How to maintain WILDS/DEILDS?

[MRH92]

My normal and most practiced method of becoming lucid is DILDS but recently I've been experiencing more WILDS/DEILDS. I tend to experience these within my last hour of sleep as I often drift in and out of consciousness; and as my dog takes it as his duty to bark at every possible noise he hears in the outside world that wakes me up constantly as well. My problem is I seem to struggle stabilizing when it comes to WILDS in ways that seem easier for me during DILDS. Normally when I become conscious via DILD my awareness and the vividness of the dream increases immensely and my level of control fluctuates. Sometimes I can do anything and other times I can do nothing. However the majority of the time I can use standard stabilising techniques and can keep quite a good hold on the dream but on average they only last about 2 minutes. With WILDS the dream feels very different. I go into it quite blurry and it takes a long time for an image to form. My awareness is pretty good but I feel very groggy and tired and often don't pay attention to things. The nature of the dream is quite surreal and not structured, very much like a standard non-lucid, and my level of control is very poor. The only upside to it is I can stay in these dreams for much longer and I don't have to put as much effort in to stay conscious. So far, for me, DILDS are the most vivid and with the initial spark of awareness I can achieve quite a lot in the dream but it comes to an end all too soon. WILDS/DEILDS definitely feel better as that transition from being awake into a dream is a great feeling and despite being less vivid than my DILDS they somehow feel more real. So I want to get better at stabilising WILDS but nothing I do seems to work. I focus on my hands or rub them together or I shout out things such as "increase clarity" but generally everything is blurry and hard to control. I can only thinks it's because when I enter into the dream I'm far too tired and don't have as much conscious awareness as I would like. I've tried to wake myself up more during WILDS but then I can't get back to bed. Anyway any tips and advice is welcome. Thanks.

[gab]

Have you tried engaging more of your senses? Touching, licking anything, smelling the air, stomping feet. You have tried yelling commands, but what works for me even better is to say something like "look, how is everything so detailed" [vivid, colorful, focused, briliant...] I think this works better for me, because I say it as if it was already so. I don't have any doubts, as I would perhaps have with a command. And what if you just thought "hey, I'm good at this, my dreams are stable". Sometimes when I forgot to stabilize, my dreams were super short, but a few of them were the longest ones ever. I think it's because I was so worried about stabilizing so I don't wake up, that actually that could have been waking me up.

[Runeword]

i'll second Gab here a little bit. i have that quite often as well where i will step into the dream and for some reason i'll have slightly unfocused vision etc. for me it seems to clear up if i use a command like "now i see perfectly" and also if i stoop down and find a rock (for me it's always a piece of chocolate candy that i pick up lol) and then i try to really focus intently on all the details, taste it, turn it etc that seems to clear it up. using that command just the other night i went from blurry to HD vision in microseconds. it's definitely a challenge though to stay calm and not concede to that sense of urgency when you really want to accomplish something in the dream. i can't really relate though to the DILDs feeling more real vs WILDs. for me they feel the same. i think another key to keep them going longer is to keep maintaining that awareness by frequent hand rubbing, detail checking etc not just something you first do upon arrival.

[MRH92]

I'll attempt to do these things next time. I suppose the sense I rely most on is sight so I will try to engage my other senses as well. I already do those sorts of things in my DILDS but I just seem to forget when it comes to WILDS. To be honest I think this might be another problem caused by my medication. I'm so groggy and drowsy on a morning so it's very easy to slip into WILDS but it's not easy to really hold on to them. I will keep trying to engage my senses however and I will try some of the commands you both have listed. Thanks