I’ve been experimenting with WILDs for awhile now. Attempting to enter a dream when first going to bed. I understand that the longest REM cycle is 5-7 hours into your sleep, but I’ve been wondering if it’s possible to retain conciousness throughout an entire nights sleep.
I’ve managed to make it just past 2 hours before having to turn over and passing out, I was fully concious for the entire time and felt well rested in the morning.
I experienced what can only be described as a vivid lucid day dream about 1.5 hours into the night, that lasted a few minutes. The rest of the time was just laying there numb and really relaxed.
Not sure what I should be looking for when it comes to actually entering the dream. I’ve only recently made it this long. Any advice?
From what i have understood you’re looking for your mind to be awake during the entire night ? Well, that would mean you would never loose conciousnees, you will always be lucid.
I have never heard of this before, and i do not know if it would be possible, but…our mind always needs to take a rest, extensive use of our mind for anything will lead to stress, i think that trasnforming your whole night into a WILD would be very stressfull and you will eventually pass out.
In my oppinion, i do not think such a thing is possible, mainly because of the stress that it induces on to it’s user, still, there might be people that think differrent of me and believe this is possible.
I’m not sure if it’s possible to remain conscious throughout an entire night’s sleep, but my guess is no - not practically, at least. If it were possible, it would take some intense training and inhuman focus to accomplish.
I’m not sure if you’ve already looked at them, but the WILD FAQ and WILD tutorial posted here have some good advice on what to look for when entering a dream and what to do if you’re stuck at a certain phase of WILD:
In short, what Spider said in the FAQ is to wait for a full-fledged hypnagogic hallucination (HH) - as opposed to just a hypnagogic image (HI) - before attempting to “step into” a dream.
In the tutorial, Mew151 has some example images that demonstrate the difference between partial HH and complete dream scenes, the latter being what you should be looking to enter.
Thanks for those guides. I’ll be sure to read them, should be very helpful.
As for my intentions. Yes I want to achieve a solid 9 hours of conscious sleep. I managed 5 hours tonight before my stomach growling prevented me from continuing. I feel pretty exhausted, but it was also a shortest night “sleep” I’ve had for a long time.
It’s definitely possible, granted I didn’t achieve true REM sleep just more advanced day dream states. Maybe if I manage true REM it will cause me to black out afterwards. I have no idea what detrimental effects it may have during the day. More experimenting will be required.
It was basically like a prolonged mediation. This may just be me forcing myself to hold still and stay awake for hours on end, and amount to absolutely no rest. It may be conscious sleep amounting to a standard amount of rest. Or possibly something in between.
My recall was pretty shady, but I’m able to piece together pretty much the entire night.
I read about being lucid in nrem phases in this book “Dreaming Yourself Awake” written by Alan Wallace. Maybe you know it?
It is mostly about dream yoga. I am no buddhist, so part of the book did not appeal to me. But I thought the extensive description on how to meditate was very helpful to me. And also it made it very clear to me how meditation can influence the quality of your dreams.
Very interesting is the part about different layers of consciousness and how to enter them while sleeping. For example, by closing your eyes during lucid dreaming, you enter a state of lucid non-rem awareness called alaya vijnana.
I myself have just minimal experience in lucid dreaming. So maybe in a few years this kind of advanced techniques will be of use to me.
I hope this post is of any use to you.
You know something about the cycles but not enough. I’m not judging here, just trying to point out very important, the most important thing. Learn everything you can about sleep cycles. Use wikipedia.
Long story short you can’t physically dream for 9 hours straight because our brain/body goes through 4 main stages of sleep which one of them is REM sleep in which we dream. It is known that we do dream in NREM cycles too but that is irrelevant because most of the dreams that we do remember are REM dreams.
So once when we cycle through those 4 stages of sleep body goes again through 4 stages of sleep. Of course NREM stages become shorter because you don’t need relaxing and falling asleep any more and REM becomes longer but that means that you dream or to better say you enter REM sleep every 90 - 120 minutes which is also the length of all 4 stages combined together. Those 90 - 120 minutes vary from dreamer to dreamer, they are just the average number.
So after every sleep stage is complete “micro awakenings” occur. So after NREM 1 stage awakening occur and after second and third NREM stage as the REM stage too. So physically you are waking up every now and then so you can’t be asleep for 9 hours and dream for that time. Those micro awakenings occur usually to move and change position and so on. Sometimes when somebody comes to our room we do respond but we don’t remember doing anything when the person tells us that we talked to them, that is usually also happening in micro awakenings or when we are very close to the end of sleep stage in which we are at the moment because the sleep becomes lighter as the stage/cycle is coming to its end.
If you have any questions regarding WILD I will be more then happy to answer!
I’m not pushing myself too hard. Last time I was pretty tired throughout the day so I got something like 10.5 hours of normal sleep the next time to recharge. I haven’t gone that far again since, need to learn more first.
dB_FTS, thanks for the information. You misunderstood my post, I have no intention of attempting to fill a 9 hour sleep full of REM. I just want to learn how to become lucid during NREM cycles as well as REM cycles.
