Thread: Testing SSILD for a month

I'm in. Let the record state that I will be doing vipassana meditation for 40 minutes before bed, will wake up 4-5 hours after going to bed, do SSILD, go back to sleep, wake up 1.5 later and do it again. My sleep schedule is very stable so no issues with rem rebound for me.

I'm thinking that it will get easier once we build the habit of getting up in the night to do it. I expect the first week to be the hardest.

Also we have to keep a very sharp eye out for false awakenings. I'm going to be using the nose pinch technique every time I wake up.

I might as well give SSILD a serious try too. Right now a WILD-like technique is the main thing missing from my regimen, so this should be good.

I'm not gonna count last night for me, my sleep schedule was kinda screwy. I took a 2 hour nap in the early evening, then stayed up for like 6 hours til 2 am and then slept for 6 hours. On one awakening I did want to DJ but couldn't remember anything. Oh well. Night 1 is tonight.

I'll happily join in, I started my own trial period for the SSILD technique 3 nights ago (7th of October, 2014), it'll be my 4th night tonight.

The first night seemed to consist of normal dreams.
The second night I recalled 3 dreams, the last one that happened had a lot of stuff about lucid dreaming but I didn't become lucid.
The third night I had a bunch of dream fragments, one of which was a short-lived semi-lucid experience. After that, I had a normal dream.
Last night was the most interesting, I knew I was in a dream but got snapped awake before I managed a RC for some reason - (my most recent DJ #24 accounts a lot of this).

And like tofur said, keep an eye out for FA, I had to check multiple times last night.
Good luck everyone

I will sure be following this thread

I should probably note that while doing the repetitions, I had a few moments where I felt super aware. And on about 3/4 of the nights I've done now, I would wake up and feel a bit wired and unable to fall back to sleep - This is quite common for me because of my mild insomnia, but after reading an old thread, I think I might have had a few false awakenings. I did do some RC when waking up, but they all seemed to fail. Also I recall some good feelings as I was doing the cycles, like feeling 'light', as if I could float off (these feelings are things I would normally never experience). I also experienced a few hypnic jerks, the most intense was last night (my 4th time doing SSILD) where my neck spasmed because I thought a duck had nipped it...

Day 4: Still no luck, although I had a really long dream that was vivid and had a coherent storyline until the duck nipped me >_<. The problem with that dream was that I felt like I was in my bed the whole time (like I hadn't quite drifted off to sleep yet), I felt like I was only imagining the dream, and when I 'woke up', I thought I had just been sitting there thinking about a random story arc - I clicked to it a few minutes later that it wasn't, and wrote it down in my DJ. Also I feel like I've had a deteriorating sleep cycle from trying to do this technique, I had terrible dream recall for all my other dreams, they would vanish the second I woke up. This is definitely more likely to be caused by my mild insomnia, it makes doing any technique (except DILD, to my knowledge) quite difficult and tiring.

Attempts: 3
Semi-lucids: 1
Lucids: 0
FA: 0

Day 1

Well I got lucky and my first night was a success. I had a cool lucid dream where I basically just sprinted all over the place and flew down some escalators (no time to wait obviously). Next time I'm going to take it slower and maybe talk to some dream characters.

As for the technique - it took me a while to fall asleep after finishing the cycles and my sleep was not very restful at all. But I do think the technique helped, even though I had the lucid dream later in the night. I think I'll stick with SSILD even if my sleep suffers a bit.

Success rate: 1/1

Night 1:

Had steadily improving dream recall throughout the night. No FAs or lucids, but just recall and DJ is great compared to what I had been doing.

Attempts: 1
HIs: 0
FAs: 0
Near-lucids: 0
Lucids: 0

Day 2

I didn't really do the technique right. I was visiting home and our cat was on my bed so I didn't want to get up for the 5 minutes. I still tried doing the cycles, but could hardly get through 2 before drifting off. The night was pretty typical in terms of dream awareness.

Success rate: 1/2

Not much success for me last night, forgot 95% of my dreams and didn't do the cycles properly. This is more because I felt overtired from doing the technique for the previous 4 nights in a row. Will be able to do it tonight definitely since I feel so much more rested now

Attempts : 4/5
Semi-lucids: 1/5
Lucids: 0
FA: 0

Forgive my ignorance, but what does the acronym SSILD stand for??? People take it for granted that everyone is familiar with these terms. I wish that the first time you state the acronym in a post, the author would define terms. I read this thread hoping for some indication, but no joy.

DH

Heh yeah that happens sometimes. Anyways it's Senses Initiated Lucid Dream. You can read about it here.

CosmicIron has a huge and active SSILD thread right here, on Dreamviews http://www.dreamviews.com/induction-...eam-ssild.html

Night 2:

Not counting this as an attempt. I didn't do any DJ for some reason. I think I need to try harder to remember a dream after waking.

However after looking at my DJ I notice that last night I had a dream where I was working but people kept talking to me and keeping me from my work. I thought to myself that this never happens. So I noticed something was strange while in the dream, so that counts for something for me (see below).

