Remembering dreams..

[Pizzabeak]

I quickly wrote this on facebook (needed somewhere to let it out), but I'd like to expand on it slightly more:

This has worked for me on multiple occasions... Wanna be "aware" during dream time? Sleep with your iPod on (preferably shuffle), or play music through speakers at a reasonable volume.. Pretty soon, in your dream (probably when you're close to waking up now that I think about it, but it probably doesn't matter), you'll recognize a song playing... But you'll still be dreaming! More often than not, the dream will start to be related to the song. This morning, a chapter from a Terence McKenna audio book came up on shuffle and it was.. Interesting to say the least. Also interesting to note that a 4 minute song will seem like forever (combined with the fact that the song will play during your entire dream.. a lot will go down in like 30 seconds. Time seems to function interestingly during dreams - I could just be making this part up though). Usually when I wake up I scroll backwards to see what songs played & I definitely remember some. On average, depending on how long you sleep of course, 120 songs'll play. Last but not least, and this happened last time I did this & it had to have happened at least a couple other times, when I'm (and maybe you if you give it a shot?) barely awake I'll be thinking of a song and, of course, it'll come up on shuffle. This morning (April 4th), if I remember correctly & you'll have to take my word for it, I was sort of hoping 'Somethin' For the Kids' by Astronautalis would play, and then it did, and then I woke up. (<--- that happens sometimes, so, of course, it could be "random chance" so let's go ahead and leave it at that)

This morning, and the day before, I really couldn't remember anything. What I did today that I didn't do yesterday was scroll backwards through the songs & recognize which ones played.. This step is vital. After you recognize a song that played you should instantly remember everything about the dreams.. I do at least. I get all giddy when I remember. It's awesome. Dreams rule. I'd basically like to see how fare with this - if you're having trouble remembering dreams and are desperate to give any technique a shot, feeling experimental. Yes, sleeping with music on can be quite difficult so you're pretty much on your own when it comes to that part, sorry. Just because you don't fall asleep instantly with music playing doesn't mean you won't, sometimes it might take like 30 minutes before you start feeling drowsy, all part o' the plan.

 

[Moocow]

Cool idea, except I have difficulty sleeping with earphones in, and well, my iphone runs out of batteries if I use it for anything for more than 2 hours. I'm not sure I even have 120 minutes of music to listen to these days either. It might be worth a try though if I could get back into experimenting with sleep.

Have any other users ever frequented dreamviews or ld4all? They have a ton of really good ideas for all of this. For remembering dreams, I subscribe to the practice of keeping a dream journal and reading it over some nights to try to recall past dreams before sleeping. It seems to help, and within a couple nights any new dreams I have will be a lot more detailed. The first night, I might only jot a few notes down of little moments I remember. Two or three nights in and I'm covering three or four pages.

It's hard to keep in the practice of this if I don't have a specific purpose, and it is generally rare that I do. The tragedy with lucid dreaming and all the related phenomena is that no matter how amazing it is to the practitioner, no one else will ever give a shit about your stories. Not trying to be rude or anything, that just seems to be the reality of it. Taking it to an art form like painting (my preference) or music (apparently aphex twin's preference) can provide for some excellent material though, and people DO appreciate that.

 

[Moocow]

I don't mean to hijack your thread but I do have another idea I think you might want to try. Smell is the most strongly associated sense with memory. Even a faint whiff of something I haven't smelled in years can put me into flashbacks. I'm sure I'm not the only one.

Try this procedure if you want, I think I may do it and post up the results some time:

1. Buy a wide variety of incense
2. Wake up after 5-6 hours of sleep and remain awake for 30 minutes to an hour.
3. Burn one incense stick.
4. Go back to sleep.
5. When you wake back up, put out the incense and clear the smell from the room. It's probably better to just sleep through the entire duration of the stick.
6. Go through the entire variety using a different one each morning.
7. Write down some key moments from any dreams you remember in a journal.
8. Wait a week or more to consolidate all the memories into long term memory. DO NOT smell any of the incense sticks in that time.
9. Sit down in a semi dark, quiet room, light one of the incense sticks and read the corresponding dream journal page. The smell should cue the memory really strongly and the journal is just to give you a place to start.

The idea is that the incense only burns mostly while you are in REM sleep and distinguishes any memories you have of dreams. Waking up after 5 or 6 hours of sleep then going back to sleep will launch you directly into REM making it the optimal time to fuck with your dreams.

Other things that help:
-mugwort tea before REM sleep does a lot of weird, weird things. I've had goddamn visions with the stuff. You can get it on amazon for like $1 / oz.
-The longer you wait between smelling a distinct and uncommon smell, the more effective it seems to be at initiating a memory.
-Do something that stimulates your imagination in that hour or so before going back to REM sleep. Read, do some math in your head, or just go through old dream journal entries and try to recall them.

 

[Ex-User (5841)]

-mugwort tea before REM sleep does a lot of weird, weird things. I've had goddamn visions with the stuff. You can get it on amazon for like $1 / oz.

