Hey everyone,
I just remembered that my first experience with attempting to influence my dream content (my precursor to LDing) was on 12/18/02, before I had bought EWLD…I attempted to recall someone’s face in perfect detail (I’m terrible at recalling faces, I have to recognize), and in the end after maybe 5-10 minutes saw for a split second a flash of the face in PERFECT detail.
Now, my question is…was this anything Hypnagogic, or was it the start of a WILD? I don’t recall any vibrations or feelings of weightlessness, although I do remember that the sudden appearance of this image out of nowhere (I rarely see Hypnagogics while going to sleep, my mind tends to get distracted in a wild train of thought) startled me out of concentration.
It sounds like the face was a hypnagogic image, but this IS actually the start of WILD. Hypnagogics occur when the body begins shutting down and the dreaming part of the mind becomes active. The fact that you were conscious while it happened means you were on your way to WILD.
That’s wild (good lord, I just realized the inaneness of the unintended pun here…NO PUN INTENDED), Atheist…I have yet to see another such vivid Hypnagogic Image flash before me. Does focusing on a mental image VERY strongly (not just the weak focusing I do on the ‘dream car’, which tonight will be the ‘dream jet’) create hypnagogics? This image came after quite a bit of focusing, many minutes; I don’t have HI very often at all.
Granted, my problem DOES rest in the fact that I always try WILD before going to sleep (I rarely wake up in the middle of the night; I’m a VERY deep sleeper…just read my post in the Big WILD Topic 
).
I am going to try to influence HI more often, because this tends to keep me focused. I will visualize an image that I want to result in a dream…hopefully this will be the right thing to do. Maybe tonight it’ll be a samurai battle, muah.
People experience hypnagogic imagery each and every time they fall asleep. Usually though, a person will become unconscious before actually taking notice of it. In your case, when you were specifically focusing on the face, it allowed you to remain conscious and witness some of the more spectacular visions, sounds and feelings that accompany the process of falling asleep.
When you’re trying WILD, the best thing to do is concentrate intensely on the hypnagogic images and sounds. If you’re not actively paying attention to them, you’ll slip into unconscious sleep before you even realize what happened. You can control these images usually, but the closer you get to actually entering the dream, the more random they become. If all goes well, the hypnagogic imagery will replace all of your actual senses, and you’ll find yourself inside a dream with no contact whatsoever to the real world.
Again, make sure you sleep for around 6 hours before trying WILD. Hypnagogic imagery can occur any time you are close to falling asleep, but unless you’ve already had a few hours of sleep, you won’t be able to actually step into a dream. Instead, you’ll just fall into the first sleep cycle and lose consciousness. People don’t enter REM sleep straight away unless you’ve just woken from it.
Thanks, Atheist…you definitely got me started on the way to learning to WILD. Sadly, though, I very rarely wake up in the middle of the night. And even worse, I’m not allowed to set alarms to wake me up because those wake up my parents, and then they can’t get back to sleep.
I figure I’ll just goof off with late-night WILD attempts and see how far I can get before I lose consciousness…is it ACTUALLY possible to stay conscious of one’s sleeping the moment one goes to sleep? I’m sure this is the way the Tibetan monks handled things…
It is apparently possible to remain conscious through the initial sleep cycles (though without the use of any senses at all) but I’d wager it wouldn’t be a simple process to develop that ability. Maybe there are other ways you can wake youself up during the night. You could try drinking a few glasses of water before going to sleep, or perhaps using a watch alarm or smaller alarm device.
GREAT IDEA.
Thanks for kind of “chatting” with me here (lol), but the water idea DID work for me once. I am the type of person who has an ENORMOUS capacity for fluid (read: oversize bladder), but I have used this method correctly at least once. I’ll get a bottle or two of water right now, but I’ll try to work on my WILD technique tonight anyway.
Damn, I have to DOUBLE the dose of water . Last night, I woke up around 5 from a “bad” dream (not a nightmare, but near to it) which had an end that shocked me into awakeness. That was around an hour before I usually get up. I felt like I had to use the bathroom only SLIGHTLY, and soon fell to sleep. No time to even practice WILD…good God, I’m a TANKER! That was a big water bottle I drank. LOL.