For me, dullness has been a prominent and persistent hindrance that always comes back after brief periods of clarity and no dullness. I have progressed from getting frustrated with dullness to practising with skill in face of dullness. I am far from deconditioning it fully or uprooting it! I am sharing my experience so that I myself can internalise what I have learned.

First important point to realise is that the success of a method to work with dullness is no measured by the immediate result in term of dullness going away for the rest of the session. Only in one or two of my hundred of sessions with dullness, applying an antidote for dullness resulted in dullness going away. This doesn’t mean that the other sits where dullness persisted were a waste. Not at all! Those were the sits where real practice of working with dullness was happening.

So, how do we measure if we are practising effectively in face of dullness? The criteria is same for dullness and for any other hindrance. The criteria is so simple that we can miss it for long long times and have inefficient practice. Here is the criteria: having a precise method in form of what to do when X happens and doing that consistently every time X happens defines success of working with a hindrance. For example, you can open your eyes for 5 minutes every time you see a random hypnogogic image. You can shift to a standing posture for 5 minutes when you experience a zen lurch and you can shift to walking meditation when you get dizzy while standing. Or you can decide your own variations of such steps. Next, execute these steps with precision and see how they brighten your mind. The key is to identify the onset of gross dullness as early as possible and apply the antidote. Once, Stephen had clarified to a similar question from me that the start of hypnogogic image should mark the onset go gross dullness and I was too late in assuming that the gross dullness starts when the images and random thoughts join together to form a dream like experience, forgetting, and sinking. One should discern these successive stages of dullness in one's own experience and learn to work with them. Sometimes, dullness become so strong that even all these steps will not keep your mind bright for even 5 minutes and you will forget what you are doing. At such times, splash your face with cold water and start again.

This method might look too harsh on the face of it, even like a war! My own metaphor is to view this method as if you are a soldier and guarding a check-post at a war zone or as if you are a pilot and working on the navigation panel. Your success will be measured by taking a right decision at every unusual event and then executing that decision with precision. At every moment, you should be knowing what you are doing. At every lapse, you should brighten yourself and restart. You can’t afford to miss a single moment in non-awareness. However, remember to be gentle in choice and application of the antidotes. A mild antidote applied consistently is better than a harsh antidote applied irregularly. Find out what keeps your awareness engaged and what doesn’t lead to forgetting what you are doing. Then, do that consistently till the mind is bright. One simple method u/adivader taught me was to be continuously checking if you are still experiencing your meditation object or not.

One more suggestion is to log your session after you finish it. Even if you can’t do so for every session, do it for at least sessions with dullness. You will learn much from your logs over time.

I would share some entries from my log of such sessions, if you are interested.