Hello,
I am new to lucid dreaming. I am 18, I have been meditating regularly for the last 3-4 months and keeping a healthy life style ( exercising, and a good diet). The last 13 days I have been trying to lucid dream by doing regular RC and keeping a Dream Journal and also been practicing the WBTB method, or the timer method: Basically I wake up at 5 am after 5-6 hours of sleep, then set an alarm for 6 am then 6:08 then 6:12,6:16,6:20
and so on..
But I have encountered a few problems:
First of all it takes me a long time to fall asleep, it always has been this way, it takes me at least an hour to fall asleep, but usually its an hour and a half, even when I try not to move, and do the Drop Roll Sleep Command. After I wake up at 5 Am if I stay awake for 45 minutes I have extremely hard time getting back to sleep again, and when I fall asleep I cannot wake up again by the alarms, I just simply keep on sleeping and cannot retain any descent level of consciousness. Although I have made some progress I think, My dream recall ability went up to 2-4 dreams per night, and two nights ago I knew I was dreaming, I was dreaming about dreaming, weirdly enough, I could hear noises and feel sensations from the dream, but the dream "sight" wasn't as vivid and clear as real eye sight, and in my dream I got SP and couldn't move, But I was aware that I am probably dreaming but didn't do anything about it. And yesterday I also knew that I was dreaming and I remember thinking to my self, "hmm I am dreaming, this is a pretty good dream, I should write this dream in my Dream Journal", but I didn't do anything about it and kept on sleeping, only later after I woke up I realized that I was dreaming really. Also I cannot enter full SP, but my body becomes heavy and numb.


My questions are:
Will taking Melatonin increase my ability to have lucid dreams and enter SP and fall asleep faster?
Also my Dream memories feel the same as my real life memories that came from my real eyes and real eye sight, except that I know my dream memories came from a dream.
So does that mean when I dream I actually see my dream but I am not concussions enough to see the dream, and it registers in my brain like a normal memory of eye sight from real life?
I would really love to be able to see my dreams and experience them as vividly as my real eye sight is. Basically achieving "perfect visualization".
What am I doing wrong, and can improve?
What can I do to improve my visualization ability?