best beginner techniques that aren't WBTB?

Quest for Lucidity
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hey yall! I’ve been a lurker on this site on and off for a couple years, but the account I had before is long gone, so I remade;; I’ve been poking through the forums for the past couple of days, trying to get a refresher course on techniques and stuff, and keep running into a repeated frustration.

Namely, a large number of beginner guides emphasize WBTB as the best beginning technique, but for my personal sleep schedule (and, biorhythm maybe?) that’s really not ideal. I’m very slow to fall asleep and very hard but very quick to wake up, which means that a) quiet or illumination-based alarms won’t work, and b) any alarm that does work is going to get me up and keep me up, and I won’t go back to sleep.

The one technique that I did have success with once was FILD, when I just happened to wake up on my own, try it, and quickly fall back asleep, but I haven’t been able to reproduce that since, and it’s been several years. I’ve tried MILD off and on, but it never seems to work (although I could just be impatient lmao).

So my question is: Which alternate techniques would you recommend for a total beginner? Should I just keep sticking with MILD even though it’s never worked for me? If I can’t WBTB, am I just out of luck? Anyone else successfully work around a similar issue? Please let me know!

(P.S. Just in case, I consulted the Beginner’s Guide to Lucid Dreaming and How to Choose Your Technique topics to make sure there wasn’t anything I missed, but the former just talks about dream journaling, which I’ve done since long before I ever discovered lucid dreaming just as a matter of course, and the latter just suggested MILD, which. See above.)

Thanks in advance for any thoughts or help you can give! ( ´꒳`)ﾉ°

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Hello! A technique that’s often overlooked because it doesn’t have a flashy fun “-ILD” acronym to it is simply making constant reality checks a habit. Eventually you’ll start doing reality checks in your dreams and get lucid. Doing the reality checks may seem like a lot of work at first, but this method isn’t affected by sleep schedules. Also, in general this technique is more of a matter of when it will work rather than if it will work (I mean… there are ways to do this technique “wrong”, for example if you don’t really put much effort into reality checking in waking life, you may not notice their results in the dream and not get lucid). I’d definitely give constant reality checks a try because they tend to be overlooked!

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Like Mew said, simple reality checks throughout the day can help vastly.
I’ve been doing a few that have worked for me recently and a few years ago.
My first and most successful reality check method is counting my fingers. I look at my palm and count my fingers starting with my thumb to my pinky, then pinky to thumb. Then I look at the back of my hand and do the same thing. I also have tattoos on my fingers, so I make sure they all look as they should and aren’t deformed or some kind of different tattoo. I make sure my fingers aren’t some strange length, color, or have some sort of deformity. Like I said, this has been the most successful reality check I have ever done, probably because it is so thorough.

The other reality check I do is looking at a digital clock. I look up to see what time it is, then look away for a moment and ask if I am dreaming, then look back. If the numbers stayed the same, then I am not dreaming. If they have changed drastically, then I am dreaming. Even if it changes just one minute, I do a different reality check just to make sure.

I do these reality checks anywhere between 3 - 20 times a day. I will admit, it definitely took a long time to get my first lucid dream with these techniques, but they will work if you can’t do a WBTB or other -ILD technique. It just takes practice and patience.