Thread: Hello everyone, just started my journey

Well, first of all, welcome to DV! You've come to the right place!

From what you wrote I can see you've really set your mind to lucid dreaming. That's great, and essential, but you need good recall to remember being lucid. You might have been lucid last night, you just haven't remembered it.

First of all, I recommend starting a dream journal. You can create a digital one here on DV or keep one on your phone or in a notebook. Upon waking up, write down every snippet of dream you remember. Try to move as little as possible, keep your eyes closed and wait for things to pop up. Once a word, concept or image comes to your mind, focus on it and more will usually follow.

Write the things you remember down in as much detail as possible. When you start recalling so many dreams every night that it becomes too time-consuming, you can start writing down key words or only recording the dreams you find interesting, but at first I think it is best to write down as much as you can.
During the day, try to remember your dreams a couple of times (without looking at your journal of course). Also, before going to bed, read through it once.

Something else that works amazingly (not only for recall, but LD'ing in general) is Wake Back To Bed or WBTB. This method has you waking up 90 minutes or so before you normally wake up, you stay awake for some time and then go back to bed. It increases your chances for lucidity since at this time in your sleeping cycle you will enter directly into REM sleep.

Above are some things that positively influence your recall, but they will not yield great results if there are other things harming your recall. Alarms can be especially destructive for my recall. They can just smash the whole dream/sleep vibe out of your head. Try to wake up naturally or with a smoothly rising alarm that doesn't jerk you awake.
Also, a consistent sleeping schedule is quite important for recall, as well as not being too tired.

You can find much more information on everything above throughout the forums, but I hope this can get you started

Thanks Eddie, some decent advice there. Maybe im changing so much at once i need to give it time, ive also only just started to stick to a strict sleeping schedule and still find it really hard waking up. The alarm idea i had never thought of, ill change the alarm tone now.

Im planning on trying the WBTB tonite, just it see if i can do it, also i heard drinking a large amount of water just before bed will wake you up after 2nd REM, allowing you to wake up more naturally then attempt WBTB.

Either way i guess ill have to just stick with it and hope for results.

Thanks again for your advice

The water method is one I started using a while ago and I've had a lot of succes with it! In fact, I don't really use anything else to wake up during the night (I do wake up quite often naturally even without water though). That said, it is not really something I plan to continue using. The end goal is to wake up through intent only (so I 'plan' to wake up at a certain time or every time a dream ends and it happens), but while working on that the water method works really well!