So, this afternoon (CTZ 2pm-8:20pm, I have no idea on what timezone I operate), I finally remembered my first lucid dream. Granted, it was an uncontrolled lucid dream (I realized I was dreaming, but didn't or couldn't do anything about it), but still.
Method: Repeated in mind ad nauseum that I would have and remember a dream today (I remembered no dream yesterday, first time that had happened in over a week in over a week), and played a cd I made (1 hour 5 minutes of To Zanarkand from Final Fantasy X and Always on my Mind from Kingdom Hearts, then some less mellow bbut not loud songs such as Tom Petty's Running Down a Dream, ELO's Mr. Blue Sky, America's Horse with no Name, and two other songs I deactivated because they were on the wrong volume scale [PS2 music player qualitiues are cool]). The first cycle through, I stayed half awake until the CD player was already halfway through the Tom Petty song, then I had to restart it a couiple of times during the first sequence of songs, then finallyt I fell completely asleep but woke up having remembered, or possibly having had no dreams, exactly as the last repeat of To XZanarkand startyed before the Tom Petty song. So, I switched it off, dozed for a bit, fell back asleep for a couple of minutes, woke up, tried the Wake-Induced Lucid Dreamingtechnique, fell asleep, and woke up remembering a dream.
The dream went thus: I had decided to visit a group of people who I thought were psychologists* whose main stuy were dreams, but they were actually individuals who had studied their own dreams, and progressed with theikr dreams more than their lives to the point that they were almost like recent drug addicts, strung out on oversleep or lack of sleep, and out of the loop on anything not involving dreams that happened recently. I was annoyed by this seeming dead end, because althoutgh they would be a better source of information than psychologists, I had no way to get reliable information out of them in their sleepdeprived/sleeppoisoned state. I was about to leave when suddenly it was perfectly clear to me that I was in a dream, I thought "cool," may have thanked somebody in a free-broadcast semitelepathic form, and then conbtinued to leave, despite that I had just experienced lucidity, and still was. The instant I passed through the gate (wrought iron in a brick and cement wall), I woke up.

Well, I seem to have just remembered a lucid dream for the first time, even though it was an uncontrolled lucid dream. Possibly I accidentally used the mnemonic to wake up and remember a lucid dream a couple of times, and that affected it? Anyway, does anyone have any suggestions for trying to stay in a dream after realizing it's a dream, and perhaps trying to affect the dream environment, rather than giving into an apathy allowing me to wake up?




*I happened to miss the space there. Werepsychologists. funny. Freud would either be happy or indigniant.