This is by no means a revolutionary idea, but I’ve been using this technique for the past month because I’ve become increasingly busy. It has cut down on the time I spend on LD stuff and increased my frequency of LD’s (WOOHOOO!!!).
Start by dividing your dream journal into weekly sections. I know quite a few people have two DJ’s, one which just has keywords (people, locations, objects, feelings, etc) they write down during the night, and one with full descriptions of dreams written out later. At this point I only write out full descriptions for dreams that I find particularly interesting, and just leave the rest as keywords.
At the end of each week, I go over all the dreams for that week and identify the three most prevalent dream signs. These are noted, and for the next week I focus my RC’s on those dream signs (not exclusively). For this part it helps to identify dream signs which exist IRL, so you can actually do the RC’s .
Since I have only been using this idea for a little over a month, I don’t know how it works in the long term, but it’s helped me to focus my efforts and have more frequent LD’s. If you think you’re too busy for a DJ, you may want to give this a try.
Any suggestions/variations are welcome. If you want to try it out, please post the results!
The trouble with keywords (for me) is that they make me think that I don’t need to memorise the dream in detail because the words will spark the memory later. Then, if I don’t have time to write up the full version in the near future, I come back to the keywords and realise I’ve forgotten almost everything.
It might work for some people, but personally I’ve learnt my lesson. If I want to remember a good dream, I’ll commit it to memory properly so that I can write it up fully!
I may just decide to do this in the future. I tend to notice when I remember one detail of a dream it usually triggers more and more memories until I can at the very least piece together what happened in a dream. On top of that, I generally record my dreams on a journal right after waking up, and later on a file in my computer when I have more time, so doing this would do nothing but save me effort in the AM when I really don’t feel like doing much. Thanks for the idea.
That happens to me as well if I wait more than a day or two to write out a dream in full. Ideally I would write out all of my dreams in full detail. However, I don’t seem to have much free time these days so that’s not an option. I just make sure I note the signs from each dream, and consider the ones I don’t get to write down in full lost.
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