I don't know about nightmares, but I've had more livid dreams for sure.  A side effect of exercising your imagination muscles I guess..

I don't think it's specific to Heisig, but intense mental activity during the day seems to stimulate dreams or at least make them more memorable. I've noticed that effect with learning Japanese, programming, strategy games (囲碁、将棋), etc. Also I've read about similar experiences on many internet forums so that's apparently very common.

I've noticed that reviewing cards with affirmations or other positive statements just before going to bed influenced some of my dreams, pretty cool

I imagine doing a lot of kanji the Heisig way, especially if your stories tend to be first person, can also influence your dreams. That's why personally I 'd use that proactively with something like affirmations, and as for remembering the kanji, I always preferred to use stories that are not related in any way whatsoever with my relatives, family , friends , etc; contrary to Heisig's advice about the "person" primitive.

Tobberoth wrote:

I haven't noticed any difference at all... but I've been very imaginative since I was a kid so I don't think using the Heisig method changed much for me.

Yep, same here

But from experience (one particular dorama translation) I can say, that after spending some time doing nothing else except for this, it started plaguing my (day)dreams - from some minor stuff like suffering from LSS syndrom (timing the opening karaoke was a pain in **) to actually talking to the characters in my dreams And since dreams have this really awesome ability to make even the most unbelievable things seem totally normal, I ended up actually enjoying this (nightmares don't seem to be my case )

When I do something new(new language, new job, too much new anime) for a long time in one day, I tend to dream about it. Especially if it's shortly before I go to bed. The other night I watch this bizarre Russian animated movie, and the sounds and images turned up in my dreams.

That's really sad.  All you people are making me angst; I can never remember my dreams.   ....

@igordesu : Remembering dreams is not very difficult, it's just practice. You must go to sleep with the intention of remembering your dreams. This creates a small autosuggestion, that helps you remember to remember when you wake up. When you wake up, stay quiet on your back and just lie there, don't try to force, if you don't remember ANYTHING at all, just lie there without your mind wandering about the tasks of the day just enjoying the quiet for a couple minutes, kind of making a space for memories to come. Eventually a little thing comes up, then another. If you do that at least for a week, you will very likely start to remember parts of your dreams. Mind is very subtle the intention si very important, if you go to sleep thinking "I can't remember my dreams" then it most likely won't work.

Last night I woke up in the middle of the night thinking that I had discovered the perfect method to study kanji which I think I was just dreaming about it from doing all this learning.  I think that it was if you use a wacom tablet could draw the kanji on your computer over a picture of the kanji you want to write well.  You could draw over an outline of the character so that you would learn by muscle memory how to draw it to look nice with the proper shape of the lines.  I'm still not sure it's not a bad idea.  I could probably test it out in photoshop.  I think I had the ideas because I'm trying to copy the stroke order animations from Yamasa Online Kanji Dictionary, and I had too much caffeine last night.  I was thinking if you could also incorporate the character drawing into the review process it would be almost perfect.  I was also thinking it would be cool to do this along with a game, except the game would be designed with Heisig and SRS in mind so that you are reviewing in the optimum order and with the optimum frequency for you.  Somehow the game would be able to use the keyword and not just be random monsters that you fight like in a program I was looking at called JRPG.

Last edited by drivers99 (2009 April 23, 12:49 pm)

I'm serious it's really depressing, I also have deorestation dreams and global warming dreams they suck.