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I've had a dry spell for years now. I used to have a lot of success with MILD. I used to have lucid dreams every night but after I went back to school and some medications I was on changed I didn't have as much luck. Every once in a while I'll have a LD or two but nothing as consistent as before. I came back to Dreamviews hoping to get back into LDing and I read about SSILD. I've read a lot about it but I was wondering how effective it was.
It has been described as highly effective by Cosmiciron. I have been using it for a while and it has worked wonders... for the first week doing it. This has occurred twice. I stopped working on Lucid Dreaming for some time after SSILD stopped working after a week and then began it again and yet again had the most vivid and interactive LD's of my life, but after that week about two months ago, I've had one very weak LD. I have had some health issues that derailed my sleep recently and I'm currently working on curing them. So that it part of it.
I'm playing around with it, trying to make sense of the initial power it seemed to have. I had experiences of only going through half of it, thinking that it failed, then had a strong LD later in the morning. I've been able to successfully WILD spontaneously after SSILD. I've been able to literally summon a dream around me. I had one where I was in a room, like a martial arts dojo, and I had the ability to leave the room whenever I wanted to have an LD from that starting off place. I've flown and interacted with dream characters.
I'm playing with waking up enough, or doing it sitting up in bed, because I go to sleep too easily. Sometimes I find it's a great induction for WILD. You'll have to play around with it like every other technique. Techniques are not really exact methods, they have to be experienced to be internalized. You have to learn by feel and trial and error.
Thanks for your response. I tried it last night and while I did not get a lucid dream, it did improve my dream recall which has been greatly lacking recently. So it shows some promise. I will continue experimenting with it.
Dream King, I practice SSILD nightly. It almost always creates false awakenings (at least for me), so if you can train yourself to recognize the FAs, you can greatly increase the effectiveness of SSILD. Good luck :)
EDIT: I will add that I've only been practicing for a week or so! But this technique works. I almost WILDed with it the other night :)
Wow, that is impressive. I will definitely keep at it and see how it goes. I was a little skeptical of it when I first heard of it because it sounds a lot like self-hypnosis and other pseudoscience like that but based on what I've read on DV there seems to be something to it.
I had my first induced lucid in forever last night! It was incredibly short but it was a lucid. I think I did SSILD last night, I can't really remember for sure but I think I did. Either way that was two days after starting it. I was pretty skeptical but at least for me it works.
do you think ssild is better than fild? both seem like miracle techniques that just seem to work from what i have read.
I had been having a dry spell for a couple months, in part due to a lot of traveling and not giving much attention into my dream practice, so about a week ago I remembered these forums and was browsing through them to try to stimulate my motivation. I stumbled across the main SSILD thread and decided to try it out.
So far I've been very impressed! I've been having much better results, both in terms of the success rate and the quality of the dreams themselves, than any other technique I've tried since I started practicing lucidity four years ago. Again, I've only been experimenting with this for a week, but so far three out of four attempts with SSILD have been successful, and the one that failed was a case where I think I tried a little too hard and was unable to go back to sleep. And this morning's attempt was so casual that I wasn't even sure I was going to call it an "attempt" at all... my WBTB lasted only a minute or two, I felt hot and uncomfortable, and after getting back in bed I ran through the cycles very rapidly only about three times... but I still got lucid, so I guess it counts! The first dream was a WILD-variant, the second a straightforward WILD, and this morning's was an FA that I fortunately recognized as such, so it turned into a DILD.
It's still too soon to speculate about the longterm success rate, and I'm sure my current level of motivation is a huge contributing factor, but the fact that even the vividness and overall quality of the dreams has been so high suggests that SSILD is helping. So give it a try! And if it doesn't work at first, play around with it a bit, like adjusting the length of the cycles or the way you focus your attention, or the level of intensity. For instance, when I do sight, it's not like I'm "looking" for something or trying to "see" anything, I'm just engaging the sense in a very neutral way... it feels more like turning on the TV but not really watching it, and then turning it off again as I move on to the next sense. When I do sound, I'm careful not to listen to anything for too long lest it wake me up too much, so I just scan around the environment and see what sounds I can pick up, and then ignore them again and move on to touch, which is basically a quick body scan.
I discovered that if I focus too much attention on any of the senses then it wakes me back up again, so that would have to be my best guess why SSILD works: by very lightly stimulating waking awareness during the process of falling asleep, you're more likely to maintain a measure of it into the dream state.
SSILD seems to work both as a primer and as a kind of variant on WILD/WBTB. It has led me to many false awakenings and some powerful WILD's, not to mention having had 7+ powerful LD's in a week. But like every other technique, its results just dried up. Maybe because I fall asleep too easily.
yeah watch out for FA's. First time it happened to me was such a trip. Remembered to plug my nose and try to breath upon waking up, only half focused, and then I actually drew air in through closed nostrils... :O
I was able to make SSILD a WILD technique last night, which led to a tiny lucid moment and a non lucid WILD moment.
After 4.75 hours sleep, I found a supine position and began the rapid cycles. Then I moved to the slow cycles, just until I began falling asleep. Then I moved to a lateral position, my normal sleeping position and began the rapid cycles again until I was asleep.
This led right into the dream state. I remember because I woke up a little afterwards. Later on I realized I was dreaming. So, it was a success. I think it is a powerful technique this way because it has a priming effect: it tends to cause me to have LD's later in the morning. So to be able to WILD with SSILD without having to change techniques makes it much easier to do when I'm drifting off and don't have much mental focus left to WILD in the traditional sense.