Hello with a Few Questions

Hello all. I recently discovered lucid dreaming less than 24 hours ago. I have been fascinated, reading about it and quickly finding these forums. I am unbelievably excited for many different reasons and look forward to participating in this community.

I simply have a quick introduction to give a background for a couple questions for anyone willing to help. I do not usually remember my dreams and have not for a while. However, I do have several dreams forever implanted in my memory as vividly as any waking memories, so I have confidence that more can come. In my reading it also seems that dream recall is a trainable and acquired skill in which practice and patience will develop, which is also encouraging. On another note, I am very motivated to develop these skills and begin consistently encountering lucid dreams for various reasons. With that being said to give a bit of information, I have a couple quick questions.

Firstly, other than beginning and keeping a dream journal in the morning and writing down dreams immediately upon waking, is there any other repetition or action that I might do to develop or cause myself to remember dreams over time?

Secondly, how long should I expect for my first LD (assuming I am not any more or less "attuned" than an average person) based off the effort I put into it? (I plan on simply beginning by developing dream recall while making it a habit to do reality checks consistently throughout the day. I plan on being able to DILD before attempting any of the other methods.) And also, how long before I am looking at multiple LDs a week, assuming I am consistent and motivated in my approach?

Another question I have is how long is the typical LD for someone who experiences them consistently? Does it depend upon what time in the REM period one wakes up? What might be considered a long time in an LD? (I'm talking about something that is rare, but repeatable, not the world record.)

I think that is it for now! I really look forward to your helpful responses and appreciate you giving your time to help me out!

Welcome to DV and the wonderful world of lucid dreaming! :)

I'll see if I can answer some of these questions for you!

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Firstly, other than beginning and keeping a dream journal in the morning and writing down dreams immediately upon waking, is there any other repetition or action that I might do to develop or cause myself to remember dreams over time?

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I usually don't have a problem with recall, but I do get into dry-spells where I have problems with it. To drag myself out of it, I try a couple of tactics...

1) Drink a cup of apple juice before bed. There's a few people here that swear by it, drinking apple juice can help you to recall more dreams and more of your dreams.

2) Autosuggestion: Repeating to yourself as you're falling asleep, I will remember my dreams. I did this just last night and was finally able to recall some fragments of dreams. It's better than nothing!

3) Dream journalling your fragments: Journal it all, because you'll notice your fragments will start getting longer and longer :P

4) Pictures! I notice for me, adding pictures to my dream journal helps improve my recall.

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Secondly, how long should I expect for my first LD (assuming I am not any more or less "attuned" than an average person) based off the effort I put into it? (I plan on simply beginning by developing dream recall while making it a habit to do reality checks consistently throughout the day. I plan on being able to DILD before attempting any of the other methods.) And also, how long before I am looking at multiple LDs a week, assuming I am consistent and motivated in my approach?

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This is hard to say because everyone is different. There was a poll about this a while ago, it seemed most people took about 3 weeks from joining to their first LD. As for multiple LD's a week? Could be a month, a few months or years! That all depends on you. If you're planning on mastering the DILD first, I highly recommend reading Naiya and Shift's tutorials. They're first-class.

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Another question I have is how long is the typical LD for someone who experiences them consistently? Does it depend upon what time in the REM period one wakes up? What might be considered a long time in an LD? (I'm talking about something that is rare, but repeatable, not the world record.)

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Hmm... this, I don't know. For me, anywhere between 5-10 minutes when it happens.