So, let’s say that you’ve just woken up from the longest, most vivid and in-sane lucid dream (or any other kind of dream / out-of-body experience or whatever other extraordinary, non-normal experience for that matter, but let’s keep it inspiring and “in the context”, shall we? 🙂 ) in your life. You can still feel the adrenaline pumping through your veins, you’re in a good mood and you’ve just finished writing it down in your dream journal. You turn on your computer and launch Dream eXplorer to enter your dream in your digital journal for “safe keeps” and begin gathering information to do some serious dreamwork later.
Let me begin by explaining what I mean by dreamwork. The term includes every dream-related activity – from dreaming your dream, to writing it down, analyzing it, searching for dream signs, reading and re-reading it, watching a dream-related movie, reading books on the subject etc., etc. These are all extremely important activities that help you to strengthen your dream recall and develop your dreaming attention – the ability to “hold the dream” (in terms of not allowing it to change until you don’t want that) and experience it as fully as possible. Even though we are all natural dreamers (we’re all doing it from our births and until the day we die) the ability to dream (and to remember it, of course) is like a muscle – we need to develop it in order to use it to the best of its potential, which we can only achieve by persistence and practice.
Now, let’s get back to Dream eXplorer.
When you launch a new journal entry, the first thing to do is to select the date and location you were at when having the dream, then giving the dream “a name” (title). This is what you’ll see when you open Dream Library therefore it is best to name your dream in such fashion that you’ll be able to recognize and remember it later when browsing through the Dream Library. After saving the basic information, you can begin entering dream details.
Regardless of us remembering it or not, we usually wake up several times per night (thus remembering several dreams in a single night). Usually these are the so-called “micro awakenings” that occur after every sleep cycle and that we usually don’t even remember, but sometimes it happens that we awake ourselves from a “full-blown dreaming experience”. 🙂 Dream eXplorer is designed to allow you to enter your dreams for each sleep cycle that you remember.
The first thing is the time of each awakening (the end of the sleep cycle). The Dream Details section is divided in tabs which allow you to enter the contents of your dream along with some other information:
– Dream Categories – whether it was a “normal” dream, false awakening, semi-lucid or lucid dream or any other type/category you use to differentiate between different kinds of dreams that you have.
– Techniques – whether or not you used any “special” technique in your attempt to achieve a lucid dream.
– Supplements – whether or not you used any kind of dream supplements / enhancers (i.e. dream herbs, LD-induction supplements, vitamins etc.).
– Comments – anything you consider important in regards to your attempt.
Additionally, there are three more tabs, allowing you to enter dream signs, perception bubbles and activities that took place in your dream but we’ll get to that next time…