Recently I noticed something: if my NDs are more vivid and have higher quality, I usually become lucid. But if they aren’t, I don’t become lucid. So, I think if I could somehow enhance the quality of my NDs, I would have more LDs. Anyone know how?
The idea of vividness of normal dreams is closely related to recall, since training up recall also means remembering more details of the dream you just had, to the point your dreams become more vivid themselves as a result (by recalling, you are stating your interest in dreams, and they become fuller by this);
summing up, you should improve your recall. There is a very nice guide on how to in the Knowledge base.
Here’s also the idea behind this.
I have very good dream recall. When I say that a dream wasn’t vivid, it’s not because I didn’t remember full details. The dreams with the worst quality I’ve had were dark and faded around the edges, and were somewhat blurry. I’ve become only once lucid in a dream like this before, but I can tell you it had REALLY bad quality.
I sometimes have “low” quality dreams as well. In these whenever I become lucid everything is blurry (sometimes sounds are poorly-defined as well) and dim when I try to move around, and there is almost no detail. The LD’s don’t last for more than a minute or two regardless of what actions I take.
For me, the low quality dreams are almost always in the early REM cycles, and the higher quality dreams seem to come in the morning hours. You can try to focus your dream recall efforts there. I’ve had some success by being more observant of the real world than usual for a few hours before bed (of course it could be the placebo effect), but your mileage may vary.
Most of the time, this really is a dream recall related issue. Yes, you can have dreams where you’re dreaming blurry or faded but that’s pretty rare. Remember, the imagery are brain uses to generate dreams is derived primarily from our real life recollections of what the world is like. Our brain tries to model the word while dreaming, but without outside sensory input it is left “guessing” at what the world is actually like and bases its model of reality on past experiences. Think of any old memory, something distant. It’s probably a bit blurry and faded, and you can’t crisply recall any of the feelings or sensations of it the way you can of having stubbed your toe five minutes past. You probably remember most or all of the main storyline of the event, but none of the details are fresh at all. When my recall gets a bit lax, what you describe is virtually identical to how I end up remembering my dreams; they are faded and unclear, and I often feel as if I was a third party observer to myself. When my recall is crisp I remember dreams like they happened 30 seconds ago, smalls, sights, and interactions are clear in my mind, and I can clearly remember myself performing or perceiving these actions. It is important to note that in both cases I remember quite clearly what happened, it’s just that vividness of the dream with lesser recall is far less; I remember the events and sequence well, but it’s like someone sucked all the exciting details right out.
That’s a pretty exciting thought actually. It really shows how living a rich and full waking life, experiencing as many different things as we can, corresponds to a more complex and detailed dream life.
The concept of your brain reaching the ‘edge of its limits’ reminds me of a scene from this movie Dark City (highly recommended by the way - it explores themes of our memories and how they relate to our perceived reality. The main character even experiences a ‘lucid awakening’ of sorts) where the protagonist reaches the edge of where his memory goes to, and finds a brick wall, and I think a painted representation of what he thought was there on it.