Still need more tips...

Quest for Lucidity
1

I have read everything I can get my hands on and I’m wondering if I’m just too stressed out right now to do this…I haven’t recalled even one dream the last three nights, I’m having trouble feeling the validity of doing RC s, I know I have to trust the process, I want to do it very badly, but when I ask myself if I’m dreaming I feel like it doesn’t matter if I do it 20 times a day, that’ll never force me to do it in my dreams, as in, I don’t do other things in my dreams that I do all day, like brushing my teeth or watching TV…I don’t feel that my doubting is hurting me because I do want to do well at this I just feel a bit frustrated, like I end up falling asleep each night before I even have a chance to tell myself to remember my dreams when I awaken or to realize I’m dreaming or to even notice the hypnagogic imagery as I’m falling asleep.

I really need some advice from seasoned LD vets or even LD newbies, tell me what helped you the most to (A) recall dreams and (B) have your first LD?? I realize I can read the forums and the Net and EWLD till my face turns blue but I would like some specific advice tailored to my personal needs. I am very stressed, have to get up at five a.m. every day to drive 40 minutes to a methadone clinic, get medicated, drive 40 minutes home, get ready for work, go to work, come home at 5:30 pm, go to bed by 9 or 10 pm, I don’t have enough time at work to do RC’s because my job is quite hectic, it’s not to say I want to give up or only try it on the weekends, I just need advice for my situation! I try to read EWLD on my smoke breaks at work, I’m absorbing everything I can about LD ing in my spare time, that alone should help me in my sleep and it’s not! I don’t have time to do WBTB, I would love to try WILD, even on the weekend but am thinking I need to do MILD or DILD before I go as far as WILD, but maybe I’m backwards. Please, any help at ALL would be greatly appreciated…I think if I can successfully begin having LD s I’ll be able to manage my stress better IRL. Thanks, thanks, thanks!

2

Is that every workday or every single day that you get up at 5? You can practice WILD with WBTB on weekends.

Also, can you take naps or sleep after 5:30 pm?

3

Hello! I am not a vet LD and not a prof. at all but I think I can suggest you some tipst to get your first LD.
I managed to have LD with a dramatic method which almost only includes “programming” or “confessing” I don’t know how to call it.
I deal with LD for years but I have a poor frequency. But when I wanted an LD very much I did the following:
I repeated the words whole day:
“All my dreams are lucid”
“I will know that I am dreaming”
“in my dreams I realize I am dreaming”
“I am always lucid”
“I will notice any difference and strange and do an RC”.
I tried to repeat them with of course faith not just mechanically.
I found the first sentence the most effective.
I really told them a lot, more thousand times a day.
Yes, really. And it worked.
I told them( in my mind of course but sometimes loud)
during bus trips, during boring classes, and even during doing anything around the house… .
After about 3 days to 2 weeks(2 week was a limit because I always succeed in 2 weeks :smile: )
I had multiple low level LD-s and sometime higher ones. But they came without using other techniques or came very easily with other techniques.
This always worked independently from dry spells, fears, anything. It only takes a hard concentration not ot forget to repeat the “sentences”.

Because it is really important to tell them very much(more thousand times) just 10 -20 programming word is not enough for this. :smile:

Unfortunately when I stopped confessing the automatic lucid dreams also stopped after a while.

4

Mindfield what you were doing was MILD, but not as usual just before or during sleep, but during the whole day (you could even say its a form of lucid living). It is a kind of programming of yourself which can be very effective, and for me it is the best method to go lucid too.

5

For me I put a good amount of effort into trying to LD. Like I was probably focusing on it for 3-4 hours a day. I would take naps in attempts to get LDs and such. The first few I had were just spontaneous ones, its not as if I had control over haveing LDs at this point. But then, after I had a few LDs I began to think “Hey, I can do this” and then I started getting a few more and then just became confident that I could have lots of lucid dreams. After I realized that I was able to LD at will

You mentioned that you say you fall asleep before you can even began reapting a MILD mantra. This implies to my that you fall asleep extremly fast… which means that WILD would probablly work well for you.

Oh, one other thing, WILD and MILD are sperate technqiues, you don’t need to be good at one before you can gte good at the other. There are plenty of people who are great at WILD and pathetic at MILD and there are people who are great at MILD and not good at WILD.

Hope this helps a little.

