In the introduction to RtK, Heisig says

Quote:when we recall our dreams we are using imaginative memory

This kind of worries me, because I generally don't remember my dreams, and when I do the images are vague and fade rapidly :-)

I get the impression that Heisig was very good at constructing mental images in his 'mind's eye'. I'm very poor at that -- if I try to think about something as an image it's very vague, requires a lot of concentration, and tends to waver out of focus or spontaneously distort into something else. I guess I'm more of an auditory kind of person. Are there people here having success with RtK who don't do so well with the 'visualisation' bit (or who didn't at the start and found it got easier)?

(I had a go at the Heisig method a couple of years ago, but got bogged down in trying to do an SRS with real cardboard flashcards and boxes by the time I got to 500~600 kanji and gave up. I'm a bit sceptical about the method working for everybody, but the website is so fantastic I couldn't pass it up, so I'm having another bash at it.)

I don't (usually) recall my dreams and forming mental images or just using my imagination is not my forte, but this website makes a huge difference. For the vast majority of the stories, I just found something in another story which grabbed me and built on that. I generally did not focus very hard on forming images. The method really relies on having a spark that links the keyword to the mental image and, for me anyway, that spark can't be created by force. Usually, one of the stories on the site would grab my attention (light a spark) and as soon as that happened, rewriting it in my own words would complete the job. Generally these images worked as well as ones I created myself by letting my mind wonder and the process was also much faster.

If you got to 500, you surely don't have major issues with the method, so go for it... I'm not sure the method works for everyone but it did for me, at the very least thanks to this site and its members. Don't pass it up, chances are it'll work for you just as well.

I initially thought Heisig meant for us to create mental pictures for the kanjis, but upon rereading and thinking about it, he seems against a purely visual stimulus. You are meant to create a story, and visualization is how a lot of people do that, but you can just remember a bunch of words in a sentence and it works well.

I started off just making a picture in my mind, but when recalling I feel like I'm really just remembering the elements in the stories in purely word form, unless the image is particularly vivid. I still remember the kanji just fine like this, in fact it's quite speedy to recall the two or three elements that make up some of the 'older' characters in my mind. For example, 'delicious' 旨 is just 'eat all day' in my mind, no image, just words and the kanji clicks into place. Use whatever you need to remember. I don't even make up many stories anymore, just use other people's, it's quicker and often the website collectively comes up with much better stories than I would on my own, indeed better than Heisig's too.

I think the major trouble I had last time around was that the keywords didn't really suggest the stories to me. So for example with 'overcome', if you look at the kanji and see the primitives 'older brother' and 'needle' this suggests the story and you get 'overcome', but the bare 'overcome' keyword on its own doesn't particularly pick out this story as opposed to any other... I think the stories that start with the kanji's keyword and go on from there to bring in the elements work better than ones which start with the elements and finish with the keyword, but they seem to be quite hard to create.

pm215 Wrote:I think the major trouble I had last time around was that the keywords didn't really suggest the stories to me. So for example with 'overcome', if you look at the kanji and see the primitives 'older brother' and 'needle' this suggests the story and you get 'overcome', but the bare 'overcome' keyword on its own doesn't particularly pick out this story as opposed to any other... I think the stories that start with the kanji's keyword and go on from there to bring in the elements work better than ones which start with the elements and finish with the keyword, but they seem to be quite hard to create.

I think I know about what you're talking. I found that Heisig's stories sometimes just fail to entwine the keyword within the elements. He just tell the story, and then adds the keyword at the end as a judgement of the scene, which is just shooting in your foot because if there is no clear connection between the elements of the story and the keyword, you cannot recover one from another.

Another problem with his method, related with the previous one, is that he focuses too much in using only one word for each primitive, which limits your imagination. However, I found that you can assign many, many words to the same primitive as long as they don't clash with words assigned to other primitives. You haven't had any problems using both Moon/Month/Body for the same primitive, do you?

For 'overcome', I used the primitives [more (+ symbol)...older brother] which makes for a very easy story you can find at the study page. For the primitive '+' I usually use the keywords: needle, +, ten, cross, and sometimes cross-eyes ( like on this smiley -> x_x )

Another example is the 'turkey' primitive, which I changed to mean any kind of big bird: turkeys, cranes, snorks, roadrunners, chocobos, ostrichs, even donald duck! The kanjis featuring that primitive passed from being needlessly complicated, to one of the easiest, which speaks a lot for the importance of using good primitives from the start.

I plan on posting a thread about this once I finish RTK1. I hope this helps you meanwhile!

Ahhh, I wish I had used chocobo instead of turkey! That would have made some of the kanji a bit easier for me to learn.

One word of warning about attaching too many different meanings to the same primitive. Just check ahead, in case other primitives or keywords share the additional meanings, as this could cause complications in the future.

Crane for example, is a keyword of its own...

DrJones, I think you're spot on personally. I'd extend this to even creating multiple stories for one keyword also. I've found that sometimes when I come up with two stories for one keyword and test it later, I will often remember both stories. Or sometimes story switching happens so that one week I might remember one story, and then several weeks later when testing again I will have forgotten that story but will have remembered the other, but then again next time I will forget that one and remember the other and so on such that one story is never permanently gone from my memory.

Basically, more memory associations = good.

I can kinda remember my dreams, sometimes better than others... If it's an interesting dream, I repeat it in my head when I wake up and then write it down. Which leads to the problem of writing down my dreams inside my dreams and then waking up to find I haven't written anything down :?
I'm a visual person, so visualizing mnemonics works for me. But since I'm not a good audio learner, my listening skills suffer.

I have a terrible visual memory, too, and I can't visualize anything so, instead, I say the stories aloud while I write the kanji for about four or five times. That's usually enough for me. Sometimes, when I have trouble remembering a story, I rewrite it into a rhyme, and I try to use the primitives in the order in which they appear in the kanji. Rhymes do help me remember the stories.

pm215 Wrote:I think the major trouble I had last time around was that the keywords didn't really suggest the stories to me ... I think the stories that start with the kanji's keyword and go on from there to bring in the elements work better than ones which start with the elements and finish with the keyword, but they seem to be quite hard to create.

To me the key to making a good story is to ask, "why does this keyword necessarily lead to the story?" You have to have a reason or a mental hook to get you there. The mental hook can be something like a phrase using the keyword. For instance, just today I wrote a story for "unusual". I thought for a few moments and came up with the Cyndi Lauper album "She's So Unusual". So unusual necessarily leads to "She's so unusual" which necessarily leads to Cyndi Lauper. My story then revolves around Cyndi Lauper's appearance and demeanor.

So I don't think your story has to always start with the keyword, but the key thing IMHO is to force yourself, while creating the story, to find a "necessary and sufficient" reason that the keyword must necessarily lead to your story.

Ok, not entirely in line with the thread. However, I've been going to sleep with Japanese playing in my ear (via iPod). I find that I actually dream in Japanese now and again when I'm doing this (never when I don't). Yes, I even remember reading kanji in my dream last night.

I think it's very important not to depend on mnemonics too heavily. If you see "sandwiched" and immediately picture an image of sliced fingers being served sandwiched between two slices of bread with a bloody pair of scissers in the background, I don't think you'll have difficulty with that kanji anymore.

Don't get me wrong, a good mnemonic like the one for female "Stop spooning turkeys, spoon females" works great. But a majority need an image if you're looking to keep the recall up there.

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Digging up old threads I am!

I am recently again experimenting with lucid dreaming. This has got to be the ultimate imaginative memory experience Like most people I guess I had a couple experiences as a child and teenager but not since.

There is a beautiful forum all about lucid dreaming called ld4all (checkout the guide).

As for digging up this old topic, I remember myself about one dream a day. But I wanted to say that dream recall is just something you get better at when you explicitly train yourself to remember dreams. It's all about recall and not so much about the aptitude of visualizing, which can also be trained separately.

In fact, according to research done on Lucid Dreaming (esp. by Stephen Laberge), everybody has the ability, and so everybody in their dreams has an incredibly realistic imagination. Dreams are blurry just because they are always memories of the dreams, rather than the experience of the dream itself (which would be a lucid dream).

ファブリス Wrote:Digging up old threads I am!

I am recently again experimenting with lucid dreaming.

No way, me too! What techniques are you trying?

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playadom Wrote:No way, me too! What techniques are you trying?

I am trying WILD when I go to sleep, even though I've read it's the least effective time to do it... because I can't mess my sleep schedule with WBTB as I am trying hard and finally succeeding at getting up everyday at the same time. But if I feel sleepy in the afternoon I try WILD then during a 30 minutes nap.

In the evening sometimes I fall asleep without realizing, but when I count a bit and visualize something it seems like I can go on and on. Because sleep paralysis can be a bit scary (or just feeling out of touch with the body), I am sort of baby stepp'ing into it, trying to relax a little further each time. But eventually I get a bit scared or I call it quits after trying for what seems like an hour?

What techniques have you tried?

ps: I just bought The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep. All the well known techniques experimented by Laberge etc are easily found on the web, so I thought I might find other interesting approaches in this book.

Currently the only method that kicks in the lucid realization for me is if I'm flying or floating for long stretches of time. You can train yourself to note key events to kick in realization (gun in your hand, nude in public areas, chats with dead people, etc.). Pretty sure it's not the most effective.

