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.
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