Introduction
Hello everyone!
For the past couple of years I have been studying mnemotechnics which, on the surface, is about using memory techniques to enhance memorisation and recall. Going into it deeper you can discover how the brain actually stores and retrieves memories, which builds the foundation of mnemotechnics / mnemonics.
Learning mnemotechnics has changed the way I learn, I originally did it out of curiosity and it eventually lead to me being bored by university exams. If you google mnemonics and memory techniques you might find interesting things like how to memorise a pack of cards (or several) in just a couple of minutes, but I originally did it so that I could learn faster and use it in general life (although memorising cards will help you in a casino ;-) ).
Now, I will not go into the full depth of mnemotechnics here because I would like to keep this topic to Lucid Dreaming, if you would like to know more I suggest the following links:
This excerpt from Secrets of a Mind Gamer, which will give you a good overview.
The new mnemotechnics forum.
The wikipedia article on the Art of Memory.
How does memorising a stack of cards relate to Lucid Dreaming
You might be wondering what does all this have to do with LDs, well the MILD technique stands for Mnemonic Induced Lucid dream, the key word here being Mnemonic and mnemotechnics is all about mnemonics!
Because the science of mnemotechnics is very advanced in this area, I would like to use it to try and explain exactly what the mnemonic part of MILD really means and exactly how it works. I'm doing this because from everything I have read on MILD I have not found an explanation I thought was good enough, there are lots of parts that are correct, there is also a lot of misleading information and a general lack of why, which I think is important because when you know the why, you know how to use it properly. Even Stephen LaBerge didn't go into enough detail in his book when he described MILD.
The brain and memory
Memory in the brain is not cut up into "short" and "long" term memory. If you would like to understand how memory really works then picture a massive network of roads (links / synapses) that run between locations (memories / neurons). This isn't 100% scientifically accurate but the analogy suffices for all our needs and the needs of mnemotechnics. Because of this the brain learns by association, you associate (link) a memory you already know well with something new that you would like to learn. If you don't do this, the memory will not be very strong.
As a quick example, say you would like to learn a new word from a different language, the correct way to do this would be to find a similar sounding word in a language you already know and link them together! Since I'm trying to stick to LDs I won't go into more detail, you can find all the different techniques for learning languages, memorising numbers or studying in the links above.
So association is important, the other important thing is repetition, the more you use a road (link) to a memory (location), that is the more you remember something, the stronger the road (link) to it gets! So once you have the link in place, the next part is using it in order to strengthen it. You might be tempted to think "I do this anyway when I repeat something lots of times to remember" but you are doing this without doing the association first which means you are trying to form a link from nothing to something, the brain will eventually do it, but it will take a long time.
On the other hand if you form an association, you might not even need to do any repetition and yet all the links formed will be enough for the memory to stay for the next week or month or even year! As an example the last time I memorised important facts for an exam, I couldn't get them out of my head for the next two weeks, even though I only spent a few hours memorising.
Another way to look at it is if you want to add a new location (memory) to your existing network of roads (your brain) you need to build a road to that location that comes from a location that already exists, if you simply add it without doing that it will be a location that hangs in the middle of space and you'll never be able to get / drive to it.
Mnemonics and Lucid Dreaming
Let's list the important factors from above and add some more:
In MILD what you are attempting to do is remember to do something in the future. LaBerge called it Prospective Memory, from what I understand the Buddhist perspective is that it is Mindfulness that reminds you of what you should be doing. Being in the present moment is mindfulness / awareness, if you go throughout your day automatically without any awareness, you will not be aware enough in a dream to remember it or remember to do something in it. There are already a lot of articles on awareness in LDing, so I won't go further into it.
The last two things on our list are Strangeness and Visualisation, let's go through Visualisation first. The most important part of the brain to memory is known as the hippocampus, the brain is very, very, very good at remembering spacial information. If I asked you right now to close your eyes and list as many things in your room as you could and where they are located, you would be able to. You never specially sat down and memorised this information, it just happens naturally.
Which leads us to visualisation! Basically when I ask you to tell me about your room, what you do is visualise each object and its location. Imagery plays a vital role in our memories. This is probably because of how we have evolved 1) we had to remember where our cave is and where the best animals to hunt are and 2) we had to remember what colour poisonous berries are so we don't die. Since these were very important to our very survival, we became quite adapt at it.
A very important thing to note is that the brain has a filter, it will remember things more easily if it decides they are interesting and conversely, if they are not interesting, it will likely not bother to remember them properly.
To wit, if I said I have an apple and it's red, you would probably forget about this fact very quickly. If I said I had an apple and it was glowing purple, you would find this odd and will remember this for a while. When forming new associations and memories, it is important to make our new memory strange, sexy, weird, f****d up, funny or otherwise odd in some way.
MILD
Now that we have gone through everything, let's see how this all fits together. First let's approach this in real life.
When you go home tonight, stop by the shops and pick me up some eggs.
If I asked you this, you would picture yourself buying the eggs, you might even picture where you are going to buy the eggs. Or, if you might not care at all and forget about buying the eggs because you do not picture it and you do not find it interesting (the brain filters it because you hate me and don't care about buying eggs).
