Thread: WBTB Health

Using WBTB can be accomplished by waking up naturally, or by using an alarm. It helps immensely if you happen to already wake up several times during the night, or you can use mantras to get yourself to wake up in the middle of the night. Otherwise, you may be stuck using any alarm.

Regarding your health... believe it or not, sleeping all the way through the night is a relatively recent phenomenon. Humans in the not so distant past naturally would sleep for a few hours, wake up for an hour a two and either catch up on some reading (if there was literature during the time period we're talking about; this was the natural way of sleeping and was what we did for hundreds of years before the industrial revolution), or do a little bit of work. After that, they would go back to sleep for a few more hours, then get up and get to work. As I mentioned already, this was how we naturally slept for hundreds/thousands of years. It wasn't until recently where our lives have become so work-centric (not that people didn't work hard and all day long before, but there weren't jobs like we have today, where we are on very tight schedules) that we have started the practice of sleeping all through the night.

Unless you are flat out unable to get back to sleep, or it takes you 3 or 4 hours to get back to sleep and you have to get up for work early (effectively only giving you like 3 or 4 hours of sleep at night before going to work), then WBTB will not prevent you from getting your full rest or otherwise be unhealthy.

I, for one, have been regularly doing WBTB's for close to 40 years now, Germancho, and I'm fine.

With the exceptions Snoop notes above aside, I've never heard of WBTB's being bad for you, period. Getting up after several hours' sleep and going back to sleep a short time later is completely harmless... it might even be good for you!

Also, I always recommend doing WBTB's without alarms, because alarms tend to wake you up too much, which can hurt your lucid mindset, thus diminishing your chances of a successful WILD (they don't call them "alarms" for nothing, you know).

Sageous runs a class on WILDs, which usually require WBTB most of the time; if it's related to WILD, and he says it, it's probably true. I agree about the alarms, it definitely helps if you naturally wake up or can make yourself wake up in the middle of the night. I typically wake up multiple times a night anyway, but it helps that I can get myself to wake up by using a few mantras I repeat for maybe 5 minutes before going to bed if I want to wake up. I used to use some variation of "I will wake up at 3:45 am", because when I got early success with WILDs, I had always woken up and gone back to sleep between 3:30 and 4:00 am. Using usually 2 different mantras, one just a slight rewording of the first mantra, divided over the 5 or so minutes I repeat them in my head, I usually find myself waking up anywhere between 3:25 and 3:55 am. The accuracy and the success rate is what makes me so sure that it was actually working. So, Germancho, try using a mantra as you are going to be to wake yourself up at night, it might just work for you. Just to note something, I didn't get a very high success rate waking myself up at first. It was probably somewhere around 50-60%. After doing it for a couple of weeks, the success rate became more like 80%, where I was waking up in the right window of time nearly every night I used the mantras.

Hi Germancho I try to encorperate regular wbtb 's now I know they are great for lucidity. Sometimes I just don't manage coz I have been working hard or have an early morning and I accept that but ...I am always ready to be ready for a wbtb. The conditions for me are when I am well rested and don't have an early morning with deadlines etc. Anyway I'm always on the ready coz the chance of lucid dreams after wbtb for me goes up tremendously if I am up for long enough ( depends on my final wake up time ) ..anything from 15 to 40mins.

It will take a while to find what you can do comfortably like you say but it's worth the interest

oh yes I forgot to mention that I have had no adverse effects form wbtb'ing

I see, i rarely sleep all the night without waking up, so i can clearly use this to my advantage, i proposed that second question because i didn't know if waking up naturally in the night was going to leave me close to a REM cycle, or if it was really effective, especially because everywhere you read (except here) says it needs an alarm, which is famous for being detrimental to health.
I would definitely love to read more about this, the fact that i forgot about biphasic sleep for example is proof that i should re-read about this topic.
I appreciate your responses! Any more light into this subject would really be of help!

^^ Here is another quick thought, Germancho: "Catching REM" is way overrated.

If you are doing your WILD after 5 or 6 hours' sleep, with a WBTB of at least 10 or 15 minutes (but less than 90), and that WBTB is done properly, you will most likely find yourself in a REM period after you go back to sleep. And throughout the process there is no reason whatever to even think about REM, much less do something mechanical to try to catch it.

Here's another thing to think about: Rapid Eye Movement is a sign that you are dreaming, and not the thing that makes you dream. If you are experiencing REM, then you are dreaming. And, given that your brain activity throughout the last hours of your sleep cycle is mostly one that is conducive to dreams, there is a lot of flexibility in when you dream. This means that there is no reason you cannot get your dream started quickly, even if your "scheduled" REM period is still a few minutes away. It is this flexibility that enables DEILD dream-chaining to be possible, BTW; and it would not be possible if our LD'ing were dependent on catching pre-programmed REM periods.

I think the world of WILD would be a much tidier place if we stopped adding extra things to the process -- especially things like "catching REM," where you are not only wasting mental energy better spent gathering self-awareness, but where you are using intrusive, potentially mindset-shattering alarms to help with that catching.

Originally Posted by Sageous

I, for one, have been regularly doing WBTB's for close to 40 years now, Germancho, and I'm fine.

With the exceptions Snoop notes above aside, I've never heard of WBTB's being bad for you, period. Getting up after several hours' sleep and going back to sleep a short time later is completely harmless... it might even be good for you!

Also, I always recommend doing WBTB's without alarms, because alarms tend to wake you up too much, which can hurt your lucid mindset, thus diminishing your chances of a successful WILD (they don't call them "alarms" for nothing, you know).

While I have no problem waking naturally, I do use alarms late in the sleep cycle often. Nowadays, you can select from dozens of sounds to wake you gently. You can even have your phone play music that you pick which slowly gets louder. These modern alarms are not very jarring and have opened up a new aspect of training for me. Consider looking in to this for another option. You probably know this already, but I thought I would mention it.

^^ Fair enough, and understood; alarms can have their uses. However:

Though there are certainly alarms that can wake you gently (I have a few myself), my point was that I do not believe there is any need at all to use an alarm to successfully WILD, because attempting to time your awakening to "catch REM" is not necessary. It's better, I think, to wake up naturally, do your WBTB, and settle back into sleep and your WILD in as simple and clean a manner as possible.

My favorite is the standard of drinking some fluids before bed. At some point your bladder will wake you.