I’ve accidentally stumbled upon LD about a week an a half ago, and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the experiences I’ve had so far. I’ve tried some techniques here and there to induce LD, but I haven’t gone too in depth yet, (obviously) and I have a question about switching between methods. For example, practicing SSILD for a month and WILD for another month.
To get good at anything, it requires practice, and if you don’t practice for a while you will start to get rusty. Therefore, to catch up, you will need to dedicate more time to compensate for what you missed. Hypothetically, if I were pretty good at inducing LD’s with SSILD, but I wanted to get better, and try out WILD, would my progress slowly reset with SSILD as I practiced with another method? Or would my skill plateau until I visited it again?
It really differs based on the person. As somebody who’s only known of lucid dreaming for a short time, you should definitely be practicing a method for a long time before changing because you’re doing more than just learning a method; you’re undoing a lifetime of not treating dreams as important experiences. Such a habit won’t disappear quickly, so it may not be the method’s fault if you don’t succeed quickly.
With only a week and a half of practice, you shouldn’t even be overly concerned with special techniques. Despite the fame of SSILD, WILD, DEILD, and certain other techniques, most lucid dreaming sites still teach the more classic methods of reality checks, dream journaling, WBTB, and questioning if you could be dreaming. The reasons for this are twofold. First, it puts a great emphasis on studying both your dreams and your waking state instead of using a “method”, thus retraining your brain and making dreams feel important. Second, it gives you something that could work even if a technique fails; for example, you could fail to have a WILD and fall asleep naturally but still question something about the dream and have an LD anyway.
Don’t focus on an exact span of time for techniques until you know for a fact that your brain considers dreams important. Start with the classic methods to cement that importance and to learn critical skills. Only then can you start gauging how long to spend on different techniques.
I appreciate the speedy response, Thorn! After reading so much just recently, I guess my brain has been bombarded with so much new material I don’t know how to take it in, and I want to try everything. But it’s always better to build a firm foundation so you can expound upon it later.