No real reason to put too long and wordy of a post, but I've been at it long enough to say with confidence that meditation is negatively impacting my recall and lucidity.
Over a fourteen day period, I meditated 8 of the 14 days and had 5 lucid dreams in that timespan (I'm counting layer one experiences.) Only one of those lucid dreams took place on a night that I had done meditation the previous day. I even had two recall-less nights following days that I had done meditation. Recall-less nights are a very rare occurrence to me.
I also charted all of December 2016, though that data looks marginally better for meditation (Cause I did less of it ). I had 7 lucid dreams over the course of the month and meditated on only 12 of the 31 days. Only 3 of the lucid dreams happened to be on nights that I had done meditation. Also I don't think I'm counting any layer one experiences here. In december, the few lucid dreams that I did have were of higher quality.
My meditation routine is simple. I generally have two phases to my meditation. In the first phase I will clear my mind through counting and focusing on breath. When I first began practicing meditation over the previous summer I would count down from 100, then count down from 30 to settle down. But lately, I've found that to be excessive and so I halved the amount of counts to 50 and 15 respectively, but still return to the 130 if my mind is particularly busy. The second phase of my meditation tends to vary more. I either choose to sit in silence and meditate on the stillness, or choose to focus on a subject or theme.
I would do this routine twice a day, with it taking usually around 15-25 minutes to complete. But if the subject or theme is something I want to focus on for an extended period of time, they can go for longer. Generally morning meditations were silent or had a theme tailored to the day, such as focus, patience, or avoiding distractions and wasting time. Meditations done at night would have themes related to lucid dreaming, such as dream recall or stabilization. I was planning for these to give way to visualizations of lucid dreams that I would have once I started getting lucid more consistently, But since they've been so horribly ineffective and it seems impacting me negatively, I haven't yet had the reason to step away from meditations focusing on dream recall and attaining lucidity.
I've also included good old fashioned Reality Checks into the mix. I don't need to say too much outside of the fact that I've been logging them. I made the benchmark of five but on days when I'm motivated, often do more, and I do many that I never get around to logging. I also keep track of betime, generally shooting for <11:00pm. The reason I'm keeping this brief is that generally the days that I have been motivated to meditate are the same days I doc a lot of reality checks and go to bed on time.
You will also notice that I am not meditating every night, and that's because I'm hardly motivated to keep up this routine with it producing such poor results. I'm not posting my charts but the routine comes and goes for about four or five days at a time. (Four or five days of good meditations, RCs and consistent bedtimes, followed by four or five days of being unmotivated, inconsistent, if any meditation and RCing and a rodeo bedtime, upon which I decide I should try again and the whole thing starts over.) To some extent, I recognize that the effects of a regimen like this might not be immediate and that I should probably try sticking to my guns for more than a week. In fact, I see a drop off almost immediately, within two or three days where the quality of dreams starts getting worse.
If I were to place a realistic expectation on this routine, I would expect of myself that after two or three days, instead of the quality of dreams dropping off, it would start improving. I might not get lucid only a few days after starting, but I'd have some better recall and see some more stable non-lucidity. (But I haven't) Sure i've still got my fingers crossed every night that I'll get lucid dream.
So I need to know from you gurus, why am I getting these backwards results, and what can I do to turn this around?
(wound up being kind of a long wordy post anyways )
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