6

Monday through Friday I get up at five, on Saturdays I get up to an alarm also, not as early but maybe around six, to go to the clinic…so this only leaves me with Sundays with no alarm and possibly no stress.

I can’t really nap after work or I won’t be tired enough to go to bed at my “normal” time. I’ve tried to go to bed around seven so I can do a WBTB around one or two a.m. but when life is 90% maintenance (anybody see Taken on SciFi last year? :wink: ) it’s really tough. It’s unfortunate since I prefer dreaming to waking life (is that sad? maybe not so much in this forum), but it takes a certain amount of time after work each day to do necessary things like eating and housework and bills and hey, maybe watch a TV show once in a while, just unwinding if possible. :content:

I hate to think that I can only devote the weekends to my waking dream of lucid dreams.

Thanks, that’s definitely encouraging. I’ve read that it’s easier to do WILD after a WBTB or during a morning or afternoon nap than it is at bedtime, but I’m getting ready to try it tonight anyway and then again in the morning after I get home from clinic, that should qualify as a WBTB / morning nap. After clinic I’ll have been awake for a couple hours and will read EWLD to keep my mind on it.

I know that LaBerge says you should be able to recall at least one dream a night for a week before you try to have a LD but I have always been able to recall my vivid dreams, it’s just that I’ve been way too stressed lately, I know how to recall dreams, that’s not really the problem (even though I know I asked for advice on that subject). He says what’s the point of having a LD if you don’t remember it, well I’m totally convinced that when I finally do have one, I’ll definitely remember it because it seems so amazing after reading everyone’s experiences that it’s not something you can easily forget. (No matter how stressed out I am!)

If I can’t get WILD to work, I’ll go back to trying MILD your way…a thousand times a day if necessary. I’ve even made a business card with “Am I dreaming?” that I keep in my pocket and look at it during the day but I feel too mechanical as you say. I have trouble with the prospective memory part of it, as badly as I want it (not so badly that that’s what’s stopping me, I think), I have trouble when I tell myself I want to realize I’m dreaming and then when I wake up and recall a dream I had, I think how the heck is that thought of “am I dreaming?” ever going to come into my sleeping mind? Maybe this is why I’m a better candidate for WILD than MILD, we’ll see…I hope I’m not coming across as doubtful or skeptical, quite the opposite, I mean heck, if I didn’t have an open mind, I wouldn’t even be here in this forum in the first place! I also hear once you have a LD you realize how easy it is, I can’t wait for that day to come, I just feel like I hope it doesn’t take months to achieve it like it does for some people. :cry:

Thanks to all of you, everything you said was helpful, wish me luck, I’ll be sure to shout it from the virtual rooftops when I finally have a LD! :content:

7

I tried WILD last night but I guess I was too tired, I started relaxing my body while trying to keep my mind awake and my arms actually started feeling sort of numb and heavy and relaxed but I was still noticing too much going on around me like my boyfriend snoring and the heater running but the relaxing feeling in my limbs gave me more confidence, unfortunately before I got to the hypnagogic imagery stage, I guess I fell asleep mentally and physically. D’oh! :ack:

The good news is, I woke up at three a.m. and recalled dreaming, it was a bad dream but not a nightmare, but I didn’t recall enough to write it down before it was gone, so I got up, read the forum for 30 minutes to try a WBTB, went back to sleep, got up at six, knew I had another dream, but again I was too concerned with what was going on when I awoke to record it in my DJ so I forgot it, I could kick myself for not writing that stuff down first. :blush:

I have already noticed a dreamsign from the few dreams I have recalled in the last two weeks though, I am estranged from one of my sisters and she has appeared in two out of three dreams lately so if she shows up again in my dreams, I should be able to say, “hey, she shouldn’t be here since we don’t have a relationship, so I must be dreaming”, it’s just a matter of my brain remembering to become lucid. :hmmm: I kind of feel like maybe I should be enjoying this pre-first LD time in my life though because once it’s over I’m sure I’ll never be the same again, kind of like transitioning from childhood to adulthood, if that makes any sense.

