Thread: Intro and a few questions

I've known about lucid dreaming for about half a year. Recently I found this page and decided to join. I'm also going to start my dream diary tonight. I've got one question about this, for the last month I've tried to remember dreams every morning (without a diary) but couldn't remember anything. If that happens tonight it doesn't really help to have a dream diary next to my bed. Are there any ways in which I can enhance the probability of remembering ANYTHING of the dream?
I've had a few lucid dreams before:
In one of them I was walking on a corridor with a few (unknown) people I did a dream check: looked at my hand and noticed it had 7 fingers. But I woke up almost immediately and didn't have time to do anything cool
In the second one I was walking trough an empty marketplace-like area, which I had never seen before. I realized it wasn't any place I would go to and became lucid. Suddenly a bus started racing towards me from somewhere. I kind of slammed my arms towards it and it's front side flew high into the air . After that I woke up
One more question: How do I "stabilize" the dream so that I don't wake up within a few seconds?
Ps. If anyone knows where I can find a cool picture of a wizard for my profile picture it would be appreciated.

Set the intention right before you go to sleep. I always felt silly about affirmations, but they just freakin' work. Tell yourself that it is a totally natural thing to remember your dreams that you will remember them. You can really empower this by trying to 'conjure' up the feeling that you've already attained this ability. Feel confident that it will happen. When you wake, try not to move until you've given yourself a good shot at remembering your dreams. Movement sets all sorts of processes in motion that distance you further from the state of mind you where in when you were dreaming. Good Luck . . .

Welcome! Hope to see you around! To stabilize a dream most people:
1.) Rub their hand together.
2.) Spin around.
Basically you want to touch anything possible to stimulate your sensed in the dream making it go longer.

Hey thanks for all answers!
I used the affirmation technique tonight and it worked very well! I remembered something like 5 dreams tonight I just wasn't alert enough to think of writing them down and went back to sleep. The dream I managed to write down was a weird mix of Cthulu, House (the tv series) and my confirmation camp . Didn't manage to become lucid though but I wasn't expecting I would as this is one of the first times I've tried

Welcome (Just recently joined as well).

I think also to keep being lucid longer you have to also try to keep your emotions in check...being too excited or panicked can throw you out of the dream very easily.

I'm going to try that affirmation thing tonight as well... While I have very good recall, I only remember one dream every night never heard of recalling more than one in one rest!

Welcome , bud. Stabilization can be done in various ways. Basically, you have to integrate yourself fully into the dream. How? Leave your real body behind, and shift into the dream body. Some people do that by rubbing their hands (their dream hands), or by feeling around in the dream, or simply by looking here and there. Try to activate as much senses as you can. Feel around, see, hear, smell. You'll find that the clarity and the vividness of the dream will skyrocket.
Good luck, and keep at it.

Thanks!
I took a nap just now so I could see a dream and improve my recall. again I saw a few shady dreams but only wrote one down . The one I wrote didn't really have a distinct plot and it might have been many dreams and not just one. Does the separation between different dreams get easies when you improve your dream recall or are my dreams just weird?

All dreams are weird, but navigating the weirdness gets easier. That is the thing about dreams though, you often just get dropped in somewhere. You might be remembering images from lots of dreams or your dream may just be jumpy as the mind free associates between images the dream and shifts from place to place or there might not be a difference between the two. If you think its excessive try yogic meditation/concentration techniques, trying to keep the mind focused on a single idea.

One does not stabilize a dream, one learns to stabilize themselves. You learn to "feel" what is going on with your own mind.

Its true, everything that is properly perceived is done so through 'feeling." In fact, I might even go far as to say that when you do become more stable and gain more control of yourself in the dreamworld, everything that is done or not done is accomplished through a initiating a particular 'feeling' first and foremost . . .

Thanks for the tips in dream stabilization! Haven't become lucid yet though
And I think I might have found my dream sign! It's a bit early with only three dreams, but in all of them I've been in my confirmation camp, which I completed about a month ago. This might also be only because it happened so recently though... Your opinions?