How to find your dream signs

Journal first, analyse later

For the first two weeks, do not look for anything. Just log every dream you remember, immediately on waking, before you move. Each dream as its own round in the night's entry, a vividness score, and a few lines of what happened. A voice memo in the dark is fine; fill in the scores at breakfast.

Recall improves fast once you do this, and the more dreams you have on record the more signs you will find.

Searching for the signs

After two to four weeks, search your entries. Type a word and count the hits.

• Places: school, old flat, a specific city, the sea.
• People: someone you rarely see awake but often see asleep.
• Actions: flying, falling, being late, being chased, driving from the back seat.
• Oddities: text that will not stay still, light switches that fail, hands, mirrors.
• Emotions: a feeling that recurs regardless of the plot.

Turning a sign into a lucid dream

Pick your top three signs. Every time one of them appears in waking life, a train, a school, a mirror, do a reality check: look at your hands, read a line of text twice, ask whether you are dreaming. Mean it. After a few weeks the habit runs inside dreams too, and the sign triggers the check.

Log every lucid dream with the Lucid flag set. Lucid dreams per week is the number that tells you the practice is working.

Keeping it going

Recall fades within days of stopping the journal. Keep the goal at seven entries a week, keep the reminder for the morning, and log even the mornings with nothing: “no recall” is data, and the calendar gap is the nudge.