A few nights ago, I had visited this site for the first time, and decided to try to increase my chances of dream recall by repeating something along the lines of “I will sleep and dream, and wake up and remember the dream”. However, some techniques from the WILD method (going up stairs, focusing on mental images/colors) became unintentionally intertwined, and I soon felt my body go numb (I can do this on command while in bed, I just try to forget I have a body and the feeling goes away). I decided this might help me sleep and didn’t fight it. Strangely, I soon saw a “dark figure” moving about as if in my room, though my eyes were closed. I have read somewhere that this happens quite often when someone attempts a WILD, and ignored it or tried to transform it into something less threatening. Unfortunately, it eventually disappeared and I fell aleep. I was wondering; how common is this shadowy figure? And what should I do from there if I wish to have a lucid dream? On a side note, my dream recall was excellent the next morning, remembering three dreams quite clearly. Thanks in advance!
That shadowy figure was HI, and in combination with that numb feeling of your body, it sounds as though you either entered SP, or began to enter SP (of course, I may be wrong).
As I’ve never WILD’ed before, though, I’ll leave the rest of this up to people who do WILD 
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Thanks, I figured as much.
Any WILD’ers here have some advice on how to use this figure help me LD?
It depends on what stage you were in. Sureal is probably right, it looks like an hypnagogic hallucination. But sometimes it can only be a moving hole in the phosphenes visual field. I’ll try to explain it the best I can.
When you close your eyes, you see little fuzzy dots: they are called phosphenes. Sometimes, they don’t move. But sometimes, they can have a repetitive movement. Curiously, when they don’t move, we generally focus on the clear areas. But when they move, we focus on the dark areas, the holes between the phosphenes. Thus, it may happen (rarely and randomly) that this dark hole looks like a human silhouette.
IMO, you can determine whether it’s a phosphenes hole or HI, because the “phosphenes hole silhouette” is black and you can’t see any details and it’s just looks vaguely like a human being and moreover, it moves repetitively; but in HI, you can see some details, and it looks more like a dream.
With phosphenes holes, you can’t do anything, because it means you’re not in the HI stage. Yet if Sureal and I were right, and it was HI, then I don’t think you can do a lot of things with it, because you’re unlikely to see this figure again: HI are random. Thus the only advice I could give you is, when you’re in the HI stage, try to move mentally, for instance rolling out of your bed, in order to enter a dream.
But I’m not very experienced in WILD too, so I hope another one will give you better advices! 