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.

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!

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...

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.

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.

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).

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.

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

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.

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...).

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?

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.