How many DILD's ? How many WILD's ?

He he! I’m the first to post results here. :happy:

1) Introduction

This is the result of the “How many DILD’s ? How many WILD’s ?” experiment. If someone wants to try and find another conclusions with the collected results, I’ve to precise that I added moogle’s form (19 DILD’s, no WILD). She gave me her form in a thread that has disappeared now (it was in the Helpdesk, if I remember well).

Before I jump to the presentation of results and conclusions, I would like to thank all the people who took the time and answered this experiment. :content: :handshake: As I designed the form the simplest I could, I thought that we would be more numerous. :sad:

Now, I think we need a little background concerning similar statistics :

Background:

Statistics about the proportion between WILD’s and DILD’s in lucid dreaming experience have already been done in the past. According to scientific observations, more than 80% of lucid dreams are initiated when a nonlucid dream transforms into a lucid dream - i.e. DILD’s (LaBerge, Nagel, Taylor, Dement, & Zarcone, 1981). An LD4all experiment that was conducted some months ago (“10 dreamers, 100 LDs - a review”, it has been extended later to 20 dreamers and 200 LD’s) showed 79% DILD’s. Anyhow, this proportion is susceptible to vary dramatically according to the dreamer. In scientific litterature, Donald DeGracia has 114 recorded lucid dreams of which 43% were WILDs and 56% were DILDs. In contrast, only 8% of Stephen LaBerge’s dissertation sample of 388 recorded lucid dreams were WILDs, a significantly lower proportion (LaBerge, S. & DeGracia, D.J., 2000). We didn’t found any litterature about possible variations according to gender, though the original LD4all experiment let suppose they could exist.

What has been searched in this experiment:

In our experiment, we have tried to find out:

  • the proportion between WILD’s and DILD’s
  • if girls are more gifted in WILD (see the “10 dreamers, 100 LD’s” topic to know why)
  • if WILD capabilities increases with experience
  • what porportion of people are more gifted in WILD

2) Results :

Global variations in LD initiation:

In our experiment, 28 dreamers were tested (20 males, 8 females). They recorded a total of 698 LD’s.
612 were DILD’s, 86 were WILD’s. Thus we obtained 87.7% DILD’s and 12.3% WILD’s.
This percentage doesn’t change a lot when we suppress from the sample the people who said they didn’t practice WILD’ing. Then we obtain 14% WILD’s.
This percentage is coherent with the previous foundings thus we can assert that DILD’s are much common than WILD’s.

Variations in LD initiation according to gender:

When we divide our results between male and female, we obtain the following results:

  • the 20 males had 533 LD’s (460 DILD’s and 73 WILD’s) : this gives 86.3% DILD’s and 13.7% WILD’s.
  • the 8 females had 165 LD’s (152 DILD’s and 13 WILD’s) : this gives 92.1% DILD’s and 7.9% WILD’s.
    Thus the hypothesis of girls having more WILD’s than males is not confirmed and can be given up.

Variations in LD initiation according to experience:

We have sorted the 28 dreamers according to the total amount of LD’s they’ve had in their life, then we have divided them in two groups totaling an approximatively similar number of LD’s. Thus we have obtained:

  • a first group containing 21 “beginners” (from 1 to 50 LD’s in their life). They total 366 LD’s in the experiment, 28 of them being WILD’s (7.7%).
  • a second group containing 7 “experienced LD’ers” (from 67 to hundreds LD’s in their life). They total 332 LD’s, 58 of them being WILD’s (17.5%).

Compared to the expected amounts if every group had the same probability (that is 12.3%) of WILD’ing, the chances of this result to be due to chance alone are very feeble (p=0.0002 according to a Khi2 test). Thus at first sight it seems that LD’ing experience is related to obtaining more WILD’s. Now there is another possible explanation: LD’ers that have WILD’s in addition to DILD’s are likely to have faster a higher total amount and thus they are in the “experienced LD’ers” group. If so, this result wouldn’t mean that experience gives more WILD’s but just that having WILD’s makes you “experienced” faster.

This paradox is rather tricky and I don’t see a good solution in order to resolve it. :neutral: Moreover when we draw a graphic, we can clearly see that no correlation can be found between the percent of WILD’s and the total amount of dreams. (We can also remember here, as it was said above, that Stephen LaBerge had just 8% WILD’s out of 388 recorded lucid dreams.)

Figure 1 : no visible correlation between WILD percentage and LD’ing experience

Thus variation in LD initiation according to experience is still unclear in my eyes.

Individual differences

There are 6 “frequent WILD’ers” amongst the 28, having more than 20% WILD’s.
Here we have to notice that saying “14% of LD’s are WILD’s” is not meaningful at all. The average LD’er has not about 14% WILD’s, that is, there is no gaussian distribution around 14%.

Figure 2: no gaussian distribution around 14% in people practising WILD

There are 4 people that don’t practice WILD hence they have no WILD of course; some people try and haven’t. Rarer people try and have some. Even rarer try and have a good percentage of WILD. In such conditions, I can’t see any law ruling individual differences. I have to admit that effort in trying to have WILD’s was not very well quantified during this experiment.

3) Conclusions

The results are rather disappointing in my eyes. With the exception of the total percentage of WILD’s compared to DILD’s, which confirms previous experiments, I’ve the feeling that nothing really interesting has been found. :cry: As no clear correlation between experience and WILD’ing, nor a gaussian curve have been found, we can perhaps deduce that some gift that cannot been trained is required to have a lot of WILD’s. We could search later if there is a relation between WILD’ing and having had SP episodes, for instance.

Of course, feel free to comment those results and conclusions. :grin: