Hey!
I’d like to share some of my views on different techniques for inducing lucid dreams, based on my experience and analyses. Please keep in mind that these are only my opinions, and I’m not a guy who can have thousands of LDs every month 
. Also consider that I’ve developed these ideas while searching for optimal (not much time-consuming) ways to frequently and reliably induce (and even get without inducing) lucid dreams FOR ME. An old wives’ tale states that everybody’s different - but perhaps not as much as most people think , so I hope that I will help somebody who is struggling - or wanting to have more LDs, but whose progress has stalled. Now I’m mainly using these techniques, which are quite reliable (make me lucid usually 1-2 times per night):
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Dream Recall: An obvious thing for every lucid dreamer. You need to connect your dream self to your awake self - in order to get consciousness from real life it’s necessary to get dreams into your real life. Dream journal can be a great help if you’re starting, but is not a necessity later on (still helps though). I’m not using a dream journal, but it’s just because of laziness
. What I found very helpful is trying to remember all dreams in the morning (even if it means learning some keywords by rote to be able to recall them later), and then, before sleep, try to relive them in your head, as vividly as you can, analyzing why you weren’t lucid (obvious dreamsigns etc.). -
Frequent and NATURAL awakenings: They are both a very good boost to your recall. It’s easy to learn how to wake up frequently and exactly when you want to, as long as you don’t get a sleep debt. Apart from increasing recall, frequent awakenings can help you boost your awareness during the night (which means more LDs of course
). -
Awareness aka Lucid Living: A very underrated technique, which is both very easy to do and very hard to describe
. It basically means trying to get the same state of consciousness as during a LD. If you had a lucid dream before, you can remember the shift of consciousness when ND changed into a LD. By doing a similar shift in waking world, you are in fact training getting lucid. Of course it’s not possible to be aware most of the time, but the more periods of awareness you have in your waking life, the more often lucidity will kick in while you’re dreaming. Try to ensure having at least a short “lucid” walk in the evening - feeling as you would if it were a dream and you were aware of it. If you do it correctly, you should feel slightly strange. Do not be a zombie programmed into a set of responses - employ your free will. Most people don’t use free will at all, even though it’s so simple. They are not lucid in their dreams, and they are not even lucid in their waking world - wouldn’t it be strange if somebody wanted to be able to use his free will in dreams, but not in real life? If you got home today and don’t remember most of the things you saw during the walk/drive, you were not aware. You acted like you act in dreams. Humans consider themselves to be the only conscious animals, but they are conscious only when they think about it - pretty ironic, huh? -
WILD: without doubt the most fun, crazy, but also the most reliable technique, if employed correctly. People often tell that they can’t do it, but fortunately it’s only what they think
. Basically, there are 3 keys to a successful WILD:-
Timing: The ideal is to combine it with WBTB, otherwise it’s very difficult. I can WILD using WBTB most of the time, while in afternoon it’s very difficult for me. I have never used this technique successfully before night. So you need to wake up (preferably by yourself, not by alarm clock or cat
) after 4.5-7.5 hours of sleep. -
Awakened mind: The only difference between falling asleep normally and WILDing is, that in second case you are consciously watching yourself falling asleep. Therefore it’s preferable to have the sharpness of fully awakened mind while the body is still able to fall asleep without problems. So, after waking up you have to do something which needs at least a fair amount of concentration. When you don’t feel sleepy anymore, go back to bed and close your eyes. While falling asleep normally, your eyes usually lose the focus. Therefore starring into whatever you see (empty space, then swirling colors, HI, etc.) ensures that you don’t lose consciousness (as long as your eyes are focused).