Whether you remember to buy the eggs later in the day or not depends entirely on how you memorised remembering it.
So given what we know so far, the best approach to remembering to buy the eggs would be:
If you think about how you are going to go the store around the corner later and throw eggs at every old person you see, visualising this, you won't forget about buying the eggs. In fact the weirder you make it, the more active it will stay in the brain throughout your day. Just like how difficult it can be to forget a really funny story you just heard, or how you keep thinking about that awesome scene from the book you are reading long after you put the book down.
In MILD your intention is to remember to recognise that you are dreaming, or simply to remember that you wanted to recognise that it's a dream. This is exactly the same as the egg scenario, but there are a couple of problems:
Awareness I will leave up to you to work on, suffice to say the more aware you are during the day the more aware you'll be at night, the idea is fairly simple, the practice is up to you. The second issue is more of a problem, the brain loves locations and "being in a dream" is not a location, you can guess where you might be and that may or may not work since dreams change so drastically but it's okay, because just like with reading a book or seeing something on TV that you find strange, it will still be at the back of your mind during the day even if locations are not involved.
So when I ask you to buy some eggs, all you really have to do is think of a strange story about the eggs, for example about how you are going to walk up to the egg shelf in the shop and smash them all with a giant red hammer!
Visualise this, repeat it a few times to make it stick, make it as weird and strange as you possibly can and voila! You'll be occasionally thinking about it during the day no matter what you are doing, because the brain has now decided that this is strange enough to make a priority in your memory.
With MILD it is the same thing, what you want is to think before going to bed or as you are falling asleep "I need to recognise I'm dreaming tonight so that I can ......" fill in the blank with something strange!
For example:
You are now associating recognising that you are dreaming with a strange story that you won't forget through visualisation and repetition and as long as you are aware in your dream the brain will continue to remember that you wanted to punch a baby in the face and recognise that are you dreaming.
Please note that if you make up a good story you might actually get too excited about it to fall asleep since your brain will now remain highly active, so you may want to do this before heading to bed, not as you are falling asleep, but that's up to you, experiment!
Since you also now know exactly how mnemonics work, how the brain works and how memories work, you can come up with your own ideas. =]
Happy Lucid Dreams. =]
Hello everyone!
For the past couple of years I have been studying mnemotechnics which, on the surface, is about using memory techniques to enhance memorisation and recall. Going into it deeper you can discover how the brain actually stores and retrieves memories, which builds the foundation of mnemotechnics / mnemonics.
Learning mnemotechnics has changed the way I learn, I originally did it out of curiosity and it eventually lead to me being bored by university exams. If you google mnemonics and memory techniques you might find interesting things like how to memorise a pack of cards (or several) in just a couple of minutes, but I originally did it so that I could learn faster and use it in general life (although memorising cards will help you in a casino ;-) ).
Now, I will not go into the full depth of mnemotechnics here because I would like to keep this topic to Lucid Dreaming, if you would like to know more I suggest the following links:
This excerpt from Secrets of a Mind Gamer, which will give you a good overview.
The new mnemotechnics forum.
The wikipedia article on the Art of Memory.
How does memorising a stack of cards relate to Lucid Dreaming
You might be wondering what does all this have to do with LDs, well the MILD technique stands for Mnemonic Induced Lucid dream, the key word here being Mnemonic and mnemotechnics is all about mnemonics!
Because the science of mnemotechnics is very advanced in this area, I would like to use it to try and explain exactly what the mnemonic part of MILD really means and exactly how it works. I'm doing this because from everything I have read on MILD I have not found an explanation I thought was good enough, there are lots of parts that are correct, there is also a lot of misleading information and a general lack of why, which I think is important because when you know the why, you know how to use it properly. Even Stephen LaBerge didn't go into enough detail in his book when he described MILD.
The brain and memory
Memory in the brain is not cut up into "short" and "long" term memory. If you would like to understand how memory really works then picture a massive network of roads (links / synapses) that run between locations (memories / neurons). This isn't 100% scientifically accurate but the analogy suffices for all our needs and the needs of mnemotechnics. Because of this the brain learns by association, you associate (link) a memory you already know well with something new that you would like to learn. If you don't do this, the memory will not be very strong.
As a quick example, say you would like to learn a new word from a different language, the correct way to do this would be to find a similar sounding word in a language you already know and link them together! Since I'm trying to stick to LDs I won't go into more detail, you can find all the different techniques for learning languages, memorising numbers or studying in the links above.
So association is important, the other important thing is repetition, the more you use a road (link) to a memory (location), that is the more you remember something, the stronger the road (link) to it gets! So once you have the link in place, the next part is using it in order to strengthen it. You might be tempted to think "I do this anyway when I repeat something lots of times to remember" but you are doing this without doing the association first which means you are trying to form a link from nothing to something, the brain will eventually do it, but it will take a long time.
On the other hand if you form an association, you might not even need to do any repetition and yet all the links formed will be enough for the memory to stay for the next week or month or even year! As an example the last time I memorised important facts for an exam, I couldn't get them out of my head for the next two weeks, even though I only spent a few hours memorising.