Odds are you've got the equivalent growing in your backyard. Mugwort contains thujone, one of the active compounds in absinthe. A very common landscaping shrub, Thuja occidentalis AKA arborvitae AKA eastern white cedar contains the same compound.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thuja_occidentalis

Odds are you have mugwort growing somewhere in the neighborhood as well.

 

[Moocow]

Odds are you've got the equivalent growing in your backyard. Mugwort contains thujone, one of the active compounds in absinthe. A very common landscaping shrub, Thuja occidentalis AKA arborvitae AKA eastern white cedar contains the same compound.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thuja_occidentalis

Odds are you have mugwort growing somewhere in the neighborhood as well.

I live in a city where we don't really have yards but I think I've seen it growing here and there. I would bet that the small, isolated patches of soil or dogshit that anything can grow out of here are not a clean substrate for anything you want to consume.

 

[Raquelio]

This is sort of unrelated but the other day I had an odd dream (I can't really say it was a nightmare because I enjoyed it). I was playing minecraft and I was on a cobblestone road that seemingly went on forever, except since it was my dream there were thousands of other people on the road and we could all interact, but the strange part was they all had MPD and the different personalities they had were almost transparent and were floating over there heads, and they could change them...It was a very violent strange place...But I know what caused it earlier in the day I was messaging my friend and he was talking about how he found diamonds ( for those that don't play Minecraft: finding diamonds is a huge accomplishment) and while we were talking I was reading articles about schizophrenia and MPD ( they were very interesting by the way) well, enough with my useless babbling.

 

[Pizzabeak]

The tragedy with lucid dreaming and all the related phenomena is that no matter how amazing it is to the practitioner, no one else will ever give a shit about your stories. Not trying to be rude or anything, that just seems to be the reality of it. Taking it to an art form like painting (my preference) or music (apparently aphex twin's preference) can provide for some excellent material though, and people DO appreciate that.

True, and funny, but I'd hope any methods in this thread will help others that may be fascinated with the whole dream thing at the very least. I always thought somehow capturing dreams on film would be interesting - like a film composed of some of the most interesting dream sequences I've had. It'd just be an interesting ass film cinematography wise if a story could somehow be weaved into them.

Odds are you've got the equivalent growing in your backyard. Mugwort contains thujone, one of the active compounds in absinthe. A very common landscaping shrub, Thuja occidentalis AKA arborvitae AKA eastern white cedar contains the same compound.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thuja_occidentalis

Odds are you have mugwort growing somewhere in the neighborhood as well.

I'd like to search for some and try it, I hope laziness doesn't get in the way of that though.

This is sort of unrelated but the other day I had an odd dream (I can't really say it was a nightmare because I enjoyed it). I was playing minecraft and I was on a cobblestone road that seemingly went on forever, except since it was my dream there were thousands of other people on the road and we could all interact, but the strange part was they all had MPD and the different personalities they had were almost transparent and were floating over there heads, and they could change them...It was a very violent strange place...But I know what caused it earlier in the day I was messaging my friend and he was talking about how he found diamonds ( for those that don't play Minecraft: finding diamonds is a huge accomplishment) and while we were talking I was reading articles about schizophrenia and MPD ( they were very interesting by the way) well, enough with my useless babbling.

Interesting dream. What was so interesting about schizophrenia that caught your attention though? It always seems to pop up in discussions here. I've come upon some interesting things about it as well, I should mention.

 

[Cognisant]

Last night I dreamt there was flooding and landslides in around my home city (although in reality the terrain is very flat) and for whatever reason I was firing this heat seeking missile launcher at some guy in a exosuit, but missile dosen't lock on to him and hits someone else entirely, which was rather embarrassing. He turns around and points this massive gun at me and I'm waving frantically, signalling to him that I'm on his side and I meant to do that (I didn't), so he seems to accept that, turns back around, and I switch to dumb-fire mode (no heat-seeking) and take another shot at him, because I'm a prick.

Next thing I know this there's a powerful blue electric flash to which I exclaim "shit that's new", then I wake up.

 

[Raquelio]

True, and funny, but I'd hope any methods in this thread will help others that may be fascinated with the whole dream thing at the very least. I always thought somehow capturing dreams on film would be interesting - like a film composed of some of the most interesting dream sequences I've had. It'd just be an interesting ass film cinematography wise if a story could somehow be weaved into them.


I'd like to search for some and try it, I hope laziness doesn't get in the way of that though.
Interesting dream. What was so interesting about schizophrenia that caught your attention though? It always seems to pop up in discussions here. I've come upon some interesting things about it as well, I should mention.

Well first my grandma had it, and she ran away many years ago and no one is sure of where she is or whether she's alive or not, also i'm fascinated with the mind and how it works, I found a very interesting article about a girl in the U.K who had over 17 different personalities (it might have been 14) and she drew a picture of all of them, though I can't recall where I found it you would have to look it up.