This morning I had a rather scary dream which I don’t have very often, but this time I actually woke up when I realised I was having the nightmare. As soon as I awoke, my first thoughts were to try and re-enter the nightmare using a WILD/WBTB combo and thus changing it into a cool lucid dream, but I failed
As soon as I had woken up I didn’t even open my eyes because I’d read that it’s easier to re-enter the dream. I recalled the last few minutes of what I was dreaming beforehand in my head and set my intention to re-enter that same dream. I laid there for a good 10 mins trying to WILD, I even had the most relaxed body I’ve ever had when trying to WILD but ended up passing out because I wasn’t getting anywhere.
What am I doing wrong?? Should I have continued trying longer? Was laying on my side a bad thing?
According to my experience, when you use the dream reentry technique, it goes very fast. When you wake up, you must not do the faintest movement and must not open your eyes. You just wait passively, you don’t have to remember your last dream. If after about 30 seconds, you’ve not reentered a dream, you can give up, it won’t work this time.
Yes, the dream reentry technique should work very fast. If it doesn’t work, you’re probably too awake already and/or you’re too much focused on your waking body or waking perceptions. If you wake up, don’t move a muscle, stay calm, briefly repeat the previous dream mentally and say to yourself that you want to reenter it. Then let yourself sink into your bed with every deep exhale of your breath. Don’t think about the bed, don’t think about your body, but gently focus on the sinking sensation and revisualize yourself back in that nightmare, in the last scene you saw right before waking up. It’s important not to overdo it, and certainly not to force it. Let yourself be passively drawn back into the dream by lowering outward awareness of your waking body and the bed it’s lying on, and simultaneously by redeepening inward awareness of the dream body, the action/situation it was in and all the specific feelings accompanying that situation. It can take some practice, but if you were very relaxed and if awareness never really separated from the dream, then it should work fluidly. At least, in my experience
empty_spaces !
I agree, that’s exactly how it works for me–I can enter and recall at most ten dreams using this method.