Another way to look at it is if you want to add a new location (memory) to your existing network of roads (your brain) you need to build a road to that location that comes from a location that already exists, if you simply add it without doing that it will be a location that hangs in the middle of space and you'll never be able to get / drive to it.
Mnemonics and Lucid Dreaming
Let's list the important factors from above and add some more:
- Awareness
- Association
- Repetition
- Strangeness
- Visualisation
In MILD what you are attempting to do is remember to do something in the future. LaBerge called it Prospective Memory, from what I understand the Buddhist perspective is that it is Mindfulness that reminds you of what you should be doing. Being in the present moment is mindfulness / awareness, if you go throughout your day automatically without any awareness, you will not be aware enough in a dream to remember it or remember to do something in it. There are already a lot of articles on awareness in LDing, so I won't go further into it.
The last two things on our list are Strangeness and Visualisation, let's go through Visualisation first. The most important part of the brain to memory is known as the hippocampus, the brain is very, very, very good at remembering spacial information. If I asked you right now to close your eyes and list as many things in your room as you could and where they are located, you would be able to. You never specially sat down and memorised this information, it just happens naturally.
Which leads us to visualisation! Basically when I ask you to tell me about your room, what you do is visualise each object and its location. Imagery plays a vital role in our memories. This is probably because of how we have evolved 1) we had to remember where our cave is and where the best animals to hunt are and 2) we had to remember what colour poisonous berries are so we don't die. Since these were very important to our very survival, we became quite adapt at it.
A very important thing to note is that the brain has a filter, it will remember things more easily if it decides they are interesting and conversely, if they are not interesting, it will likely not bother to remember them properly.
To wit, if I said I have an apple and it's red, you would probably forget about this fact very quickly. If I said I had an apple and it was glowing purple, you would find this odd and will remember this for a while. When forming new associations and memories, it is important to make our new memory strange, sexy, weird, f****d up, funny or otherwise odd in some way.
MILD
Now that we have gone through everything, let's see how this all fits together. First let's approach this in real life.
When you go home tonight, stop by the shops and pick me up some eggs.
If I asked you this, you would picture yourself buying the eggs, you might even picture where you are going to buy the eggs. Or, if you might not care at all and forget about buying the eggs because you do not picture it and you do not find it interesting (the brain filters it because you hate me and don't care about buying eggs).
Whether you remember to buy the eggs later in the day or not depends entirely on how you memorised remembering it.
So given what we know so far, the best approach to remembering to buy the eggs would be:
- Picture where you are buying them
- Picture the eggs
- Make it strange!
If you think about how you are going to go the store around the corner later and throw eggs at every old person you see, visualising this, you won't forget about buying the eggs. In fact the weirder you make it, the more active it will stay in the brain throughout your day. Just like how difficult it can be to forget a really funny story you just heard, or how you keep thinking about that awesome scene from the book you are reading long after you put the book down.
In MILD your intention is to remember to recognise that you are dreaming, or simply to remember that you wanted to recognise that it's a dream. This is exactly the same as the egg scenario, but there are a couple of problems:
- You need to be aware enough in the dream
- Dreams are not a location and they change frequently
Awareness I will leave up to you to work on, suffice to say the more aware you are during the day the more aware you'll be at night, the idea is fairly simple, the practice is up to you. The second issue is more of a problem, the brain loves locations and "being in a dream" is not a location, you can guess where you might be and that may or may not work since dreams change so drastically but it's okay, because just like with reading a book or seeing something on TV that you find strange, it will still be at the back of your mind during the day even if locations are not involved.
So when I ask you to buy some eggs, all you really have to do is think of a strange story about the eggs, for example about how you are going to walk up to the egg shelf in the shop and smash them all with a giant red hammer!
Visualise this, repeat it a few times to make it stick, make it as weird and strange as you possibly can and voila! You'll be occasionally thinking about it during the day no matter what you are doing, because the brain has now decided that this is strange enough to make a priority in your memory.
With MILD it is the same thing, what you want is to think before going to bed or as you are falling asleep "I need to recognise I'm dreaming tonight so that I can ......" fill in the blank with something strange!
For example:
- I need to recognise I'm dreaming tonight so that I can wrestle Godzilla naked!
- I need to recognise I'm dreaming tonight so that I can punch a baby in the face
- I need to recognise I'm dreaming tonight so that I can fly to the moon and eat its cheesy centre, but I have to avoid the rocks or my teeth will shatter (if your teeth aren't aching right now you're not visualising enough)
You are now associating recognising that you are dreaming with a strange story that you won't forget through visualisation and repetition and as long as you are aware in your dream the brain will continue to remember that you wanted to punch a baby in the face and recognise that are you dreaming.
Please note that if you make up a good story you might actually get too excited about it to fall asleep since your brain will now remain highly active, so you may want to do this before heading to bed, not as you are falling asleep, but that's up to you, experiment!
Since you also now know exactly how mnemonics work, how the brain works and how memories work, you can come up with your own ideas. =]
Happy Lucid Dreams. =]
via Lucid Dreaming - Dream Views - Attaining Lucidity http://ift.tt/1qKfILL
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