Thread: Reboot, Refocus, Reread, Reflect!

I think I am in the same boat with you, at the moment. I'll be watching to see how your progress goes. And that did not sound creepy at all . . . .

This sounds like an excellent plan for you FM! I believe, with all of your great base of knowledge, experience and refocus going forward, that SSILD can do wonders for triggering reflection for you in your dreams following the cycles. It is amazing some of the obvious stuff I miss when I don't use it and the more subtle things I catch when I do use it. If you aren't feeling SSILD, then MILD could be your answer for an extra boost. You got this my friend!

This has reminded my brain that it needs to refocus as well, your plan seems pretty good, I think reflection and honest self assessment is pretty key to advancing with meaningful progress. Good luck with your journey .

Hey, FM: If you want wild, wacky, memorable, bordering on nightmarish dreams, take some 5-HTP. That stuff will elevate your dreams into the realm of Tim Burton style strangeness.

Thank you all for the nice wishes! And YAY, I in fact got a lucid this morning. It was a battle, including a touch of insomnia (wakefulness seems to go hand in hand with effortful intent for me), on a morning with an early morning alarm no less, and I made it back to sleep using my relaxation breathing techniques and a touch of SSILD-like cycles (I "projected myself" into the visual and audio spheres). So effectively, I did a WBTB.

It was already excellent, and shaping up to be even better (nudge nudge wink wink) in just a second, and that was just the moment when my wife chose to wake me up! ARGH!

I finished reading the DILD portion of ETWOLD last night before bed, reading carefully through the Combined reflection/intention technique and MILD, and skimming through the rest including a bit of the WILD chapter.

Yesterday I made the little "Is this a dream?" card LaBerge recommends and carried it around in my pocket during the day and periodically took it out and read it.

Here's the DJ entry:

Nice to see that effort paid off for you. Clearly it's the four "R's" that you named in this thread plus one additional: "Resolve." Maybe that's where I've been letting myself down of late, as I've gone from Late April until now with not a hint of lucidity, yet my dream recall has been unusually good.

Ah man, I pride myself on my alliteration abilities (see!?) and I missed "resolve." Yep, that's in the mix, big time. Is this a dream?
p.s. dreaming supplements make me feel pretty unwell in general (5-HTP is one, also wormwood, yuck) so I've stayed away from them for a couple years now.

Sounds like you have the resolve issue covered, my friend! Now it's MY time to ratchet up the "desire factor" by an order of magnitude. Going to be following this thread to see where it leads. I anticipate it will be full of good vibes and success stories in short order.

Good thread! I kind of feel like I've had a bit of a dry spell too the last month or so. Not totally dry, but it just feels like my frequency and strength of LDs has been rather lower than par lately for some reason. For now, I'm mostly trying to renew my focus a bit on having more of a constant eye during the day on possible dream signs/questioning my reality. Also I'm trying to continue improving the “night-work” periods of brief awakening, even though it's a bit tricky since for some reason I seem to be “conking out” and falling back asleep after journaling a bit faster and more abruptly than usual lately.

I did get a rather nice lucid NREM moment a few nights ago and rode into a LD from it in which I seemed to take my time and engage in more mindful thought/reflection about what I was trying to do than usual in my LDs, so that seems like a step in the right direction.

Good luck!

"Success is not an accident...success is actually a choice, [a choice to create the habits for today] that are on par with the dreams that you have for tomorrow."

"You have to want it like you want to breathe."

I've had some amazing nights of dreaming recently. Last night was another "all-night long dreaming night," very vivid, so many scenarios and scenes and situations, beautiful, scary, exhilarating, detailed, ...just amazing! I had a semi-almost-lucid moment in the final dream where I recognized a dream-like scenario very clearly but somehow I let it slide by. But still that's the closest I've been for a long time, so I'm stoked!

I've been re-reading The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep, and re-discovering so much wisdom and incredible insights on the nature of lucidity therein. I plan in fact to adopt the TYoDaS practice as my primary practice for now. I think it explains perfectly well why I'm not lucid a lot more. Here is one of any number of amazing excerpts:

This is the sequence: awareness in the fist moment of experience, in response, in dream, ... One cannot just start at the end. You can determine for yourself how mature your practice is: as you encounter the phenomena of experience, examine your feelings and your reactions to the feelings. Are you controlled by your interactions with the objects of experience or do you control your reactions to them? Are you thrown into emotional reactions by your attractions and aversions, or can you remain in steady presence in diverse situations? If the former, practice will cultivate the presence needed to free you of ... reactivity. If the latter, you will increasingly develop stability in awareness and your dreams will change in extraordinary ways.

LD #186 DJ Entry

Not the best night of dreaming, and the LD isn't all that impressive, but hey, I got lucid, and I'm very hopeful this is a sign that my renewed practice is on the right path.

I started with 10 minute forceful zhine sessions, moved up to 15 minutes a few times, and just now I did a 15 minute session followed by a short break and another 10 minute session. My mind is fairly stable during these, mostly I'm trying to avoid jerking my eyes slightly and did much better this time. I was getting some fairly wild open-eyed HI by the end of the 15 minute session. Almost no blinking in the 15 minute session, but a lot during the following 10 minute one.

Had a short LD last night, got lucid but lot it pretty quickly. Tons of dreams, though, some moments remembered vividly. Need to refocus also on recall!

Pretty dry all of June, but with generally fairly good recall. Practicing Illusory body/world and mindfulness most days, but nothing much at night, no WBTB.

Then I started reading Andrew Holocek's new book on LDing and Dream Yoga. I got to the mindfulness meditation chapter last night and it's brilliant, he really makes the spot-on observations about the relationship between mindfulness/attention/lucidity and mindlessness/distraction/non-lucidity. I get very excited as it resonates very strongly with what I believe about the nature of lucidity and how best to train it. His brief discussion of the "Lion gaze" is very instructive ("gaze of the dog": follows distraction [the stick thrown away from it] vs. "gaze of the lion": ignores the distraction and instead looks right to the source of it, the thrower)

Then I go to bed doing some of the Dream Yoga visualizations (red pearl in the throat, a red "AH" in the throat)

Then I get a near WILD at about 3 hrs into the night!
2016-07-14 near early WILD [remarkable!], long insomnia, late semi/almost-lucid - Dream Journals - Lucid Dreaming - Dream Views

I'm so excited by this I can't return to sleep (unfortunately!) I make it back to sleep eventually and get a near-LD, but the later dreams are more distracting.

Holocek has a really great way of phrasing things, and pointing out what's important. I think a fault in my practice is that it has become too serious. Lightening up, trying to recapture the "child's mind," seeing dreams as fun, will go a long way towards more frequent lucidity.

He finishes his mindfulness meditation chapter with: "So you want to be lucid at night? Meditate during the day." OK if that's not going to get me to daily meditation, nothing will!