The Transcendence Institute

During the Intermission, we explained that dream recall can be improved by immediately writing a dream down as soon as you wake.

It seems that some systems in the sleeping brain prevent long-term memories from forming. Likely the long term potentiation of the neurons involved is suspended, or reduced. We don’t have a lot of evidence go to on to determine exactly how this process works, but we have plenty of evidence that dreams can indeed be hard to recall.

Writing a dream down as soon as you awaken refreshes all these memory traces in the waking brain, allowing those traces to be strengthened a second time, without the dampening effect of sleep. The fact of writing it down is usually enough to force those memory traces to remain open. Simply recalling them is less effective, perhaps because putting things into words is a more powerful process, perhaps simply because you have the written record to refer to.

Either way, the act of struggling to remember a dream is doubtless practice at recalling difficult to remember things. As you have learned from the beginning of the Transcendence Institute’s writings, the things which you practice you will get better at. Thus, simply the act of remembering your dreams in the morning will in itself improve your memory recall.

Lucid Dreaming

With the addition of the ability to dream lucidly, whole new avenues are opened up to help you to improve your memory recall.

As you have learned, all memory is essentially constructive. You don’t recall every bit of data which flowed into your nervous system while an event happened, you brain doesn’t recall a trace of every patch of colour your saw or waveform your ears processed. Instead, you recall the gist, a personal story about that event, and your brain reconstructs the data from the traces of that high-level memory.

Sometimes interference from other memories or associations may impede this process, making it difficult to bring some desired detail to mind.

During a dream, however, your mind is less constrained by your current sensory experience. It’s more prone to freely associate, to lower the barriers to recall and present detail which you may have assumed you had forgotten.

Once you have learned to lucid dream you can take advantage of this. When you realize you are dreaming you can place yourself, within the dream, in a replay of some event. You can look around, interacting with the dream environment, the virtual reality, and take note of things which you thought you had forgotten, maybe even details which escaped your notice at the time.

While dreams are not bound by current sensory inputs, they are influenced by memory interference, assumption and false association as well as random noise. While actively using lucid dreams to recall some event can give clues, cast light upon a fading memory, they can not be guaranteed reliable. Though, as usual, with practice you may be able to learn to tell the difference.

Since the lucid dreaming state leaves a person so suggestible, you can also use Lucid Dreaming to actually improve your expectation that your memory recall will work well. This expectation can influence the likelihood that a given memory trace will surface. Try eating memory-improving pills in your sleep, or visiting some swami who can improve your memory and performing the tasks he suggests. Magic and voodoo can work in dreams. Their effects can sometimes influence our subconscious to make that ‘magic’ work outside too. Our meditation, the guided dream this month, will simply give you suggestions that the act of practising is improving your memory and dream recall.

The Meditation

Once again this month we’ll present you with a guided lucid dream. In the dream you’ll be gradually brought to dream-consciousness, into lucid dreaming. You’ll be prompted to recall some event, to relive it in detail, to refresh and improve your recall of that event. To notice details you hadn’t seen before. To look around and understand the event more fully.

For example, you can try and use your dream to recall the face of someone who was close to you but you haven’t seen in years. To refresh their memory in your mind by dreaming about them during the night.

If you aren’t particularly interested in reliving some old event, or refreshing your memory of some person, you should imagine instead an imaginary event, one in which you gain guidance and then follow through with action on how to improve your memory through magic, spells and dream-chemistry. This should improve your belief in your recall, which could in turn improve your ability.

This week the Transcendence Institute presents a guided lucid dream intended to improve dream recall and to help you use your lucid dream to explore the details of something thought forgotten.

As with the other guided lucid dreams we’re presenting during this third lap around the spiral, it’s designed to be listened to as an alarm set for ten minutes before you must get out of bed.

It will start quietly, spending a couple of minutes getting gradually louder, giving suggestions that we hope you’ll recognise in your sleep, bringing you to consciousness in your dream without waking you up.

In order to improve dream recall, the next two minutes will be spent suggesting that you go over the content of the dream in which you have come to consciousness. Spend a minute recalling the adventure so far, summarising and driving those events deeper into memory.

The next four minutes or so of the lucid dream will be spent helping to recall some detail of things you may have thought forgotten. Before you sleep you’ll ideally have selected something. The location of some lost keys perhaps, or the detail of the face of an old lover. If not some urgently needed memory then presumably something you’d like to reminisce on, relive in your dream.

