Hello, I'm new to the forums. I wanted to share my recent experiences with learning to lucid dreaming.

I've been getting natural SP my whole life pretty consistently. I usually have 3-8 natural SP experiences a month. I initially discovered lucid dreaming while researching my SP but never tried it until I found out about WILD. I saw WILD as a perfect fit for me. In the recent months I've finally got over my life long SP anxiety. It was a big step for me to choose to stay in SP rather than just wake myself up or just intentionally avoid the SP since it got to a point where I could call my SP before it happened.

Recently I've been working on forcing my SP instead of just waiting for it to occur naturally for the sake of WILDing. I've been working on this for about 2months. After about 4 weeks of mediocre results, I've successfully forced SP every time I've tried this month. I don't keep track but 10 times is a good ballpark number. At the moment I'm concentrating on getting stable SP w/ strong closed eye HI. I've noticed this to be key for me to transitioning to LD. I've noticed some differences between my forced and natural SP. I thought I might share them.

When I force my SP I feel like I wake up into it. Usually I'll wake up, go do something, then wait til I feel like I could fall asleep again. When I go back to bed I just kinda zone-out. An unknown amount of time will pass and I'm suddenly entering sleep paralysis. I seem to get two types of SP when I force it. The first kind is more of a false SP where I get strong paralysis then I wake up from it without trying. I can open my eyes and move around(dream body) I've noticed closed eye HI is weak or non existent when I get this kind. The second type seems to be my winner for getting a WILD. When I wake up into these the paralysis of my body feels different. The paralysis itself seems much weaker. I don't open my eyes or move in this SP because the paralysis feels so weak. I think I could break it easily if I tried but it comes with decent closed eye HI. So I make it a point to keep still. the transition to LD has been pretty quick with these.

When I have natural SP I always fall asleep into it. 100% of this SP occurs in the middle of the night and it has a pattern. I'll be in the middle of the dream and for some unknown reason I wake up. It becomes predictable based on how I feel as soon as I wake up. If I feel incredibly sleepy I know within half a second of closing my eyes I'm going to be fully paralyzed. There seems to be a 1 minute period where I have to force myself to stay up to avoid it. Choosing to transition to a LD is extremely reliable when i get natural SP.

Natural SP is a whole other monster compared to my forced SP. Everything is more intense. It can be a bitch to wake up sometimes but closing my dream eyes and shaking my foot works. I can fuck around in this SP but if I want but to get a good transition going I have to close my eyes and watch the HI otherwise I'll wake up. The closed eye HI can be amazing to watch. It's almost like smoking DMT. I usually see crazy patterns. I recently saw a grainy outline of my face yelling(no sound) at me with hundreds of smaller faces patterned around it also yelling.

I still need to work on staying asleep once I've made the transition. I'm thinking learning the DILD technique would be beneficial since my dream recall is good. I think It would provide me with more opportunities for control than WILD does.

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Kind of unrelated but I had a cool natural SP experience recently. I was dreaming and in the dream I decided it was late and that I needed to go to bed. When I fell asleep in the dream I woke up. Now when I woke up I knew I was headed straight into SP. I decided I was down for it and went into the SP. When I entered SP I was back in the bed I fell asleep at in my dream. This was the first time I had ever experienced SP in a place other than the place I was sleeping. I would have been cool with it but there was a pitbull with no eyes at the foot of the bed walking towards my face so I elected to wake myself up.