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Hosts: Crystal, Skyfall, Liam, Curious
Listen to the full course as it was presented live on the 22nd of October 2023:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hw4ExZUXI5Y
**A written overview of the session is given below. **
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First and foremost, if you don't remember your dreams, how do you expect to remember your lucid dreams? Even if you got a lucid dream every night, did everything you wanted to do in it, you would wake up none the wiser. Dream recall also has a massive effect on the perceived vividness of your lucid dreams, as you may be recalling the experience incorrectly. Your level of "presence" within your dreams is also affected by dream recall.
It's recommended to recall at least one full dream consistently per night before starting practice. Not only can it help improve the quality of your lucid dreams, it can also help you obtain them - understanding your dreams, picking out dreamsigns, and noticing patterns, will help you to notice these patterns in your dreams and become lucid from them.
Writing down your dreams is key for recall improvement, as it solidifies your memories and stores them forever. It allows you to spend time thinking about dreams, finding details within your recall, finding patterns within your dreams and coming to understand them, and rereading your dreams to refresh your memory.
Dream delving is where upon waking up you try not to move much from your waking position or get distracted by thoughts. Instead you try to recall any recent thoughts, feelings, colours even, and piece together any dreams from that. If you remember one image, you can try to remember what happened before it. Then after you think you've got everything, you write it in your journal.
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Rejournaling dreams, although tedious at times, can help to keep up consistency even when you don't recall any dreams upon waking. It's recommended to journal for at least 20 minutes per day consistently to see results.
Other recall techniques also exist and can be found in the resources channel.
We already wake up in the night many times when the phases of sleep change, known as microawakenings. We don't notice them as they're short. But, utilising these natural awakenings can bring many benefits to our practice.
Dream recall, and overall dreamwork, symbiotically require the foundation of a good sleep schedule to be of any use. People under the age of 18, over 13, require 8-10 hours of sleep per night - adults over 18, 7-9. See a more detailed guide [pinned in lucid dreaming channel](#lucid-dreaming message).
We awaken naturally every night [around 10-15 times](#lucid-dreaming message), which is a natural phase of sleep. It's generally accepted that in order to recall a dream, one must wake up from it, even if briefly. Of course, if awakenings are extended by the dreamer many times as to lose important sleep time without consolidation, there may be effects.
There are techniques to help falling asleep available online.
It is possible to notice natural awakenings by setting alarms, ideally at a time which is a multiple of 90 minutes from when you go to sleep to allow for the 90 minute phases - 4.5 hours, 6 hours, or anything around there that works best. However, it's better long term to recognise the natural awakenings that we already have, rather than trying to create new ones. To do this, we can generate intent; the topic of the next segment.
We use the mental function of intent all the time in day to day life, for example, when we intend to buy milk at the shops. Usually we use external reminders for our intentions, such as a shopping list, but the simple memory used for intent is known as prospective memory - remembering what you intended to do in the past.
Intending to lucid dream is key in any practice - you probably have that intent reading this now. The more intent, the better, and the technique MILD takes advantage of this by generating intent to lucid dreaming using mnemonic devices. Intent can also be used to recall dreams, notice awakenings, and a lot more.
The first important question here is simply, are intents "set"? The word implies that it's a one-off action, instead of a scale, and that there was no intent before the setting. The term is up for debate, as are many. An alternative term is generating intent.
For how to generate intent, see Skyfall's intention setting guide previously linked and the resources channel. The cornerstones of intent are willpower and association.
Prospective memory exercises appear in ETWOLD just before the MILD guide and can be accessed through our resources channel. Mantras and visualisation are key aids to intention generating.
Mindset is key to lucid dreaming as it is to any other mental activity. As Laberge puts it in ETWOLD in the context of the autosuggestion technique, "Do not strongly insist with statements like “Tonight I will have a lucid dream!” You might find that if you don’t succeed after a night or two following such misplaced certainty, you will rapidly lose faith in yourself. Instead, attempt to put yourself in the frame of mind of genuinely expecting that you will have a lucid dream tonight or sometime soon. Let yourself think expectantly about the lucid dream you are about to have. Look forward to it, but be willing to let it happen all in good time."
This is a good example of how mindset of achieving lucidity can be viewed. This topic overall is very deep and can expand to the idea of questioning whether lucidity should be the main goal, of the result of inevitable "failure", of the influences of society and much more. I won't go much into this as the mere existence of this course and the way it is presented immediately presents the idea in a certain way, and debating it would be self destructive. That's a course for another day.
More on mindset in the resources channel.