i ask a lot of questions, in case you didn’t notice.
i learned recently that character induced lucid dreaming is a thing people use? creating characters associated with lucid dreaming that will trigger awareness if you ever saw them in your dreams.
so i was writing earlier and it got me thinking- could i create a fictional place that i associate heavily with lucid dreaming? and when i see this place indream, it will have a similar trigger effect on me?
i’m interested to see if this would work.
You should look into dream incubation. Works on the same idea; you incubate a specific topic you would like to dream about, whether it’s some place or a specific situation you want to rehearse, etc. People use it for problem solving through their dreams, and some lucid dreamers set their intention before bed to dream about something specifically, whether to solve a problem or look for more information/answers related to a dream they’ve had before, or some situation they experienced when awake, etc.
How specific can you go? That depends on the dreamer, his practice and experience. But it’s definitely possible, though I haven’t tried it out yet. Whether it will work or not for you, we’ll never know unless you do it.
I’d imagine it’d be possible… in fact, that was the premise for the former “Paradiso” software for lucid dreaming. Basically, you’d work for a week on creating a place to go when dreaming to the point that you dreamt about it regularly inducing lucidity.
I have often wondered the same thing. It seems like this would basically be like creating a dream-sign in the form of the entire setting. It seems like a great idea. The challenge seems to be creating a place that is completely distinguishable from reality, as all the ideas you will associate to this place will be pulled from you subconscious mind.
As LaBerge has stated, the only restrictions we limit our minds to are the expectations we set on ourselves. This principal seemed important to this conversation.
I think its also worth mentioning that within the practice of Tibetan mediation is an art called zhine in which they focus their energy on a symbol (usually the Tibetan letter “A”). Upon further research of zhine practice I learned that this object should only be focused on during meditation so as to not associate the higher awareness achieved with states of lesser awareness.
If you apply the same logic to your so-called ‘fictional place’ then you might only contemplate this place upon falling asleep/waking and other relaxed states of meditation.
Zhine meditation is anything but relaxed. In fact it is seen as an obstacle to experience laxity or drowsiness just as too high of an awareness would impede your desired state of lucidity. Just a thought.
Good luck. Keep us posted.
You could create fictional place but sometimes fiction and imagination aren’t powerful enough to make and impression to the mind and to set intention. That’s why sometimes CILD or yours PILD might fail.
But for the purpose of discussion I would suggest maybe the most fruitful way would be to analyze your dreams. See what kind of settings you usually find yourself and use that as your starting point or a place that would remind you that you are dreaming, why? Well my idea is that as everything that our mind creates in a dream is mostly from waking life which has a lot stronger connection in the mind then it would have purely fictional place. What I’m saying is the places that occur in dreams are the places that we have been already in waking life or at least some variant of that place and that is already connected to the wakefulness of the mind.
I’m going round and round with this but that’s exactly the point, by creating something for the dream from the waking life might have much stronger impression on the dreaming mind then something purely fictional. So that’s why I would suggest to take a place that you find most dreamy or a place that reminds you to dreams the most from waking life and imagine it as your dream place, your utopia where your dreams become your reality…
Sure, you can change it, add something distinguished to your dreams and your personality but try keep it more ground based, because you usually dream about your house or your street, why wouldn’t you image some special house in your dream street that could remind you of dreams rather the imagine some fictional place which you never visited and struggle with that when you already have the material in your mind which you just need to use in a little bit different way…
But if you have great imagination and visualization power then don’t mind my post!
Good luck! 
dB_FTS: In Paradiso, the premise was the exact opposite. You were supposed to make the place as extravagant as you wanted and unique. You’d also have a set series of actions to go through. For example, you walk in the front door, you chat with the secretary, you take the elevator to X floor. You were supposed to rehearse it until it became solid in memory.
I don’t know how successful people were with Paradiso, but… I gave up after the first day. 
I wasn’t disciplined enough to keep up with something requiring so many steps… especially since after each day you’d have to do EVERYTHING from the previous day…
I’ve never used paradiso so I can’t talk about it but what I was telling is from my logical point of view and experience. I just don’t see why bother creating something when you already have all the material that you need…
I think the reason you were to create something new was to make it unique, and personalized… I’m not sure, though, cause I haven’t looked at the Paradiso thing in years. Still, like Reality Checks, I think the place one should use will vary from person to person. Maybe one will find familiar works better while another will find the other extreme more effective.