Help is required.

Yo guys, Aziq (the newb) here with yet more questions to be answered for me and possible future noobs. If you feel like it and have good advice please teach us noobs the way of the Lucid Dreamer!

Also i'm not gonna use abbreviations just incase people don't know the meaning of them.

So here's my problem(s):

1) At the moment i am focusing mainly on improving my Dream Recall, because i think having the best possible dream recall is great, even if you don't have a lucid dream you can still remember what you were dreaming about. Meanwhile i'm doing reality checks whenever i remember. The problem however is that i have times when i do them every 10 minutes (sometimes even 5 minutes) and times when i dont think about doing them for 2 hours straight because i'm so busy with school. So what's the deal with reality checks, do we do them whenever we think remember to do them and it's ok even if theres a 10 minute gap between some and a 2 hour gap between some?

2) Now problem nr.2 i'm facing. I wake up monday to friday on 7 AM in the mornings, by means of an alarm clock. I have an additional 2 alarms on my cellphone that wake me up around 6:40 AM to get myself ready to get up (yes i do require that because i'm a very lazy guy). The problem is though, in the weekends i get up at around 10 AM (because hey why the heck not?) and if i set my cellphone alarms for around 7 AM (waking up around that time shouldn't be a problem since my sleepcycle should let me wake up around them) i actually don't get woken up by them! I have no idea why i don't wake up, because i even set the volume of the alarm quite high to such a level that increasing the volume even more would be socially disrespectfull because i would wake up my family. So what can i do about this? i really want to try and be able to get up at 7 AM in the weekends so i can try Wake up Back To Bed techniques.

Thanks in advance for your advice, and your time for reading this thread!

Aziq

Hey Aziq, Welcome to DV.

To answer your first question, just doing them when you remember is fine, also reality over dreams.... So dont worry if theres a gap. Basically its not the frequency of RC's that does the trick, its the quality of each one. If you REALLY question your reality and take about a minute or two to convince yourself that your actually awake, your doing the right thing.

Maybe you are waking up, turning off your alarm and not remembering? This can happen. Its clear that the alarm isnt working for you. have you ever tried going to bed with the intention of waking up at 7AM... Maybe use a mantra "i will wake up at 7AM". That can actually work quite well, your internal clock is very good.
Also maybe try drinking water before you go to bed as you'll deffo need to wake up early.... And hope you dont dream of going to the toilet :cheeky:

I hoped this helped man.
Good luck with your lucid experiences

I always used to sleep through the night, and I really wanted to do WBTB.

So what I did was I told myself I had a plane flight during the night and I needed to get up at 4:30. I really told myself this, and I imagined not waking up and my family going without me, and me being stuck alone at home. I imagined that rush I would have to be in if I got up just a little too late.

Basically, I did the intention thing Nito89 was talking about. That night for the first time I woke up around 4:30. I then told myself this was good, and every night since then I woke up after my REM cycles around that time. It's now around 5am I wake up. I do an hour long WBTB, and do some techniques then.

TL;DR intention is the way to go, it helped me from night one and it still works without me even trying 2 months later.

For reality checks, I do them when I remember. Its the same thing, sometimes I do them 5 times in an hour. And sometimes 5 times for 5 hours.
The thing it helped me is that I always do them when something seems strange to me.
Also the thing that might help you analyze your dreams. If most of them occur in a building, do reality checks when ever you pass thru a door. If you dream of some friend often, do a RC when you think of them. And so on..

For the second problem it all depends on your goal. If you want to wake up easier at 7am you will need first to change the time you go to sleep.
Until a month ago I was staying up every night till 3am. Then I would go to bed, wake up at 12pm, and I was exhausted.
Now since I've been doing some organizing of my life, I started going to bed before midnight. First I was setting up my alarm clock at 9am, but after three days I started waking up before it.

6-8 hours of sleep is more then enough for a person of your age.
But this means going to bed at before midnight. And this also goes for weekends too. It will be hard at start, but when you adjust it will be easier and you will have more energy.
Also, you cant achieve this by doing it 5 days a week and then for weekends to sleep in late.

