I don’t know if this is common knowledge or not, so I thought I’d throw it out there…I hope this is the right forum for it.
Oftentimes when I would WILD in the morning by imagining I was floating out of my body, I would enter a black void where there were only occasional blips and strings of light that floated by me. Trying to actually have sights and sounds and smells surrounding me during the dreamstate could be very difficult. I would will myself to go to a place I wanted to go, but I would get no results - I would stay in the void. Well, I figured out what I was doing to keep myself from leaving the void - I wasn’t relaxing. I thought I’d share this in case other people were having the same problem.
After over a year of having WILDS and DILDS, many of them taking place in this void, I finally figured out the secret to leaving the void, thanks to a friend’s advice - all I had to do was mentally calm myself as much as I could, and imagine where I wanted to go, and just let the location gently “come to me” (hard to explain better than that, sorry =(.)
The first time I tried this, all of a sudden a bunch of white five-pointed stars flew towards me and passed by me - I didn’t let it faze me, cause I knew they couldn’t hurt me, and when the stars were done flying towards me I was dreaming about being in my mom’s house. It wasn’t where I wanted to go that time, but at least I was out of the void - it was so cool!
In a similar way, sometimes when I try to wake myself up from a lucid dream by telling myself “I’m going to wake now,” the command doesn’t always work - sometimes it has no effect, and sometimes it just pops me into another dream that’s slightly less deep than the one before it and I have to go through several successive dreams in this way before finally waking. When I lay down on the ground in the dream, relax, and THEN say “I want to wake,” it happens much more smoothly and reliably.