I just found out about Lucid Dreams yesterday, and I was extremely eager to try them out last night. When I laid down to bed, I started breathing rhythmically, while attempting to keep my brain awake.
It felt like my body was getting heavier and stiffer. I wasn’t completely paralyzed, because if I put an effort into it, I could move myself a little ( I had to move my foot because it was in a bad posistion). The longer and longer I went, the less my body felt like it was me. My hands were resting on my body through a blanket, and it felt like they were resting on some other body.
Then I started getting a horribly uncomfortable feeling in my arm. Kind of like it was under some kind of uniform pressure. It felt really bad, so I pulled myself out of it. Is that how one is supposed to feel?
When I sat up to look at the clock, it was an hour and a half after I had laid down. Is there something that I am supposed to do to progress the sleeping body to the Hypnogogic images?
It’s not supposed to hurt, normally. This doesn’t mean that it never does, a lot of “weird” stuff can happen when you try WILD. But it’s nothing to worry about as long as it doesn’t happen all the time. Try again, my guess is that it won’t happen anymore.
To WILD succesfully is a pretty hard job to do when you try it when you go to bed at night. In stead, try it combined with WBTB or when you briefly wake during the night (my personal favorite). To enter a LD from WILD, you have to use some kind of an induction technique to actually pass the treshold from wake to sleep/dream succesfully. One is to focus on the HI, and when they get more pronounced, try to let yourself be suck into the HI, so that you become an actor, instead of a “movie watcher”. Personally I use a different method, one which you can find here. If you browse the forum (for example the Big WILD topic), you can find many more such techniques. Good luck with it!
My first SP was a bit like that but I hadn’t heard of Sleep Paralysis at the time so it was extra scary. I would say Try to keep your awareness ballanced between letting a dream form and staying concious as you fall asleep.