind of just throw the literal dream elements (people, places, things) into the rooms instead of having to actually synthesize an image on the spot in that state of mind.