The main WILD ingredient

[RooJ]

This is just a current personal belief, and im sure its probably obvious to most of you, but id love feedback on it. (sorry if its been mentioned before) From what ive read and understand the backbone to nearly all WILD techniques is concentration. Its concentrating on the movement of fingers for example that seems to have made FILD successful, or concentrating on counting in some other techniques. It seems that to concentrate and focus the mind, we can avoid being caught up in HI, we can maintain awareness even as our body begins to sleep. Feeling very tired detracts from our concentration skills, just look at WBTB. We wake up early but lack some concentration due to tiredness, so we stay awake for 30 mins or so and then go back to bed, we are in a prime position to fall straight back into REM sleep but also have the concentration to maintain some awareness. Even dream yoga seems to be based around the same principle to a certain degree, yogi's concentrate on visualisations while falling asleep to hold awareness. The point of this post then: Just as performing bench presses slowly allows us to do more pressups (because they work the same muscles), so should concentration excercises help us to achieve WILD. If we focus on and build up the foundation skill, we can expect a much higher degree of success when we attempt techniques requiring that skill.... in theory. I intend to do more research on this to see the impact on WILD, Im currently making an app that will shout out numbers to put you off counting in your head for example, the object being to focus on counting without being influenced by the audio. Theres also many other concentration excercises on the internet aswell as just being aware during the day.

[dodobird]

Very true. Did you find any more good concentration exercises that you recommend?

[SKA]

Nice post. Yes it's obvious concentration is the key to lucid dreaming, and so many other wonderfull things, but it's good you point it out. This allows us to narrow down the field of investigation to concentration and how to hold on to awareness so we don't get side tracked and go offtopic that easily. A simple Tibettan Concentration focus technique is to draw the Tibettan letter A (Any other symbol/letter/shape will do as long as it isn't too complicated). Monks focus on it and work hard to keep their concentration at the letter A long and without interruption. Try focussing your Mind on an Object, while looking at it, and keep it there for the full 100%, continuously for only 5 minutes. Most of us will find that spontanious, distractive thoughts arise within the 1st minute, but practice makes perfect. Sofar I've never had the discipline to train myself like that, but as little as 5 minutes a day can suffice as practice. As you progress you may lengthen the focus-sessions to 10 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes...etc.. Eventually an hour. Since it takes about an hour at MAX to fall asleep I guess when you can focus your attention on 1 thing, object or thought, being able to concentrate on it a 100%, uninterrupted for an hour would allow you to maintain awareness while falling asleep.