6 hindrances to your dream recall

May 29th, 2008

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Dream recall is a pretty simple thing to do. You have seen the previous posts, and none of the techniques are overly complicated. And still, remembering dreams is often not accomplished easily. In this post, I give some mistakes that I made in the past, and that you can hopefully avoid.

1) Failing to remember to do the exercises in the morning.

This is a thing that I even now struggle with, after so many months of practicing. One wakes up and forgets to do the exercises. This is especially the case when one starts out with this kind of exercises.
Do not worry! With persistence you will remember to do them. And you will start doing them regularly.
Why then do I sometimes forget? Well, I sometimes get a rough awakening from my kids: 1-5 year old do not wait to get up, they make you come to their room within the next minute or … :-) . But do not worry, once dram recall becomes a habit, they will come back without doing the exercises. Or when doing them only one day out of two like in my case.

2) Being tired.

All of our memory is affected by our lack of sleep. Everybody knows this from experience. And dream recall is just a special type of the use of our memory: bringing back what we experienced during the sleeping ours. There is no real cure for that except getting more sleep. Go to bed one hour earlier and you will have more success.

3) Lack of faith in your abilities

Nothing impedes progress more than a lack of faith in you own abilities. The most used quote in this respect is: ‘Whether you think you can or you can’t, you are always right’.
Unless you have a severe (and very rare) medical problem, everybody dreams and thus everybody can remember his or her own dreams. This is a very important point. Everybody can. Yes you too :-)

4) Lack of motivation

Dream recall is not that complicated at all, but if you do not try it whole hearted, you will soon give because the lack of success. It is a simple procedure that everybody can learn, but one needs to be persistent to do it. It will probably not work in the first week, or even the first month. But once you get the hang of it, you will see that you can recall as many or few dreams as you really want.

5) Not making it an important thing

Remember that in the case of dream recall, we need to tell our sub-consciousness to commit the dreams to memory, for us to remember them in the morning. But the sub-conscious has many tasks to perform and moreover is not used to perform this one. So, at least in the beginning, you need to tell it that it is a big deal. That it is important to you. I explained how to do this is this post.

6) Not writing everything down

Write all of your dream in a diary. That makes them important (see previous point). But this one is special. It will allow you to track you progress and once progress is made, it will encourage you even more, and before you know, you will remember almost all of your dreams.

I hope you enjoyed this post. If you have found other things that impede your dream recall, please share them with me in the comments section (which is dofollow btw)

To the astral!

Entrecard news

May 20th, 2008

Today I got the happy news that entrecard updated his systems and now allows to connect multiple blogs to ones accounts.
This was actually a feature that was much needed. I only have two blogs on the system and it was already hard to manage: I constantly needed to logout of the system and log in again to be able to drop for the other profile. The same would happen when anyone was asking to advertise on my blog. I off course was always logged in with the other profile :-) I can only imagine all the trouble that people with for instance 5 blogs had to go through.

But now all this has changed. I can now change profiles with one simple click. This will save me lots of time.

And more good new: the people at entrecard also released a free ebook in which they give a few tips on how to get the best out of the network.

Let’s remember dreams!

Some statistics on my dream recall

May 14th, 2008

As I posted in one of my earlier entries on remembering dreams, one of the key elements is to make dream recall an important issue. I argumented that this was one of the reasons why I started this blog on dreams and astral travel.

Today I would like to illustrate this point with hard facts: numbers!

I keep a dream diary since some time and so I can just count the number of dreams I remember.

I will give you the numbers for March, April and May 2008 up to now.
Why?
Because it illustrates my point perfectly :-). I slacked in my effort to remember dreams and I needed some new impuls. That would have been March. In April, I started thinking about a new blog. I bought a new book on remembering dreams and did my first post on April 17. Since then, I work on it continuously. And now for the numbers:

March:
Remembered Dreams: 4
April:
Remembered Dreams: 9 of which one was a lucid dream
May (up to now)
Remembered Dreams: 11

And May is only half gone! I think that this is a clear proof that the system I use works. I plan to make these numbers available each month, for the same reasons: they are important to me. I will put them in a nice graph, because then upward and downward trends can be easier spotted and remediated if needed.

To the astral.

