Hey DreamerDad.
I’m quite new to all this too, but I’ve been lucky enough to have about 14 proper LD’s. I have a 2 year old toddler, and have been trying WILD as well as other techniques, but thinking about it WILD probably isn’t the best one if you’ve young kids.
As a parent, you’re programmed to wake up when you hear a baby monitor making noise, or if you hear them let out a cry and during WILD, a big part of it might be that you’ll hear noises as you get closer to sleep paralysis.
Your instinct as a parent of young kids would be to wake up or focus on these noises, when for WILD to work you really need to be just accepting these noises but not reacting to them. So to me, and others might disagree, but it seems that WILD is quite a difficult one for us new parents or people in noisy households to work with.
I too didn’t really remember any dreams when I started, I thought I didn’t actually have any, and I was also crap at writing down dreams with a pen so I found an app, “Awoken” on android, which is a dream diary, and find it way easier to just pick that up in the middle of the night, write in a few key points of anything I remembered and go back to sleep using MILD.
Once I started writing them down, I started remembering more and more details, and noticed dreamsigns and everything. (School, my old classmates and workmates and my old job are big ones for me). So don’t lose heart if you think you can’t remember your dreams, once you start taking proper note of even little bits, you remember, more and more details will start to emerge from your memory.
Going back to a technique that might suit, for me, I’m going all out now, and trying to develop a “lucid mindset”. There’s a post on here by Robert Waggoner (I recommend his book btw too) where he talks to a ultra-frequent lucid dreamer, who over the years had gotten into the mental habit of asking herself the question, " What was I just doing?" in waking life. Over time that transfered over to her asking it in her dreams and from that questioning she could become lucid every time.
To me this seems like the Holy Grail for LD’s. It would obviously take time (maybe a lot!) for this mental habit to work it’s way over from WL to DL, but the rewards, with no need to wake up, just have that awareness in your dreams to become lucid by asking yourself “What was I just doing?”, would be amazing. This is what I am going to work towards now, and the fact that you said you really want lucid dreaming in your life seems like you could be willing to put the effort in too.
This is all just my take on things, some of the more experienced LDers on here might have better advice for you, but being just a small bit past where you are now with LD’s, I hope this helps some bit.
Good luck on your journey!
Strangegravy
That post I mentioned. --> Lucid Mindset