Previous posts in this series:
Prospective Memory and Lucid Dreaming
Prospective Memory and Lucid Dreaming 2
Prospective memory is an incredibly clever piece of mental machinery! It allows us to park simple future tasks and then automatically retrieve them at a predetermined time and/or under predetermined circumstances.
For example, one morning you feed your cat, “Fluff Hole” and notice that’s the last of her food. You do a mental note-to-self number… “gotta stop at Safeway on the way home from school and get food for Fluff Hole.” Then you go on about your business.
That intention initiated a prospective memory cycle by encoding a specific task… get food for Fluff Hole, along with two specific cues… a place, namely “Safeway” and a time, “the way home from school.” Without even thinking about it, you also set an importance level for the task. “I must…”
As you sit through your classes, you have no attention on your no-cat- food situation.
Hours later you’re on your way home, and miraculously out of nowhere, perhaps even before you reach Safeway, a seemingly spontaneous thought enters your mind… “Oh yeah, I’ve got to stop at Safeway and get food for the cat.” And you do.
The entire time, prior to stopping at Safeway, your prospective memory machine was continuously monitoring your awareness, looking for “Safeway” and/or for you to be “on the way home from school.” When one of those cues registered, the machine checked the importance level of the task, and saw fit to give you a little nudge… “Better stop for cat food.” Note that the strength of the nudge was appropriate to the assigned importance level of the task. If it had been less important, the nudge might have been less demanding… “Maybe stop for cat food?”
Notice that you were not looking for cues. Once the task, cues, and importance level were set, the process was entirely automatic until the machine nudged you. After encoding all you had to do is go about your business as usual.
Now consider this… what if you could encode in your prospective memory machine the task to “recognize that you’re dreaming”, and the cues “this night” and a workable “dream sign” likely to show up that night?
Well, maybe you can!
When I first started experimenting with prospective memory, I didn’t understand that after encoding, everything was on automatic. I thought I had to do something with reality checks or whatever… which I always forgot about once asleep. Then one day in an NLD, a little monkey with a tool belt let me know I was dreaming. Even though I at first resisted the idea, he managed to convince me and I became lucid. It wasn’t until much later that I realized the monkey was the prospective memory machine’s “nudge” to remind me I was dreaming. The dream was so amusing that I posted it here:
My Monkey and I
Part of the fun of this technique is seeing the various ways the PM machine incorporates the nudge into the NLD.
My original intent was to update LaBerge’s original MILD technique. In light of what I had learned about how prospective memory works, it’s a near miracle that the approach worked at all. The pioneers who somehow made it work on a consistent basis deserve medals!
The major problem I encountered when attempting to streamline MILD was how to predict what dream sign is likely to show up on any particular night. Once I got by that, it was downhill. There’s a story behind that, which I’ll post after we see how well it works for you guys.
Tomorrow I’ll post my version of updated MILD. I have high hopes for it, but in the interest of full disclosure, I have to admit that it’s still pretty much an untested approach… although it has been working extremely well for me.
Prospective Memory and Lucid Dreaming
Prospective Memory and Lucid Dreaming 2
Prospective memory is an incredibly clever piece of mental machinery! It allows us to park simple future tasks and then automatically retrieve them at a predetermined time and/or under predetermined circumstances.
For example, one morning you feed your cat, “Fluff Hole” and notice that’s the last of her food. You do a mental note-to-self number… “gotta stop at Safeway on the way home from school and get food for Fluff Hole.” Then you go on about your business.
That intention initiated a prospective memory cycle by encoding a specific task… get food for Fluff Hole, along with two specific cues… a place, namely “Safeway” and a time, “the way home from school.” Without even thinking about it, you also set an importance level for the task. “I must…”
As you sit through your classes, you have no attention on your no-cat- food situation.
Hours later you’re on your way home, and miraculously out of nowhere, perhaps even before you reach Safeway, a seemingly spontaneous thought enters your mind… “Oh yeah, I’ve got to stop at Safeway and get food for the cat.” And you do.
The entire time, prior to stopping at Safeway, your prospective memory machine was continuously monitoring your awareness, looking for “Safeway” and/or for you to be “on the way home from school.” When one of those cues registered, the machine checked the importance level of the task, and saw fit to give you a little nudge… “Better stop for cat food.” Note that the strength of the nudge was appropriate to the assigned importance level of the task. If it had been less important, the nudge might have been less demanding… “Maybe stop for cat food?”
Notice that you were not looking for cues. Once the task, cues, and importance level were set, the process was entirely automatic until the machine nudged you. After encoding all you had to do is go about your business as usual.
Now consider this… what if you could encode in your prospective memory machine the task to “recognize that you’re dreaming”, and the cues “this night” and a workable “dream sign” likely to show up that night?
Well, maybe you can!
When I first started experimenting with prospective memory, I didn’t understand that after encoding, everything was on automatic. I thought I had to do something with reality checks or whatever… which I always forgot about once asleep. Then one day in an NLD, a little monkey with a tool belt let me know I was dreaming. Even though I at first resisted the idea, he managed to convince me and I became lucid. It wasn’t until much later that I realized the monkey was the prospective memory machine’s “nudge” to remind me I was dreaming. The dream was so amusing that I posted it here:
My Monkey and I
Part of the fun of this technique is seeing the various ways the PM machine incorporates the nudge into the NLD.
My original intent was to update LaBerge’s original MILD technique. In light of what I had learned about how prospective memory works, it’s a near miracle that the approach worked at all. The pioneers who somehow made it work on a consistent basis deserve medals!
The major problem I encountered when attempting to streamline MILD was how to predict what dream sign is likely to show up on any particular night. Once I got by that, it was downhill. There’s a story behind that, which I’ll post after we see how well it works for you guys.
Tomorrow I’ll post my version of updated MILD. I have high hopes for it, but in the interest of full disclosure, I have to admit that it’s still pretty much an untested approach… although it has been working extremely well for me.
via Lucid Dreaming - Dream Views - Attaining Lucidity http://ift.tt/1gYboSa
No comments:
Post a Comment