Best technique for an erratic sleep schedule?

Quest for Lucidity
1

Hey look, I have more questions! I do seem to be full of those, don’t I?

I’ve discovered recently that, if left to my own devices, my sleep schedule will very quickly become sort of… odd. My earliest class starts at 10:30 and it only meets twice a week, so my body has sort of decided that the best times to sleep are from five to nine in the evening and from four to ten in the mornings. I feel perfectly rested-- I’m getting ~11 hours of sleep for every 24 hours-- but it means that certain techinques like WBTB, which (correct me if I’m wrong) work best if you wake up after 5-6 hours of sleep, aren’t going to work so well since I’m really only sleeping 5-6 hours at a time.

What techniques would you guys suggest given these circumstances?
(I do MILD every night but I feel like I’m not very good at it, and it’s slow going… I keep my dream journal and do reality checks as often as I can remember, but it doesn’t seem like enough.) Any thoughts?

2

Well usually I wouldn’t recommend WILD when you’re just starting your quest to lucidity. But it does seem like your sleep cycle would accommodate the WILD technique best. So I’d say give it a shot, you won’t know until you try :razz: and you have nothing to lose. My sleep cycle tends to be quite chaotic actually, and often times I find myself in a perfect state to WILD and DEILD ~ Give it a shot and don’t be discouraged if it doesn’t work for you, its a difficult method that takes practice. Good luck :content:

3

Okay, thanks a lot!

A problem that I have with WILD is that everyone says “oh, it’s not a technique for beginners,” but nobody ever says at what point one becomes proficient enough to begin learning it. So I’ve practiced it a couple of times, but every time I have trouble I get the same response: you’re new to this, try something else. Well, I’m not that new… xP

ANYWAYS, I’ve tried WILD a couple of times before-- my ability to focus on one thing for any given time is low, sadly-- and I have run afoul of the same problem several times. I get into hypnagogic imagery and recognize it as such, but as soon as I do that-- even if I don’t try to ‘grab on’ or pull myself in, but just watch it passively-- I snap back to a waking state.
Do you have any suggestions for that? I need to be able to realize that HI is what’s happening, otherwise WILD will never work for me-- but the realization itself is enough to jar me back to reality! Any ideas for staying focused without making any sudden moves, as it were?

4

The goal is to stay focus but not so much to the point of not being able to sleep. So you want to maintain very little focus, enough so that you can easily fall into sleep. This is something you have to experiment with a couple times, that’s what makes WILD difficult :meh:. But HI isn’t the only way of getting into a dream! You can fall into SP and metally roll out of your body once your body becomes completely paralyzed, this is what I use most of the time. I’ve only succeeded once with HI, but it was a difficult process, just like you I wasn’t able to remain in proper consciousness once I realized my HI I woke myself. I remember I was having HI of a park with a bench, so what I did was imagined myself rubbing the wooden bench with my hand. Eventually I was in the image, but it was reallly unstable so I had to stablize with rubbing my hands together.