Tutorial: Beginners Guide to Lucid Dreaming

Thank you for your post Mattias! As I mentioned above, its your dream journal, choose your format! If you want to do point form, go for it!

The only thing I can suggest is trying to do the entries as soon as you can, otherwise you will lose the opportunity for those “OH YEAH!” moments I talked about. Today I was late for class and lost the opportunity to write in my DJ, so I did it when I got home, only to find I pretty much wrote down what I could already remember. The dreams I write down right after I wake up seem to be the most progressive ones, by far!

The importance lies in putting logical order and detail to your dreams, it being recorded down is a bonus (as you can reread them for dream signs, but more on that later).

Cool, I’ll see if I focus more on this part specially :wink:

Oh, my goodness. This is gold! :happy: Out of the many guides to lucid dreaming I’ve read here, I’ve never seen one that stresses the importance of vividness as much as yours. And the whole time I was reading your guide, I kept having those “realization” moments, when I thought, “Of course, that makes sense! Why didn’t I think of that?” I loved reading it, and hopefully you’ll continue to update it whenever possible! :happy:

Another reason why I had those realization moments was because I understood exactly what you were trying to say. I myself never have vivid dreams unless they’re induced by techniques, but those weren’t my normal, everyday dreams. In fact, I made a post a while ago addressing that problem, see here if you want: [Vivid vs. Hazy Dreams)
So basically when I read your guide I thought, “I have to do this.” Thank you so much for the wonderful explanations! :bow:

Thanks for your reply Kandri! I hope my tutorial answered the questions you had about increasing vividness in your other topic. Do not get discouraged when you don’t obtain lucidity, it is not a skill learned over night!

I would love to hear any progress you or anyone who has read my tutorial has made.

Please note the additional information posted in Stage 2. I forgot to mention that you need to work on details for all 5 senses, not just vision.

As always, feel free to post any comments or questions you may have.

Hm… Nice guide, this is a bit intresting I think. Yesterday I readed this guide and thought " Wow, I really need to stop slacking off! " so that night I couldn’t find my Journal, and so went to sleep without it, and in my dream I found myself putting the pencil down to write the date. ( Alas, the only thing I remember was putting the pencil down the paper… I still tried to remember as much details as I could… )
Well, great guide. :happy: This one helps alot!

Because of my free time today I took a nap during the afternoon
(“nap” : I woke up afer 3 hours :eek: )
And I remembered a quite cool dream. It wasn´t the whole dream, I know there was something before my Recall comes in, but I wrote and wrote and wrote… at least I had been writing for 45min and this still wasn´t the whole dream!
Maybe I need a quicker method than simply writing on Paper? I dont want to Imagine myself writing more than one dream when my recall improves :content:

But hey, the dream was worth the time, alot about fighting with (kitchen)blades, dealing with some of the very bad guys to finally deescalate the situation and show my wounds to the person who had the fault for all the struggle :cool:
No need to mention, that I woke up right after this with the feeling that I just saved the day :grin:

Sounds amazing Chris!

To help with writing dreams, I started typing my dreams out. I do have over 100 words per minute while typing however, so it really helped me (I spent a lot of time in chat rooms / coding :wink:) .

More importantly though, its about getting the dream out of your head into another form. This requires your brain to analyze the dream and put some structure to it, which will start training your brain to use the logical section when it comes to dreams. Right when you wake up, and I mean the instant you wake up, start thinking about your dream, and start trying to ‘stretch’ into those sections of the dream where recall isn’t at its fullest. Use specific details or events in your to aid you in recovering what you have forgotten.

Your best bet is to find a medium that works for you. I know I gave up on writing pretty quickly as it would take forever to get everything down.

Wonderful advice :smile:. I wish this had been around when I first started, would have made life a whole lot easier.

Vividness => LD

this is genius!
you should get an award for this or something :tongue:

To reinforce the importance of this, I want to share with you my experience over the past 3 days.

