Thread: WILDS just a brain chemistry thing?

Yeah, it probably has a lot to do with brain chemistry and how you fall asleep. For me, WILDs happen most easily when I'm very tired. Before I learned to lucid dream, I would have very rapid-entry REM started by a sinking feeling and featuring a string of false awakenings when I took Benadryl early in the morning and went back to bed. The types of sleep states that tended to produce WILDs after I learned to LD had a very similar feel to those Benadryl states: very rapid entry, very rapidly shifting, and yet hard to wake up from. I've only had a few WILDs that were entered more slowly - a FILD and a couple others where I was repeating something to myself as I was falling asleep.

I think brain chemistry might influence DILDs too, to some extent, because if I fall asleep faster and have longer dreams, as in the early morning within a couple hours before I'd normally wake up, I seem to be more likely to be able to recognize dream signs, in part because I'd just been awake not long ago. But I'm one of those people who finds it far easier to DILD than WILD, and that's probably because of my brain chemistry and the way I normally fall asleep. There are some WILDers, on the other hand, who have a hard time DILDing. Perhaps for them it's kind of all-or-nothing: either they fall asleep half-awake or they take a while to enter REM and have a very low level of awareness once in it. I think experience helps a lot with DILDing too: just having thought about dreams a lot at some point in your life.

This is an interesting thread. It could make sense, I suppose. There are lots of people who find WILDs really hard to do, or even impossible, and then there are those who have them without meaning to. I'll "feel" beforehand that I'm about to have a WILD, it's like I have this feeling of being alert and sleepy at the same time. It hasn't failed so far. I've been taking anti anxiety meds for the last 7 years or so, but they stopped working around December, at the same time as I started having spontaneous WILDs (again). Would that be a coincidence?...

Incidently, I raise the question not to disparage people who have worked very hard to develop this ability.

The point is two fold. First, the question I raise about brain chemistry and tendencies to enter non-REM even if REM is just around the corner.

Second, I wonder if people aren't focusing their energy in the wrong place. I'm a firm believer that anyone can learn to lucid dream via DILDs. I think it has less to do with learning mental tricks and more to do with mindfulness during the day. Maximizing your awareness during the day WILL bleed into your dreams.

Interesting thread!
I think it's not just WILDing that is dependent on certain chemicals, it's the whole sleeping process. And I think some people might have a brain that easily 'creates' the right chemical cocktail for WILDing by nature.

Isn't it so, that the technique is to CREATE this right 'state of the brain' or what you could also see as 'the right concentration of chemicals needed'?

If you'd want to get more scientific answers to your questions, you could try and search on scholar.google.com for articles. There's a LOT to find about brain chemicals and sleep vs waking state of mind. But I'm too tired now to read it (and I'm off to bed, hoping for a WILD, LOL)