Crazy WILD Experience + How I Did It
Hi guys, last night I finally had my first lucid dream through WILD. I wouldn't really call myself a begginer per se, as though I did not have any completely lucid dreams before this one, I've been educating myself on Lucid dreaming through various internet sources and I read Stephen Laberges book. I've known about Lding for probably 2 years at this point.
I also think I have a problem a lot of you guys have - racing thoughts, not being able to focus on anything or go back to sleep after WBTB.
Unfortunately, I also have an extremely short attention span so my attempts were often 1 or 2 week long stints. These stints consisted of me dream journalling and attempting some form of LD every night, mostly WILD, sometimes MILD and recently, SSILD. All attempts were done with WBTB. I knew that WILD wasn't reccomended for beginners, but I was extremely stubborn and knew that WILD was the way that I wanted to do it, which is why I kept trying over and over again (well, every few months lol). The allure of a 'harder' technique which had consistent, more guranteed results at the expense of being harder to grasp drew me in.
I normally wake up sometime in the middle of the night to pee, and this night was no different. I woke up at 4am after sleeping around 12am, conducted a quick reality check and went to piss. As I laid down, I thought about WILD briefly and was like, why not?
I was laying for about 10 seconds and focusing on the ambient sound of a fan as an anchor. when I felt myself falling through my bed, and crazy hypnagogic imagery, like the dream forming through my eyes. A KEY step is that I stayed calm here and did not react, or even really think about it as it happened. My thoughts were passive thoughts, like "oh, something is happening". I then felt myself fall through some sort of barrier (like membrane feel) and and fell directly into a dream.
I was immediately lucid as I had retained the memory of quite literally falling into the dream seconds before, and rubbed my eyes to make the dream clearer.
An important note is that this all happened within the span of around 10-20 seconds.
In essence, I conducted WILD, using ambient noise as an anchor. An additional important point is that I normally fall asleep with a fan on, or some sort of noise in the background, a la something I can normally fall asleep too.
While I am certainly not an Lding expert, I believe that WILD is more like 'threading the needle', rather than simply staying conscious while falling asleep. If you try too hard, you will never fall asleep and if you try too little, you will 100% fall asleep. The key is to maintain a very thin line of consciousness, almost passiveness while falling asleep. This is by no means a controversial or new opinion, but I still see plenty of misinformation on WILD which involve staying completely still etc and maintaining full consciousness. You need to be able to fall asleep.