Remember dreams:esoteric clues

May 10th, 2008

Adding to the more traditional methods to remember dreams, I would like to add 2 from more ‘esoteric sources’.

Use the law of attraction.

The law of attraction states that we attract whatever we think about. The technique is in essence simple: just visualize yourself doing whatever you want to do or have, and it will come to you. In practice it is a bit harder. I have an other blog where I post on this kind of matters. I now run a series detailing the 7 laws of attraction, that detail this.

Use gnostic techniques.

This is actually one of the most potent formulas to remember dreams I know of. Mind you, it is not scientific, but I use this every day and it works wonders.

I use a mantra. A mantra is a phrase that has magical powers. Actually, it imbues the consciousness with the correct vibrations in order to make the magic work.

The mantra is RAOM GAOM.

How to use?

When waking up, again, do not move and mentally repeat the mantra RAOM GAOM in the folllowing way:

RRRRRRAAAAAAOOOOOMMMMMMM GAAAAAAOOOOOOMMMMM

So elongate the words and let the R roll like in Spanish.

That’s all for today, next I will try to make an overview article.

To the astral.

My new entrecard ad

May 5th, 2008

Today I proudly announce my new entrecard image:

dreams entrecard ad

Tada! I thinks it looks awesome and really matches with the theme.

So am I bragging about my own work here? No, it was designed by Samsara from the really nice blog “Living within Samsara“. On this blog you will find all things spiritual like dreams, astral projection and even a section about gnosticism. I invite you all to go over there and check it out. I promise you will find it an interesting read.

To the astral.

It is working!

April 29th, 2008

In my last post, I outlined the importance of making remembering dreams an important practice. I also outlined what I was doing in order to accomplish this and reported some successes.

But this night I went over the top! As you know, My main aim is astral projection and/or lucid dream induction. And last night it happened. I was dreaming and I thought to myself: “this is not possible. This must be a dream”. And indeed, I was right. Moments later, I was floating in the air!

I tried to reach the moon, as this is a long time goal of mine, but unfortunately, I got a bit over enthusiastic and woke up. I was nevertheless thrilled about this experience, since it has been a long time since I had a lucid dream.
Off course this success is the result of thorough preparation. I did not become lucid just like that. Like remembering dreams, it is a skill that needs to be learned and practiced. I will talk about the hows and whys later, but for the impatient, you can check out this guide or register at gnosticweb for their free courses on astral travel, that include a section on lucid dreaming.

Let me finish by saying that for me this is my ultimate goal: to go to the astral plane with full lucidity.

To the astral.

Yesterday I also produced a squido lens about the 7 laws of attraction. You are welcome to visit it.

Why start a blog on dreams?

April 25th, 2008

To start a blog one usually needs a good reason fro doing so. It requires a lot of hard and dedicated work. So why go through all this trouble?

In my case I have several reasons. I’m trying to see if I can make my living completely online. But that alone will not do the trick. One needs something more: a subject that one is passionate about, like this blog on dreams and astral projection, or like in the case of my other blog on the law of attraction, a subject that I wanted to study and know better.

In this case, a blog about dreams, it is different. I know the subject rather well: I have been studying it for several years. Actually, I’m interested in gnosis (modern gnosis in the tradition of Samael Aun Weor) and theosophy and through these, I naturally came to doing exercises like meditation, dream recall and astral projection.

Why start a blog on dreams then?

Well, in my last post on remembering dreams, I left out a few clues. Dream recall is actually very simple. And once it starts, it becomes more and more easy. I was able to remember a few dreams per night in my high days.
But as with any skill, one needs to keep at it. For various reasons, I started to practice less, and so I remembered less and less dreams. I was even at a point where I could remember only 1 dream per week or less!

So what is the extra clue to dream remembering?

Make it important!
Yes, that is right. The clues I gave about repeating to yourself to remember your dreams until you fall asleep conveys the following message to your sub-consciousness: “This is important!”
So what better way it their to make this message clear that to start a bog about the topic? Almost none I would say :-)
So the purpose it to be thinking about dreams very regularly via the need to post regularly. And hence this blog was born.

And the results?

I started to do the exercises again, which is already a step in the right direction. I also recorded 3 dreams last week. And this to me is a big success!

