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?