Thread: Hi all, Joan's there! newbie with some experiences...

Hello Joan and welcome.

I am no expert but will give advise.
I'm not keen on you waking yourself up at this early stage of your LD endeavours and I would suggest that you allow yourself to sleep normally and concentrate on keeping the dream journal and doing reality checks and making them habitual.
If you wake yourself up during a REM sleep, you may disturb a dream or a potential LD from occurring. Making a habit of writing down your dream when you wake up will improve your dream recall and you will form the habit of waking up after a dream.
I have found that the best time for REM sleep and having a LD is during an afternoon snooze on the weekend.
Dont push yourself into trying to LD as frustration and anxiety will combine to inhibit your progress. Start with the journal to improve your dream recall and also do regular reality checks. Starting at the beginning will give you a better chance of success more quickly unless you are a natural at LD'ing.
How do you climb a mountain? One step at a time.

Good luck and best wishes.

Hello Ronstek,

Uhm... your advise confuses me now... what happens is that without waking up I nearly never remember my dreams. If I wake up in the night (the three nights I did so) I can have at least a picture of the dream I was having, and so I can write it down and know what kind of things I dream about. For instance, I could detect one case of "device not working", one of the signs to realize I'm dreaming.

Now I am for waking up two or even only once per night, just to keep it slow and to get some rest too.

I am not too disappointed actually. the way I wrote it is just a way to say that my dream recalls are small compared to some I have read around... but actually I am very courious about this and very glad of the small dreams I could recall.

Do you think just reality checks are enough to make my dreams recallable at all??

Thank you!

Joan

Hi Joan,

Didn't mean to make you confused and there are probably quite a few here that would disagree with my advice but that is there perogative.
Anyway. I believe that your dream recall will improve without the need to wake yourself up by simply doing a journal entry whenever you remember a dream, doing it frequently and making it a habit. Combine that with reality checks and an LD should come to you. Just doing reality checks will not improve your dream recall, you need the journal for that.
Give it a couple of weeks for the habits to form and then try to encourage an LD by using any of the techniques available to find what works for you. For me its WILD during an afternoon siesta.

Best wishes and good luck.