I am also still reeling with delight and very pleased to have helped!

In time, you will be able to refine your practice. You will also start to notice what tends to work for you in terms of techniques involving hypnagogia and hypnopompia.

Progressing as a lucid dreamer will lead to the discovery that induction methods interrelate in the sense that the intention that comes with a type of attempt may lead to the side effect of entering the lucid dream state a different way, i.e., trying for a WILD may lead to falling asleep but one may suddenly 'wake up' in a dream—as is the case of DILDs.

And sleep itself always provides the opportunity to take advantage of awakenings, when the door to lucid dreamland is still open, figuratively speaking. As Morpheus said in The Matrix, 'I can only show you the door, Neo. You're the one who has to walk through it.' Which is what DEILD is in the context of lucid dreaming. Michael Raduga managed to publish a scientific paper about research on DEILD, which is referred to as the 'indirect method'. Check out the link below and scroll down to access the paper (you will find a useful diagram illustrating an algorithm of action upon awakening to access the LD state):

https://phasetoday.com/indirect-meth...tific-journal/

For anybody who has not been following this thread, we have practically covered the three main methods of lucid dream induction, which involves entering the phase state (wakefulness+dreaming Gamma brainwave hybrid) BEFORE, DURING or AFTER sleep:


We have established that the best time to do it is after optimally getting normal sleep for 4 - 6 hours at night in order to get NREM and delta stages out of the way for quicker and easier REM access in the morning, getting up for a few minutes to use the loo or maybe think about lucid dreaming while awake, and then returning to bed with the intention to have a lucid dream—known as 'WBTB' which is essentially deferring the method of induction. So we have the following options upon returning to bed ...

WILD: wake-initiated lucid dream; entered directly from the waking state. Focusing the mind on something in a relaxed state until weird images, sounds and sensations take place (hypnagogic hallucinations). Amplify the hallucination and then separate from the perceived sleeping body (OBE-style) to find bedroom replica or jump into a forming dream scene. So many ways or percept-based techniques that can be employed in order to access the LD state. Hypnagogia techniques here should not be performed for longer than 20 minutes to avoid frustration if it doesn't work—simply fall asleep with intention to become lucid or catch the next awakening. Also known as the 'direct' method.

DILD: dream-initiated lucid dream; which can occur as a side effect from trying the other methods but can increase by recording normal dreams to detect dream signs or clues to become lucid. It helps to ask during the day if you are dreaming, several times, and looking at your hands to see if they look normal and performing other reality checks to effectively answer the question even if the waking state seems obvious. This behaviour will carry on into your dreams and you'll be shocked by noticing that maybe you have more fingers than normal. Aiming to become lucid whilst dreaming is also known as the 'dream consciousness' method.

DEILD: dream-exit initiated lucid dream, which takes advantage of grabbing the borderland state of lucid dreaming upon awakening. The first sensations of lying in bed upon awakening are not real, they are phantom. Separate from the bed/perceived sleeping position (OBE-style)—you can even just get up to stand lucid in the dream world. It can happen straight away upon awakening! If there is real movement, just relax and wait for hallucinations to occur or even visualise them until they become real—like an imagined voice, sound, image or phantom sensation like vibrations. Known as 'cycling through techniques' until a particular hallucination sticks and then it can be amplified with your mind. This cycling through no more than 3 techniques (e.g. observing images/listening in/phantom wriggling) is done quicker than in the direct method scenario above because here only 3-5 seconds are spent on each as opposed to minutes. It won't take long for hypnopompia to happen as you've just woken up. This is also known as the 'indirect' method.


I'm glad you are grasping it, Tiktaalik. I think sometimes people make it harder than what it actually is and then, with practice, surprise themselves with how simple induction can be. That was certainly me when I seriously began my practice almost 13 years ago. Prior to that, it was pretty much stumbling upon lucid dreams and out-of-body experiences once in a blue moon and in no way as regular as those experiences were during my infancy, which used to terrify me.

When I was a kid, I'd feel awake in ultra-realistic dream replicas of my childhood home which would often start as false awakenings and I'd suddenly realise something was off, sometimes trying to reason to myself that 'mum must have made changes while I was asleep'. Subsequently, nefarious albino men—with no clothes and faces like the Royals from typical playing cards—would come through walls and chase me with leering expressions and awful smirks.

When they managed to grab me, I felt tickled and violated. I told my mother that 'white men came for me in dreams that felt real', but she didn't know what to make of it. I began to think that those characters were ghosts that lived in dreams and were having fun at my expense by haunting me. Once, they appeared in a dream that contained my sister. Immediately I felt awake with mortal fear and they pulled me into the bathroom. As I tried to scream to alert my dream sister—who had her back to me—one of the albino men pressed on my bellybutton and my voice turned into a barely audible high-pitched sound. Amidst the terror, something in me wished to wake up and I did.

These lucid nightmares involving pale men often emerging from walls repeated themselves throughout much of my childhood and petered out to never return once I approached my teens. Often, fear appeared to prolong those experiences. That's one thing that is not often talked about: fear can prolong your stay in the dream world, but it is not desirable; sometimes only a desperate wish to wake up can break the effect of such powerful emotion anchoring you to a nightmare.

Anyway, I don't want to go off on a tangent here, so, to address some of the points you raised, I'll start by saying that if you feel too awake, get into a comfortable, sleeping position to counterbalance your current state—and vice versa: if you're feeling sleepy, and you reckon you might fall asleep prematurely, adopt a physical position which is less comforting but which you can relax into. If you have to move in order to find the right position, don't worry—go ahead and move; contrary to popular belief, changing your body position will not ruin your chances of entering a lucid dream, in fact, it will improve them!

