# Lucid Dreaming > DV Academy > Current Courses > General Lucid Dreaming >  >  Zaqwsx170's Workbook

## zaqwsx170

Hey everyone! I'm a newbie here, though my account is 5 years old. I'm hoping to spend the next 8 weeks productively on enhancing my dream recall and awareness, and reality check ability, and hopefully have some lucids. I'll be posting my dreams here, and I'll be using the text-check reality check once at every alarm (with an alarm for reminder), every time I open a door, and every time I check my phone. I'll read text, look away, then re-read the text to see if it's the same.

Day 1 of Week 1 - Recall 7 dreams.

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## Matte87

Hi and welcome to class! If you can you should stop using the alarm once you get into the habit, you don't want to do it on queue but rather when you feel like a reality check would be good. Overall it sounds like a good plan!  :smiley:  If you haven't tried out the WBTB technique I suggest you do, it's very effective for most people. If you don't see much results from what you do, don't be afraid to take a different approach. 

How good is your recall as it is now? Starting off with improving recall is a great idea if it's not that good. 

If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask! Welcome once again  :smiley:

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## zaqwsx170

Excellent advice, matte87.

(mild success! brief lucidity attained.) Night of 10/26: Went to sleep at 9:30pm, set my alarm for 3:00 am. Woke up, sat at my desk and read about  lucid dreaming for 20 minutes, and then went back to bed. I was trying to do a Wake Back to Bed. I couldn't sleep for another 40 minutes (4:00 am) and then I had a dream, went lucid, got super excited and then woke up. Then I got out of bed and went to my desk to start recording my journal, and I woke up again. False awakening...so then I recorded my dreams without moving much from my bed.
Issues: -Have trouble getting back to sleep after waking up at 3.

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## Matte87

Nice!  :smiley:  If you're having trouble going back to sleep, try shortening the WBTB. Some people only do tiny WBTB's. Now a days I can do a 1 minute WBTB really, I only need to wake up and start doing some mantras or visualizations for the WBTB to be effective. If you still can't go back to sleep, try doing the WBTB at 4½ hours after going to bed instead of 6. You want to choose any of those as they're the best times to do it on.

Always RC whenever you've been lucid and wake up. I've missed a few FA's that way. Keep on dreaming!

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## nito89

*hey there zaq (hope you dont mind me calling you zaq)

Welcome to the class... Hope you have fun*

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## zaqwsx170

Haha, no I don't mind.

My recall of my dream last night (which was not WBTB or anything special, because I had a test bright and early in the morning) was rather vague and hazy, but it was of a longer period. I remember coming up with some laptop/wire machine that does something special and showing it to a professor, and I woked up a friend and told him I actually hated computer science (not what I'm studying, but I like it) and he went to work. Then I had a discussion while standing in a field of ice (like there was a 5 foot deep field of ice, and the ice went up to my shoulders) talking to my old philosophy teacher while periodically eating the ice.

<.<
>.>

Lol. Today's friday, so I'll be better able to do a WBTB or something interesting.

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## zaqwsx170

Been having some trouble recently. Friday night I did a 5-minute wake up then back to bed, and I recall only the barest of fragments of a dream. Saturday night I set alarms for 1.5, 3, 4.5, 6 and 7.5 hours after going to sleep, and I didn't get anything. Lol. Uncertain if my alarm even went off. Hm...the WBTB method seems very valuable, but I think that this week it is most important to focus on dream recall. So for the next 3 days I'm just going to set my alarm for 4.5, 6, and 7.5 hours after sleep. I'm using an android app that plays a light melody as the alarm, and automatically shuts off after 3 seconds.

And out of curiosity, how good can recall get? I was just reading Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming, and Laberge said that its commonly accepted that we forget our dreams if we don't awaken after the REM period and record them or cement them in our memory. So my question is, can you guys remember multiple dreams by only waking up once at the end of 8 hours of sleep, or do you always have to wake up periodically throughout the night?

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## Matte87

Yeah it sounds like a good idea. Don't feel too much pressure though, that will only kill your recall. I've recalled 10 or more dreams on several occasions when I've slept more than 8 hours. Using supplements often result in having more dreams aswell. You can't have an unlimited amount of dreams from one night, so the more you wake up after each REM period the more you recall. Keep on improving your recall but don't stress yourself and feel pressure of having to wake up after every REM cycle. It's not after the first three cycles that you spend a decent amount of time in REM. Whenever you feel like it, only try to recall during the morning and even having days off is never a bad thing. 