Some sacrifices must be made, the question is are you willing to do them and do you find it worthy...

Here's what I say about reality checks...

Don't worry about doing reality checks every set amount of time (every 5 minutes, 10 minutes, whatever). The main thing is to do them when it is necessary. I used to drive myself crazy trying to always remember to do RCs even when they weren't called for. That path only leads to frustration. Instead, do an RC whenever something seems out of the ordinary, when there is even the slightest possibility that you are dreaming. I've never had a lucid from a random RC, they've always been triggered by something.

If you start keeping track of your dreams in a journal, look for what are called dreamsigns, which are things that occur regularly in your dreams (they can be people, places, objects, events, you get the idea). Read the dreams you've written down and try to find these recurrences. I think Ivan452 was hinting at this above. Once you discover your dreamsigns, you can use those as another reason to do RCs. If you happen to come across one of your dreamsigns in waking life, you know "I'd better do a reality check now because this happens all the time in my dreams." Hope this helps out!

-RD

First off thanks everyone for your time and advice, i'll get to it immediately! :D

@nito89, you have a really good point there, i never really thought about doing really good reality checks rather than a lot of them. Someone to consider for the newbies definetely. Also the drinking lots of water trick doesn't do the job unfortunately, since i have done so for a while and it doesn't really wake me up anymore :cheeky: but that's ok i'll try the mantra thingy, i'm convinced it'll work a lot better than my external alarms.

@Ivan452, that's a nice idea there, my reality checks are usually really random and as you've said, after about 2 months of random reality checks i've had no results. Also i forgot to mention i go to bed at about 1:00 AM or 1:30 AM on weekends, which might be the reason i won't wake up at 7:00 AM.

@ReaLiTy_DReaM, i'm nearly driving myself crazy trying to remember to do reality checks at the moment as well :cheeky: it's quite frustrating as you say. And i'll be sure to try to be alert to anything unusual and make it a habit to do a reality check whenever i do notice something strange. I've recorded about 55 dreams now but i just can't find a common trait amongst them. Are there more people with this problem? because i think if i really could find a dream sign it would really help.

There must be a trait somewhere. Don't just look for recurring people or things, but also places and situations you are in, and actions as well.

@Avalanche I'll try to find some similarities between them then, it's also possible i'm just not noting enough keywords maybe. Also it doesn't help that i lost the first 30 dreams due to reinstall of the system :D. But i'll try my best anyway!

Well that loss may be a good thing. We often pick up dreamsigns from new things we do. Like if you watch a movie, often you will dream of it, possibly over a few nights. This doesn't make it a dreamsign though, as unless you watch that film over and over, it will fade eventually and you will no longer dream of it. You may have been into surfing around the days you were recording those 30 dreams. Odds are you dreamed about surfing, but once you stopped, it disappeared from your dreams.

Only look at recent ones, and update every month. The ones that stick are true dreamsigns. Often we don't have dreamsigns for life, but we usually have things in life that stay with us for a long time, and thus become dreamsigns.

Well, this might be redundant, but here's my word of advice.

1.) Reality checking at your own pace doesn't matter. Just RC whenever. As long as you remember to it's fine. But obviously, you'll forget while locked in school work. I don't RC anymore cause I'm confident I don't need to. But, when I still did, I did think people might be wondering why I'm pinching my nose and looking at my hands...lol.

As for recall, in time it'll get better. Mine's been bad recently, but I'm recovering at a good pace. You'll develop it soon. Even if you just remember ONE little image, write/type it down.

2.) I'm not sure what to say. Maybe you should ask your family to wake you up since they apparently get awoken too.

@ineverwakeup97 haha yeah i've been wondering what people think when i do a reality check as well :p and yeah lately i've been able to remember at least 1 dream a day with lots of keywords (lots of details!). So that's been getting better. Also i'm happy to announce everyone's advice here has indeed helped my life become easier with the reality check tips, and have enabled me to wake up at around 7:00 AM! thanks a bunch :D

It's not a problem!