Lucid dreaming seems to be an elusive but extremely tempting target for many people in the quantified self and self-improvement community. And it's not hard to see why. Lucid dreaming presents the possibility for a potentially large amount of leisure time spent in a virtual world under your control. Perhaps even more exciting, it presents the possibility for further learning and skill acquisition accelerated by the increased control of the dream-space and memory consolidation that occurs while dreaming. For more information on Lucid Dreaming feel free to check out the sources listed at the bottom of the page.
As may be obvious by now, the goal of this experiment is going to be the induction of lucid dreams. The approach I'm going to be taking towards this experiment is two-phased.
The first phase will last 2-3 weeks (depending on how it goes and how busy I am) and involves two key behaviours which I will implement. The first behaviour is daily dream journalling in order to increase dream retention. While I currently remember dreams occasionally (around one on most days), I hope that by the end of these next couple of weeks, I will at the minimum be remembering one or two dreams a day. That being said, I am hopeful that I will be remembering more like 3 or 4 dreams today, but one or two is the minimum number for success.
The second behaviour I will implement in the first phase of the experiment is reality checks. Reality checks are small behaviours performed throughout the day to create the habit of checking whether one is dreaming. For my reality checks, I will be holding my nose while breathing and jumping into the air every time I go to the bathroom, and holding my nose every time I go through a door. This way, even if I forget occasionally, I will still be able to maintain a high frequency of checks throughout the day.
Assuming the first phase of the experiment is relatively successful. The second phase of the experiment will involve me attempting to induce lucid dreams using the MILD (Mnemonic Induction of Lucid Dreams) technique (described in much more detail at the two links at the bottom of the page). The MILD technique involves intensely focusing on remembering your dreams as you fall asleep combined with the now-habitual reality checks I will hopefully perform while dreaming.
My success in this phase will be measured by the number of instances in which I succeed in inducing lucid dreams. I consider 5 instances of lucid dreams in a months span to be the minimum for success. A truly exciting result would be if I could consistently induce lucidity multiple times a week. I am frankly unsure how long this phase of the experiment will last, because I would like to at least attain some level of success before I move on to my next experiment. However, I am going to set a hard time limit of one month on this aspect of the experiment, because at that point it will most likely be difficult to continue writing novel posts about my adventure.
Thanks for reading and look forward to my next post, to be posted by the end of next weekend.
Links
Tim Ferriss' Beginner Guide
Lucid Dreaming Wikibook
Lengthy, More Technical Article on Lucid Dreaming
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