changed topic to make it clearer. Old title: I have an idea!
Like the title says I have an idea. It sounds pretty dumb and I’m not making anyone try this, just something I thought I would share. Alot of people write Dream Journals down, to remember dreams and such. Why not write a day dream journal ^^ A journal for whenever you find yourself day dreaming, and it can help with awareness as well. Because you’re aware that you’re daydreaming, so you notice it, and write it down. Hey…it may help with LDing…just maybe
My psychology teacher made us start writing one along with a dream journal, and it sounded really cool.
As I mentioned in the Mindfulness of Lucidity thread, (that would be in Theory of Lucidity) meditation can help in increasing awareness about your current situation, since most of the time we end up daydreaming without realizing it. I suppose a day dreaming diary might help in increasing awareness, although I’m not too sure about it. Promoting day dreaming seems to be the opposite of the goal of increasing mindfulness in meditation, but the concept of a daydreaming journal might help you to better understand how your mind works, so it might be worth a shot.
Give it a try: you never know if it will work unless you do so!
I read somewhere that a great way to get rid of the background noise in your mind is pay attention to it—transform the stupid nonsense remarks and remainders in actual thoughts and give them some of your time. So if your mind is beeping: “I need to buy a new pen” while you do other stuff, you should stop, think “why do I need a new pen? when will I get it?” make a decision and the thought would vanish.
Perhaps it’s the same with daydreams—if you focus on them, they cease from being noise and actually become sound, so to speak, so that would be a quite ingenious way of achieving mindfulness. In fact, if you start to write your daydreams, you’re reallocating a useless feature to a useful function—you’re making something that was otherwise useless become a major source of inspiration and creativity.
Thus, you’ll be focusing on less things, for once you started doing that, you won’t start daydreaming unwillingly while you’re trying to write an essay—because daydreaming would have become part of the essay–writing function and thus you’d be willingly daydreaming while you wrote and making use out of the daydreams. In that sense, you’d be in charge of your thoughts: more power to yourself, which means you’re one step closer to minfulness.
As for the relation of keeping daydreams and lucid dreaming: I think it could help you with the recall, and boost your motivation, but I’m not sure if it would directly relate to LDing otherwise. Then again, this whole post is just speculation. But I think that even if it’s just for the motivation, it’s worth a try; and in the non LD related sense it’s definately worth it: self–knowledge and a bigger control over yourself is what you get from it.
Yeah I really didn’t suppose it could really help directly for inducing Lucid Dreaming, but I just thought it might boost awareness of some sort. Very good replies thank you
I think this idea is brilliant! It should make you much more aware of what you’re thinking all the time. You should write up an experiment on it. I’m in!
Vi, you might be interested in checking out the Lucid Living topic and the Lab Research on it. The concept of lucid living is being aware all the time—
Using daydreams for self awareness would be a similar concept to lucid living, so I figured you’d be interested in the topic. On the other hand, lucid living is more lucid dreaming—oriented, while in this discussion about daydreams, we only especulated it’s possible that it would help you be more aware, but it would be mainly a self–improvement thing (like meditation).
I myself cannot run an experiment right now due to lack of time, so if Melissa or you want to prepare an experiment to check how daydreams can help one on their quest for lucidity, feel free to write the proposal.
I have seen the lucid living topic. The subtle difference between the two, I think, is the direction of the focus. In LL, I feel like it’s about observing the world in a lucid manner, as you would in a lucid dream. Being aware of your day dreams I think is more internal, where you’re focused more lucidly on your own thoughts rather than anything around you. Internal vs external observance! Which would be more helpful?
You know, I read the first part of this, and I immediately thought, “Ack! I can’t do that! How am I supposed to write it all fast enough!? I’d never get anything done!” And then it occurred to me that really, I already do it.
I have a seriously overactive imagination. I write a lot, and I draw a LOT. It’s always just been instinct for me to take note of what my brain was doing, and writing and drawing constantly really gives a clear picture of what’s happening inside there.
This could definitely help some people with LDing, mainly those who notice that they have different thought patterns in dreams. For me it doesn’t really work that way, but I think a lot of people could benefit from something like this.
