Hello everyone!

In this post I will shortly introduce myself and describe my current progress with lucid dreaming.

I live in Switzerland and I'm currently in my first year of college (Computer Science major); [insert typical bland introduction here]... I will cut this part short and move on to the more interesting part.

I first became familiar with the concept of lucid dreaming after watching the movie Inception, but I didn't give it much thought; for my sleep deprived self it seemed that a lot of work and dedication were needed and I hadn't considered all the things you could achieve with lucid dreaming. So I let the subject sleep for a while and it wasn't until recently that I set my mind into seriously trying to become a lucid dreamer. I surfed the web for information, read Dr. Labergue's book and one thing seemed clear: I had to improve my dream recall. And so I went with my dream journal trying every morning to remember my dreams in a half zombie state, but it was worth it; under two weeks I went from one dream recalled every week to peaks of 3 dreams per night. During the day I also did as many reality checks as I could and it seemed to pay off as I had a lucid dream at the end of these two weeks.

As a side note, I don't believe this was my first lucid dream; when I was much younger I was able to get out of nightmares by forcing myself to wake up, unfortunately I never used this to control the dream actively. My dreams seemed also much more vivid back then...

After this breakthrough, I made the big mistake of putting away my dream journaling and focusing only in induction methods. My recall went downhill from there and I quickly lost what I had gained. Since last week I'm attempting to get my recall back and I have already recorded 10 dreams (having more time to sleep really helps). I want to try MILD but as I use a mantra to remember dreams I don't how I can mix up the two (I don't want to use an alarm to wake me up at night). Can you use a mantra to wake yourself up after every dream and recall them? My dreams seem also very foggy; does it get better with time? Because I really struggle to extract stories from these vague images that greet me every morning.

Thank you for taking the time for reading this and I'm looking forward to your replies.