February 8th marked the end of my 30 day lucid dreaming trial. I recorded 14 out of 30 days’ of my dreams in my dream journal, slightly less than half. Most of the times I either forget my dreams upon awakening or was lazy.
So what addition lessons have I learned since the 15 day mark?
1) Keep your pen in your journal on a blank page. Makes it much, much easier to just flip open your journal and write first thing in the morning. You won’t believe how much momentum you lose just in those few moments of looking for a blank page, and sometimes you’ll even write in the dark which makes fumbling impossible.
2) I’m still waking up in the middle of the night after a dream. Bah. A friend of mine who’s done the same thing assures me that it stops after a while.
3) Most of what I remember seems to be from the tail-end of a dream. I have this feeling sometimes that the dreams I can remember are only the ones that happen closest to waking time, and not the whole night’s. Can any experienced lucid dreamers verify this?
4) Dreams reflect reality. I’ve definitely had dreams where stuff that happened that day was reflected in the dream, but in a weird way. Perhaps dreams are a form of defragging after all?
5) Some dreams are stronger than others. Sounds obvious, but some dreams you remember with such emotion, while others only feel like passing scenes. You wonder if the stronger dreams have a deeper meaning or purpose…I had a really dream last night where the last line I uttered was; ‘there is a better world’ before I knocked into the alarm clock and caused myself to wake up (Jung would scream synchronicity!).
6) Some dreams repeat. While I can’t say why, I’ve realized that I’ve been to some dream places more than once, and some people appear in my dream again and again.
7) I still haven’t had one lucid dream yet. Hmmmm.
Even though I still haven’t had one lucid dream yet, this 30 day trial has been interesting. I’m going to extend this another 30 days, because I still feel it’s a fun skill to learn, it doesn’t cost anything except a few moments in the morning, and after 30 days of writing down my dreams, it’s become a habit.
P.S. If you want to join me in my lucid dreaming journey, Bill runs an entire blog with articles about lucid dreaming you can read at Lucid Blog.