And yes, sometimes setting an intention and then not even thinking about it produces surprising results. Whatever the weather, remember to not obsess or stress. Everything in life should be done with harmony. Even the process of making an attempt can be viewed like a fun game where the reward is a massive insentive. Relax into the practice.

Sometimes trying and accepting failure, with grace, to subsequently take a break from making attempts, can yield unexpected results—almost like your subconscious mind decides to email you with a lucid dream attachment: 'Hi! You've recently requested a lucid dream! I know it's been delayed but I've been a little preoccupied. Well, here it is ...' Intention is indeed a powerful thing.

I felt the same the first time I experienced vibrations. It is one of those blatant sensations that prominently let's you know you are entering an altered state of mind. It's hard not to go, 'Shit! This is it!' And yes, the lucid experience of being in a realistic dream environment is undeniably in your face. It has, in many respects, a lot more in common with being awake in the real world than ordinary dreaming.

I once played with oddly shaped clock attached to a wall in a home replica. This clock had a melting shape—like something out of a surrealist painting by Salvador Dalí—but when I touched it, the object felt absolutely solid and even made noise when I tapped it against the wall, albeit the sound gave me the impression that it was produced 'underwater'. That had such an impact, it always stayed with me. And so did my melting reflection in the mirror. It inspired me to do a painting in order to convey what was observed. It goes without saying that this phenomenon inspires much of my art.

Lucid dreaming feels out-of-this-world even when familiar environments, such as inaccurate home replicas, are experienced. People don't really get how much of an impression it can make until they experience it for themselves. Imagine Morpheus had merely described to Neo what the Matrix is without showing him ... It wouldn't have had the same impact. Sadly, many still believe it's not even possible.

They need to see it for themselves because even the popular term 'lucid dream', having long been coined by Frederick van Eeden, doesn't quite capture the essence of the phenomenon. For starters, it is deep and in full swing, it is anything but 'dreamlike'. People also don't always interpret the experience to be a dream when it's happening—even though they have waking consciousness inside a vivid, sleep hallucination; for instance: 'I'm in the astral plane!', 'I've separated from my body into the ethereal realm which resembles the physical world!', 'I've been abducted by aliens as they paralysed me in my sleep, I open my eyes an I can see them around my bed!'

Meanwhile, the neuroscientific perspective, irrespective of people's views and interpretations, is that of a brain in a hybrid state—with active prefrontal lobes displaying around 40Hz of brainwave action—which is quite distinguished from a brain that is ordinarily dreaming as well as one that is awake in the real world. So what we see here is clearly something apart from those two usual states, and it can fluctuate either way unless it's maintained while it's happening.

In 2005, Mahowald and Schenck attempted to unite all states that include REM sleep and waking consciousness under the umbrella term dissociated REM states. But it was clearly a bit of a mouthful, so the term phase state (or just 'phase'), which had been used by Robert Monroe decades ago and more recently popularised by Michael Raduga in research circles, began to be pragmatically used in order to attract individuals with different names or views for ostensibly the same subjective phenomenon.

In the days when I was still learning from Raduga's School of Out-of-body Travel, a few of us shared an inside joke for inciting curiosity in anybody who was not familiar with this phenomenon—as we felt that using the always popular label 'lucid dreaming' just wasn't doing the job—by talking about the phase in front of newcomers until they looked confused; to which we'd say:

–'You know the question, just as we did ...'
-'What is the phase?'
-'Do you want to know what it is? It can't be shown. You have to see it for yourself!'

Sometimes, 'I can only show you the door, you're the one who has to walk through it.'

Yes, I know. The Matrix was very popular at the time and it holds relevant connotations. It is, after all, about a computer-generated dream world which everybody takes to be real save for the ones who wake up and realise the truth: Paradoxically, 'There is no spoon.'

I'm glad you are interacting with your lucid dreams, keeping your senses alive in order to stabilise and maintain them. Nobody wants to wake up prematurely or slip into a non-lucid state. Not much time is required to get a lot done in lucid dreams anyway—just imagine how many goals can be achieved in just a single minute! In the real world, it might take a few minutes just to exit a building from the third floor of a building, but in the dream world, you can cut many corners. Try setting a stopwatch for 1 minute and imagine that you are executing tasks in a lucid dream! Just looking at a hand go around a clock for, say, 120 seconds (2 revolutions) can seem like an 'eternity'.

WILDs certainly seem to often start from an intensified outset, but I think it is only because we are already carrying a lot of 'waking ammunition', as it were, into the dream world, as we are already amplifying hypnagogic hallucinations which tends to correlate with that hyperrealism where colours seem to even outdo those of the real world. In saying this, it is also possible to obtain high definition in DILDs by employing deepening techniques from the beginning of lucidity, if required.

Actually, you have touched upon a distinction between vivid dreams and lucid dreams which I feel isn't stated enough: It is possible to have non-lucid vivid dreams just as we can be extremely lucid in one that displays a faint quality, is dark, or lacks realism in some way. In the latter case, our lucid awareness alerts us to this fact and we subsequently intensify the environment to prevent the dream world from collapsing.

Finally, let's try to land on an alien planet next time! I actually have an experiment to do for Project Elijah where I have to enter a lucid dream and count breaths. I can initially intensify the environment but I'm not aloud to use maintaining techniques because the very act of counting as many breaths as possible is being test as a means to prolong the experience. By the way, I don't usually have multiple awakenings at night but I think that particular instance was due to overindulging in a nice dinner that my wife cooked and then I paid the price! LOL! So I am only recommending staying in lucid dreams for as long as possible and, in the case of awakening interruptions, attempt re-entries—also for as long as possible or until you are satisfied.

Good luck with those future DILDs, my friend, and they, too, can be realer than real. And by all means grab those DEILD opportunities for entry and re-entry! I hope this journey is insightful and life-changing for you. Have fun and sweet LDs!