How I perform SSILD:
"My variation with the cycles is to do two breaths focusing on the backs of my eyelids, two breaths focusing on hearing and then two breaths focusing a tactile feeling (I use the pressure that I can feel in my sternum area when laying on my back). This "warm-up" reminds me of how to focus on each of the 3 senses that make up SSILD and takes however long it takes to take 6 total breaths unless I start over due to feeling too sleepy to get the three points of focus correct. Then I combine the 3 senses into each breath. I focus on vision as I start to breathe in. I focus on hearing as I am at the transition from breathing in to breathing out. I focus on feeling as I am breathing out. When I am trying to DILD I will do this for 2-3 minutes and then attempt to fall asleep. Not being able to fall asleep on occasion is when I started experimenting with WILDs, sometimes with my sole intention being just to get to sleep but then when noticing the HH's I would remember various things I read about WILDing and experiment with them. Sometimes I would just fall asleep but more and more I was starting to succeed at WILDs. I found that my SSILD variation helps my WILDs in two ways. The first is that it does seem to create a bit of a trance like state which seems to help keep my mind from getting too active with "the noise" as Sageous says. The other way I feel it helps is like a WILD anchor, it is something to keep my intention in place while helping to create the fine line between just enough consciousness needed to become lucid and not so much consciousness that you stay awake. When trying to WILD I will do more repetitions of the combined cycles in each breath than when trying to DILD, but I may stop for a while especially if HHs occur. I may go back and do the combined cycles a few more breaths depending on if it feels right or if nothing seems to be happening. A few times I gave up, rolled over and only then did I quickly start to transition into a dream."
If you want to see some of the back and forth clarification regarding this style of SSILD that I went through in a member's workbook you can find it by using control-f (find) with the search term "cycle" on the following page:
http://www.dreamviews.com/dild/14763...orkbook-3.html