Mnemonic Dream House (MDH)

The Mnemonic Dream House (MDH) - A bridge between waking and dreaming life

This is a technique, or rather, a series of techniques I’ve been thinking about for a time now. You might call it a lucid dream induction “system”. I have yet to actually test it, so you might think it’s a little early to make a post about it. However, since it would motivate me to work more with it, I thought it could be a good idea to share it with you.

The idea came from, well, a rather unusual source, I think. Recently, I’ve been interested in mnemonics (memory techniques), and read books describing various such systems. One of them consists of creating an imaginary house, where you kind of “place” things you want to remember. Actually, there’s no need to “create” your house, since you can use your own from waking life, or any place you know well.

I will now describe this system, and then go on to explain how I think you can adapt it to use it for Lucid Dreaming as well. Ok, so let’s say you want to remember 5 things you have to do by tomorrow: buy a ticket, meet a friend, take a walk with the dog, watch an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and hand in a clock for reparation. We have five key words (a very important term in the world of mnemonics): ticket, friend, dog, Buffy and clock. Just thinking of these key words should remind you of what you need to do, so all you need to do is to keep them fixed in your mind, somehow.

This is where the house comes into the picture. You will take a mental walk around your house and “place” the things at certain places. So, to remember the five things I just told you about, you could, for instance: see tickets come flying out of your front door when you open it, and go straight into your mouth; see your friend come out from the toilet chasing you with a large chainsaw, telling you to hand over all the tickets; see your dog jumping in and out of the refrigerator, becoming bigger and bigger each time until it explodes along with the refrigerator; see Buffy jumping out of your TV and thrusting her pole right through your heart; and then finally, see a large clock instead of your bed in your bedroom.

It might be useful to start and end the round walk at the same places every time, and follow the same route (this is essential if you want to remember the things in a certain order). You will select certain spots where you stop and look for things every time you want to check your “list”. In this case it would be the front door, the toilet, the refrigerator, the TV and the bedroom.

Okay now, so how does all this relate to Lding?

Well, the first, and maybe most obvious use you could have of this system would be to memorize dreams in the middle of the night, without having to get up in order to take notes in your dream diary. You would not have to move at all, not even open your mouth to record your dream on a tape, if that’s what you usually do. This would be useful for people like me, who have a hard time going back to sleep after getting up and moving.
Of course, the idea is that you will write down your dreams in your dream diary later when you have time. But anyway, let’s go on the idea itself.

First, you would need to examine your dream diary (if you have one) and select different types of scenarios that you often dream about. This would be a very personal process. For instance, one category could be dreams about your childhood (if you often dream about it), another could be about your family etc. Personal issues. Then, you would let one room represent each category.

Since often it’s enough only with a simple thought of something to trigger memories of whole dreams, you would make use of this fact in order to make mental notes in your dream house. Let’s imagine you dreamed about a wolf, and say it appeared in a dream about your attempts at mastering a foreign language (one of your categories). When you had woke up, you would then mentally take a walk to the room representing that category, and make an association with “wolf”. Let’s say there was a desk in the room with study materials. Then you could imagine a wolf sitting there studying complete with human outfit, or ten thousand wolves jumping out from one book and starting to dance ballet. It helps to make the image bizarre.

In the morning, you could examine your room, and “ah!”, the image of the wolf would appear in your mind, which in turn would trigger memories of the dream. And maybe you had literally filled the room with other dream memory triggers. The dream would come running back into your mind. Well, anyway that’s what I hope it would.

Since you don’t have to move yourself in order to write down your dream or record it on a tape, you have a much greater chance of being able to go back straight to sleep, and can move in directly to other LD induction techniques. This would be especially helpful for people with problems getting back to sleep once they have woken up (and moved).

My idea is that all this will bring the dream world and the waking world closer together, by building a kind of bridge between them (the house, that is). Just thinking about this house during the day and being there mentally should help you become more aware of dreams versus reality, and your own dreamworld, and hopefully it would make you dream about this house during the night, which could be a LD trigger in itself (you could combine it with VILD if you wanted to)

You often forget what you want to do in lucid dreams. You can make up a set of places in your dream house, which you associate with each action. Say, for instance, that you want to swim deep down in the oceans. Then you could imagine a hole in one of your rooms, full with water, and when you swim down there, you get to an ocean.

You could also do the reverse, do things to the house when you are dreaming so you can think about that when you are awake. I can’t come up with an example now, but it could be useful to reinforce the connection between the waking and dreaming worlds, somehow.

Ok, this is just some of the ideas I have. What I want is this house to be completely full of dreamy things and ideas. I want it to be a place you can go to during waking, just to get into a more lucid state of mind during the day. And I want your ideas and opinions! What do you think? Is it just too much or do you think it might be of some help?

