listening to music

While listening to music/anything else to induce a lucid dream, does anyone have trouble falling asleep? Or should I only try it when I'm really tired already?

Personally, I prefer as little sound as possible when trying to get to sleep. I find that those little foam earplugs work nicely -- you can still hear your alarm or telephone (unless they're really soft and/or far away) and probably anything you'd need to hear (like your dog barking at an intruder), but it muffles a lot of noise that would otherwise be irritating (like snoring :P ).

I have considered using one of those tapes/CDs with ocean sounds, or a mountain stream, or something like that. I think that a regular, natural sound like that wouldn't be annoying, and would tend to mask other noises that might interrupt sleep. I'm sure somebody here has tried that -- what do you think?

In my lucid dreams, I sometimes hear sounds that seem to be coming from the real world, but they are actually just parts of the dreams. When I hear sounds from the real world, they sometimes work their way into the dream. They usually wake me up. A few months ago, my clock radio went off and the song "Squeeze Box" by The Who was on the radio. In my dream, I rode around Oxford, Mississippi in a car with some friends and blared the stereo. The song playing on the dream stereo was "Squeeze Box." It sounded incredible because lucid dreaming has extreme mind expansion possiblililties. My brain did some really interesting stuff with the song. However, it didn't take long to wake up. I have had a bunch of lucid dreams this way, but I can only dream to real world music for about a minute or so.

Yeah I tried that brainwave generator stuff a long time ago, but not really extensivley, and not since I've been really concentrated on lucid dreaming. I used to always listen to music to get to sleep, but not for a long time. Classical music is great for it. When I am entering a dream, instead of Hypnogagic Imagery most of the time I get Hypnogagic sounds - people talking to me, really random conversations, it's kind of unsettling but cool, and I have gotten used to them. I think it is because I am really into music, and it has played a huge part of my life ever since I was a kid. I would like to experiment more with music though - I mean say if you tried doing a WBTB or MILD or WILD with soft music, would this affect my hypnogagic sound?