When I first began trying to lucid dream, around November of 2023, I started off with WBTB + WILD. I now know that WILD isn’t great for beginners lol. But this was what I was attempting at first, so I have been trying it for a while, without many changes to my technique since I first began. I’m looking for some advice for what I could do differently to help with my no successes :')
(I also don’t mind if you skim through this, it is quite long! I’ll just let you know if there was something important you may have missed, based off of your response)
My main issue is that I either fall asleep because I am too tired to focus on staying aware (that sort of tiredness where anything you think about starts going into really repetitive loops and you keep forgetting what you were just thinking about), or I am too aware and can never fall asleep.
People have told me that I just need to tough it out when I feel like I can’t fall asleep, and that the hypnagogic hallucinations will come eventually. But at some point it feels like my chest is going to explode from boredom lol. And I feel like I am alright at doing stuff like meditating, but for some reason trying to do WILD for so long gets unbearable.
Btw I am doing other techniques at the same time, but I want to work on this one while I am at it! I am trying to put an emphasis on MILD especially. Also note that attempting to lucid dream has been a very on-and-off process for me, so I have not been trying consistently for 3 years straight lol
So this is what mainly happens during my WILD attempts, if I don’t fall asleep during the process:
-I lay down and relax my entire body. This comes to me really easily. I may spend a minute shifting my body around until I get fully comfortable, and then I can basically just go limp. Sometimes there is lingering tenseness, but I can get rid of that within a couple minutes by relaxing whenever I exhale.
-I go through some MILD mantras/intentions. I might do this before or after SSILD, it depends. This part doesn’t feel very structured, it’s mostly just willing myself to have and remember a lucid dream lol. I try and remind myself of what I want to do once I realize I am dreaming. I have also begun asking a CALDacter to help me become lucid at night, but definitely not for long enough to say anything about the effectiveness. He is barely developed within my own mind yet.
-I then cycle through SSILD. I go through my sight, hearing, and touch. Even if I am not too sleepy, I can start losing track here like crazy! I try to do 6 cycles, but often I zone out in the middle of one and have to pick up from where I left off. If I am doing really badly, I might just go through 1 quick cycle to at least get something completed, and then call it a night. Should I try doing something else in this situation?
-Time to focus on an anchor and wait until something happens! Here I just focus on something, like my breathing or visualizing a dream that I want to enter. If I am too sleepy, this step is where I fall asleep lol. If I am not sleepy enough, this becomes the infinite wait! But a lot of stuff tends to happen during this wait, so I will talk about that next.
-Fake itches! These are easy, maybe just mildly annoying. One time I felt a “bug” on my face, crawling towards my eye. I knew it was fake, but I still wanted to swipe it off for that 1% chance that it was real lol. But nowadays I can wait through these sensations easily!
-Numbness level 1. Once the itches are over, I feel a mild sense of numbness come over me, especially on my limbs, which are motionless. Not really my torso or head, since those are moving from or feeling my breathing. At this point, if I am lying in any weird position with any sort of discomfort, this becomes very apparent lol. This is why I CANNOT try WILD while lying on my sides, the asymmetry is unbearable. The feeling of my neck being bent, my feet/legs intersecting, my innards being pulled to the side by gravity, and my ribs holding my skin up against gravity is wildly uncomfortable. There are also discomforts from lying on my back, but it’s so much better than on my side. Lying on my side is just for falling asleep normally. That was a bit of a tangent lol. At this point, my vision may also “zoom into” the darkness behind my eyelids, as if I am being enveloped.
-Waitinggg. Just a lot of waiting…
But during this part, depending on the day, I might end up giving up. It’s been happening fairly often. And for the reason of being uncomfortable, despite lying on my back. One thing that happens is that I get the super strong urge to swallow. Either mucus is building up in my throat, my throat is becoming too dry, or both. I drink a lot of water to try and avoid that, but it doesn’t work. This is really difficult to get through! Last night I got it while I was meditating, and it was the first time I could actually get myself to sit through it. My throat felt like it was getting dried and “cracked,” but I got through. Well, not exactly “get through,” since I still had the sensation distracting me the entire time, but at least I did not succumb to the urge to swallow lol. Reason that swallowing is an issue is because it distracts me from my anchor and makes me too “awake,” which pushes me off the path to WILD by a bit. And of course I can’t achieve WILD if I keep having to swallow over and over. Another thing that happens is an air bubble being in my mouth. I don’t know why, but it makes me uncomfortable and it really distracts me. I try to get rid of the air bubble, but when I relax my mouth, it shows up again. This never bothered me years ago, it is a fairly recent annoyance. There are probably some other things that I don’t remember, but the main gist is that annoying/uncomfortable sensations around my mouth/throat keep distracting me and are very difficult to ignore. What should I do about that?
-Weird sensation. If I wait long enough, I may get a weird sensation as well as static sounds becoming louder in my ears. It is hard to describe the sensation, but it can be pretty strong. It used to be much stronger when I was doing this around 2-3 years ago. Recently it’s been a bit weaker in comparison. It’s a kind of cool feeling, but also very unrelaxing. It makes my heart rate go faster and causes my breathing to speed up to non-sleeping speeds. I usually try to slow it down to keep up the facade of being asleep to my brain, but it makes me feel like I’m going to run out of oxygen, even though I won’t. I can do it fine, even if it is uncomfortable to breathe more slowly, but I am worried that putting all that focus on it knocks me off the path to success with WILD. Another annoying part about it is that it makes me tense my core whenever I take a breath. I don’t know why, maybe that sensation is too strong? I should be keeping my body limp, but I don’t know how to not tense my core when this sensation happens. I have also tried not to focus on it much, but when I do that, it keeps happening anyways. So what could I do about the core tensing? And should I slow down my breathing to be more normal when this happens, or do I just let my body do whatever it is doing automatically so that I don’t knock myself off the path?
-Numbness level 2, and nothing else happens… This feels like I am more numb than before, almost as if my limbs do not exist. I still feel my torso and head, though. That part never goes away. I feel like I am getting close to something here, but then nothing else happens. I just lie there. Maybe I go back and forth between the “weird sensation” step and this one a few times over the span of several minutes. I try to visualize a dream to enter. I feel the surroundings, hear the sounds, look all around. But I never get immersed into it, I am only thinking about it, for what feels like a really long time. Nothing else really happens. At some point I start to feel super uncomfortable and like I really have to move. I try to keep waiting, but nothing happens. So ultimately, I give up. This is the furthest I have gotten. What should I do?
I wrote a LOT here, but hopefully someone doesn’t mind helping lol. I will be really thankful to get some! 