A new lesson learned: WILD or FA-DILD?

So last night I had quite a few what I would consider regular awakenings. During one awakening I had what I thought was a WILD, as someone threw a tennis ball at me in my room which came to me as a DT, but obviously there was no tennis ball to speak of in the morning, so the assumption is that I either a) had a WILD or b) had an FA. As an LD'er I've always focused more on stability techniques as opposed to reality checks or dream triggers, and since I've neglected these practices it has made it impossible for me to determine what the nature of this experience was. I was either fully awake and fell straight back into a WILD, or I was simply in an FA, believing that I was awake. So lesson learned. As well as my regular practices it's now the time where I have to focus a little bit more on RC's and DT's as those are the things that are going to help me determine the difference between WILD's and FA-DILD's.

I have been having similar things happen to me... I can't tell when I am awake/sleep because it takes me such a long time to fall asleep and I am constantly waking up (Or at least what feels like waking up). It's such a strange state of consciousness.

FAs are sooooo sneaky and convincing. I bet I've had tons and tons of the sort where I "wake up" and just "go back to sleep", there's really no way to tell. I think what people describe as being DEILDs in large part may in fact be FAs where they "return to the dream." Just like many people who say they've WILDed actually have periods of discontinuity before the dream starts and so really are experiencing start-of-dream-DILDs.

In the end, though, the categorization doesn't matter so much: for me, it's all about the experience of the dreams, however I can get them!

Haha, I feel ya. Many times I tried to categorize my experience especially from the beginning. But it's not always possible. Then we just have to be happy that we had "something" cool, haha.

For me though, an FA is a normal dream. It becomes a DILD only after we realize that we are dreaming. So a lucid dream has only one rule - we need to realize that we are dreaming while in the dream.

Sorry if I just told you what you already knew. And I'm sorry, but what is a DT?

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Originally Posted by gab

Haha, I feel ya. Many times I tried to categorize my experience especially from the beginning. But it's not always possible. Then we just have to be happy that we had "something" cool, haha.

For me though, an FA is a normal dream. It becomes a DILD only after we realize that we are dreaming. So a lucid dream has only one rule - we need to realize that we are dreaming while in the dream.

Sorry if I just told you what you already knew. And I'm sorry, but what is a DT?

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A Dream Trigger. Someone threw a tennis ball at me which made me realize I was in a dream, as obviously (to me) I'm alone in my bedroom, so when it happened I was like "that shouldn't happen, I'm obviously dreaming!" but I was convinced before it happened that I was awake, so I either slipped into a WILD or simply had an FA-DILD.