Dream Counter system Tutorial

[Burns]

I just want to say that this system is brilliant! A really cool and unique feature. Excellent job, Raklet! Now I have even more motivation to keep up on my DJ to add to my dream totals

[Robot_Butler]

This is so cool

I have to figure out how I'm going to handle this.  I don't even record all my lucids in my online DJ, let alone all my dreams and fragments.  I will need to think about how I can record some data for myself without screwing up the community totals. 

[pj]

There are a couple ways you could handle this.  One is just to make note that you had the dreams in a journal and input the stats.  There is no rule saying you have to provide details.

[Mark]

I did originally add all my dreams onto one post but I have sorted that now....sorry if I caused any trouble.

I must say this is a brilliant idea! I really like this and as far as I know I have not seen anything like this before

I think its good for people too because it gives a really good idea of how common lucids are and I think this will be a great help to newbies and the experienced alike

[Raklet]

I did originally add all my dreams onto one post but I have sorted that now....sorry if I caused any trouble.

I must say this is a brilliant idea! I really like this and as far as I know I have not seen anything like this before

I think its good for people too because it gives a really good idea of how common lucids are and I think this will be a great help to newbies and the experienced alike

Thank you for modifying that.  It will benefit you in the long run.  Eventually, I will develop a package that will total your dreams for you by day, month, year, provide averages, graphs, etc.  Also there will be a spot that will list the date and number of dreams for that date.  It will be linked.  You can click on it and go visit the exact post where that information was recorded.  Thanks for the compliments.  Glad you like the feature.

[The Cusp]

I was just wondering what most people consider to be "fragments".

I usually don't bother writing down fragments unless they are at least a small paragraph in length, and I wanted to know how everyone else was doing this.  Should I be counting really small ones that go "Something about a zombie..."  ?

[Raklet]

I was just wondering what most people consider to be "fragments".

I usually don't bother writing down fragments unless they are at least a small paragraph in length, and I wanted to know how everyone else was doing this.  Should I be counting really small ones that go "Something about a zombie..."  ?

"Something about a zombie" - I generally consider that a fragment.  For me, if it is a small paragraph in length, it is a dream.

[Clairity]

I was just wondering what most people consider to be "fragments".

"Something about a zombie" - I generally consider that a fragment.  For me, if it is a small paragraph in length, it is a dream.

I consider "Something about a zombie" a fragment as well.. but I sometimes consider dreams a fragment if I can't recall how the dream began nor its middle (but just the last 10 minutes or so).

[iadr]

I'm probably more lenient than most people.  If I can remember the general theme of the dream and have a pretty good idea what I was doing, even if I don't remember all of the details of the dream, I consider it a dream.

If I remember all of the details of the dream, I consider it a vivid dream.

If I wake up and have an idea that I was dreaming about something, but am unable to remember any details about it, I consider that a fragment.

[pj]

It is clear that we need some definitions.

Here is what I'm going with:

Anything I can write more than two or three sentences about:  Dream

Something  I can only write a couple sentences about: Fragment

ANYTHING I remember being lucid in: Lucid

Anything less - yeah... I may have dreamed, but there's nothing to count.  My goal is to improve my recall, so saying that I remember having dreamed being the same as remembering a fragment of a dream is not really conducive to that.

[Sunshine]

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[iadr]

Very often what appear as fragments in my dream journals are dreams in their entirety. as I have many, very short dreams, that I refer to image streams.

In fact, just this morning I had 15 of them in a period of about 50 minutes.

I've heard these kind of dreams called everything from lucid dreams, to marathon lucids, to WILDs, to lucid thoughts, but I usually refer to them as image streams because of their short duration, and count them as regular dreams instead of lucids or WILDs, even though I am awake while they are occuring.

They often start out while I am laying in bed trying to remember the last dream I had, which is what happened this morning, and often occur when I am hungry or need to go to the bathrrom, which possibly provides the slight discomfort I need to stay awake during them.

This morning, while laying in bed after having slept about 7 hours, and while trying to remember my last dream, I suddenly found myself riding in a car down a road when I heard a very loud bang come from a car parked on the side of the road.  The loud bang not only startled me, but then started a stream of other similar short dreams where I was riding in car in some of them, hiking through a woods with a group of people in another one of them, in my house doing things in several others of them, and in a restaurant with a group of people singing happy birthday to some guy in another one, which one I have decided to count as a lucid since it was longer, and had so many more things happening in it than the other short dreams did.

[pj]

What it comes down to is that each of us is the only one who can judge what category our dreams belong in.  Journaling styles vary wildly too, from just a memo to incredible detail.

Fragments are mostly forgotten dreams.  Dreams are recalled dreams.  A very short but fully recalled dream would be a dream to me.  Remembering that I had a dream about a kitchen cabinet but nothing else would be a fragment, no matter how much detail I remember and write about that cabinet.  Likewise, a two-hour dreamed space journey may be summed up by, "I sat there in the cockpit as we traveled through the void."

So long as we are on the same wavelength as to what criteria we are personally judging our dream categories with, it will be OK.  Another thing is that the fragment/dream division can be ignored statistically simply by adding the two together.  We just thought that differentiating between well remembered dreams and fragments would be statistically interesting.

[dodobird]

Oh. I entered LD's as both 'D' and 'L'... My fault for not reading the tutorial, I'll fix it. Though I think others will make the same mistake, so it would be better to write NLD, and LD in there.

[Alex Lou]

I don't record most of my dreams.  How do I get my numbers to disappear like Robot_Butler's?