Adventures in Lucid Dreaming 4: Reflections and Thoughts

I've been on this Lucid Dreaming Adventure for over a month now, and, although I have not yet had even one lucid dream, I've learned some noteworthy things that I'd like to share.  Before I do that, I'd like to place a disclaimer that the hypotheses stated in this essay are based on anecdotal evidence and speculative.  I am not trying to revolutionize dream science.  Rather, I am constructing my experiences into a narrative hypothesis that I hope to one day explore further and in more depth.

The other day, I looked through my dream journal and read through a bunch of the dreams I've had over the past couple of weeks.  I noticed two key characteristics of these dreams.  First, they consistently contained tinges of things I had been thinking a lot in the days prior to having those dreams.  There was a period of time where I thought a lot about food and philosophies of food consumption.  My dreams during this period were set in restaurants or other food-centric venues and involved some sort of conflict centered around food.  During a period of thinking about group dynamics, I had multiple dreams revolving around either sports or other forms of large groups.  This realization fits in well with our current understanding of how dreams and sleep work. If we take the current common wisdom that sleep plays a large role in memory consolidation and organization, it makes sense that dream topics mimic the thoughts we think and events that occur in our daily lives.  Dreams are a way of taking those chunks of memory and manipulating them.  This also fits in well with our current understanding of how our memory shapes the past and constructs narratives.  Humans do not remember things like they happened.  Rather, we remember things in a way that fits into our own personal biases and narratives of our lives.  Dreams play a large role in constructing this narrative.  By parsing through our memories, replaying shadows of them, and manipulating chunks of them, dreams assist in memory consolidation, which is really just a fancy way of saying narrative composition.

This conclusion informs my more out-there hypothesis that part of the reason we don't remember our dreams is that pieces of our dreams are actually being reinserted back into our memories somehow.  Thus, it is not necessary for us to remember our dreams as the important parts of our dreams are somehow connected and consolidated in the personal narrative of our memories.

I hope to investigate this phenomenon further in the future, as I think achieving lucid dreams will inform this hypothesis further.  In order to make any real claim, however, I need some way of falsifying this hypothesis, which will be the topic of a later post or perhaps a particularly curious commented.

In terms of the experiment, I'll be continuing on with my attempt to habitualize my reality chekcs and increase dream recall, in order to hopefully induce lucidity.  My next post will either continue in this vein or go back to the more practical aspects of this adventure.

Adventures in Lucid Dreaming 3: Week 5 Update and Changes

This is, unfortunately, going to be a short post. 

At this point, I've stagnated a bit.  My dream recall is at or above the level I wanted it to be at.  However, I have not yet achieved lucidity although I firmly believe I am getting closer.  A big reason for this, I suspect, is that I have not been able to do the reality checks as regularly as I would like.  As a result, I intend to up the ante by adding some sort of reminder system to force me to do reality checks more often.  I am considering two options, one digital, one analog.  I will either set reminders on my phone throughout the day or simply carry an index card in my pocket that says "real?" on it, to remind me.

Hopefully, I will be able to put up a long post this upcoming Sunday with more details about my progress, observations, and other, unrelated but also interesting, things.