DEVELOPING EXCELLENT DREAM RECALL
Getting plenty of sleep is the first step toward good dream recall. If you are rested, it will be easier to focus on your goal of recalling dreams, and you will not mind so much taking the time during the night to record your dreams. Another benefit of getting plenty of sleep is that dream periods get longer and closer together as the night proceeds. The first dream of the night is the shortest, perhaps only five to ten minutes long, while after eight hours of sleep, dream periods can last forty to sixty minutes. We all dream every night, about one dream period every ninety minutes. People who say they never dream simply never remember their dreams. You may have more than one dream during a REM (dream) period, separated by short arousals that are most often forgotten.
It can be useful while you are developing your dream recall to keep a complete dream journal. Keep the journal handy by your bed and record every dream you remember, no matter how fragmentary. Start by writing down all your dreams, not just the complete, coherent, or interesting ones—even if all you remember is a face or a room, write it down.
When you awaken in the night and recall what you were dreaming, record the dream right away. If you do not, in the morning you may find you remember nothing about the dream, and you will certainly have forgotten many interesting details. If you do not feel like writing out a long dream story in the middle of the night, you can memorize the dream and just note the key points of the plot. You can then use your notes to write out the full dream in the morning.
Possibly, all you will need to do to increase your dream recall is to remind yourself as you are falling asleep that you wish to awaken fully from your dreams and remember them. This works in a similar manner to remembering to awaken at a certain time in the morning. While you are at it, why not tell yourself you will have interesting, meaningful, and lucid dreams?
A major cause of forgetting dreams is interference from other mental content (i.e., thoughts, feelings, events, etc.) competing for your attention. Therefore, try to let your first thought upon awakening be, “What was I just dreaming?” Before attempting to write down the dream, go over the dream in your mind, retelling the dream story to yourself until you remember it as a whole.
Important! For optimal dream recall, do not move from the position in which you awaken. hold completely still, and focus your attention only on what was just going through your mind. Avoid the usual pattern of thinking of the day’s concerns immediately upon awakening. Scan for any clues of what you might have been experiencing—moods, feelings, fragments of images, or thoughts. Ask yourself, “now why was I thinking that?” and you will frequently find that you were not just thinking whatever, but dreaming. When you recall a scene, try to recall what happened before that, and before that, and so on, reliving the dream in reverse.
If you find that you sleep straight through the night without being conscious of waking from your dreams, you might try drinking a little coffee, tea, or other caffeinated beverage before bed—not enough to keep you awake, but enough to get you out of bed during the night. You can also try setting an alarm clock to wake you at a time when you are likely to be dreaming. Since REM periods occur at approximately ninety-minute intervals, good times will be close to multiples of ninety minutes after you go to sleep. Aim for the later REM periods by setting the alarm for four and a half, six, or seven and a half hours after you go to sleep. Once again, when you wake up, do not move. Instead, think first of what you were just dreaming before writing.
To remind yourself of your intentions and get yourself into the spirit of your dreams, read through your dream journal at bedtime. Learning to remember your dreams may take particular effort at first, but if you persist, you will almost certainly succeed—and may find yourself effortlessly remembering four or more dreams per night. Of course, once you reach this level, you probably will not want to write them all down—just the significant or compelling ones. The more familiar you become with the style of your own dreams, the easier it will be to remember you are dreaming while you are dreaming—and explore the world of your dreams while still on the scene.
WAKING UP IN THE DREAM
Getting to Know Your "Dreamsigns"
In the more common of the two ways that people experience lucid dreams, the dreamer somehow realizes that he or she is dreaming while in the midst of an ongoing dream in uninterrupted REM sleep. This is termed a Dream Initiated Lucid Dream, or DILD.
So let us suppose that you now have excellent dream recall. This means that on most nights you vividly recall at least one of your dreams, and if you wish, it is easy to recall two or three or more. Now you can start to get to know what makes your dreams dreamlike. As we discussed in Chapter Two, dreams and waking experiences are more alike than different, and much of what happens during your night life will be little different from what happens during your day life. But for the purposes of developing lucid dreaming, you need to focus on the differences—the ways in which dream experiences differ from waking life experiences. Those aspects of dream content that reliably differ from the corresponding experiences of waking life, and hence can clue in the attentive dreamer to the fact that he or she is at that moment dreaming, are referred to as “dreamsigns.”
I coined this term twenty years ago to conveniently refer to all those elements of dreams that can indicate that you are dreaming. examples, taken at random, might include miraculous flight, irrational thinking or anomalous emotional response (either too strong or too weak for the context), malfunctioning devices, meeting deceased people or celebrities, etc. By studying your dreams, you can become familiar with your personal dreamsigns and resolve to recognize them as such the next time you see them and thereby become lucid in future dreams.
There are two distinct classes of dreamsign. “Strong dreamsigns” are necessary and sufficient conditions for concluding that one is dreaming—that is, events that can happen only in dreams (e.g., impossibilities like walking on water or levitating). “Weak dreamsigns” indicate events that are merely improbable in waking life but characteristic of dreams, such as meeting celebrities, finding money in the street, etc. The basic strategy of using dreamsign awareness to induce lucid dreaming is to firmly resolve to (i.e., set your intention to) recognize any dreamsign noticed in the future for what it is, and thus become lucid.
