In my daylight hours I wear glasses. When looking for dream signs, I realized I don’t see through glasses in my dreams. I thought I could use this to trigger lucidity, but I can’t seem to be aware of it to check while dreaming. Is there some sort of state check that I can do during the day? Should I ask myself if I’m wearing glasses often during the day?
Any tips or guidance would be appreciated. Thanks.
Welcome to the Night Club club! I’ve heard that if you consciously put on glasses in a lucid dream, the dream will become even clearer. Perhaps develop the intent to put on glasses, maybe a special pair, say gold rimmed frames, that could be a state check in a dream.
One way to work on recognizing dream-only phenomenon during the day is to do what I call “daytime MILD”. Basically, you recall and visualize a dream scene (it can be more effective after relaxing and reaching a meditative state first), reliving it, and then you visualize yourself recognizing the dream sign and becoming lucid in the dream. I like to loop over visualizing a key image that I want to recognize, and affirm to myself “I’m dreaming! I’m dreaming!” I’ll repeat this for a while. By the way, this is also how I “set” a PM target for PM exercises.
What is a PM target?
That is very helpful advice. I have been wondering how to set the intention of recognizing dream signs that occur often as dreams.
Thank you
PM = prospective memory, the memory of remembering to do something in the future, especially in some particular context. The classic example of PM is “I will remember to buy lemons when I go to the store later.” The particular use of PM in dream yoga is “I will remember to recognize the dream as dream while I am dreaming.” You can train PM during the day by establishing some “targets”: events that you want to purposefully, consciously recognize as they occur. For example, “I will remember to do a state test (“reality check”) when I see a red car”. Seeing a red car is the “PM target” in this case.
It works really well, especially if you practice it consistently. The “trigger” fires almost magically when the desired event occurs. I used this just the other day to remember to do something when I entered my bedroom hours later in the day.
One specific example of this is when I was having a streak of nightly dreams located in my childhood home (CH) and the surrounding neighborhood. During the day, I would visualize walking in and around my CH and area, recognizing the scenes as being in my CH and affirming to myself, “I’m dreaming! I’m dreaming!” all the while. This worked, and in subsequent dreams that were located in my CH, I got lucid.
This can also serve to incubate dreams about/located where you want, since our dreams of the night are usually about what we’re thinking about during the day.
@Dream_Hacker Thanks so much for the explanation. I will try to practice more of PM (Prospective Memory) by remembering to do a Reality Test as much as possible during the day. I might try a variation. For example. During the day, as soon as I remember, I say: “This seems very dream-like” , then I will ask : “Am I dreaming?”. “Let’s do a Reality Test”. Then I will pinch my nose and try to breathe. I plan to do keep doing this as often I remember - even though there is no PM target. That way I will get more practice.