As I'm sure almost everyone here knows, a single dream can set your mood for an entire day. If you dream about something upbeat and very happy, you'll usually be really happy for the whole day! The opposite also holds. If you dream about something sad, like someone close to you being sick, you'll be kind of gloomy for the remainder of the day. I'm interested in ways of harvesting this, and am wondering if anyone here has successfully done it consistently.

Obvious approach: LDing. Of course. If you can construct your entire reality, it's a matter of making it a happy one. Of course, you need to be able to do things like "surprise me with something happy" because if you have complete control, the element of pleasant surprise disappears... but yeah, this would probably be a good way to accomplish it, so long as it's your last dream of the night before getting up.

What I'm trying to figure out, however, is whether there are other ways of harvesting this mental booster. For one, is dream recall necessary? Let's say you have that kind of great, super happy dream, and you don't remember a thing about it for some reason... can you still wake up and mysteriously feel REALLY happy?

The other, kind of related, question I have is... (especially if the above is true), is playing some kind of music during the night, or at least during the later REM stages, something that might alter your state in that way? I guess playing music might be a great RC mechanism, but that's unrelated...

discuss!