Sleep Paralysis to LD?

Hello everyone!

Recently I decided to get back into LD. In the past I had decent success with LD but limited success with dream control. One of the reasons I quit was due to the frequent onset of sleep paralysis associated with my efforts.

I decided to give it another shot after reading some guides on meditation and OBEs. One of the things I read sounded very familiar to sensations I had in sleep paralysis so I thought maybe I would give it a go and embrace the sleep paralysis instead of fearing it. Just so you understand I know that with melatonin 5mg and sleeping on my back I am 100% likely to experience sleep paralysis and/or a LD.

So my very first night attempting this I had some vivid dreams but nothing I could remember. Me and my girlfriend decided to take a nap the next afternoon and that is when it all went down. I fell asleep on my back and before long I knew I was in sleep paralysis. I could not move anything hardly but this time I wasn't scared and felt no dark energy. When I read about meditating to OBE the author mentioned feeling electrical or tingling throughout your body and I focused on this and before long felt my entire body tingling like never before. I really can't describe this sensation it was not a "euphoric" feeling nor a negative one either.

So I decided I was going to attempt to leave my body in this state. To do this I decided I would attempt to roll out of my physical body. It took me a great deal of effort as my body was basically paralyzed but finally I felt myself roll over off the bed and onto the floor.

This is the last thing I remember. I know after this I had some very vivid dreams but none were Lucid. I also had a few more incidences of the same paralysis but the other times seemed a bit darker and I was very confused in some and trying to get my girlfriends attention who was sleeping next to me.

So I would like to know what happened with rolling out of my body? Was this a brief OBE? Did I simply wake myself up from the paralysis or could I have actually stood up and entered a lucid dream from this stage?

I feel like the sleep paralysis might be a doorway into extremely easy lucid dreams if I can master it but I'm not sure if there is any point.

Am I wasting my time or should I continue with inducing sleep paralysis?

It's very easy to avoid by sleeping on my side (which is my normal position anyway).

I really can't describe just how powerful 5mg is on the vivid nature of my dreams. In the past I took much smaller dosages but the ones I bought were 5mg and I find they really help my quality of sleep although give me a hell of a hangover for about an hour in the morning.

Two things:

First, you want to have an idea of what you want to do in the dream. A detailed plan is great, but a simple one is better than nothing. It could be: "I want to go to place X." Or "I want to find person Y." This is important for a couple reasons. 1) It plants a seed in your unconscious to build a scene around. Without an idea, your mind may likely just continue the scene of you falling asleep: your heavy stiff body in a dark bedroom. That's not conducive to a sustained dream. You want something creative. It doesn't have to be too fanciful. The goal can be right through your bedroom door. 2) It gives you something to focus your mind on during the transition and take your mind off the SP. SP is fine, but it's just an indicator not a technique. While that is happening, you want to direct your mind toward a visualization of your planned scene. There are other options too. You can focus on recalling memories, or reciting a mantra, or focusing on your senses, or on hypnagogic imagery or sounds. What these all have in common is that you are directing your mind toward an intention, which propels you forward.

Second, you want to master the transition, which may take some experimentation. The key is to create an idiom for how you transition from wake to dream. Rolling out of your body is a fine example, but be sure to enrich that idiom with the dream logic. You are detaching your dreambody from your real body, such that your dreambody now obeys different physical laws and expectations. Allow yourself to believe the magic a bit. It's not supernatural, just an idiom for making the experience symbolically coherent to your unconscious. Just as Superman assumes his persona by ripping open his shirt, you enter a lucid dream through some bodily action with symbolic meaning. For this reason, I'm more of a fan of transition idioms that are a bit more imaginary. For example: floating up out of the bed, or falling through the bed (my favorite), or transitioning toward a light, or through a tunnel. You can help these along with visualization, as in the planning goal from above. The benefit of a supernatural transition is that it is an undeniable reality check. If you start floating out of bed, you can be sure that you are dream. So now you are free to trust in the dream logic and start dream control, like teleporting to your planned dream scene.

Edit: Just thinking about it more, the rolling-out-bed transition might be well-suited to those with heavy SP, as you seem to have. For you, any movement out of that paralysis is sufficiently "surreal" to facilitate a good transition. Me personally, my hypnagogia is just a kinda weak heaviness and buzzing that I can easily move out of, so I prefer the fall-through-the-bed as a sure indicator of transition. Anyway, that speaks to the importance of experimenting so that you build on what is personally effective to you, based on what you experience.