Thread: I want to Attempt a WILD (and Recover from a Dry Spell...)

I have tried inducing WILDs many, many times before in my 4 years of practicing lucid dreaming techniques, but I've never actually had one (closest I got was a few tingles... I always either fell asleep too fast or stayed away until I eventually gave up and went back to sleep normally). I didn't give up at that, though. I just decided that different methods work better for different people, and just because I struggle with WILDs doesn't mean I can't do anything else. That was about a year ago.
Since then, I have noticed that a great majority of my dreams are DILDs. The rest of them are from waking up in the middle of the night (sometimes naturally, most of the time I set alarms to help me remember more dreams) and going back into the "dream realm" just knowing that I'm dreaming 100%. Those are the best (but don't happen to me very often anymore).
Around November 2016, my ability to lucid dream with little effort (only writing in my dream journal, setting alarms 6 hours after I went to sleep and just turning them off and going back to sleep, and using mantras every night as I drifted off) started to fade away. At first, it was small. I thought it was just a bump in the road, but then I started only having lucid dreams once a week at the most. After about a month of that, I had none. Not much changed in my waking life, but something in my head changed my mindset a whole lot. I had several months of frustration because I couldn't lucid dream no matter what I did. I had one or two random ones during the several months of almost nothing, but I was barely aware. I could barely remember my regular dreams anymore.
Over the past few weeks, though, I've gotten a lot better. Lucid dreams are more regular, as I decided to start listening to hypnosis videos again. Jody Whiteley's 8-hour lucid dreaming hypnosis really helped me. LDs are starting to become more common again, but there's one big problem; any time I become lucid, I can't control anything. This used to happen to me before, but I eventually just got past it (after I had a non-lucid dream of being in a magic school, I knew I could do it, so it worked). Any time I do become lucid, my mind is all foggy. I plan on doing something, but I can't use "dream powers" for anything because they don't work.
Anyways, I've been thinking of giving WILDs another go. I'm thinking that if I can go in while I'm more awake, my mind will be more clear (or I can at least remember to use some simple techniques to make it that way). My main problems are that I don't know when to wake up, and I don't know how to stay awake long enough to induce a WILD. Like I said, my mind always drifts away, and if it doesn't, I focus to hard on what I'm doing/what I should do and keep myself up (but I have had some of those epic WBTB dreams that I mentioned from it... just rarely, though).
It's really frustrating, because I feel like I'm supposed to have figured out what works best for me by now, but I'm still stumbling through because most of the stuff that actually WORKS for me stops working after a few weeks/months.

*I should probably also note that I've tried using hypnosis audio on YouTube for WILDs to keep me focused enough to keep my mind awake, but the sound of words just distracts me and keeps me completely awake until I turn it off or ignore it*

Sorry for the really long post, I usually put off asking for help on forums until, well, I REALLY need help. Thanks for taking your time to read it, I really appreciate it. If you guys have any advice for what I should do to get past all of this and to further improve my lucid dreaming, I would love to hear it. Thanks again.

-Alli