I’ve read a lot of WILD tutorials. I get the sense that most of them are written by people who’ve read other tutorials, rather than people who are actually really good at WILDing.
Click for my personal WILD experience:
[spoiler]I, for one, am not good at WILDing - possibly because I’ve always had a high frequency of spontaneous lucidity. But I’ve always wanted to be better, because the feeling of a guarantee is hard to resist; and because I’m a perfectionist, who wants to have every aspect of lucid dreaming at his command. I rarely even fell asleep.
I tried different approaches for seven years or more, persisting with each before trying the next. I’ve tried lying still on my back, on my side, counting, watching images, breathing, naps, early mornings, all possible combinations - nothing; even after more than an hour on each attempt.
So now I’m trying a new tack. My only successful WILDs have been unplanned, and they’ve all been similar: while falling asleep, mind totally unfocused, I very suddenly become alert, a loud ringing in my ears with hypnagogic imagery and “rattling through a tunnel” feeling’; then, within 20 seconds or so, I’m in a dream. It’s like a DILD, except early: prompted by the hypnagogic state rather than the dream state. It’s very much a “boomerang” effect: I lose almost all consciousness and awareness, then it’s thrown back at me just before the dream starts. It’s much more passive than most tutorials suggest.[/spoiler]
I’ve come to believe that the trick to WILDing is nothing more specific than getting the right “fuel mixture” between alertness and sleepiness. Everything else, all the dozens of named sub-techniques, all the breathing and counting, are just means to this end, and most of them are far too personal to have wide application. My experience has taught me that I need to vary my awareness significantly downwards in order to have success. My only connection to waking alertness is a very unobtrusive attachment to the buzz in my ears. Others may need to make a smaller or an opposite adjustment, becoming more aware rather than less.
The trouble with WILD tutorials is that human language has not really developed to describe such intimate, inner-mind details as a good WILD technique requires - whether to “focus” on your physical eye or your mental eye, which “field” of your mental eye should take priority, how to forget your body but remain aware, &c. I’m opening this thread to invite people who have had problems WILDing to share how they overcame them, how they made breakthroughs.
I’m convinced that building a body of experience which shows how individual dreamers can reach a tailored WILD technique will help people to find their own way more easily than yet another prescriptive tutorial. We need to lay down some general principles for how you decide, personally, what’s working and what’s harmful. My bit of advice, to start things off: remembering and analyzing the spontaneous “dream re-entry” experiences during the early mornings was crucial. It showed exactly what a successful WILD would feel like for me: that the images seemed to be in my physical eyes, that I was very forgetful of my body, that my ear buzz would block out all external noises. I can use that knowledge to avoid red herrings in future - e.g., sleep paralysis has little to no relevance for my personal WILD success (so I needn’t worry about moving and turning), I do not see images until the last few seconds (so no use looking for them).
Can anyone else help with this project? Let’s crack this once and for all: so many people want to know the answer. Once we’ve gathered enough info I might try to make one of my proper “motivational” tutorials…