In the dream, you’ll bring this memory to mind, undistracted by input from your main sense systems. You’ll stare at, play with, manipulate and remember this memory in order to recall it when you wake.

Finally, for the last two minutes you’ll go over the content of the entire dream again, before being told to wake up and write it down. Writing it down is important. In the time immediately after waking your dreams are usually erased unless they’re recorded, and concentrated on.

Download The Meditation:

Guided Meditation File 19 – Memory – Recall Backing Music “Distorted Reality” By Zero Project

In the first lap around the spiral we looked at memory encoding, developed some techniques for finding good associative links to enable you to remember things, building the things you want to remember up into chunks and then associating those chunks with a well remembered thing. For example, using the Loki Method to store things in imaginary positions in a well known route.

Obviously a good memory is a helpful ability in just about every walk of life, including the pursuit of improvement of the other mental skills in our spiral. Getting good at memorisation takes time and practice, but your skills have been growing slowly as you have done so, and should continue to grow as you practice more. That ability will filter into improving all the other skills in the spiral.

With Memory Encoding in particular, the skill is to quickly and efficiently associate a thing you need to remember with something that will remind of of that thing and then burn it deeply and wilfully into your memory with strong visualisation and emotional significance. The more your practice doing that, the more second nature it will become.

In order to actually benefit from your memorisation techniques in real life you have to remember to use them, which means keeping an awareness of the fact you have these skills in your mind at all time. Not only do you need to be aware of the things you want to memorize in order to commit them to memory, but also an improved awareness will remind you more often to use those techniques. Classic feedback effects, each skill in the spiral supporting the growth of the others.

Likewise for your ability to be in control of your moods, your self possession, your very state of consciousness at any given time. We’ve seen how remembering an event vividly can push your consciousness towards the mood it was in when you experienced that event. Control over your memory leads to improved control over your consciousness which in turn leads to a better understanding and use of your memory. Remembering happy things makes you happy, so having good recall is key in mood control.

With enough consciousness, and enough memory of the events of your life, you begin to learn the ability to reason, your cognition improves immeasurably for each rule of logic you can memorize, each counter-example you can bring to mind, every common fallacy to remember to avoid.

Simply the ability to remember people’s names makes a massive difference to a person’s social skills, let alone being able to recall every conversation you have with a person, what makes them happy, what memories you can share with them to remind them of good times and so begin to influence the consciousness of other people too.

All these feedback effects into your abilities with the other skills in the spiral come from a fast, and deliberate even reflexive use of memory encoding skills. And you will only develop that kind of reflex though practice. Just as with enough practice at reading you can look at a written word and simply know what it means, so you can build your memory skills until you can look at anything and have it effortlessly slide into memory but you must practice.

The Meditation

With all that in mind, we will present a meditation at the end of this month to help you to learn to do these things during a stroll around your world, practising your memory skills as you walk.

During the second loop around the spiral we examed memory storage, discussing ways to keep a memory from fading by refreshing it often, ensuring that you burn those neural pathways deeply, activating the long perm potentiation of your neurons by re-experiencing the memory over and over again as vividly and powerfully as possible.

The main system you use to refresh your memories is likely to be something similar to the Loki system we discussed back in Lap one. A route or map, a chain of locations in which you mentally place reminders, and which you wonder around often.

The obvious way to extend the Loki system is to use new or longer routes, keep more than one. Perhaps your route to work, and a short walk around the rooms of your home. Having more locations to store things in is a good idea, we encourage this.

It is limiting though, in that you need to remember all the routes that you can take and it doesn’t give any clear order to move from one route to another if you wanted to remember a very long list of things.

Therefore it’s worth thinking of a better way to extend the Loki system. Once you have two different routes you can combine them in a factorial way. Two routes of ten locations can give you over a hundred different holes to put things, 100 different queues to refresh and remember.

How?

Imagine the location in one route as the first digit in a two digit number, and a location in a second route as the second digit. This gives you 100 different combinations, each of which can be recreated by imaging items from the first route in the location of the second. Location 41, for instance, might mean combining the picture that’s always hanging from the wall of room 4 in your home with the first corner on your route to work. When you hang something in that picture, you have placed it in a unique location from that list of 99 possible combinations.

