A little background: I have been meditating on and off for months, and recently (in the past week or so) committed myself to thorough meditation. More or less, I've stuck to a two phase meditation. In the first phase I will simply focus on clearing my head by counting down from one hundred on each breath. I will be laying down during this phase. When I reach zero, I will sometimes start over from 25 or 50 if I feel that my mind is still not clear. I will generally do this laying down.

After the 'clearing my mind phase', I will often sit up and assume a proper meditation pose. I may simply choose to focus on breath, or I may focus on another matter (such as lucid dreaming.) This phase is often rather short, only a couple minutes, until I get a 'meditation ending' feeling.

I generally try to preform the meditations in mid-afternoon, (roughly around 4:00pm) but I do not have a set-in-stone time-frame.

But I've been having some problems and would like some advice.

Problem #1: I have issues with intrusive thoughts while meditating.

I wanted to start with this one because it is honestly the most irritating. Some days it is better than others, but every day it has been happening. My mind can become easily sidetracked by intrusive thoughts. I've tried jounaling them once before and they came up as utterly random. Often they were things that were not even relevant, sensical or pertinent to me at the time.

(For example, once while in the 'clearing my mind phase' I got sidetracked on the thought of 'The Grim adventures of Billy and Mandy, a cartoon that I loved when I was a kid, but haven't watched in over ten years. I spent a good five minutes thinking about it the show, characters, and my favorite episodes before asking myself why I was laying on the floor and remembered that I was supposed to be meditating.)

Problem #2: Meditation seems to negatively impact lucid dreaming.

This one is probably the most out-of-left-feild and unexpected issue. Late last year, I made my first attempt at committing to daily meditation. I was using pretty much the same techniques and parameters that I described above, and I had pretty much the same mental approach. Some of it was just meditation for meditation's sake, but some was focused on lucid dreaming.

I expected my recall and lucidity to improve in leaps and bounds, but instead I saw that my dream recall flounder into a couple of vauge fragments each morning and my lucidity was practically gone. This went on for about a week and a half until I stopped meditating. My recall and lucidity slowly returned afterwards.

I can't really say too much else about this, because to be honest I don't have any idea why this happened to me. It seems to be happening (albeit less severely) in this past week as I've started meditating.

Problem #3: Meditation feels like pulling teeth.

This is probably because of the two problems above, but my, oh, my is it painful to meditate. Despite the fact that upon having a successful meditation I generally feel good and tell myself that I should commit to doing this more often, in the long run, (by the next day) the thought of conducting another session simply feels like a chore.

It also seems to kill my motivation to do other things like write in my autosuggestion notebook, go on Dreamviews or say mantras.