Over spring break (or reading week), I pretty much lost all my DR and had no LD’s and few ND’s. I was almost starting back at square one.

After only 3 days of getting full 8-hour sleeps, writing as much as I can in my dream journals for every dream, and WBTB method (woke up naturally, I’ll explain this method later on), I have already had another lucid dream.

Teach your brain that remembering and analyzing dreams is important! You’re brain will then try to be ahead of the game and will start analyzing dreams while you dream!

Since I have some free time tonight, I will continue writing the guide. Stay posted!

Yeah, since for us to be able to remember dreams in the first place we have to be “conscious” in the dream, even if only a ridiculously tiny bit (without being technicaly lucid). I mean we aren’t 100% unonscious. So analyzing the dreams, and focusing on details is putting more awareness in the dream!

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This tutorial is really good! The day before yesterday I read your tutorial and last night I had a lucid. :grin: Thanks Rathez. :smile:

BTW, first post :tongue:

That’s great to hear Carlos! I’m glad my guide helped!

I apologize for not updating the guide. I’m still writing midterms for university and its ‘crunch time’ at work, so I quickly found my free time disappearing.

What you need to LD though is already posted. The rest is just going to be helpers for increasing vividness.

It’s okay. Please update when you really have free time. :smile:

Hmm, I think I really like this guide. I already wrote down a lot of dreams into my DJ for a long time now, but I still had the (subconscious?) idea that writing your dreams down wasn’t really that important. And I think I also wasn’t really lazy with it, but I just didn’t put that much effort into improving recall as I probably should.

Now, after reading this guide two days ago, I tried to squeeze out every detail of my dreams that I could remember. And I also tried hard to rediscover dreams and fragments I already forgot.

The result so far is that yesterday I did something in a dream I always wanted to try, but never dared to do. And today I awoke frustrated with no recall at all after about 6 hours of sleep, but after that I dozed off again and again and could remember a new dream about every 50 minutes. Those added up to 3 new pages in my DJ just for today, which is an all time highscore. When awakening from one of those dreams and recapitulating it I also caught me writing down details in my DJ in a new dream after that one, and I woke up from it because I thought I should better do that in reality :tongue:

I really think this guide is significant and I will continue with pushing recall. I also hope that it will help me to get lucid again in a dream, because of those slightly lucid characteristics stated above.

Thank you Rathez!

Please note the additional information posted in Stage 1:

After much talk with a fellow lucid dreamer, I found that they took an extremely passive stance to their dreams. They just let things happen because they were dreams, and never tried to figure out why certain things were happening.

We are trying to activate the logic section of our brain, so we must try to make some logical sense (in comparison to our waking life) of our dreams.

Great guide, thank you very much !
I’m at square one right now, I hope my dream recall will improve if i put some effort into it !

Plus, i heard that dream recall is linked with simple recalling, what i mean if that if you recall more vivid dreams, you will recall more vivid memories in real life. Is it true, did you notice a change ?

Another fact is that i don’t remember smells in my dreams, a little of sounds, the mental images are not really precise, sometimes a little taste and touch, but no more. Do you remember vivid smells, tastes or sounds ? Do you think i’ll remember more with training ?
Anyway, i’m impatient to see the second part of the guide,
thank you again.

I was wondering that too, even though my recall is OK 1-2 dreams a night, i never recall smells, and i only remember voices and no backround sound. (the only time i hear real sound was in one LD so i guess thats a start)

Welcome Wedgez to LD4all! I see you do know your business, dream memory and life memory are very related, like you said. In fact, I do advice training IWL recall in order to improve the dream one.
For the same reason, if you want to power up any particular sense recall/appearance in dreams, give it more importance during the day, stop and smell things, appreciate the tastes when you eat food.

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welcome :wave: Dream Recall sure gets better with practice. For me taste and smell are pretty rare, but I’m sure it’s just more practice and, as Tosxychor said, putting more attention on these senses.