I've been LDing for (gosh, has it been that long already??) 4 years. I was not a natural, and it took me about 6 months of trying after I read ETWOLD to have my first. My motivation comes and goes, and the frequency of my LDs tends to correspond with motivation.

However I've found something that really works for me.

My room faces East (I guess) and I have no curtains so as soon as the sun comes up my room is very bright. I'm a person who needs 100% pitch darkness to have good sleep, and instead of getting heavy curtains I opted to buy a sleep mask instead.

Instead of just putting it on and wearing it all night, though, I wait. When the sun wakes me up after I've had about 6 hours of sleep, I roll over, think about LDing a bit, put on the sleep mask and then WILD.

Using the sun seems to be a much more natural way of waking up and doing a WBTB type of induction than using an alarm clock or something like that. Also, it works perfectly as I've usually gotten about 6-7 hours of sleep by the time the sun wakes me. Later REM cycles are best, as we all know.



This is probably not a big revelation to anyone - I'm just doing a pretty standard type of WBTB routine. But I can't believe it's taken me this long to figure it out - I always used to just grumble, promise myself I'd buy curtains, try putting a shirt over my eyes, etc. I fixed both my bright room problem, and gave myself easy LDs!

Also, I think the brain is more active when something is different about your sleep. If I was to, say, sleep fully clothed instead of naked like I usually do, my dreams would tend to be more vivid or weird. When you sleep for 6 hours and then put on a sleep mask, I think the brain picks up on the fact that something is different. This may also aid gaining lucidity if you fail at WILDing.

I've been LDing for a while, but I never thought I'd be able to achieve nightly LDs. I'm still not quite there, but I'm probably getting them 4 or 5 nights a week now, and that's not bad!


For what it's worth, I'm using this sleep mask. It's a "Lights Out Sleep Mask" from Magellan. I had never been able to wear a mask before, because I hated having something on my eyes. This mask is molded so that it stays off your eyes - you can open them with the mask on which is very nice for me. This is probably very important because the eyes move a lot during REM.

Again I'm sure this isn't a big revelation to anyone, but I wanted to share since it has been so effective for me. If I had known I'd be having this many LDs so easily, I'd have bought a sleep mask years ago!