Anyone have expert advice on WILD?

I had my first WILD a few months ago. I accidently woke up and felt exhausted, as well as seeing a lot of hypnogogia. I thought to myself "this is a good time to try out a wild". so i laid down, closed my eyes and counted to 4. Then i was in the dream.

The day before i had not done anything exhausting, such as running, working out etc. And i have tried to have a wild since then, but not succeding. I am always to awake to preform wild even if i have actively tried to tire myself out.

How do you combat this?

Hopefully someone more expert at WILDs will be along to help you, but the only times I've managed to WILD took about two hours, and just like you I was too awake. It was just too tiring and often didn't work! I suspect your success was probably down to the fact that you may have actually done more like a DEILD than a WILD?

Are you typically trying WILD as you're going to sleep for the first time at night? Or are you waking up in the middle of night, and then trying? Most people find that some form of WBTB (Wake Back to Bed) is a flat out requirement for WILD to work. It involves waking up around 3 am, getting up and going to the bathroom, and possibly doing something like reading a book for up to 30 minutes, then trying to go back to sleep. Since you find yourself too awake to go back to sleep most of the time (much like myself), if you try WBTB, don't stay up more than 5 minutes. If you want, don't even move much or get out of bed; this is what I do.

Can you give some more details about your routine and some examples of attempts at WILD, so we can get a feel for what you need to work on, exactly? I'm not necessarily an expert, especially now that I don't actively LD, but even without trying I still get around 15-20 LDs a year, and WILD is the technique I'm most prolific in. Out of my total LDs, I'd say a mere 5% are the result of DILD, less than 5% are a result of MILD, 40% are a result of DEILD, and the remaining 50% are a result of WILD (DEILD is kind of a sub-form of WILD though, it's Dream-Exit Induced Lucid dream if you didn't already know, and involves waking up from a dream and using it to form a new dream/chaining them together). If you don't know what any of these acronyms mean, or want a more detailed explanation of what they entail, just ask.

Anyway, I don't know how often you LD, but if you aren't that experienced, you ought to know that WILD is one of the more advanced techniques. It takes a long time to nail down (unless you happen to just be a natural), but it can be the most effective once learned. It's typically imperative to sleep beforehand with WILD for a couple of reasons. One is that NREM sleep is what you go into when you first go to sleep, and dreams that happen during this phase of sleep are often extremely bizarre, frightening, short lived, and typically almost never remembered. You start experiencing REM at around 2-4am, which is why I usually would wake up at 3:00-3:45 am (I knew how to get myself to wake up naturally, so there was a good deal of variation, but not too much). Typically people wake up after each REM period, which at longest are usually about 90-120 minutes long. IIRC, they're a bit shorter when you first start going through them, grow steadily longer, then start to get shorter again once you get past 6 am. In any case, most of the time, you just don't remember that you wake up. It just so happens I wake up several times at night most of the time, so it's not hard to try WILDing every once in a while.

In any case, having already been asleep, it's SO much easier for me to get back to sleep when I try to WILD. Being able to actually fall back to sleep is the most important step of WILDing. Just out of curiosity, have you ever experienced Sleep Paralysis or REM Atonia (the difference is mostly in whether or not you induced it and if it's an issue that disrupts your sleep on a regular basis, otherwise it describes the same phenomenon)? Most people want to emphasize that WILD isn't about inducing SP/REM Atonia... it isn't, but at the same time, it's not unwelcome. People focus on inducing it so much they lose sight of the bigger picture at times, so others have to remind them it is in no way required to WILD. However, the others that explain that to them sometimes overemphasize it is a taboo to want to induce it sometimes, like wanting it to happen is a bad thing. I think this does more harm than good, because about 30% of my WILDs didn't ever involve SP/REM Atonia prior to the dream, and the remaining 70% have. For me, SP/REM Atonia is an excellent tool for getting into a dream. I've got a ridiculous success rate when it comes to transitioning from SP/REM Atonia into a dream. Many people, however, have some real difficulty with it, which is why reminding people it isn't required to WILD is still, indeed, required and a good thing. If all you can do is get into REM Atonia when trying to WILD, but you can't get into a dream, then what's the point, right?

If you post more details, I'll be checking back in this thread to help out where I can. I know Sageous is really at WILD, so perhaps PM him or something. He has a tutorial up somewhere, I'll find it and post it here in a while if he doesn't respond to this thread himself.

You can go to Sageous's WILD class on the DVA section of the forums, there's tons of great information and essential background.

My advice is: spend some time every night (in the middle of the night is better than at bedtime to allow the chance for entering a dream aware) paying attention to how you fall asleep. Don't hold on tightly to awareness or wakefulness, just pay light attention to the changes that your mind and body go through as you fall asleep.

