Hope I’m not posting in the wrong forum… I’ve been told that WBTB is good for beginners to start out with LDing. And DEILD is also good to start with as well since I have some experiences with DEILD before succeeding. But my question is how does the WBTB technique actually work? I’ve read tutorials on it and I really don’t get it… Do you wake up in a dream or do you become fully lucid when you wake up in a dream or how does it work and how long does it usually take to work?
You don’t wake up in a dream, you wake up in reality/waking life.
The idea behind the WBTB is hidden in the science of REM sleep. When we go to sleep we don’t enter REM sleep immediately because our sleep is contained of few stages and one of them is REM. We need roughly 90 - 130 minutes to do so. Arguably the most memorable and vivid dreams occur in REM sleep. Also what’s important is that when you sleep longer into night stages that come before REM become shorter and REM stage becomes longer which means that you will later into night have more time to dream.
Statistic show that the longest REM stage might get to 40 minutes. Again this depends on how much you sleep, if you sleep 10 hours it might even be longer. So when you’re using WBTB the idea is to wake up after 3 hours or later of sleep when REM stage is already long enough to remember some dreams and become aware in waking life and hopefully carry that awareness into dream.
When becoming more experienced with this you can even train yourself to wake up after almost every dream where DEILD comes into play because it’s also proven that we do have micro awakenings between every dream but most of them we don’t remember. This goes for REM and non REM dream too.