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Sleeping body: If you get back to sleep within a short time, falling asleep is automatic - you just need to relax (while having your eyes focused) in the same way as you normally do when you want to sleep. The only difference is that you’ll have the opportunity to feel exactly how falling asleep really feels
. Of course, you shouldn’t move any large body parts, but moving your eyes (but once again, DO NOT LOSE FOCUS!) or swallowing saliva or similar stuff isn’t very bad. After a while, your limbs will get numb, you will feel like you don’t need to move them anyway. Then more and more parts of the body get relaxed, and after your body is prepared for falling asleep (by the time I usually get heavy HI, but it’s also possible not to see anything at all - I think that the visual stuff you see is not linked to the body relaxation mechanism), you should get vibrations. Some people claim that they don’t get them and just enter the HI, but it’s not in my case. Anyway, this is a point where you just need to stay relaxed and either wait for a dream to appear or just try to move (but do it very calmly as it’s the dream body you want to move and not the real one )
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That was about the everything that I’m using now. Now I’d like to tell why I don’t use some of the conventional techniques:
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Reality Checks: The basic idea of doing dozens/hundreds/thousands reality checks per day is that, because your dreams reflect what you’re thinking about in real life, you’ll hopefully do a reality check in a dream and recognize your state - pretty straightforward. In order for RC to work, you have to open your mind to the possibility of being in a dream. In other words, you need to be already aware enough in order to conduct a correct RC. If you’re not aware, then the RC might not work, it might work but not induce lucidity, or it might induce a very low-level lucidity, because you know that you’re dreaming, but you don’t realize the implications of this knowledge. It’s awareness that makes you really lucid - that’s why I consider RCs to be obsolete, in favour of the Awareness technique described earlier.
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MILD: The idea is to program yourself before sleeping to have a lucid dream. It’s obvious that person’s thoughts before falling asleep have a large impact on his dreams. If you think about cars, you’ll get a dream about cars, if you think about fish, you’ll get a dream about fish, if you think about lucid dreaming…, you’ll get a dream about lucid dreaming. Perhaps a really irritating one in which you talk about LDing for half an hour without a slightest idea where you really are
. A slight improvement to MILD is incubating a dream which would allow you to realize your state, for example a flying dream. But whether you realize it or not, still depends on your awareness! -
Suneye method: I’ve just discovered it a few hours ago, but it’s about… focussing your eyes! As I’ve written earlier, it helps in maintaining consciousness. That’s how I do WILD, except I don’t focus on the 3rd eye, because it’s painful and perhaps unhealthy to strain your eyes that much. I don’t see what’s the difference between focusing on 3rd eye, 4th hand, 17th nose, or just your eyelids, but the point is the same…
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Brainwave Generator/Hemi-Sync/Drugs/whatever: Let’s get serious. You can do it without unnatural stimuli to your brain.
I’ll greatly appreciate any feedback of yours!
lupus
. A little something I do to speed up the WILD process (which I also only do when I briefly wake during the night) once i’m already 1/2 asleep is that I start to imagine myself spinning around my length axis in bed, and then after a while use this momentum to roll my dream body into a LD (some call that an OBE but I don’t). The spinning disconnects your external senses from your awareness so that once you start to move, you don’t move your physical body but your dream body.
She meant that during a LD, dreamers can overcome this loss of lucidity provided they are very vigilant. But when you practise WILD, and try to get asleep consciously, unexpected images catch you very fast in their flow, and generally, you loose consciousness during a (short?) while before you become lucid again and have a LD. She said that it’s rather hard not to loose consciousness at all, and that the cause of this brief loss of lucidity was these unexpected images. That’s what I meant by: they are “deadly” (probably the wrong term… 
) .
They pop into my mind without warning and I tend to fall asleep and loose my logical thinking when I get them 
They are usually so sudden that it’s extremely hard to stay aware of what’s happening when one gets them 
I wonder what one could do to not loose awareness from these random images/thoughts. I’ve been trying to WILD from HI the past few days and I’ve been trying to keep my mind clear from thoughts and focus on what I can see, but these images suddenly pop into my mind. They are also different from HI. HI I can see infront of me, but these images are more like imagination/thoughts.