Making research easier & Boring and Interesting dreams
I once heard that there is nothing more boring than someone else's dream. I don't agree at all, of course. Whoever said that originally, however, must not have realized that dreams by themselves are usually bewilderingly boring, no matter who is dreaming them. Let's face it, some of them can be drop dead dull.
And there's nothing worse in lucidity research than having to get out of bed and lose sleep in order to remember something you'd want to forget just as much as you easily could.
The next worse thing is experiencing said dream as it's happening. Not only are boring dreams undesirable for the reason that they are simply boring, they also do not captivate the dreamer's interest enough to look out for dream signs and act on them.
Lucidity and lucidity research are altogether easier and more fun when dreams are already interesting. The goal of this study is to find reliable means to have more interesting non-lucid dreams, so that the dreamer will be interested in whether or not the experience is a dream as it is happening.
"Interesting" may be different for each person, which compounds the difficulty of this endeavor, but it does not necessarily mean to have more vivid, longer, realistic, or more pleasent dreams. Any of these in the right combination can also make the dreamer uninterested in whether or not the experience actually is a dream as it is happening.
During my onslaught of boring dreams I have noticed that I haven't been engaging many purely creative faculties in real life. Certainly I've been using creativity in other ways, like creative problem solving, but if anything this has contributed to dreams that put me in a sticky situation where my thoughts go on automatic into getting me out! That's speculation, though. And there is significant creativity involved in reading books, but it's still anchored to something you know you don't control, which is not itself a productive LD habit.
But purely creative activities alone do not interesting dreams make. I have known a few artists who have boring dreams and don't seem to be very interested in lucidity in the first place.
So, it seems that one would do to both practice purely creative activities and alter the purpose for doing so.
Starting today I will draw for at least an hour every day for the purposes of having interesting dreams, not just to have fun, advance a project, or learn new skills, though none of these are mutually exclusive. This means that while drawing I will be thinking about how nice it would be to be creating these works in the dream environment, what kinds of things would take place, etc.
I have every reason to think that this will be successful, but I'll be documenting everything very thoroughly, of course, including the dream journal and the sketchbook. And I wanted to post this just in case anyone wanted to try a version for themselves. Perhaps there are other activities that would work, or others where people would find altering the purposes for them distracting.
I understand the simple answer to the question is "make your life more interesting, and your dreams will follow," but that doesn't always make one interested in whether or not the experience is a dream, either. The idea here is that a prolonged and leisurely enjoyable invested interest in the creative power of dreaming will simultaneously make non-lucid dreams more interesting and make the dreamer more interested in whether or not they are dreams. Thus, making lucidity and lucidity research a whole lot easier.
Dream recall down, LD frequency up
It's been a week and my dream recall has decreased, for the reason that I am now sleeping all through the night, without my natural awakenings. I think this is because I am more satisfied with my day after expending some creative energy through drawing, and that makes me more restful.
Although, yesterday morning, I had one of the most fascinating lucid dreams of my life. And it came from recognizing the silliness of a dream that directly tied into my thoughts on character and story development. Very amazing. It had to do with experiencing the topography of extra dimensional space. And at one time during the experience I thought, is this zero dimensional? When I woke up to write about it I found that I was lacking the proper words to describe it. It obeyed no familiar rules of perception at all. [Edit: I don't think I was actually travelling through different dimensions, just dreaming of it].
So, if I use a week as a period for comparison, my dream recall went down and my lucid dream frequency went up. I'm sure that there are many complexities involved here. That is the challenge of our research in this area. But I hadn't expected this at all.