You’ll likely want to imagine something in those locations to represent a way of turning a two digit number into a character or funny image, just as we associated numbers and letters during the first lap. If 1 is eels and 4 is Ra, then seeing the sun-god of the eel-people and imagining him as a character will help you whenever the number 41 comes up. Putting him in that picture hanging on the street corner will further reinforce it.

The Meditation

You’ll gain practice using a loki system during our walking meditation presented at the end of this month. Both practice at storing new things, and at refreshing things which you have previously stored there. As you walk, remember this, the more you practice this the more second nature it will become, like learning to play an instrument, or learning to read.

During the third loop around the spiral we examined memory recall, learning how to improve dream recall through practice, and how to become more conscious, more lucid in your dreams. In this way we hoped to recall forgotten events by literally dreaming them up.

In our walking meditation presented next week we’ll be concentrating on simply using that walking time to practice chunking, encoding, storing, refreshing and retrieving memory. This week however we suggest a way to try and recall a lost memory though simply talking a walk.

You’ll have often found yourself at a loss to remember something, sure that you know it yet equally sure that it won’t come to mind.

How to make it come to mind

You are reminded of things, you recall them, when your memory systems are in a similar state to the one in which you first stored that memory. Your associative memory will follow an associational link, a chain of reminding which leads to a more and more detailed description of the missing information.

This is one of the main functions of a psychotherapist or councillor. Perhaps you’ve heard people say that they can’t remember much of their childhood, but still those people when in counselling do spend hours talking about it, answering the well chosen questions from the therapist with stories which remind them of more stories, the details of which remind them of yet more stories, always homing in and refining detail until the issues are recalled clearly enough to find resolution.

Likewise when you struggle to remember some thing in your life, the key to finding it isn’t just to concentrate harder, but to think of something which will remind you of that thing. If going a direct route is difficult, a more circuitous path may be more fruitful. But how to let your mind wonder enough that it may find something to remind you of your target memory?

This is where our suggested walking meditation comes in. This is perhaps best done without earphones and a voice reminding you what you should be thinking about all the time for the point of the walk is to look for things which might remind you of the target memory. Be aware of your surrounding and have those surrounding constantly changing as you ambulate though them. Always keeping the target in mind, looking out for things which may remind you of it.

So next time you find you can’t remember something, just try thinking about it while you take a walk. If the walk isn’t convenient immediately, write down what you hope to remember and give it a whirl on your way home.

This week we present our second guided walking meditation. Designed once again to be listened to while you take a short stroll. Perhaps just your walk to work, or to the pub. Perhaps a stroll around the park or a hike through the woods. So long as it’s more than ten minutes long, wherever you’re walking, whatever environment you’re walking through, will be fine. You should have the meditation plugged into your ears though a personal music player of some kind, concentrating on the words and focusing your mind as directed. If you do so you’ll be spending ten minutes of your walk practising using your memory, and so improving your memory encoding, storage and recall.

Ambulation Preamble

To begin with the meditation will have you relax into your gait, check your posture and facial expression, look around you and start to become more suggestible, preparing yourself for the rest of the meditation

Encoding

For the next few minutes you’ll look at the things you’re seeing in your journey, notice them intensely and place them into your Loki map. Over and over again, placing things into your Loki map so that you will be able to recall them later. Repeating the process until you have stored ten of the objects you pass, be they roadside litter, street-signs, clouds, birds or buildings.

Storage

The few minutes after that you’ll go through the loki map again, remembering not the things you’ve just stored but all all the other things in your map. The eels, the characters, the animals and slime as well as whatever else you’ve stored there over the course of your daily life. The aim is to refresh all these memories so that they don’t fade, they stay with you until they are no longer needed.

Recall

Then, eventually, for the last few minutes, you’ll run though that loki map for the third and final time. This time you will concentrate on the items you saw earlier in your walk, the street-signs and birds and buildings and whatever else your wondering attention focused on during the first part of your walk. Practising recall, checking how well you stored these objects in memory to start with.

Practice

When you have practised this meditation a few times, you’ll likely want to try it without the voice-over guiding you though the process. Whenever you find yourself walking around, you can practice and refresh your memory skills, always improving, so that those improved skills can feed back into the rest of the spiral, pushing your onwards towards transcendence.

Guided Meditation File 27 – Memory – Integration Backing Music “Fly Away” By Pretonika