Quote Originally Posted by Tiktaalik View Post
That’s similar to what I do. I don’t necessarily look upon waking life as another form of dream but I do enjoy imagining that what I’m experiencing during my walk is a dream I’m lucid within. I imagine that the people around me are dream characters and my reality is a stable dream reality that I’m navigating through so that I can practice staying calm and present in the moment as I observe my surroundings. The purpose to train this mindset and utilise it again when I’m actually in the dream.
Yes! That's what I do, too. Done consistently, I think the result are very powerful and absolutely manifest in dream in time. I'm in particular really working on instantly recognizing all people as dream signs and dream characters. That's particular relevant for me since I live now away from the city and interact with people other than my wife only a couple times a week at most.

BTW, about treating waking life as dream, in the new edition of The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep: Practices for Awakening (HIGHLY recommend!!!! More clarification, explanation, and IMO less Buddhist jargon/leaning, more western-facing), Tenzin clarifies what he means by treating waking life as dream:
Quote Originally Posted by TYoDaS
... it doesn't mean we can suddenly fly or transform into a lion, it's the realization that the entirety of experience takes place in the mind and that how we make meaning of an experience and react to it is due to our conditioning.
For me that pretty much seals the deal. I had more or less already resolved my earlier cognitive dissonance with treating waking experience as dream, really truly starting to feel waking experiences as dream, but this framing is so digestible that I'm 100% on board with this idea now.

Quote Originally Posted by TikTaalik
I agree about consistency. I’ve managed to do dream journalling, recall and MILD pretty much every night since I began and get a good 7-8 hours sleep but really struggle to keep consistent with the day work. Mindfulness/ RCs and such which is what I’m working on. I get lucid regularly but really want to start having those longer lucids where I can achieve more.
Tenzin has a section on consistency in TYoDaS in the Four Foundational Practices. If he bothered to put it there, it must be important!

Quote Originally Posted by TYoDaS
The importance of the day practices to the later stages of dream yoga cannot be overstated. They are much more powerful than they appear to be....Simply doing a practice before going to bed may be ineffective, but with consistent practice of the foundational practices during the day, it becomes much easier to attain lucidity in dream...
Quote Originally Posted by TikTaalik
I’ve recalled some amazingly vivid, long regular dreams in the past but that I’ve always put down to my strong commitment to recall. The faster I’m able to notice the moment of awakening the more likely I am to remember more of the dream and its details. I can see how being more present and aware of your experiences could enhance this though. Thanks for the advice.
Me, too! I love those epic non-lucids, miss them, and am working to get them back. I think it's a combination: the recall work, the attention/lucidity/mindfulness. In order to have something to remember, you need to pay attention to your experiences, and be there, present in the moment. I think it's a symbiotic relationship between better recall and more lucidity and epic non-lucids: they each build and support the other. I now think epic non-lucids are a form of pre-lucid dream, the only missing ingredient to being fully lucid is the strong intent to recognize the dream in the dream. And as Sageous says, some dreams are fine just the way they are!

As an update, I basically had my first epic non-lucid just last night: a sailing adventure that took up the whole night of dreaming, some 10+ scenes.