Thread: How to VILD effectively

This is a thread about VILDing and WILDing. It’s a pretty long thread but it should be a worthwhile read. I teach a bit of well.. I’ll refer to it as “philosophy” for lack of a better word. If my technique actually works for you or not, the rest should help you WILD with better clarity, vividness etc.

I guess the best way to start out a thread like this is by stating the purpose. To try and teach you how to WILD in a short time frame and pretty much anywhere. But this is directed towards people who have had multiple lucids. People who know what a lucid is and how it feels. Keep that thought in mind. How a lucid feels.

Now, lets dive into the philosophical stuff. Consider this: What makes up your waking life? It’s one thing. (Well.. you COULD say five I guess... ) The five senses. Touch, sight, sound, smell, and taste. This is all you can use to prove that you are alive and this is all you can use to explore the world around you. Some of you may see where I am taking this and have noted that these are everything we (usually!) use to explore the world in our dream as well.

Simple enough?

Now, we can look at what role each plays in our dream. What we think we feel, see, hear, smell and taste are what make us believe we are in the world in our head. Now, the order those senses are listed is very important. This is the order of importance that the senses tend to play in out dreams, how much each contributes to the realism of the dream and how much you will need to concentrate on each to get it to seems real. Heres a breakdown:


Touch: The hardest part of building your dreams from scratch is to get all the feelings just right. This is the sense that we take for granted the most. Take a moment and study yourself. How much are you truly feeling right now?

You are probably feeling your ass on the chair, your feet against the floor and the mouse in your hand. If any of you limbs arn't resting on anything, you'd feel the slight bother of your muscles working against gravity.

Now this is just you sitting like a bum in front of your monitor. Theres tons of different feelings you register without even thinking every day. When people try to imagine themselves in a dream, they normally concentrate on sight they hold their hand in front of their face and go "ooo hand" but they're usually not really convinced it’s a hand. Its certainly won't seem like their hand. It might as well be a 2D image somebody drew on their minds eye.

Hold your hand in front of your face. feel the weight of your arm? Thats YOUR arm and you know it. Flex your fingers. Feel the different muscles working in your arm and hand? Now, try to capture the feeling in your head and let your arm relax. Now try to recreate the scenario in your head. If you can do it, you're already on your way to jumping into a dreaming state. If not, I'll have some exercises later on.

Sight: Often considered the most important because this is how we collect the most information and the majority of our dream world is represented. I don't think theres much to say about sight that’s not known anyways. Visual representations are commonplace in the mind.

Sound: Like touch, this is almost always ignored. Especially when we are being dazzled by what we are seeing. You wouldn't believe how much you miss sound-wise in movies. Often a movies will have "music" playing in the background the whole way though. You never really notice it though because its ends up being the columns under the bridge that is the visuals. Try watching a movie and pay special attention to sound and music. You may be quite surprised. (unless it’s a crappy movie). The same things that applied to touch apply to this.

Smell and taste: Now we get to the two lesser senses. Smell and taste. These do not contribute to most dreams. Especially taste. Smell is most often used to set the tone of the atmosphere. Like touch, this is also ignored by the conscious mind attempting to generate a scenario. Did you know that water has a smell? Quite a distinct one in fact. It is simply just lost in the setting along with touch and sound.

Taste is comprised of 70% smell. Go figure the importance of that XD

And now.. the part this has been leading up to.

The method

Now here’s a rough sketch of the thought process you could (should?) take to VILD. This is very similar to Gothlark’s V-WILD. In fact that’s what it pretty much is… but there was no formal write-up for that technique so I feel the need to make one that is to my satisfaction. Call it what you will. A VILD, V-WILD…. Doesn’t matter. Here it is.

Alright.. =) first things first. Close your eyes and decide on the dreamscape you want. If possible, you want somewhere that will let you do the next few steps easily. I will describe a sample dream as I go through the process.

I chose a nice low patch of grass beside a lake. The water seeps through the soil and makes it swampy where I am supposed to stand. We will build the world around us by using the 5 senses. First is sight because it always seems to be the thing people need to spark off the dream world. I etch the scenery in my mind. First, I do the sky. Be sure to include as much detail as possible. For example, the sky is a brilliant shade of light blue with semi-transparent fluffy clouds floating lazily through it. The sun shines down in helpful rays. It helps to think poetically like this when you are identifying the features of your scenery. It helps draw the connections that make up much of the foundation of the dream. For example, in your head you likely have the connection implanted between a “helpful” sun beating down on you and warmth on your face. Having a “helpful” sun over a simple sun (or no sun at all. It may not even be included in the dream!) will help later when you try to build up the rest of it.

The rest of the picture gets build up in this manner. There is a range of majestic mountains in the background. They frame the perfectly calm lake in which no ripples can be seen. The muddy ground protrudes ahead of me in a miniature peninsula towards the centre of the lake.

Once you have finished that, you have completed step 1. You now have generated a rough shell to spark your dream. (remember that there is almost no way that your conscious mind can match the ability of your “dream mind” when it comes to creating eye candy so don’t even try to get it perfect. If you’re really desperate, coloured blotches is okay at this point =O). The next step is slightly trickier. You must insert yourself into the dream and appease your “setting senses” touch, sound and smell.

These are the senses that you normally ignore but they make a very vital part of your world. You may have to rediscover these sense completely before you could even dream of using them. (haha.. sorry for the pun..)

