odd2k, I’ve never imagined anything like I did that rotating square thing this morning. Never. My imagination doesn’t give me such realistic images when I normally close my eyes, not even when I’m about to sleep usually (probably because my mind would have been shutting down, right…).
from my favorit text file ‘ld-faq.txt’:
The problem is remaining conscious until your dream start. Many strange things may happen when you remain conscious until the REM-period starts. The first thing you see may be Hypnagogic Imagery. It is a pattern, like the one you see when you press your fingers against our closed eyelids. Remember that this is hypnotic, and getting too involved with them will induce unconsciousness. Just let it flow, don’t get too involved and don’t suppress them either. The next thing you may experience is Hypnagogic Sounds. It may be as real as the sounds you hear in waking reality, but they are nothing to be afraid of. It is a good indicator that the REM-period is right around the corner. Just don’t let these sounds scare you. If you start to experience Abstract Thoughts, the logical part of your brain is falling asleep and you are not far from losing consciousness. You might be lying in bed thinking about a friend and the hypnagogic imagery starts and you see your friend’s face. You have also worked a stressful day so you start to remember stocking the shelves at work. Soon you are thinking that you are putting cans of food on the shelves with pictures of your friend on them. All this might seems perfectly normal. But it’s not logical. What you need to do is try thinking logical, do some math or start over again. Tactile Sensations can feel like you are paralyzed and high-voltage painless electricity is jolting through your body. You may experience these vibrations and find yourself leaving your body or having a Lucid Dream. But remember that all this is nothing to fear, it happens every night, whether you are consciously aware of it or not.
BTW: Sleep until U can get strait into a REM (after 5-7hours) MILD is much easier!
i read this in part one of the topic and thought about it .how you started to see and hear things that werent really thereand this is about how far i got the first time i tried wild and i didnt have any vibrations or any thing…is that good for my first time i was like half asleep but i was accepting what was going on in my mind. i had been in a wedding earlier that day so i started having images and sounds and things like that about it and someone said something and spoke back when i made the decision to say something i thought it was logical but i didnt know it woukld come out of my mouth but it did and when i heard it i became aware thati was talking to nothing and then later someone asked me for something and i reached over and handed iot to them but then i realized that i had just reached over at the side of my bed and i hand my hand shaped like it was grasping something but it wasnt and it loked as if in was handing something to noone and when i did this i opened my eyes when i saw my hand like that i was like what the heck am i doing…is that what hypnagogicimagery and slound is …i thought i was having a dream but when i woke up i realized t hat it was just HI because i was very irratated because what i had mistaken for a dream did not meet my expectations…are real dreams more realistic than hypnagogic imagery and sound?
Real Dreams and hypnogogic imagery can be both very real!
but i think in Hypnogogics Imgagery you got more levels and in dreaming that is less i think.
Sound i experience always as real!
Jeff
I read on this thread that to do WILD we should wake up after some hours
sleep and then go back to sleep to do WILD. But is it ok to go to the toilet when we wake up at this time? Sorry for this practical question… would a couple of minutes make all that difference?
For WBTB, I think its best to wake yourself up a bit intentionally, but not too much so you can’t go back to sleep. It might be a good idea to write down your dreams so far too so you can get your thoughts on dreams stable. Make sure you are at least awake enough so where you don’t just plop back to sleep within a minute without even attempting to LD. This happened to me a few nights before.
You could try WILD right after awaking though, but IMO its a lot harder to stay awake unless you actually get out of bed. The advantage though is that you might enter REM faster this way, but I don’t know if thats true or not.
These are WILD’s right? I’m laying in bed all relaxed and start to lose all sensation in my body. Can’t even detect breathing. I’m asleep now but fully conscious. There is a feeling of rapid motion and I am scared. There are no images at this stage. After a little while the motion stops and a dream starts, I’m still fully aware. After a little while I see the dream fade to a void and the motion starts again. Really high speed again (I hate roler coaster rides) sometimes there’s a “clunk” as if I entered my body and I feel myself wake up. Last month this repeated 6 times in a row and I was wondering what the dickens was going on.
Had another 2 a while ago.
Any better way to handle the high speed ride? Like I said I hate roller coaster rides. I’d like to be a ble to enjoy it more without getting scared but I’ve found getting scared seems to make it work better. If you know what I mean.
Thanks. I try to write them down.
I’ll keep waking myself up a bit, then. WILD hasn’t worked for me yet, but it’s only a week or so since I began trying.
I havent been paying much attention to LDing since i started back at school 
I would like to try, but it is fairly impractical. Having said this I will try WILDing and stuff soon. I have dabbled with WILD, but I only succeeded in staying awake for hours before feeling too tired to be bothered and just fell asleep. Any tips (except the obvious “Dont give up”)? Is keeping a dream journal important for WILD?
Hi! 
I’m a beginner in lucid dreaming but already read a lot about it.
Last night I attempted WILD for the first time. First, at 01:00 AM when I
went to bed. I concentrated at my breathing and after about 15 minutes
I started to feel very strange electricity sensation on my body. Then
I became to excited, my heart beat went mad and I lost it.
Second try was at 6:00 AM. This time I was not able to get the feeling,
gave up and had a difficult time sleeping. 
This was harder than I thought… 
My question is:
What is the best method for beginners, WILD or MILD?
