i’ve been thinking lately that WBTB could work pretty well for me, apart from one thing.
so, WBTB says that you should wait six hours before waking yourself up with an alarm. i’m pretty good at waking to an alarm. but the problem with me is that… once i’m awake, if i stay up for more than even a few minutes, i’ll stay up pretty much until the next night. which… is counterproductive, given the technique.
does anyone else have a similar situation to me? inability to fall back asleep after that half hour? or, any tips on how to fall asleep quick?
would it help if i shortened the time that i slept for before waking myself up? like shorten it from 6 hours to 3 hours?
I’ve done WBTB after only 3h of sleep many times, but it’s almost always after 6h of sleep that I become lucid. You can shorten the time you are up. If you are going for MILD or DILD, shortening the time you stay awake is fine. I often just write down dreams, drink water and visit the toilet before going back to bed. The point is to “refresh” your dream incubation, autosuggestion and intention. Recite your mantra/incubation/etc a few times and go back to sleep with those fresh in your memory. Also you are more aware in the dreams and, if nothing else, you recall dreams better.
But sometimes I have trouble falling asleep too. It happens. Often I don’t feel tired, but I can still fall asleep if I just clear my mind and relax.
It’s suggested that you should wake up after six hours because REM period is getting longer the longer you sleep. So then when you fall asleep again you have more dream time so to say. But you can do it like Letaali. By that time you would be roughly in your second REM cycle because the average time of getting into REM cycle is every 90 - 130 minutes. Depends on the dreamer but more important then when you wake up is if you actually wanna go through with this practice you need to be ready to spend a lots and lots of nights figuring things out before actually getting any intentional lucid dreams.
I’m not saying this to discourage you I’m just trying to tell you the truth. You’ll have to figure out when to wake up and trust me the best time to wake up is when you wake up naturally, without alarm. When you wake up naturally it can mean 3 things:
you woke up before REM cycle
you woke up after REM cycle
you woke up in the middle of the REM cycle.
And you might think that this same scenarios are possible too when waking up with alarm and that is true. But when you wake up naturally you can see how for how much you were asleep and then you can roughly know whether you woke up before or after REM cycle but if you wake up while in REM you might get few indications like; SP, remembering dreams, being little fuzzy and so on and on.
But all that to get working the most important thing is to get a regular sleeping schedule, that will make your effort count for something.
The thing is you have to experiment a lot to see what is good for you and what is not.
I wouldn’t recommend waking up after 3 hours. as dB_FTS pointed out your REM periods are longer after 6 hours. In the first 3 hours you’re body mostly experiencing stage 3 sleep (Deep sleep).
If you have trouble going back to bed I recommend you try something called the “progressive muscle relaxation technique” (there’s some instructional videos on YouTube). Basically the technique involves tensing your major muscle groups for 10-15 seconds and then releasing.
For example tense your calves very hard for 10 seconds and let go. Then tense your quads for 10 seconds and let go. Keep doing this until you’ve worked all your major muscles and you’ll feel a lot more relaxed and will be able to fall asleep much easier.