First is touch. Build yourself from the bottom up. You start with feet. Your feet can feel the cool, moist grass and squishy ground. They feel the weight of your body resting on them and sink slightly into the ground. Next is your legs. They need to keep you us so you can feel the muscles working slightly, slightly tense but not too much. Then comes the upper body. Same deal as the legs and feet. Next is another unexpected feeling, Clothes. You feel them pressing against your skin 24/7. Are you naked in your dreams? If not add on the clothes. Are they tight anywhere? Do you feeling it pinching or squeezing?

Then, try and feel anything else you may be feeling. The feeling of wind on your face, is it humid, is it hot?

[edit] the rest of this tut was added on later. Just saying this so the rest of this thread makes sense…

Then comes sound. Everything has a sound. When I type this, my keyboard makes a sound. When you swallow, it makes a sound. Hell, when you breath, you make a sound. Any kind of action, any kind of motion will produce a sound. When a big breeze comes by, I will feel it on my face and I will hear the rustling of the trees and the grass.

Then is smell. This should mainly come from your memory. This sense is both easy yet very difficult to reproduce. You see, you only ever smell one scent. But that scent is a combination of the scents all around you. By far the easiest way to get the right scent is from memory.

I know what it smells like to be standing by a lake so I remember that scent and include it in the dream. If you don’t really know what you should be smelling, just use the smell of the most prominent feature.

By now, everything should be a mess. You will most likely have lost clarity in the sight and have forgotten most of the touch. Try to recapture as much as you can. You have just felt it/ seen it/ heard it/ smelt it. You should be able to pull all the parts that are still fresh in your memory and meld them into one big picture. As you pull it together, try not to concentrate on a single sense or you’ll likely lose track of the others again. Do it slowly. There is no reason to rush. In fact, from this point on, attempting to do things quickly is liable to rip the whole thing apart.

When you have pulled it all together to your satisfaction, try to hold it together. Now we must stabilize everything in order to move to an actual dreaming state. (I don’t consider this dreaming yet. Although, it tends to be hard to draw the line between a dream and a visualization.) For a short while, just bask in the senses. I squish my feet in the mud and feel is squishing under my toes. I see a deer flitting under the trees at the other side of the lake. I feel a nice breeze wash over my face and hear is rush by my ears.

After a short while, it should feel much easier to maintain. In fact, you may not even have to think about it at all to keep everything running! Now, DO NOT DO ANYTHING DARASTIC! You may feel exited, but do not rush. Keep yourself and your mind where you are standing. It is often important at this time to remind yourself that you are dreaming. This is all a dream. Otherwise you are likely to descend into a semi-lucid or non-lucid.

Do basic actions. I turn on the spot and begin walking away from the lake. Again, I stress this because it is important, take your time. I do not want to try to fly right now. I don’t want to attempt the task of the month. All I want to do is move further into my dreamscape. It is often good to encounter a DC now. Talk to them. See what is happening in this dream. Without direction, you are liable to never enter a true dreaming state.

I turn around and see a few tents set up. I walk towards them and my friend comes out of one of them.

“Hey dude, what’s up?”
“I was about to go do some fishing, wanna come?”
“Sure.”

As you progress through the dream, it will stabilize further and your dream mind will take control. If you have had a lucid before, you should be able to recognize when it has turned fully. But don’t check every other second. A watched pot never boils and a watched dream never turns. Although, try not to lose track of the fact that is a dream. Otherwise you lose full lucidity. Although, if you quite enjoy semi-lucidity, it may not be such a bad thing =P

At the end of our fishing trip, we returned to camp. But it had just been ransacked by a bunch of thugs. I knew I defiantly didn’t make that happen. Therefore my dream mind had taken over and this “reality” was no longer simply what my imagination could churn out. I was lucid and quite pissed at a gang of thugs =)

Tips and tidbits

When does this work best?

The best time to try this is actually RIGHT when you wake up. You can actually jump right back into a dream you just had by closing your eyes and re-imagining it. It goes 5x faster when you have just come out of a dream. Plus, if you wish, you can actually go back to a previous part of the dream that you remember and start fresh from there. This is especially effective if you just came out of a non-lucid. You can make something that you wished didn’t happen, not happen then continue on from there.

I can’t think of a scenario. What do I do?

You do something I like to refer to as “squirreling”. It’s originally a debating term but it fits here pretty nicely. Pretty much you take a part of one concept and use it to obtain an utterly different one. Simply pick an object out of your surroundings or some random surrounding. For example, I see a bow. I’ll use that. Then you generate another surrounding for that object. Boxes are common in factories so I’ll think of that. Voila, I have a dreamscape I can use =O

I can’t visualize anything. What do I do?

Work on it. I can’t really teach visualization. If I were to write a 200 page book and you read it cover to cover, you would likely still be unable to conjure images out of thin air. But there are was you can try to build it up.

By far the best way is to experience something then try to visualize it. For example, when you held your hand in front of your face then closed your eyes and tried to visualize it. If you were unable to do a complex shape like a hand, try something simpler like a square. Repeat as many times as you can. Look at a square, close your eyes and try to keep it implanted on your vision. Once you have been able to get the square successfully multiple times. Try getting it without first looking at it. The same goes with all the senses.

Please, comment comment comment. Even if its to say “Thanks that worked”, “I don’t think this would work” or “I hate you and I slept with your mom last night.” It helps me learn as well. I will try to answer all questions to the best of my ability in this thread as well.

Happy dreaming, hope this helped a bunch of people =)