The late Paul Tholey, a German psychologist and world-class oneironaut, developed and tested a variety of techniques for inducing lucid dreams, derived from over a decade of research involving more than 200 subjects. According to Dr. Tholey, the most effective method of learning to achieve lucidity is to develop “a critical-reflective attitude” toward your state of consciousness by asking yourself whether or not you are dreaming while you are awake. Tholey stressed the importance of asking “the critical question”—“Am I dreaming or not?”—as frequently as possible (at least five to ten times a day) and in every situation that seems dreamlike. That is, at any appearance of a dreamsign, weak or strong. Asking the question at bedtime and while falling asleep is also favorable. Following this technique, most people will have their first lucid dream within a month, Tholey reports, and some will succeed on the very first night.
The following is modified from Tholey’s combined reflection-intention technique. The referred audio link includes a very similar technique: the Guided reality Test
LISTEN TO TRACK 2
Guided Reality Test
COMBINE REALITY TEST WITH INTENTION SETTING
Do a reality test. Carry some text with you or wear a digital watch throughout the day. To do a reality test, read the words or the numbers on the watch. Then, look away and look back, observing the letters or numbers to see if they change. Try to make them change while watching them. Our research shows that in lucid dreams, text changes seventy-five percent of the time it is reread once and changes ninety-five percent of the time it is reread twice. If the characters do change, are not normal, or do not make sense, then you are most probably dreaming. enjoy! If the characters are normal, stable, and
sensible, then you probably are not dreaming. Go on to step 2.
Imagine that your surroundings are a dream. If you are fairly certain you are awake (you can never be completely certain!), then tell yourself, “I may not be dreaming now, but if I were, what would it be like?” Visualize as vividly as possible that you are dreaming. Intently imagine that what you are seeing, hearing, smelling, and feeling is all a dream. Imagine instabilities in your environment, words changing, scenes transforming, perhaps you are floating off the ground. Create in yourself the feeling that you are in a dream. holding that feeling, continue with step 3.
Visualize yourself enjoying a dream activity. decide (in advance) on something you would like to do in your next lucid dream, perhaps flying, talking to particular dream characters, or just exploring the dream world. Continue to imagine that you are dreaming now, and visualize yourself enjoying your chosen activity.
Firmly resolve to be lucid and to carry out your chosen activity. While continuing to imagine yourself doing what you want to do in your next lucid dream, tell yourself firmly: “next time I’m dreaming I want to recognize I’m dreaming and to do whatever I want to do in that lucid dream.” repeat the resolution several times until you feel your intention is firmly set.
Using Missed Dreamsigns as Stepping Stones to Lucidity
Most of the dreams you recall will contain at least one but more likely several dreamsigns. Until you have developed at least a moderate degree of lucidity, you will almost never recognize these dream oddities for what they are, and this leads to a pitfall which can block progress until it is understood and corrected: the mistake (common among novice lucid dreamers) is to focus on how uncritical their minds are during dreaming, using each missed dreamsign as another example proving that they never recognize dreamsigns. This is a mistake! If you do this, you use missed dreamsigns to learn that you are too unreflective, stupid, or simply lacking in the capability to become lucid. This is not what you want to learn, is it?
What you do want to learn is how to recognize when you are dreaming by getting to know your dreamsigns. Thus you should make sure that you reflect on which parts of your dream could have told you that you were dreaming, and resolve that the next time something like that dreamsign reoccurs, you will remember that you are dreaming! So, if you awake from a dream in which you failed to notice that the friend you were talking to has been dead for years, you must firmly resolve that if you ever see that person again, you will realize that you are dreaming. Furthermore, resolve that you will see your friend again, and that the next time you do, you will become lucid.
Missed dreamsigns are like stepping stones across Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, to the promised “Lucidland,” but only if you use them as such, only if you decide with complete conviction that you won’t get fooled again. Of course, you will. To err is human, but why not learn to err less and less?
REMEMBERING THE FURTURE: MNEMONIC INDUCTION OF LUCID DREAMS
It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.
—Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
The most powerful technique for inducing lucid dreams is based upon “prospective memory,” remembering to do something (i.e., notice that you are dreaming) in the future. While most of what you think of as memory involves retrieving information from the past, prospective memory, or memory for intentions, refers to our ability to remember our intention to carry out some specific action at a future time or circumstance.
Aside from writing ourselves memos (a device of little use here for obvious reasons!) we do this by forming a mental connection between what we want to remember to do and the future circumstances in which we intend to do it. Making this connection is greatly facilitated by the mnemonic device (i.e., memory aid) of visualizing yourself doing what you intend to remember. It is also helpful to verbalize the intention, “When such-and-such happens, I want to remember to do so-and-so.” For example, “When I pass the bank, I want to remember to draw out some cash.”
I developed this technique as part of my doctoral dissertation project and used it to achieve lucid dreaming at will. The verbalization that I use myself to organize my intended effort is, “next time I’m dreaming I want to remember to recognize I’m dreaming.” The “when” and the “what” of the intended action must be clearly specified.
