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by a little over a week ago i'd been regularly remembering 3-4 dreams a night and had built up a habit of casually retelling them to Josiah, just cuz, who's been an eager audience. his conscious experience with dreams and dreaming is so spare that despite my hazy recall and clumsy spotty storytelling there's novelty enough to make him interested. for me the reward is in observing their "concrete" formations and recognizing the very personal associations upon which they're based-- trends in day to day thought i'd heretofore failed to acknowledge...embarrassing associations i thought i'd successfully failed to acknowledge...decade-gone associations my mind somehow excavates in an instant... dreams are characterized by a peculiar, niggling familiarity with every experience i direct attention toward, every moment. i revel in it. more on this some other time.

because of xtra recall and spare time i thought now could be a good time to give lucid dreaming an honest stab. it's been 4 years i'd been struggling (for the most part passively) with this hangup centered around what i thought was SP, where after some minutes of lying still i'd feel a wave of (hilariously) mild numbness pass over my entire body, which i've described previously here and here. until last weekend i had had this huge festering misconception abt what was happening and the correct course of action to induce an LD after the numbness, which was mostly based on an experience with an unreasonably successful WILD attempt 4-5 years ago that took 5 seconds to complete with virtually no effort: i had woken up in the middle of the night in a very comfortable bed in a pitch black room, saw it as an opportunity to try WILDing, lay there breathing for a bit, then a tremor, and all my faculties of perception crumpled inward, and i existed in an unmistakeable Blackness... from there i just rolled into a busier dreamworld. in other words, i just kinda "fell under". i consciously and subconsciously expected every subsequent WILD attempt to have/require these characteristics, which, along with excitability, was my ticket to failure. last weekend tho, after reading a bit and talking to a couple of super helpful people in irc, i've come to understand the following:

-above all, KEEP IT SIMPLE, STUPID.
-"WBTB, then just lay there motionless, relax, and wait; it'll happen" is a fine strategy.
-SP is not necessary to WILD, and many people experience only partial paralysis. don't make it a goal.
-operate without goals in mind. passivity is key.
-"everyone's different, all normal" in general. no single correct way to do anything, no imperatives.
-that initial "numbness" is not SP, obviously.
-nothing wrong with swallowing, or moving at all/"messing up" for that matter, as long as you go back to what you were doing.
-as far as recall goes, it's cool if you dont try to remember/talk about/write down every minute detail. practice recall in whatever way works for you.
-you'll improve through practice and experience. period.

tbc