The one that interested me 20 years ago was the "REM Nightmask" I saw on Beyond 2000 TV show. It would detect your REM state then blink 3 to 5 red lights in your eyes. It means to tell you "you're dreaming". It sounded good, not sure how effective it was as I never used it.

As to experiences with lucid dreaming, I've done controlled flying, sex, suicide, talking to myself (body double) and just trying to hold onto the state. It's interesting that dying in my dreams (once lucid, once in full dream state) just creates a state of blackness and a wave of relaxation through the muscles.

I concur that lucid dreams are remembered for LONG stretches of times.

Nukemarine Wrote:It's interesting that dying in my dreams (once lucid, once in full dream state) just creates a state of blackness and a wave of relaxation through the muscles.

And I find it kind of funny
I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I'm dying
Are the best I've ever had

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Well I started reading the Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep. It confirmed what I thought, that dreams are "traces" of attachment or aversion. So say one of those lamas who cleared themselves of all emotional traces (what they call non dual awareness), they have no dreams anymore! Another way to call all those "sankara" is ego. Any traces of anger, sexual desire but also love, greed etc etc whill showup as dreams according to that book. Hence the spiritual aspect, just as in waking life, you can choose to respond positively to experiences in dream and clear yourself of "knots" (if you are lucid, otherwise I suppose you're on "auto pilot").

I suspect when you see yourself dying in a dream, it's your ego dying. So maybe that explains why it can feel good actually o_O .. a kind of release (just a theory, I didn't read that in the book).

I've never had a dream where I die, and also I don't remember ever having fired guns, used weapons or killed anybody in my dreams but hum... maybe I don't want to remember those

ファブリス Wrote:

playadom Wrote:No way, me too! What techniques are you trying?

I am trying WILD when I go to sleep, even though I've read it's the least effective time to do it... because I can't mess my sleep schedule with WBTB as I am trying hard and finally succeeding at getting up everyday at the same time. But if I feel sleepy in the afternoon I try WILD then during a 30 minutes nap.

In the evening sometimes I fall asleep without realizing, but when I count a bit and visualize something it seems like I can go on and on. Because sleep paralysis can be a bit scary (or just feeling out of touch with the body), I am sort of baby stepp'ing into it, trying to relax a little further each time. But eventually I get a bit scared or I call it quits after trying for what seems like an hour?

What techniques have you tried?

ps: I just bought The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep. All the well known techniques experimented by Laberge etc are easily found on the web, so I thought I might find other interesting approaches in this book.

Yeah...sleep paralysis is downright creepy. Took me a little while to 'ride' it all the way through.

I try [unsuccessfully...and rarely now that it's during the semester and can't sleep] to set my alarm at a nice dark time[at the end of a REM cycle] and WBTB into a WILD.

Probably one of my best experiences is when I did a "chain" kind of thing. I had just awoken from a dream... I decided to picture[non-moving] a rather vivid and exciting scene from the dream. A few moments later, I felt a rather large whooshing sensation, and then went right into SP. A little while later, I emerged in the exact same dream I was just having.

Now that I think about it, a great majority of my LDs were just from incidentally realizing that something was really strange and that I was actually dreaming.

Man oh man, I've had a couple bad experiences with sleep paralysis. I would wake up and find I couldn't move my body! It was so weird. I would think "Crap CRAP, ok, can I move my fingers? NO!" Then my fingers would wake up a little, so I could move my fingers but be unable to move my arm!

I think I've had two lucid dream in my life, both when I was younger. I think both times I was trying to get a girl.

Omg, is this why I've been getting half-lucid dreams recently? By half-lucid I mean my dreams are lucid in the sense that I know I'm dreaming, but I still can't control anything in the dream (which is really really annoying, it's like you're in a world made for stupid people and you can't do anything about it...).

alyks Wrote:Man oh man, I've had a couple bad experiences with sleep paralysis. I would wake up and find I couldn't move my body! It was so weird. I would think "Crap CRAP, ok, can I move my fingers? NO!" Then my fingers would wake up a little, so I could move my fingers but be unable to move my arm!

I think I've had two lucid dream in my life, both when I was younger. I think both times I was trying to get a girl.

A long time ago, when trying to wake up from bad dreams [now that I think about it, i was technically LDing if i knew to wake up], i wouldn't wake up completely...and would be stuck in paralysis...trying to wake up.... Now when I do that i just try and jerk my neck a few times. Usually gets me out of SP. I also do that when 'bailing out' from a WILD.

Squintox Wrote:(which is really really annoying, it's like you're in a world made for stupid people and you can't do anything about it...).

Waking life?

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Indeed, Waking Life ;-) Just found out about this very cool animated movie about "what separates dreams from reality". Here's a clip on YouTube from the movie.

hehe Waking Life is great, it includes a few scenes with subliminal messages that cause the viewer to have a lucid dream right after watching it, on top of being a great film... pretty cool.