The proper time to practice MILD is after awakening from a dream, before returning directly to sleep, or following a longer period of full wakefulness, as detailed below. An important point is that in order to produce the desired effect, it is necessary to do more than just mindlessly recite the phrase. You must really intend to have a lucid dream. here is the recommended procedure spelled out step by step.
LISTEN TO TRACK 3
Mnemonic Induction of Lucid Dreams
MNEMONIC INDUCTION OF LUCID DREAMS EXERCISE
Set up dream recall. At bedtime, set your mind to awaken from and to remember dreams. When you awaken from a dream, recall it as completely as you can.
Focus your intent. While returning to sleep, concentrate single-mindedly on your intention to remember to recognize that you are dreaming. Tell yourself, “next time I’m dreaming, I will remember I’m dreaming,” repeatedly, like a mantra. Put real feeling into the words and focus on this idea alone. If you find yourself thinking about anything else, let it go and bring your mind back to your intention.
See yourself becoming lucid. As you continue to focus on your intention to remember to recognize the next time you are dreaming, imagine that you are back in the dream from which you just awakened. Imagine that this time you recognize that you are dreaming. Identify a dreamsign, and when you see it, say to yourself, “I’m dreaming!” and continue your fantasy. Imagine yourself carrying out your plans for your next lucid dream. For example, if you want to fly in your lucid dream, imagine yourself flying.
Repeat until your intention is set. Repeat steps 2 and 3 until either you fall asleep you or are sure that your intention is set. If while falling asleep you find yourself thinking of anything else, repeat the procedure so that the last thing in your mind before falling asleep is your intention to remember to recognize the next time you are dreaming. If all goes well, in a short time you will find yourself lucid in another dream (which need not closely resemble the one you have rehearsed).
PHYSIOLOGICAL FACTORS INFLUENCING LUCID DREAMING
Lucid dreaming does not occur with equal frequency at all times. Lucid dreamers from Frederik van Eeden to Patricia Garfield have long reported that lucid dreams occur “almost exclusively” during the early morning hours. Our research at Stanford indicates that extended stable lucid dreams seem to occur exclusively during REM periods. Moreover, later REM periods are more conducive to lucidity than are earlier REM periods. Although it is certainly possible to induce lucid dreams during the first REM period of the night using MILD, it is much easier when practiced later in the sleep cycle, say after four and a half hours (REM period 3), or six hours (REM period 4).
If you find that you are just too drowsy to follow the procedure as described in the MILD exercise, you might try to wake yourself up by engaging in several minutes of any activity that demands full wakefulness, such as writing down your dream, reading, or simply getting out of bed. This sleep interruption is itself a condition favoring lucidity.
In the late 1970s, I was led to develop sleep-interruption as a method of lucid dream induction after hearing a remarkably broad set of nocturnal activities that were claimed to be associated with immediately subsequent lucid dreaming. These included sex, vomiting, reading and writing, and pre-dawn meditation with a definite spirit of self-sacrifice. What did these putative lucidogenic activities have in common? The answer proved to be quite simple: wakefulness!
A period of wakefulness interrupting the normal course of sleep increases the likelihood of lucidity. In fact, the “morning nap” or “sleep interruption” technique, refined through several experiments conducted by the Lucidity Institute, is an extremely powerful method of
stimulating lucid dreams. The technique simply requires you to wake from sleep one hour earlier than usual, stay awake for thirty to sixty minutes, then go back to sleep. One study showed a fifteen- to twentyfold increased likelihood of lucid dreaming for thirty to sixty minutes of wakefulness compared to five minutes. during the sleep-interruption period, read about lucid dreaming, practice reality checks, and then practice MILD as you are falling asleep. The Lucidity Institute’s training programs include this technique as an essential part of the schedule. It is one of the reasons why most participants have lucid dreams during the workshop.[1]
I said earlier in this chapter that I had been able to learn to have lucid dreams at will using a technique I developed over several years. That technique was, of course, MILD. Once I learned how to use it, I experienced as many as four lucid dreams in a single night, and indeed seemed able to attain lucidity on any night that I tried. I see no reason why the same could not be true for others as well.
Undoubtedly, the future will see the development of much more effective techniques for lucid dream induction that promise to make this world available to anyone who needs or desires it. Who knows? Perhaps entry into lucid dreams will one day be no more difficult than falling asleep.
WAKE INITIATED LUCID DREAMING (WILD)
This brings us to another class of lucid dream induction methods: falling asleep consciously. The second of the two main ways in which people become lucid is by briefly awakening from REM sleep and then returning right back to REM sleep without losing consciousness. This is termed a Wake Initiated Lucid dream, or WILD. There are a number of techniques available for voluntarily inducing WILDs, all based on the same fundamental principle: you lie in bed, deeply relaxed but vigilant, and perform a repetitive or continuous mental activity upon which you focus your attention. Keeping this task going is what maintains your inner focus of attention and with it your wakeful inner consciousness, while your drowsy external awareness diminishes and finally vanishes altogether as you fall asleep. In essence, the idea is to let your body fall asleep while you keep your mind awake.
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