I have recently decided to try MILD as a method of reaching lucidity. From what I have read, prospective memory is a must. I have tried to develope but everyday get misses, it seems as though I never get a hit when I see something thats supposed to trigger in my head. Like I choose three a day like, next time i go to the bathroom, next time i see a traffic light, next time i sneeze. I never seem to get hits. Does anyone know how long it takes to develope this memory?
i’m not sure exactly what you mean by prospective memory. it sounds a bit like reality checking what you describe.
for MILD you wake up after a dream, remember the dream you just woke up from, and while drifting back to sleep and visualising that dream you repeat to yourself that you are dreaming. Very basically.
(have you read the MILD chapter on the main site?)
good luck MILDing!
Well prospective memory is remembering to remember, pretty much practicing to remember stuff in the day and once that gets better it will be easier to remember stuff in your dream. You develope it by doing a RC at trigger points in the day. When you MILD, you are using your prospective memory, remember to remember your dreaming. The skill apparently makes MILD a lot better.
Another question I have is if it is cheating or pointless to know the trigger point is comming up and do the RC when you get there. For example, i need to go to the bathroom and going to the bathroom is on my list for today. Is realizing to do RC and walk in there knowing to do it cheating? I mean I cant help knowing but is that helping?
Maybe it helps if you only try to remember e.g. two triggers a day at the beginning. Once your memory is better, you can do it with three, four or more.
Don’t know if it is effective if you “cheat”, as you call it…
Maybe you should only chose triggers like a dog whos barking or someone calls your name, so you cannot cheat?
Steve
You know steve thats a great idea, that would prevent me from cheating! So how long does it take to see improvment if if you practice every day.
I don’t know how long it will take for you to see improvement. I tried this too, but I forget this lot. I did combine this with RCing too, but mostly not. You trigered me to do this again 
I remember this from a book I’ve read. This is a bit more detailed. I’ll explain it.
You have two kinds of memory exercises. The one you do during the day and the one you do before you go to sleep. With the first ones you’re being training your prospective memory. This is the part of the memory that concurs with the future.
The exercise is that you have the intention to remember that you are doing this exercise. For example you are going to let your dog out in an hour. Now you say to yourself “At the moment I’m stepping outside the house with my dog I’m going to remember that there was something special” (it was a part of this memory exercise) Imagine how it looks when you step trough the door for around 10 seconds. And then say to yourself “If I do that I’ll remember there was something special” (it was a part of this memory exercise).
You’ll do this multiple times a day, for different things. If you say for the first time something to someone on the day, if you go to LD4all, if you walk on the street, if you go to the bathroom, etc. You can think of a lot of things. As long as it is in the future – ten minutes, hours away from now – it is okay.
After you did the thing I described you have to try not to think about it anymore. This can sometimes be hard, but just try not to give it to much attention. If you remembered there was something special the memory exercise succeeded.
The second kind of exercise is the one you do before you go to sleep, or when you wake up in the middle of the night. It is like MILD then, for further information about that you can go to the MILD sticky 
I had a similar problem with those prospective memory exercises Grasswar, so after sixteen days - setting four targets a day - I gave up 
I didn’t notice any correlation between my prospective memory exercises and lucidity or induction techniques, though I probably didn’t give the exercise enough time to have any significant effect on my prospective memory.
I may consider the prospective exercise again, though I found it takes a lot of time/effort to pick targets, attempt to remember to rc when you see them, and to record your success or failure.
Would certainly make good research to find the correlation between prospective exercises and success at MILD
When you first start training prospective memory, you can cheat as you call it. If you are having a lot of problems with this, then start small. If you know that you will have to go to the bathroom in five to ten min’s, then use that. Tell yourself that when you go, you will rember to do a RC. As you get in the habit, then you will start rembering every time you go to the bathroom even if you didn’t tell youself befor going. Once you get some training with one thing, then you can start working on another. The training should transfer to the new trigger, i.e crossing the street etc. Each time you add something it should get easyer. If you start with high goals, then it will be much harder.
So start small so you get lots of success right from the start, then you will be more likely to stick with it and sometime rember to do it in a dream.
don
I couldn’t be bothered to think up what targets to use either so I made a list of loads of them and a way to randomly choose some here (near the bottom of the page). Some of them may not be relevant for everyone.
Add more to the list if you like!
[mod]No, please don’t. Or else, the BIG MILD topic will tranform into a playground thread. 
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[Serbitar edit]
Ah…good point. 
[/Serbitar edit]
Edit: I just had an idea for hitting the targets. I normally use a variation of this for retrospective memory like a list of things to buy in a shop. (I know thats prospective, but going to the shop doesn’t trigger the memory, I just count upwards from 1 and the numbers remind me of the things to buy).
Choose some targets:
- The next time I juggle;
- The next time I see an advertisement;
- The next time I go into a shop;
- The next time I hear someone say my name.
Then you need a mental image to represent doing a RC, for example a watch.
Then all you do is link the image of the RC to an image of each target in some wierd way.
I would imagine:
- Juggling lots of huge watches;
- A huge billboard with a big picture of a watch with the words, ‘Am I dreaming?’;
- Hundreds of watches flooding out of a shop onto the pavement when I open the door;
- A big watch standing, facing me shouting, ‘Serbitar! Are you dreaming?!’.
If it works, the next time I juggle it will trigger the association I made with a watch which represents the RC so I do a RC.
It may sound silly to you but it really works for retrospective memory. The trick is to exaggerate the visualisation in some way: size; number; swap the roles around; or anything wierd!
I’ve been trying to do some prospective memory techniques today. I started off using Inf3rno’s advice of trying to do an RC every time you work through a door. I had some trouble with that but I would always remember like five seconds after I had walked through the door, like the check was going on in my short term memory and came up ever so often just not at the right times.
I also tried to do one when I saw grass and then expanded it to the color green, which worked surprisingly well for me.
I don’t actually do a real RC though, I normally just ask myself “Am I dreaming?” and try to think through my current situation, look at my hands, stuff like that. I don’t really have much faith in some of these checks like holding your nose, but I know that if I ever really think about if I’m in a dream when I’m dreaming, I always deep down know it.
I’ve done about 100 of these checks today; I wonder if it will affect my dreams tonight.