I’ve tried various WILD variants like SSILD, counting (“One. I am dreaming. Two…”), FILD, imagining myself spinning / rolling, and some other visualizations. I’ve tried them with WBTB usually around 0500, and just now with a late morning nap after getting up a bit early and having breakfast, taking a quick walk to the market, filling out the DJ, etc. Frequently I get pretty quickly to HI, and in my nap attempt I got dozens of visual dreamlets that last just for a second or two, but as soon as I see them I snap back to alertness and they vanish. I try not to “hold on to them” but they never develop. Twice during the nap I got the “Full Body Buzz/vibe” (FBB) that I believe is the beginning of SP, and this too has happened before. The first time I got it today in the nap attempt I stayed calm but it just seemed to wear off and I did a RC and I was awake 
. Second time I got a bit excited thinking “woohoo here we go”, my breathing got a bit uneven and jerky and I thought I had made it but it too passed and I remained awake/alert .
Any recommendations on particular techniques to staying calm, how not to snap to attention at the dreamlets, and make it through SP without fully waking up?
Do I just need to be more tired for WILD to work? Maybe due to my anticipation of my first LD I’m highly alert during WILD attempts? Even at 0500. I will try setting an alarm for 3-4 hours instead of 5 hours and see how it goes. Any advice / comments welcome!
I would recommend changing the amount of time that you stay awake and the time that you wake up till you find the right mixture of sleep/awakeness to fall asleep while aware. Change what you pay attention to as well till you find it. I would recommend doing this very systematically in order to get the right times. One good thing is that you can try it multiple times a night. I wake up about every hour when well rested, but I do this for WILD attempts and resetting my intention through MILD. It is really hard to understand the transition state if you have not experienced waking up from a lucid dream before, because you are just doing the opposite of that. That is why people recommend doing MILD first.
This is a very insightful statement and one that makes perfect sense – and one that I have not noticed before in my readings. It’s a perfect explanation of why WILDs generally should follow some MILDing LD success first, which many people write about but few explain why.
In fact I had what I think was an “almost” WILD last night, without initially intending to. I was doing MILD at about 5 hours after bedtime. I was doing pretty well with staying focused on the repetitions, visualizing a dream scene I had just awakened from, but when I thought I had finally “set” my intention, I found I could not get back to sleep. All I wanted to do was to go to sleep! But as I was reasonably alert, I just watched the process happen. When all the telltale WILD-ing things started happening (dreamlets, scenes, little sounds out of nowhere, body sensations), I decided “well, why not?” So I did somethings like counting “One. I’m dreaming, Two, I’m dreaming,” and some other things I’d read about to keep the awareness awake (imagining body motions like sitting on swing / rocking) while WILDing but being very relaxed and not “trying to make a WILD happen.” Well the result was I eventually started seeing some pretty clear, consistent scenes of a place I was thinking of, different from daydreaming visualizations, more real, deeper, more like I was “there.” I saw some things in the scene that I hadn’t imagined (a woman lying on the grass in the distance), and thought I may be almost there. I felt “on the edge” and just a small push would put me in, but as you say, I couldn’t “make the transition” because I don’t have prior experience of just how it feels. I went back and forth between seeing nothing and seeing these scenes. But I think I got a taste of it last night. I do recall at one point “sinking deeper,” and noticing that I felt like I was breathing “dream air,” cooler than my WL room air, and breathing was easier and freer. All the time I had a notion of my physical body in bed, sometimes stronger, sometimes more distant. I sensed I was pretty uncomfortable but there was pretty strong inertia against moving. I did a few throat-close-nose-breath RCs thinking I may have transitioned to a scene-less LD, but was awake each time.
Anyway, since I didn’t enter into the night with the expectation of trying to WILD, I felt no frustration, just interest and wonder at the new experiences, learning a bit more about what the process feels like. I hope this is a sign of some progress!
I am just glad to help. 
I will have to make sure I say that to other people as well.
Sounds like you are on your way! Keep it up!
Take everything as a sign of progress! gotta stay excited about it. I would recommend starting a DJ and putting as much info in it about waking and sleeping times as well as how long your WBTBs are, what you visualized, what you feel, what you hear, see, smell. Write down stress levels (less stress is always better 
) and all the techs you used and what you learned from reading throughout the day. If you can find out what spurred the dream, then it is great to write down to learn what type of things spawn your dreams.