Little Confused on FILD

At the moment, I have been trying to do FILD for a couple of weeks or so with no luck. I normally go to bed from 8:30-9:00 and wake up around the midnight-1am stage of the night.
The moment I wake up I immediately turn off my alarm and go back to sleep doing FILD, I'm a bit unaware and do not think I am close to sleep when I actually am and fall asleep before even doing the finger movements. So here are my questions
1. What signs do I use to know when I'm close to falling asleep?
2. Is 8:30/9:00 a good time to go to sleep or do I need to wait until later to be more tired to fall asleep straight away?

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Originally Posted by zxechoo09

At the moment, I have been trying to do FILD for a couple of weeks or so with no luck. I normally go to bed from 8:30-9:00 and wake up around the midnight-1am stage of the night.
The moment I wake up I immediately turn off my alarm and go back to sleep doing FILD, I'm a bit unaware and do not think I am close to sleep when I actually am and fall asleep before even doing the finger movements. So here are my questions
1. What signs do I use to know when I'm close to falling asleep?
2. Is 8:30/9:00 a good time to go to sleep or do I need to wait until later to be more tired to fall asleep straight away?

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To do FILD, you need to wake up naturally in the middle of the night and not move at all. The alarm is going to hinder your attempt, so I suggest to ditch it altogether. If you insist on staying with FILD, then bring a bottle of water with you to bed and drink some of it before you go to sleep. You will eventually wake up to take another drink, but don't move and attempt FILD as usual.

I'm a user of the DEILD technique myself, which is incredibly useful. The bottled water technique I suggested above will work; once you awaken late at night/early in the morning, don't move and keep your eyes closed. Then picture your previous dream and let the scene materialize. It's a really easy technique and if FILD doesn't end up working for you, give it a try.

1. Don't try to pinpoint when you're close to falling asleep. You'll know it when you feel it.
2. Yes. Just keep a regular sleep schedule.

1. I'm not really sure about the FILD technique, but the trick is you don't know when you're asleep. It's pretty much a DEILD using the fingers as your anchor. Also, I don't really believe these are good questions to ask yourself, because if you think about the signs of falling asleep while doing so, you may start thinking about "ok, this part is when I start getting close," being detrimental to the process.

2. It doesn't matter when you go to sleep. What matters is when you wake up, and it has to be during a REM cycle so the next one comes faster. As long as you wake up and you can remember a dream, and also you feel tired, that's good enough.

Hope that helped.

I don't understand FILD, it makes no sense to me! However some people like it so there must be some logic to it.

I agree with Zaephr, if this doesn't work well try DEILD... I personally love this technique

Thanks for the help, I will try all your options until my holidays end but if it doesn't work until then I'll move onto DEILD like you all said.