Thread: WILD (and other lucidity) insomnia: too much focus on staying conscious?

Heya all,

I had something I wanted to run by you all, to hear your thoughts and opinions.

A little while ago I was having a high lucidity run. This motivated me to work more and more on consciousness during dreams and especially on keeping conscious during the sleep transition (WILD). Then suddenly, a dry spell hit me. I had three nights where I had huge difficulty falling asleep, both at the onset and after each nightly awakening. This caused a dramatic decrease in my dream recall and lucidity as my body got tired out.

I took a day off from thinking about dreams and got a good night's rest with some nice dreams as my recall stabilized again. That was last night.

This morning, as I woke up, I couldn't help think back on the previous nights. I call them a dry-spell, coupled with insomnia, but suddenly I had this feeling that during these nights, I was actually 'far more conscious' then I was last night. The only problem was I wasn't asleep or dreaming. I had been focusing on the consciousness part of the equation so much, that my mind had given me exactly what I asked for, in the most economic and elegant way possible: by keeping me awake.

Looking back, I am certain I can identify other dry-spells in the same way. I believe from reading these forums that I'm not alone in that.

So maybe these dry-spells aren't dry-spells at all. They're actually successes. I get what I'm asking for, I'm just asking for the wrong thing. I should be focusing on 'falling asleep and dreaming (with consciousness)', but instead I get tunnel vision on the 'consciousness' part. And being awake is still the best way to keep a high consciousness for an extended duration.

The old folk wisdom: 'be careful what you wish for' comes to mind, as I write this.

What do you think?

-Redrivertears-