Here is how I define terms used in my official counter:
-Attempts: Nights I awoke at least twice and did both my dream journal and the cycles during the awakening.
-HIs: Hypnagogic imagery (visual, hearing, or otherwise) that occurs during the cycles.
-FAs: False awakenings, whether lucid or not.
-Heightened awareness: Instances where yet in the dream I notice the strangeness of something, consider that I may be dreaming, or think about lucid dreaming without actually becoming lucid.
-LDs: Lucid dreams. I only count multiple LDs in a night if I have a true awakening between them.

Attempts: 1
HIs: 0
Heightened awareness: 1
FAs: 0
LDs: 0

I'm gonna join this thread to I tried ssild last night and these are my results (first time trying btw)

FA:1
LD:0
Attempts:1

Ahhhhhhh!!!! Never would have guessed that in a million years, and that acronym was not in the Wiki. Gonna read up on that straight away!

Thanks!

DH

Day 3

Something interesting I've noticed is that every night since I started SSILD I've woken up naturally about 10-30 minutes before my alarm.

No lucid dreams last night. Some normal dreams with pretty good recall though. Also I finally feel like I got a good night's rest.

Out of curiosity, has anyone here tried pairing SSILD with FILD? SSILD doesn't really bring me into a lucid dream, I just do the cycles and fall asleep, hoping that I might have a lucid some time later. But FILD might be a good way to bring me straight into a lucid dream once I'm done with the cycles. Any thoughts?

Success rate: 1/3

Did my first night last night, no lucid but dream vividness was good. I actually woke up a couple hours after doing the cycles and didn't remember to reality check, I think I did a few cycles then went back to bed.

Also realized that my previous attempts at ssild weren't being done right. I was doing cycles and trying to fall asleep while doing them, so I ended up not staying out of bed long enough to wake up enough, I was trying to cut it too close. When I'm too asleep I lose track of how many cycles I've done, get too distracted during the cycles, just doesn't work. Last night I did 4 or 5 proper cycles then rolled over and forgot about ssild totally and went to sleep. Might not sound like much but hey...

Good news - I had a lucid dream! My 2nd proper LD ever

I recalled 4 dreams last night, waking first at 12:35, then 2:55, then I had a 3 hour waking period where I just couldn't fall back to sleep (did a reality check and it wasn't a FA). After that I fell asleep sometime and probably woke up between 6-6:30, had a dream and tried to cement it to my memory (I try to do this every time I wake) and while doing it I fell asleep again. I woke up again at 7:20, from a lucid dream this time.

I did the cycles before I went to bed and each time I woke up, doing 3-5 cycles each time. I heard 2 intensely loud hypnogogic sounds (is that what they're called?) as I was in that waking period (The birds start chirping around 5am here, one of the hypnogogic sounds was an amplified bird chirp, it sounded like a sonic boom >_<).

I'd call that a success

Attempts: 4/6
Semi-lucids: 1/6
Lucids: 1/6
FA: 0

Has anyone tried fild or deild with this. Deild would have to come after a sucessful ssild, but fild might help out. Anyone willing to try?

Day 2

Had a half sucess. I did have a LD, but it was only for a couple of seconds. I realized it was a dream, then went to change the surrounding by closing my eyes to imagine one, but I woke up (wasn't a FA). So the rest of the dream was non lucid. Definitely had a heightened awareness.

Attempts: 2
FA: 1
LD: 1

Day 4

I tried doing FILD after SSILD. I kept on feeling like I was going into a dream, but I always snapped back to reality. Eventually I just went back to bed and had another normal night.

Success rate: 1/4

I have been using ssild for over a month now and I think it is true that it seems to drop off after a few weeks, but it's not because of the technique, it's because you are starting to do it differently.

Heres what I have found, ssild works when you are well rested, enough to actually pay attention to the technique, especially vision, which is where you will find yourself dosing off (also touch step may dose you off.) you will know when you have done it well because you will be sleepy, yet aware. Now, depending on how well you do the technique, some different things may happen. If you gave it "meh" effort, you may be lucky enough to find yourself in a dild, or, if you did it really well, it will almost be a wild, with only a small lapse in conciousness (about as short as the time it takes you to realize youve dosed off during the technique.) Either way, you may find that your dream starts to fade soon when you try to do something, but 100% of the time the first "awakening" a false awakening. Last night, I did it pretty well, and I quite litteraly fell out of my bed in my dream. I was disoriented and couldn't stand for a while, (for some reason moving around my dream house feels sluggish) So i thumbled my way out the window, once I was outside I felt I could move more freely. anyways what ended up happening was that as I was starting to try to stabilize, the dream completely failed on me and I woke up in an FA outside my house. I know now that this was my subconcious' attempt at restabilizing because I could see, hear, and move perfectly fine. Anyways, I thought I had sleepwalked my way outside, flipped out ran inside, and found that I had four dogs instead of three (probably my sub telling me I was still dreaming) but i ignored that.

Anyways, extreemly off topic now, heres what usually happens for me.

SSild to dild... leads to feeling yourself in bed... use deild
ssild to wildish dream... first awakening is always fake (convince yourself now, dont think just know.)

also if you are too tired, remember, fild is ssild's best buddy.