I've dabbled with lucid dreaming off and on for probably about 10 yrs now. In that time I've only managed to have a handful of lucid dreams. There have been times where I've been very focused on the subject. Dream journaling and doing reality checks regularly but then I end up slacking off and forgetting about it entirely before making significant progress. A lot of my previous attempts in the past have been towards wild and I now believe that to have been a mistake spending so much time and focus on it. The reason I say this is I have trouble falling asleep. I've found the easiest way for me to fall asleep is to let go. When I attempted wild either my focus was too hard and I couldn't sleep or not enough and I pass out. Because of my trouble falling asleep while focused I'm thinking dild is a better approach for me. Don't get me wrong, perhaps at some point in the future once I'm able to regularly have LD's I might be interested in trying wild again. I just don't think it's the best approach for me right now. During the day I've been working on becoming more present in my moment to moment experiences because I've begun to notice I've been on autopilot for a very long time. This also seems to carry over in my dreams. On days where my focus is greater I feel like my dreams become more vivid and detailed. Also I feel more present in my dreams on those days. I've started adding meditation into my daily practice as well. I struggle with what technique to use in the night. See I wake several times through the night. Usually about three times on average that I notice. Sometimes with a dream recalled and sometimes not. If I remember a dream I'll usually try to go into a mild. Visualizing the previous dream and imagine becoming lucid. If not or if I feel like visualizing is keeping me awake then I'll switch over to SSILD. Which seems to help knock me out. In fact a lot of times while doing it I find I've lost focus and began day dreaming within the first cycle or two. But if I notice that after making attempts my recall has started going down then I'll switch to solely focusing on that. So for example if I was trying mild/ssild and by the morning I haven't remembered any dreams then I'll stop all techniques until I feel I have decent dream recall again. Which seems to come and go at times. Another issue I have with being able to fall asleep is I have this very annoying throat irritation when trying to sleep at night. Through the night I'm constantly having to sip some water or throat spray to keep it in check. I've quite smoking about 7 to 8 months ago and the problem seems to be ever so slowly getting better but just to be on the safe side I'm going to have my doctor take a look next week. During meditation I've found I can completely relax my body and basically pretend like it doesn't exist. My throat will start becoming irritated and I'll focus more and more on my breath. The throat irritation gets to a point where I feel like I can't stand it anymore, my eyes will even begin to water. But if I continue to focus on the breath finally the throat problem subsides somehow at least temporarily. I've begun trying to overcome it at night while going to sleep and it seems to help. Anyways, I'm really excited to start working with the awesome people here on dreamviews. It really seems like an awesome community here, which can be hard to find online.
