Have A Baby! (it will help you with LD's ;) )

Quest for Lucidity General Lucidness
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added a little explanation in the title. I split the off topic about babies and how to raise them, and when to teach about LD’s in a new thread

Have a baby

I know that many of this board’s members are guys in their late teens, so for you guys, consider this something to look forward to at some point in your future.

My wife and I recently gave birth to our first child, a baby boy! As friends and relatives bombarded me with stories of sleep deprivation and warnings of this perpetual state of groggy, zombie-like feelings during the first several months of infancy, I decided that if constant sleep interruption is inevitable, I would use it to my advantage.

A quick background on my lucid dreaming history:
I had my first lucid dream almost 10 years ago and in the past two years have gotten the frequency of lucid dreams up to between 3 to 5 per month. This was much improved over my 3 or 4 per year that until 2005 seemed to be the best I could achieve. But in 2005 I started putting more effort into lucid dreaming, autosuggestion before sleep, reading various books and websites, and posting on this forum and I seem to be able to have almost 1 per week now, using only a nightly vitamin supplement of 100mg of B6 in addition to my own willpower. But there is obviously still room for improvement.

So, for me, one of the most challenging, yet rewarding techniques to induce a lucid dream has been WBTB and have a DILD occur thanks to my brief conscious time awake before laying back down. It has always been hard to drag my butt out of bed of my own volition without some external excuse driving me. Now that I am a father, my baby is that driving force.

Between diaper changes, feedings, and any other random cries, I have made the effort to pop out of bed and tend to my boy with an ulterior motive in mind….I want more Lucid Dreams! The bonus to this plan is that my wife gets more sleep to help her recover and sees my regular nighttime diaper changes as a sign of me being a good husband and father, waking up each night to care for our spawn (which I guess it kind of is, so that makes it a win-win situation for both of us).

My son is about 3 weeks old now and I am happy to report I have had 6 Lucid dreams since his birth! This has more than doubled my current monthly average, and the month is not yet over. I was very glad to have these results, as it serves as positive reinforcement for me to continue getting up with my son in the middle of the night, which will have its own positive impact by bonding me closer to him by spending more time nurturing him and tending to his needs than it would if my wife did most of the nighttime baby maintenance.

Also, as far as reality checks go, having your first baby is a life-changing experience. I took three weeks off of work to help out at home and have been around my little boy constantly. Now whenever I am dreaming and I don’t see my baby or it is taking place in the past before he was born (like those “back in high school” dreams), I pause and question where he is and why I don’t see him. This has prompted me to do a RC after realizing that things were not adding up correctly (my favorite is to breathe through a plugged nose) and has led to a lucid state on more than one occasion.

So anyway, I thought this was worth sharing, especially if anyone out there is going to be having a new baby anytime soon and wanted to jump-start their lucid dream frequency. I have had limited success with doing WILDs in the past, so hopefully this new routine will help me to increase my skill at that induction technique as well.

It just goes to show you, your perception of any situation will directly impact the way you view reality, and subsequently your resulting attitude towards that situation.

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Not to mention helping the declining birth rates in almost all of the Western world out…

But you probably weren’t thinking of that :wink:

Good post by the way dude :happy:

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Heh, I wish I’d met you and this board about, oh, 7 1/2 years ago :content:

Three kids later and ahem much older, I’m well-experienced with the sleep deprivation and such that goes with small children (our youngest is 3 this month). I’m just starting on the lucid dreaming thing and while I’ve yet to have one, I feel close every so often. It’ll happen. I just need to be diligent.

Something about sleep deprivation that I’ve read, that I’m trying to put in its right place is that it causes you to go into REM more quickly. By that logic, you should be in dream state more quickly too. Other things I’ve read have said that you need to get a good night’s sleep in order to get to the later periods of REM sleep, which are longer than those earlier in the night (or whenever you sleep), the rationale being that the longer you’re dreaming, the higher the chance that you’ll realize your dreaming and so on.

I realize this is drifting a bit off-topic, so I’ll bring it around. I’m not sure what effect the longer term sleep interruptions will have on dream patterns. I know that with our first child, the first few weeks were exciting and exhausting. By six months, much of the thrill was gone, and I just desparately wanted to sleep whenever I got the chance. Things stabilized somewhat and then we had our second and it started all over again. Our third was a better sleeper than the first two (who had acid reflux which could affect their sleep), but by this point I had a bit of a sleep debt built up :eek: It’s entirely possible that learning to LD from this position would be harder than keeping it up. I have just enough neurophysiology in my background to be able to fake up an explanation in either direction. Keep us posted, though. I’d be curious to hear what your experience is.

I split the off topic discussion about raising children into a new topic here

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oh god i remember when my mom and dad had my baby sister, it left alot of time to WILD :smile:
having a baby does help, even if your living in the same house, it doesn’t have to be yours and you dont have to be a girl

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I agree. Either caring for the baby or just having your sleep disturbed enough to get you out of bed would be sufficient motivation to assist in WBTB and maybe the WILD technique.

I actually floated in and out of my first WILD on Sunday afternoon (Christmas Eve). It was pretty scary because the sensation was so new and unfamilier. I can really see how practice would pay off for the WILD technique now, since my own fear of the unknown kept pulling me back to reality.

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Congratulations! Thats amazing. Ill remember it for the future.