I find that monotonous noises like fans or AC’s actually deter progression with WILD, but that’s just me. If you get to a certain point in the WILD process, but find that the fan is deterring your progression, get up, turn it off, and go back to sleep. You have to find out for yourself whether or not it’s really that annoying to you.
Trust me though, at the end of WILD’ing, you’ll know whether or not it’s keeping you awake.
As for staying awake, if your really having trouble with it, exhausting activity may or may not help. I could only imagine it would send you to sleep faster, which could be helpful, but only in some circumstances. If you could keep your mind awake long enough to enter a dream without getting bored, I’d imagine it would help with astounding results. However, if you succumb to sleep more easily, it might just send you to sleep without you ever knowing you did. Which may end up causing missed dream signs.
This is part of the reason why WILD’ing is so tricky, every little detail requires testing before each person figures out what works best for them.
In my honest opinion, WILD’ing isn’t one of the best techniques, let alone one you should try outside of a lengthened testing period, but if you really want to immerse yourself in it, I would say try meditation. Serious meditation. As in meditate for more than an hour at a given time, focusing on your thoughts the entire time. Try and focus on situations, complete storylines you want to follow. Think about people you want to see, if you want to create a dream character, think about every detail of the persons body and character. If you want to create a dream theme/dream realm of your own, think about the town/s, think about every detail of the region you want the area to be in. The key here is to keep your mind busy and your body rested, the same way you would in the WILD process, so that you can use this technique when you WILD.
Hopefully that helps, whenever you can, try and get a testing period. Anywhere from 1-2 weeks to devote yourself to LL specifically in the WILD area. Believe me, a period of time like this is more beneficial than you could ever imagine when trying to see results from something like this.