To the astral!

Why would you want to remember your dreams

April 22nd, 2008

This is indeed a very good question. Why wold one bother and try to remember dreams? Most people do not remember their dreams at all and they are perfectly happy with this. So why would one want to remember ones dreams?

It’s fun

Really, it is really fun doing. The life we lead at night is both strange and wonderful. But mostly, remembering dreams gives you a feeling of not having wasted your complete night doing nothing. Actually, one never does nothing. The activity of the brain is always high. Even in deep sleep, the full brain is powered and consuming sugars.

You get to know an other side of yourself

The adventures we have in dreams are for their majority inspired on our daily life. We than can see how we would behave in the absence of social ties. In this way we can learn a lot about ourselves.
What also happens is that we see ourselves behave in some strange irate way during a dream. But when looking at our lives, we might find that we behave just the same. We were just blind to this. Dreams can be a real eye opener.

Lucid dreaming

If you want to become lucid in your dreams, the first thing is to remember them. We can have loads of lucid dreams, but if we keep forgetting them, it is as if we never had them. In lucid dreams, one can actively control the dream and thus perform wonders, or just visit the moon :-)

Prediction

Very rarely, we get premonitions in our dreams. We are warned beforehand of what is going to happen. This gives us the opportunity to try to avoid it, or to mentally prepare us for the event (in the case of something negative) or to start rejoicing (in the case of a positive event).
But beware, the meaning of dreams is not easy to decipher. Dreams are always symbolic, and money can be dirty in dreams, and dead can signify the end of some unhappy condition in our present life.
Nothing is what it seems, and dreams are highly personal.

These are the various reasons why I try to remember dreams. Do you have any special reasons that I omitted? Please feel free to share them in the comments.

To the astral!

Dream recall

April 17th, 2008

When attempting to astral project and astral travel, the first thing we should learn is how to remember our dreams. Without it, we could be having all kind of wonderful experiences, but never be able to recall our dreams.

Most people do not remember a lot from their dreams. Some event think they do not dream at all. But nothing is further from the truth. Scientific research showed that everybody has roughly 7 to 9 cycles of dream sleep during every night. We only just forget what we dreamed in the morning.

Dream recall is not that difficult. Actually, once you get the hang of it, it comes almost by itself. However, once that happens, we tend to slip and our efforts are lost. So that is a tricky one.

But for now, let us concentrate on a routine that works wonders and is easily implemented.

In the evening

Make a strong commitment to yourself to remember your dreams in the morning. And also to do the exercises for the morning. Because one of the difficult things will be to remember to do the exercises in the first place.
So make a strong commitment to remember your dreams. If you are able to fall asleep while repeating this to yourself, all the better. But I find that I sometimes have a hard time falling asleep while doing this. But feel free to try it. But it is better if you can.

In the morning

Do not move!

That is important as moving tends to make dream recall harder.

Then, do a retrospective exercise. This means that you try to remember your dreams actively. How? Ask these questions to yourself: before I woke up, I was doing … ; before I woke up I was in the following place … And try to fill in the blanks. After some days with this routine, you will see that you will start to remember dreams.

Keep at it

Do not be discouraged if it does not work in the first days, or even the first weeks. Try to keep up the practice scheme and you will see that it will work. Some people start remembering dreams straight away, others take weeks. But all who keep at it succeed!

Next time I will reveal another clue from the esoteric traditions, that have far less scientific background, but who nevertheless are VERY VERY potent. Actually, I found these to be even better than the scientifically tested ones. See you then

To the astral!

Welcome post

April 17th, 2008

Welcome to all of you. This is the first post in my new blog.

In this blog I will target an other of my passions: astral projection and astral travel. I have been fascinated with the subject, its implications and possible scientific proof.

I myself was not able to astral project, but I had a number of lucid dreams that were both short and amazing. And this brings me naturally to another topic that will be covered on this blog and that is often overlooked in astral projection sites: dream recall and dream interpretation.

As Robert Bruce tells us, people can be successful in astral projection, but sometimes fail to remember the event. And so they get frustrated and give up.

I will be discussing all kind of techniques, tips and tricks. I hope to be able to update this blog one to two times a week, so come back soon.

To the astral!