Thread: Sleep Paralysis to LD?

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.