Thread: DILD count has gone straight down the tubes. [25/mth to 1/mth]

I didn't want to piggyback Mzzkc's thread, but I figured I should post this now instead of letting it drag on anymore.

And I'm sorry for the wall of text; there's a few things to cover.

Okay, so in the months following when I joined DV two years ago, I had a DILD count of around 25 a month or so. I practiced the same technique, etc, and drank some apple juice whenever I felt like I needed a vividness boost before bed.

Then I hit a big slump about a year and a half in; my lucid count fell to about 2 a month and I could only remember about half as many dreams as I used to. This went on for 7-8 months and a few months back, I had a lucid (nothing special, just a semi-lucid) and figured this dryspell was behind me. I got a big confidence boost and whatnot, so I definitely had the placebo effect going.

But, no lucids and poor recall for the next week. Then, a semi-lucid, and then nothing at all, just poor recall (one dream a night compared to 3-4 when I started out). This is still the case now, with the exception of a few time-well-spent lucids of average quality last month. I downed half a carton of apple juice last night and got one weird dream, but nothing really vivid or anything. All this time, I've mentally labeled the low number of lucids as "just a slight hiccup in my LDing endeavors", so I'm guessing the mindset shouldn't be an issue. I've been drinking apple juice every night now.

I don't know why, but my method of getting DILDs isn't working at all anymore.

To make things even more perplexing, I get my DILDs through awareness - and how does awareness get worse over time if you're continuously practicing it? I don't think it does get worse (unless you get used to a certain level of it; is that possible though?).

I haven't been stressing out about using awareness as a technique, and before I got that big dryspell, nothing substantially negative happened in my life that could affect my LDing. I've still been keeping a positive outlook and "knowing", fully, that my next lucid is right around the corner, but admittedly I'm becoming a bit disconcerted.

Am I just going through a rough patch?

I know there's nothing wrong with how I've been going about getting my lucids, because I haven't changed anything with the technique, so maybe it's something else. I've been trying WILD for the past week or so, and haven't even been able to get into SP. I've had a few WILDs in the past but they're not my strong suit, so I'd really like to stay with DILD, just because I want to get back to my previous lucid count, the count when I started LDing. And 99% of these lucids came from DILD.

Edit: I've also been using MILD.

HELP!

Anyways, thanks for reading guys. Hoping you can shed some light on this, I'd greatly appreciate it. :'3