Hey, just wanted to share what I'm focusing on this week.

I decided to get back in a routine of practicing remembering. Remembering is important to remember dreams after waking up, but also to remember waking life during dreaming, and even more simply to orient yourself both in dreaming and waking life. I've been especially aware of the importance of memory in lucid dreaming practice since Sageous' Fundamentals post. Yet, I never really understood how to practice remembering to help with lucid dreaming (so I'm open to suggestions).

The strategy I chose is, just like I spend time to remember the dreams as I wake up, I am also now spending time remembering the day before falling asleep. Because I do want to fall asleep, I don't try to judge or evaluate the day, just relive it, allow the details to rise into my consciousness through visualization (with minimum effort) and let myself be guided like going down a river on a tube.

For some context, during lucid dreams, I always find it very difficult to remember anything. Last night, I had a lucid dream, walking in a mansion. The scene and details were stable and solid, yet, I was skeptical that the dream would remain stable. I was also focused on my state of mind. I knew I was dreaming but I was skeptical that this knowledge would remain. Wondering, "how lucid am I truly?", I tried to have a clearer mind and tried to remember. It was difficult for anything to come to mind. I was living in the moment, not knowing anything else about my life than that I was dreaming. But I did remember a specific domino tile. Back when I watched Inception and wanted a totem, I had chosen this domino tile to carry around in waking life and check along with my reality checks. I never thought about the tile in my dreams so I eventually left it on my desk as a decoration and a symbol of lucid dreaming. It's strange that so many years after, this is the one thing I remembered about waking life (it is also the tile's first appearance in dream). It felt like a success to remember this one thing and it materialized in my hand. I kept hold of it and set to remember more and collect these memories as I walked in the mansion, hoping to preserve the dream and my state. The dream ended.

To reflect on this dream, I'm happy to see I am taking steps to remember. There's a lot of improvement needed for me in that sphere but it's encouraging. Besides this, I notice the dream was short despite the solid look of the dream. I also notice that while the dream appeared solid, I was skeptical of this stability. I believed it to be fickle. It might have had no impact on the ending of the dream, yet, I want to take a moment to reflect on that. When I started lucid dreaming, the lucid "aha moment" often led to the dream turning to black and breaking down. I think this is because the assumption with "this is a dream" is "this is not real" is "the dream is fickle". With this new in-dream belief/assumption, it makes sense for the dream to lose it's stability and break down. Since then, I have improved this (the dream no longer turns black) but I am still vigilant of this belief that the dream is fickle and the potential effects it can have as the belief becomes reality.

So, I'm still trying to decide how to approach "I am dreaming" without leading to "this is not real" and "the dream is fickle". I think the way is to re-evaluate my assumption that because the dream is not real and because the dream is flexible (and I can change, destroy, create anything at any moment) that it should also be fickle. I think "I am dreaming" should be paired with "this is not material" (rather than not real) and "the dream can be very flexible or/and very stable" (rather than fickle). But I think I am not quite there. I think I need to put more emphasis on how dreams are likely to be solid. I think what I need to do this is to remember my dreams that were surprisingly solid and stable so I can intuitively understand this nature of dreams. To celebrate dreams' stability. Yes, compared to waking life, it is a glaring fact that dreams are not as solid. Yet, lots of things in our mind could be described as persistent: personality, memories, beliefs, knowledge. Our mind is definitely capable of being stable and I need to not let myself be blinded from these facts by the knowledge that dreams are not material and thus infinitely more flexible than waking experience. That said, our waking life experience is likewise flexible as far as it's created by our mind. The stability of the waking experience is not only dependent on the material world but also dependent on the ability of our mind to create cohesiveness and to be consistent.

So I want to take this moment to celebrate our mind's ability to be "solid" and also the importance of memory.