Keep it up!

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## zaqwsx170

Excuses, excuses. Nothing but bad reasons for not keeping up with my dream work. Been pretty busy. I just changed my email status to receive email from other members, so if you see that I haven't updated this thread in more than a day or so, PLEASE PESTER ME WITH EMAIL. The main issue is that I get really busy, and then sleep time gets compromised (i have to be IN class in less than 6 hours...).

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## Matte87

Still good to know you haven't given up  :smiley:

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## zaqwsx170

Haha. I don't intend to. Being able to lucid dream would just be...incredible.
I'll post back in the morning with my recall. I'll WBTB after 3 hours. I have trouble doing the BTB part if I wake up at 4.5 or later.

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## FelicityPotter

Lol   ::D:

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## zaqwsx170

Apparently the alarm went off, but I didn't remember it. I had very solid recall of a dream when I finally woke up in the morning though. I think I've come up with a dependable way to solve my alarm problem, based on

How to Get Up Right Away When Your Alarm Goes Off

with two different alarms. WBTB tonight.

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## FelicityPotter

Ooh that website is cool! How is it working for you? How was your WBTB?

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## Matte87

Yeah, tell us of your progress!  :smiley:

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## zaqwsx170

Hey guys! I've been using the method on that site to some success. To summarize, that article says that one way to get up immediately when your alarm clock goes off in the morning is to practice getting up to the alarm the night before, and then in the morning it will be instantaneous. It works like a charm. So the issue I was having with waking up in the middle of the night to record dreams was either:
I) I use the alarm I've conditioned myself to wake up with, and I jump out of bed and then have trouble remembering the dream.
II) I use some other alarm, and 3-hour or 4.5-hour asleep me just kind of ignores it and goes to sleep.

So I basically just practiced using the light alarm to just shut the alarm off on my phone, and take my journal and pen from the night stand. So I have two different conditionings. Lol. Works pretty well for me. I've found that trying to wake up at the 6-hour mark to record dreams is a bad idea, because then I just can't go to sleep. So I've had pretty good success at recording ~2 dreams a night for the past few nights.

So now that I have that, I'm going to start the week 2 challenge, which is to do a proper WBTB.

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## FelicityPotter

Awesome! Sounds awkward with the alarm thing … Heh  :3 good luck with your WBTB!

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## Matte87

Nice! Whenever you jump out of bed like that your recall gets affected in a negative way. You want to lie still with your eyes closed and just let the memories come to you. Although that can be hard and you risk falling back asleep  :tongue2:  Keep it up man!

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## zaqwsx170

Hello again. Sorry, it's been a while. My final exams came up and...sleep was kind of a scarce resource. Sorry. I'm back though. I've been having a lot of trouble with dream recall in the last week though. Probably the main issue is my screwed up sleep cycle. Going to sleep at 6am is probably not healthy for dream recall or lucid dreams...I think I will spend this week focusing on dream recall to get back on the wagon, then continue with your challenges. Do you guys use an alarm at all when waking up in the middle of the night to record dreams/get up for a wbtb, or is it just intention?

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## StingPT

Welcome again! Good luck on increasing your dream recall. You can do it  :wink2: 

To record dreams and to do a WBTB I find it better to use autosuggestion or drinking 2 or 3 full glasses of water.

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## Matte87

Yeah it's definitely your sleep schedule and all the stress, don't worry about it. By being anxious about not putting enough effort into it or worried about your recall going down, it'll just go down further. I do it by intentions, but you can set an alarm if you know your cycles. Between 90-100 minutes per cycle.

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## zaqwsx170

Hey guys. Sorry I've been gone (again). I have been maintaining a dream journal with 1-2 dreams a night for the past 2 weeks, so I'm going to start doing WBTBs starting tonight. I'll post back tomorrow morning.

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## zaqwsx170

It's been somewhat more than 12 hours since my last post. Lol.

Updates:

-Using water to try and wake up in the middle of the night usually worked fine, however my two issues with it were just that it didn't always work for me (sometimes even when I drank a ton of water) and even then I would only really wake up once during the night.

-So what I've been doing is kind of what I mentioned earlier, using an alarm. A lot of people have said that an alarm is a dream killer, but my alarm is just my cell phone and I actually just keep it charging in bed with me, so I don't have much trouble with inhibiting dream recall. I even have it set to require me to do arithmetic for the alarm to turn off, and I still feel like it doesn't give me much trouble with recall.

