Thread: Broth's Workbook

Hi everyone,

Thanks for providing this 'service'! I definitely think it will help to maintain my motivation. A little background: I'm 24, a private pilot, and studying for a career in web development.

My experience with lucid dreaming began a couple years ago. I don't remember how I learned about it, but I began exploring on the web. I was a member of DV, and I might have even posted a few times. This was back around 2010. From that practice I had a few lucid dreams. Most were just seconds long, although I remember 1 or 2 being a few minutes. I lost motivation and went off to college where I was focused on other things. Still, there were a few occasions where I snoozed my alarm repeatedly in the morning or took naps in the afternoon and experienced brief moments of lucidity. These always caused me to wake up immediately.

Recently, I was browsing an eclectic book store and purchased EWOLD which immediately rekindled my interest in lucid dreaming. Now that I'm out of college and my life has somewhat stabilized, I'm finding it much easier to create and stick with a lucid dream training routine. I've been practicing now for 10 days. In that time, I've recalled 4 FAs and 1 very short moment of lucidity which promptly caused me to wake up!

I'm practicing Laberge's MILD technique. I do almost the exact same practices as are written in Arch's guide about "getting your first lucid dream or breaking a dryspell" (great guide btw!). During the daytime, I do RC's/random awareness, the prospective memory exercise from EWOLD, and meditation. Before bed, I do the MILD procedure. I wake up either from alarm or naturally during the night and perform another MILD procedure while falling asleep. This WBTB + MILD is what gave me my recent lucid fragment.

My most frustrating issue with practice right now is that I sometimes have a hard time going back to sleep once I wake up. I think it's caused by the idea of "inducing" a lucid dream. I sometimes had a problem with this before practicing lucid dreaming, but very rarely. Now it's very random. Sometimes I can fall back asleep quickly, other times it takes a while or I just can't go back to sleep at all. The night of my lucid, it took me 20-30 minutes to fall back asleep even when I decided my intention was set and I stopped repeating the MILD process. Last night, I woke up at 5:00am (by alarm), used the bathroom, and couldn't fall back asleep till 6:30 or 7:00.

I was planning to try the rhythmic napping method last night, but needless to say that went out the door when I couldn't fall back to sleep. From now on, I'm going to use autosuggestion to notice the micro-awakenings after dream periods (as suggested in EWOLD) as opposed to using an alarm. I'll immediately go back to sleep while reaffirming intent using a quick MILD procedure as I drift off. Hopefully this will prevent more bouts with insomnia.

I've been keeping a written dream journal for all 10 days of my practice and I've just started keeping one on DV as well. I'll start copying those entries to this thread along with commentary. I appreciate you guys taking the time to read this!