The following passage is long so here is a summary: I tried the WBTB method for the first time but couldn’t get back to sleep because I kept salivating and swallowing. This may have been because I was hungry or may have been because I was excited by the idea of lucid dreaming. If it was indeed because I was hungry, is eatind during the one hour period of being awake advisable. Also after reading my description of my first attempt do you think that the swallowing was indeed the culprit or was it an effect of something else?
Last night I woke up after sleeping for roughly six hours and tried to go back to sleep immediately but telling myself that I would have a lucid dream. I currently have a cold so it was hard for me to get back to sleep because my throat was sore and I was uncomfortable, I also couldn’t stop swallowing so I decided to take some throat lozenges. After going downstairs and getting a lozenge I decided I might as well stay up for an hour and try to do the WBTB method properly. I lay in bed with a soft red light on and red for about 40 minutes and then I smelled some herbs that I have heard were good for dreaming (mostly lavendar) and then for about 10 minutes I wrote my intentions repeatedly in my dream journal and read them aloud to myself. I then tried to go to sleep lying on my back while repeating the message “I will have a lucid dream” to myself, in my head. My entire lower body fell asleep pretty quickly and I found it hard to move any of my body parts from the neck down, a sort of numbness was present in them. However, I kept having to swallow for some reason and therefore the muscles in my face and throat were not relaxed and I wasn’t able to experience true sleep. My heart was aslo beating pretty rapidly in the begining because I was very excited about the prospect of becoming lucid. After a while I started to experience dreamlike imagery, different from HI because these were actual short scenes and dream sequences except that I was not in them I was merely seeing them. I maintained lucidity the whole time but never actually began to dream. I began to experience a number of strange phenomena such as a swirling sensation and a pulsing/vibrating sensation. After an hour I tried to command my body to float as in an OBE. I felt my arms rasing as if I wasn’t directly controling them. It was like I was pressing a button that raised my arms for me, then my head rose and the sleep was shaken off the rest of my body. During this entire time I still had to keep swallowing. An hour passed since trying to fall back to sleep so I decided to switch positions by lying on my side, still I had to keep swallowing so I could never really fall asleep. After 20 minutes of the same thing but on my side (my lower body being asleep but my face muscles not being relaxed) I tried lying on my stomach and had the same results. I finally fell asleep somehow and had a long dream about lucid dreaming but was not lucid.
Keep up practising WILD, you seems to be gifted in this technique.