I have some doubts that MILD will work for me because my dreams are
to crazy… So I attempted WILD first. Is it more difficult?
Thanks! 
Grrr, I can’t even get the vibrations!!
Doing RCs was the best technique for me when I was a beginner… Also check out the “Lucid Living” topic; that has helped me a lot. WILD can be very hard to master, but you can still practice both WILD and MILD as a beginner. I haven’t had much success with WILD, so if you aren’t a natural at it I’d recommend MILD or doing RCs as a technique instead. But the only way to really learn WILD is to keep practicing, so if you want to master it just keep trying…
I want to try WILDing more than I can, but I have a tremendous hw load. School cuts into my time a lot, and I haven’t been getting enough sleep lately. My dream recall has been getting worse, but I remember a really strange false awakening.
Anyway, what would you suggest? It’s too much trouble to set my alarm to an early hour and then re-set it for actual wake up time. (I did try this for a while, but to no avail.) Do you think that I should try WILDing as I fall asleep? or what? I might just give up trying to LD until school is over in summer. However, that likely wouldn’t yeild great results either, because last summer I stayed awake for 24 hours and more, more than once. I should probably try to sleep more.
Anyway, what do you suggest?
I got the vibrations yesterday AFTER listening to the bwgen preset DREAM EXPERIENCE 1.4.1, while attempting a WILD before sleeping… Didn’t proceed into an LD.
With Ed’s preset this night (see the Brainwave Generator thread) I didn’t get vibrations but I got a low level lucid dream.
i had an interesting experience with WILD earlier this morning. i’m not sure how close i was to actually entering a dream completely lucid, but it felt close. here’s the story:
I woke up after sleeping for more than 7 hours, and decided that i should at least try to do a WILD. Since i was staying home sick today, i had plenty of time. So, i got on my back and closed my eyes and after about 15 minutes, i could sense some light vibrations. I noticed that every time i breathed in deeply, the vibrations would get more intense for a moment. After breathing in deeply for 5 minutes, i noticed this white light in the corner of my eye, and it gradually started covering my enire eyesite (this is with my eyes closed). i thought i could make out vague shapes in the whiteness, but they were faint dark shadows. was i close to entering a dream?
bigjedman,
Yup, it sounds like you were very close from entering your dream world. Next time, relax and let it flow… like a river. Let it flow naturally. When you see something like that again, try to fully enjoy it and pretend that you’re IN it. Eventually you’ll find yourself in it or maybe you can take a LEAP into your dream world. It works. You can also use spinning technique to get a ‘grasp’ of your dream body’s sensation therefore you step into your dream world even further.
These are my 2 cent ideas. Hopefully it is helpful for ya. 
Good luck!
thanks DM7!
yea, flow like a river…hehe
Actually I take this back because I have read something in “Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming” which contradicts this. WBTB works well for lots of LD methods including WILD, but it can also be done the opposite way. I read that everyone wakes up about 10-15 times every night! It usually happens at the peak of REM and you immediately go back to sleep dreaming and by the time you wake up in the morning, you never remember yourself waking at night. Similar to how if you talked to someone on the phone at 3AM and went back to sleep, you wouldn’t remember it. If you awake at night and don’t move a single muscle in your body, you can enter your dream again very fast because body movement tends to terminate a REM cycle if you just woke up from one. The only problem with this is that some people are too drowsy and may not even have 10 seconds to think about lucid dreaming before clonking out again. The trick is to stay completely still, but say something in your head that wakes you up mentally. Then, keep your intention firmly in your mind as you drift back to sleep. At this point you can resume whatever varation/technique of WILD you usually use as you re-enter your dream world.
I’ve got to try this… because WILD doesn’t give me results yet except when I was dreaming of WILD. Is it common to dream you are WILDing?
I am getting the itches usually similar to what hypnosis does to me.
Also some movement of my legs on their own, currently a sideways movement. Is this a usual effect?
Another problem of mine is when I take a nap I usually try to WILD immediately, not after I wake up from the nap. I reread part 8 of this thread and it seems I should try the latter.
When you do WILD and eventually see an image, you’re supposed not to think about it. But if you’re counting should you keep counting? I’m presuming the answer is yes? What do you think?
I don’t remember dreaming of WILDing. I also can’t remember ever doing it on purpose. It’s just happened spontaneously on a number of occasions.
I get knee jercks and finger flicks in meditation but haven’t had movement like that before the WILD’s I’ve experienced. For the WILD’s I’ve had I’ve been perfectly still beforehand.
That technique I posted induced a LD early this morning, but I forgot to RC to stabilize the dream 
so it didn’t last long. Anyway, what I did is I woke up again after sleeping for about 7 hours and I just stayed completely still and repeated “I will re-enter my dream and become lucid”. The major key here is to visualize the very last thing you saw in your dream before you woke up. Keep that in your head and before you know it you will actually be in your dream again.
I think counting WILD might be a distraction for this, but it depends on the person. Also, I think you are dreaming of WILD simply because you are concentrating on the technique alone too hard. Keep your thoughts focused on your last dream you were just in.
And about seeing the images, you just keep passively watching them until you find the right moment to “step in” to the dream. However, when I did this WILD I was already well rested for about 7-8 hours so the dream came back very fast. Depending upon how long you have been sleeping will determine how long it takes to re-enter REM. For those who haven’t seen this already, heres a handy chart.
“Using REM periods”