Hi Larry Boy,
I think this is a good idea, though I also think it takes a lot of practice. Some people aren’t very good at visualisation, and may be a little put-off by the technique, but I personally have been using mnemonic techniques for years. In fact I’m at the stage where I’m able to count up to 100 in mnemonic form, ie sit, sun, seam, sore, seal, sash, sock, safe, sap, dice (which are 1 - 10 respectively, and onwards). Where did you learn your mnemonic techniques, from Tony Buzan?? I think I’ve read about this particular technique that you’ve posted, and I would certainly be willing to support it’s effectiveness for those who are able to visualise with ease. That being said, I’ve never used this particular technique but would consider giving it a try.

S

Hi Snape and thanks for your reply!

Most things I’ve learnt about mnemonic techniques I’ve read about in the following two books: Your Memory by Kenneth L. Higbee and Page-a-Minute Memory Book by Harry Lorayne. Both very good books, though the former is by far the more comprehensive of the two.

With “I think I’ve read about this particular technique that you’ve posted”, do you mean the one I first described, that you can use for remembering certain things (in this case, “ticket, friend, dog, Buffy and clock”) or the one I have proposed as a technique for remembering dreams (imagining a wolf, or whatever it might be, doing something in a certain “dream category room”)?

Yeah, I agree, this would probably need more practice and self discipline than conventional techniques, but at the same time I think it can be a way to make the quest for lucid dreams more interesting. I’ve been working with mnemonic techniques for quite a while, and one thing I can garantuee is that they make the tasks of remembering things a lot more fun!

As far as I know, mnemonic techniques can be used effectively for remembering virtually anything, and I don’t see why lucid dreaming, which involves a lot of memory tasks, would be an exception!

I will start to work with the technique tonight everybody, and try to take time to post my progress here regularly. Please give me your thoughts and ideas. And of course, if you’re willing to test the technique, I would appreciate it a lot!

Oh yeah, I will also need to describe the technique in more detail, step by step, later on, but first I need to test it out a little.

Ok, these are the first steps I will take tomorrow:

  1. Analyze my dream diary and make up some basic dream categories.

  2. Start to construct the dream house in my mind and walk around it mentally to get used to its interiors.

  3. Make my first to attempt to memorize dreams using the technique I described in the main post.

The first 2 points I will probably have to work on for some time before I get pleased with them.

I hope this technique will help me remembering dreams during school days, when I don’t have time to get up and write them down in the middle night, or even in the morning. Making mental notes should allow me to get back to sleep if I want to memorize dreams during the night, and at the same time perhaps be a better way to get in touch with the dream world than just scribbling down notes on a piece of paper. Just because of the simple reason that I will have to use my head a lot more.

You could even create specific objects in the room(s) of your dream house which represent your most common dreamsigns, and visualise interacting with these objects to signify the fact that you dreamt about them. So for example if you seem to fly a lot in your dreams, perhaps there are a pair of wings attached to the wall or maybe even a little ceramic statue of a bird - I guess whatever takes your fancy.

I’m quite adept at the ‘peg system’, whereby there is an image for each number from one to ten based on that numbers appearance (as below):
1 - Candle
2 - Swan
3 - Lips
4 - Sail
5 - Hook
6 - Worm
7 - Cliff
8 - Snowman
9 - Balloon & String
10 - Bat & Ball
If I woke up in the middle of the night and wanted to remember that dream, I could just associate one (candle) with the first theme of my dream, two (Swan) with the next theme, and so on - so I visualise them interacting. Then, at a later point, I could recall my dream by going through numbers one to ten sequentially and recalling what images were interacting with my personalised number system. I say I could do this, because I don’t, and your system has a more alluring element to it. I like the idea of mentally constructing a dream house, I might give this a go.

I agree completely that remembering things is more fun when this system becomes second nature. I recommend you read Tony Buzan, he really is one of the gurus when it comes to mnemonics.

https://www.roligakort.nu/create.php?uploaded=3314&file=file.jpg

Ok, so I have made a sketch of my dream house now. It’s still in its infancy, but hopefully it will give you a better idea of what I intend to do with my house.

First of all, I try to take rooms or places (a “room” in the dream house can be a garden or whatever) from real life to make them easier to visualize, but that’s just me.

Dream rooms 1 and 2 are rooms that represent certain dream categories, and I will use them to memorize dreams. The number will grow as I collect more dreams. I have only two basic categories now, Sweden and Japan, the former being my home country, and the latter the one I currently reside in. I let my (real life) room in Japan represent my “Japan-dreams”, and my swedish room represent my “Sweden-dreams”.

The idea is that you go from one dream room directly to another, rather than going through a corridor or something. This makes it easy to just add on new rooms as you go along.