I may or may not take a nap today to try another MILD or WILD because I unfortunately have a lot of stuff to do but maybe I need to prioritize a little better and make LD s my #1 priority on the weekends although I hate proscrastinating on my real life chores, I wish I had a clone sometimes. But if I don’t do a nap today I’ll definitely do one tomorrow and post my progress in case anybody has any more advice for me. Thanks again to all, sorry if I tend to type too much but I usually have a lot to say. :content:

8

After a week of zero recall, last night I remembered three dreams! Woo hoo! If I can just keep it up for the next week, then I should definitely be ready to try MILD or WILD. I didn’t end up having enough time to nap and do WBTB / WILD this weekend and I do have long holiday weekend coming up where I actually have three days off from the clinic so better luck then, I say!

The first dream I recalled last night was after my first REM stage and I actually dreamed about my waking life preparations/studying for lucid dreaming, so hey, it IS entering into my dreams, now if I can just remember to do enough RC s and have them enter into my dreams, I should become lucid at last. :dream:

My other two dreams were both recalled when I awoke to my alarm clock and I’m pretty sure they were both in separate REM stages so wow, good recall, props to me, I’ve never recalled three in one night and especially two upon waking! The last one was about me catching snakes for their venom, why?? LOL, and the one before that was influenced by a newspaper article I read about a car accident I saw last week…I won’t go into details because I’m on my way to work but I hope someone is still reading this topic because I would like some feedback. I actually told myself before bed that I wasn’t going to get all uptight about recall anymore, maybe that attitude helped? What does anyone think? :help: Thanks, off to work now.

9

Well, I’m still not having full dream recall, probably because of my stress level and busy schedule. I find it hard to commit myself 100% to doing waking RC’s and saying “am I dreaming?” because I’m just so damn busy but I really want to have LD 's, I just feel kind of stuck. I do feel that I’ve made some progress though, as I shall explain:

I feel in my ND 's that my brain is never fully present, I guess that’s why they’re ND 's and not LD 's, but in one of the last few dreams I recalled, I remember looking through a sliding glass door and thinking actual dream thoughts about what I could do to improve the deck that was out there, so to me that is being one step closer to lucidity, albeit a slow step. I don’t recall having an inner monologue like that in any dreams in the past (if I did, I don’t remember them, or it wasn’t to that extent). Usually I just act in my dreams, I don’t really think in them (which is why I’m afraid my success at this will be a long time coming), if anyone can understand my meaning.

Any more advice for this stuck dreamer? :help:

10

I’d say you’re trying too hard. Getting stressed about it and feeling you NEED to LD isn’t going to make you realize you’re dreaming.

You said something about methodone. I don’t mean to offend but isn’t that something you replace drugs with to beat the addiction? That could be messing with your sleep, or even the effects of the drug you were taking before that could have contributed to this problem.

My advice, even though I’ve never had a LD, would be to give it a rest until the next Sunday when you can try a WBTB. Your life seems a bit too busy on the other days, and as you said that’s affecting your dream journal.

Another thing I think you could do is ask the people at the clinic if methodone could be affecting your sleeping. It may be that, or it may be the stress, or you may just need more practise. You never know, the night you decide to give it a rest could be the night you LD.

11

Thanks for your post…I agree that stressing about it doesn’t help so I try not to even though it might sound like I am. I have noticed that when I’ve taken a break from thinking about it that I’ve had better recall but it doesn’t always work that way.

I don’t know if the methadone affects me or not…I seem to sleep better now than when I was still hooked on opiates. I don’t feel that the methadone affects my dreams like opiates did, either…they used to give me bad dreams quite often.

And for the record, I had no dream recall last night again…I got woken up at 4:37 a.m. to some loud noise and it was my boyfriend stubbing his toe on something and I was pissed because I only had 25 minutes before my alarm was to go off and those thoughts ruined my dream recall. I think the weekends are my only real chance at this point but if I’m to recall dreams each night for a week before I try to have an LD then I guess that advice is not for me, I’ll have to try to have LD 's when I feel I’m ready instead of after recalling for a week as is recommended.

12

Seems you are EXTREMELY stressed here. I have the same problem sometimes. I highly encourage you to try meditation a couple times during the week after work. Get comfortable and get alone in a room. And just meditate for a while. This relaxes everything mentally and physically. When your finished, your worries will be gone, and you will feel like a whole new person. You will feel completly refreshed. This has helped me to relax…and therefor it helped me obtain a few LDs when my stress meter was a little over the top. Too much stress can mess you up…so denote some of it. Good Luck!