So I went to bed last night really hoping for my first LD. I had been reading about mantras and commanding your SC before I went to bed and decided I wanted to try that. Problem is, morning after morning I wake up at or near 2:00 and then go back to sleep. So I added a mantra to my mantra list for going to bed. Here it is:
“I will remember my dreams.”
“In 5 hours I will realize that I am dreaming.”
“I will not wake up until 8:00 tomorrow morning.” (to prevent waking up at 2:00)
So I repeated these in order over and over. When I woke up, I couldn’t remember a single thing about my dreams. I believe that this is because: A) Too many mantras confused my SC, muddling the commands and B) The present of the word ‘not’ in the 3rd mantra. I remembered just recently that using ‘not’ in commanding your SC is a no-no.
Do you think that these reasons explain why I didn’t remember my dreams? To resolve this, what should I go about doing tonight before going to bed?
Have you considered taking advantage of your usual 2 AM awakening instead of trying to surpress it? Many techniques work by putting a little wakefulness into the middle of a long period of sleep, usually thinking about lucid dreaming until you fall asleep again. Also, try one mantra at a time until you make things habitual, e.g. start by striving for recall, then once that happens effortlessly, switch it to realizing you’re dreaming.
I’m hoping to see you succeed if only to read the entry in your dream journal about the goal in your sig.
Thank you, thank you, yes I can’t wait for that goal either. I actually read about utilizing waking up in the middle of the night. I’m going to attempt the WBTB method next time I do wake up. I printed out a twelve page wikipedia article to read before I go back to sleep, that should work.
Ah, Dablooey. Good to see you integrating into the forums a lot.
Anyways, yeah, what thorn said. Try to use those 2 am wake ups to your advantage and focus on working on recall first. I tried the mantra thing around 2 yrs ago. It worked initially, but I think I got frustrated as it didn’t produce too many LDs that I could remember. Now, I’m focusing on recall alone until I reach at least a full dream a night, no fragments for a couple weeks.
Oh, and recall and LDing go hand in hand. If you have a high recall, chances are you’ll have frequent LDs.