“Room of lucid plans” is a room where I will, what to say, “plant” my lucid plans. I gave an example earlier with the hole in the floor leading down to the oceans (for those who want to swim there in their dreams). This room is directly attached to the VILD room. This is becuase, after I have done VILD successfully, I want to enter the room of lucid plans at once, so I can do what I want in my lucid dreams and not just walk around and do what first comes to mind (usually sex or flying).

The RC room is a place where I will go through my RCs. For instance, if I do reality checks every time I go to the toilet I can have a toilet chair in the room, which will remind me to do RCs every time I enter a toilet. In other words, this room is a sort of “preparation for RCs”-room.

The “dreamsign room” is a place where I will place as many dreamsigns as possible, so that I can prepare myself to become aware of them in my dreams. For instance, if I dream a lot about dogs there will be a dog or something relating to dogs there.

The “room of the subconscious mind” is just there to let your subconsciousness prepare a surprise for you. You’re not supposed to think about it or speculate about it in any way, just know that it is there, and then go there in a dream.

The stairs are there so that I can add a second floor with more rooms if I want to.

By the way, thanks for the support Snape. Your idea about having objects in the dream rooms relating to frequent dreamsigns is very good, and I will implement it in my dream house!

I like your idea to have multiple rooms, and in fact I was going to suggest that the dream rooms somehow be linked to VILD (which I’m currently practicing).
I actually applied my peg system last night, and as I suspected it works quite well. The only hitch is that I (and I think most people) tend to remember dreams in reverse sequence, starting with the most recent event and unfolding back to more previous events. I just disregarded the sequence and applied my first peg to the last dream event I remembered (ie Candle interacting with a terrace house, Swan interacting with a ghost, Lips interacting with a minefield etc).
I guess it’s not important what sequence you store the memories in, as long as they’re stored somewhere so that you can retrieve them.

I have a mnemonic room (almost Hogwarts style!) which I designed about seven years ago for remembering things. I may use this for my dream recall room. Let me know how you get on with your dream house Larry Boy - I’ll be applying my dream house from tonight to the remembering of dreams and I’ll post my results.

May even draw up a quick sketch of my DR room :cool:

I took a look at your design. Looks good - you plan to store all of your dreams permanently in this dream house? I did that for a while, but I used a 100 peg system (100 images to use as memory hooks) which seems to make it a lot easier and ordered.

Yes, please keep me informed of your progress!

I might combine the dream room technique with the peg system in some way if it makes remembering the dreams easier and more effective.

I haven’t considered storing all my dreams in the house. My idea was at first just to store them temporarily during the night and then write them down in my dream journal. But now that you mention it, I might give a try to store them more permanently. Maybe in a different part of the house, you could make a sort of storage room. There are mnemonic techniques for remembering dates and what happened on them, so if you associated the date of a certain dream with some of the content in it, maybe that would be enough. It would be cool if you could do it both ways - from the date to the dream and from the dream to the date. Then if you wanted more detailed information you could look up the dream in question in your dream journal, just by remembering the date.

Maybe you could even associate each dreamsign with the dreams they have appeared in, so that you could do a quick search through your dreams. You would make a sort of mental index. For instance, you could make a sequence starting from every dreamsign, that you add to every time it appears in a new dream. If the dreamsign is dog, you link it to fish (a dream where you are fishing), tree (a dream where you chop trees) and so on.

This dream index you could have in the dreamsign room I mentioned in my last post. It would be a good way both to become familiar with your dreamsigns and see what roles they play in your dreams. The dates maybe needs a room on its own, though.

There are many possibilities here.

1st, I cant see the sketch of your house. :cry:
2nd, Can you give any links to good sites about Mnemonics, and a few books, maybe more about imagery house. :happy:

If you can, thanks for your help, I think I will try out some of this stuff, sounds very interesting. :content:

Hi Bullseye. I have sent the sketch to you by mail now.

I would recommend these two books: Your Memory by Kenneth L. Higbee and Page-a-Minute Memory Book by Harry Lorayne.

At wikipedia there is some information about mnemonics, and links to other pages: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnemonics

Please keep me informed of your progress if you choose to try out the MDH method! :ok:

I highly recommend ‘Use Your Memory’ and ‘Master Your Memory’ by Tony Buzan. I have been using these mnemonics for the past five or so years:
https://www.buzan.com.au/products/use_your_memory.html

I’ve just bought all 4 of those books, lol. When I have a bit more time, I will start reading, and practising :smile:

It’s much fun Bullseye. I recommend you memorise your own personalised 100-peg system (the phonetical system that I described above). You’ll find it absolutely invaluable for everything. They’re great books.

Good luck with it,
S