-I use this voice recording app for my cell phone, which makes things even easier. So I  don't ever have to even get out of bed or move much at all to turn off my alarm and record my dream.

-I used to have trouble getting back to sleep with WBTB or things, but now I've gotten the hang of things. I used to think too much about my day while going to sleep, now I just kind of meditate while lying there. Helps a ton. I used to like...set an alarm for 3am, and then not be able to go to sleep until 6.

-So my dream recall has gotten pretty good with the aid of my cell phone, though if I were doing all of this 10 years ago I would be pretty hopeless, which is probably...not so good.

-I've been attempting WBTBs maybe 3 times a week for the past 3 weeks, but I haven't had much success. I will wholly admit that I have really just been going through the motions with WBTBs: I've been getting up for a bit in the middle of the night, but I've hardly been doing any intentionality, or reality tests at all during the day.

One other issue I'm (going to start) having is that of school. I mentioned above that I use that Steve Pavlina alarm clock method thing to get out of bed easily in the morning. That might get kind of confused with the alarms I use to wake up during the night. It hasn't been an issue for the past month and a half because I was on winter break for a while and the first few weeks of the semester are never a big deal, but I'm going to definitely have to start getting back on track with waking up early in the morning.

I feel like it sounds somewhat ridiculous to try and have two different alarms conditioned to do different things, but...hopefully it works out well. We'll see.

For the past two nights though, my cell phone has been randomly shutting down in the middle of the night and not playing alarms. I wake up in the morning, and the phone is just off. And when I turn it on, it shows that none of the alarms were triggered. So...I'll try to figure that out today.

I think I'll keep doing WBTBs on weekends, but it's probably going to stop being practical on weekdays as much. What would you guys recommend I do for now? MILD?

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## LucasPotter

Hey, just saw your Workbook, zaqwsx170! There's an alarm you can install on your computer, it's very light and you can put a song or something to play. If you edit it to be really short, you don't even have to move to stop it. I found out about it here: www . dreamviews . com/f79/**crazyinsanes-wild-tutorial-**-87710/

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## zaqwsx170

Hey everyone!

Today I hit all my MILD targets (exploring the world of lucid dreaming has this section on MILD, and it recommends you spend a week training your mental muscles to remember to do things without external stimulus) and generally was pretty good with reality checks and telling myself periodically throughout the day that I'll have lucid dreams tonight.

Tonight I'm going to set alarms for 3, 4.5, 6, 7.5 and do MILD. I'm still in two minds about whether I'm going to continue using alarms consistently, or whether I'll try and stop using them, but...it seems to work pretty well so far.

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## LucasPotter

I hope it worked!  :smiley:

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## zaqwsx170

Hello!

As expected, MILD didn't give me magical instantaneous lucid dreams. But that's where persistence will pay-off. I have a new set of MILD targets for the day, along with my typical reality checks.

So I was thinking before that it was something wrong with my phone that was causing the alarms to not go off, now I realize it was just the alarm application itself that I was using: it freezes my phone. I woke up at 4am without an alarm, and (unfortunately) was more concerned with why my alarm hadn't been going off rather than recalling my most recent dream, so I lost that one. I remember very little of it. So I deleted that one. That app was nice just because it had a feature that required you to do arithmetic to get the alarm to stop, but if it freezes your phone there's no point.

I had very good recall on one dream last night though. Kind of a nightmare, but not so horrific.

My ultimate goal (that will probably take a few years to accomplish) is to be able to have lucid dreams anytime at will, and I guess also to be able to recall ALL of my dreams, not just the 3-4 I manage to record by setting alarms. I don't know how best to approach those, but we'll see. Another few weeks of just doing what I'm doing with dream recall and reality checks, MILD, and general awareness should pay off in some way.

EDIT: One thing I need to do more than I haven't been doing much of is reading back through old dreams I've recorded. I'm going to do that, and explicitly note things/events that should have made me realize that I was lucid. I think that's a good habit to get into. It's kind of part of MILD as well.

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## LucasPotter

> EDIT: One thing I need to do more than I haven't been doing much of is reading back through old dreams I've recorded. *I'm going to do that, and explicitly note things/events that should have made me realize that I was lucid.* I think that's a good habit to get into. It's kind of part of MILD as well.



I had never though of doing that, but I think it's one of the best ideas! My goal now is to do that every ten days!  :smiley:

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## zaqwsx170

Sorry, it's been a few days. I was working on a group project due the next day, and everything most of my group members sent me was just utter garbage. So I had to scrap it all and start from the beginning. So I lost a night of sleep. Lol. I was being very good about reality checks and awareness before that, now I feel markedly worse. Which is very bad actually, because when you're dreaming is when you're most tired and most unaware, so it's completely unacceptable to stop being aware just because you're tired.

But now I'm back. Gonna head to bed soon, wake up at the 3 hour mark and do a WBTB.

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## LucasPotter

I'm sorry to "hear" that, Zaq!  :Sad:  I hope you get back on track soon (maybe it's happening right now  ::D: )!

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## zaqwsx170

Unfortunately not, as my poor scheduling has led to me having to cram for a physiology test.

Tomorrow night, and subsequently though, yes.

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## LucasPotter

Ah, studying always screws things up, huh?  :Sad:  Well, I hope you did well in your test AND that you're having better luck tonight!

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## zaqwsx170

Well all right. Had my test today. It went well. However, i've only gotten three hours of sleep each of the past two nights, so...we'll see what happens tonight.

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## zaqwsx170

So it's been about a week since I've recalled a dream. My past 5ish nights of not getting enough sleep have led me to do my math alarm and then promptly fall asleep again. But I can fix that today with some practice, so it shouldn't be a problem for tonight. Need to get back on track.

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## Matte87

Ouch, a week with no dreams. I had that once and it wasn't fun at all. Set your alarm to go off once or twice when you know you're in REM during the night or morning and you should have a dream or two. Good luck!

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## zaqwsx170

Good advice Matte. Two nights ago I had a night where I got plenty of sleep, and I had what I felt was good dream recall, about three solidly long dreams.

IMO using a alarm does somewhat make it harder to remember dreams, as I've noticed that my dreams frequently take place in a lot of different places, and it can be hard to remember many of them from a single dream because there's just almost no connection between the different scenes at all. But while I think it's a little easier to remember all the scenes if you've woken up without an alarm, I can still usually remember a fair number of the different scenes from individual dreams if I lie there and try to remember long enough. Really just a mental skill/habit.

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## zaqwsx170

Well meh. I recalled a little bit of one dream just after I woke up, two hours after I intended to. Didn't recall any during the night. I'm going to go back to using my math alarm, because otherwise I just shut the alarm off and go to sleep.

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## zaqwsx170

I think...that it's for the best if I just stop using alarms to wake up during the middle of the night. I think the alarm inhibits most of my recollection. It will probably take some time for me to adjust properly to getting up multiple times throughout the night just by mental will, but we'll see. I'll post back in the morning with weekly goal.

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## zaqwsx170

I had maybe 1.5 L of water at 130am right before I went to sleep. I woke up at 3:00am with an overwhelming urge to pee and remnants of memories of a dream about enchiladas.

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## zaqwsx170

So I've decided that I'm just going to go back to waking up with alarms during the middle of the night. It's been two weeks, and I haven't had much/any success with various combinations of drinking water, meditating about the autosuggestion phrase before bed, and doing autosuggestion throughout the day. I guess I'll join Matte's competition thing, because I definitely need some impetus to get beyond dream recall. It's been a while.

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## zaqwsx170

I think I am a relatively deep sleeper (excuse!), which has given me some trouble in all of this. Initially I had been trying to move as little as possible while waking, but that hasn't worked very well for me so far. I'm going to try and make it a habit to get out of bed a little and stand up for a few seconds when my alarm goes off in the middle of the night. Might hinder recall, but otherwise I just go back to sleep and have no recall anyways... I haven't really made any progress in 4 months. I think the main issue is just my schedule being erratic. I've been trying to fix that recently by working a lot (lot lot more...like 13 hours a day) every day so that I'm not crammed during midterms.

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## Nighthawk09

I know im kinda popping in randomly in your workbook but i feel alot of your problems.  I'm in a doctorate program with finals coming up and i know what its like to have dream recall shunted by it.  i've starting trying Naiya's techniques before going to bed and so far its been working very well.  Basically it just involves clearing your mind of all the problems of the day before you go to sleep and putting them into a figurative lockbox beside your bed.  With how your schedule sounds, i think it would help you.

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