WILDing is like Othello: "minutes to learn, a lifetime to master." Fall asleep, with at least a tiny pearl of awareness intact. But you must, first and foremost, fall asleep. It's a delicate balance. The more you try, the more you learn. Keep it up and eventually you'll gather enough insight to become more and more successful at it.

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Originally Posted by FryingMan

WILDing is like Othello: "minutes to learn, a lifetime to master." Fall asleep, with at least a tiny pearl of awareness intact. But you must, first and foremost, fall asleep. It's a delicate balance. The more you try, the more you learn. Keep it up and eventually you'll gather enough insight to become more and more successful at it.

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^^This. FryingMan put it much more succinctly than I did, but did a great job getting it across. Just so you don't get discouraged, achieving some minimal success at first is normal... it's a sort of beginner's luck, if you will. As I mentioned in my last post, WILD is advanced and takes a long time to get a good success rate going, but it's worth it in the end. This isn't a technique you should be condemning yourself for if you fail to get lucid many, many times before getting the hang of it. If I were you, I would stick to learning RCs and keeping a Dream Journal, working on your recall, and even practicing MILD and DILD in tandem with WILD. Try MILD as you are first falling asleep, mantras can be surprising help.

As long as you stick with your WILD practice, though, you will eventually succeed at random times. Each time this happens, you will both consciously and unconsciously start piecing together what works and feeling out what you have to do. It's almost like discovering a new sense that you were totally unaware of. You have no idea you can "feel", for a lack of a better term, something new until one day you do seemingly by random chance. Then you wonder if you can feel it again. Every so often, you start to feel this new sense, and your brain already starts to figure out a pattern; what were you doing just prior to feeling the new sense, what time of day was it, did you eat something special, had you just spoken to somebody you like or dislike, did you just have a mood swing, did you twitch your nose three times and you felt it, etc.? You'll start picking up what time of night seems to give you the most success, what position you are lying in when it happens (it's overwhelmingly the supine position for most people, including myself--the only time I've only had DEILDs on my side before, and technically they are a sub-form of WILD, but there is a special reason why it works in that case for me), the sort of mindset you have and how you feel while falling asleep while maintaining a sliver of awareness.

Here sometime today, hopefully, I'll write out various methods and things I do and notice when WILDing and DEILDing, hopefully it'll be of some use to you, OP.

^^ Nicely put, snoop!

Just a few mornings ago I had an accidental WILD while lying on my back (interesting, I seem to have much, much more reliable success at WILDs when in non-standard [on the side for me is normal] sleeping positions...I avoid my back most of the time because I snore more that way then my wife wakes me up to stop, ruining the attempt) in late morning. I all of a sudden started seeing a scene "through my eyelids". It concluded was a full LD rather than a dreamlet because the scene was stable and long-lasting, long enough to examine details of the room and determine that this was not my waking room. For some reason I couldn't not move my dream body. Maybe I was so lightly in the dream state that my connection was to my physical body instead of my dream body.

But for whatever reason, I could not move. Maybe this was a real case of sleep paralysis. But trying to move caused the dream visuals to vanish eventually. What I did then was relax, and recreate the undefinable "feeling" that I had just before the dream started, some sort of combination of relaxation together with paying attention to the contents of my mind's eye, but not using my physical eyes. Doing this, the dream scene returned, again like I was "seeing through my eyelids!" The wall texture had changed, but still was non-waking. I had a bit more movement but still could not get up out of bed and in about 30-45 seconds the dream visuals ended and I was awake.

Earlier that morning, also on my back, I found myself entering REM Atonia with a progressively louder roaring in my ears, combined with uncontrolled rapid eye jerking movements. I came through it, trying to maintain relaxation but was fully awake (according to nose pinch).

That's the sort of thing snoop and I are talking about. You need to just keep trying, and eventually, the WILDs will happen, and then you'll remember what you did that resulted in the success, and next time you'll be able to zero in on creating that magical feeling that leads successfully to a dream.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by FryingMan

^^ Nicely put, snoop!

Just a few mornings ago I had an accidental WILD while lying on my back (interesting, I seem to have much, much more reliable success at WILDs when in non-standard [on the side for me is normal] sleeping positions...I avoid my back most of the time because I snore more that way then my wife wakes me up to stop, ruining the attempt) in late morning. I all of a sudden started seeing a scene "through my eyelids". It concluded was a full LD rather than a dreamlet because the scene was stable and long-lasting, long enough to examine details of the room and determine that this was not my waking room. For some reason I couldn't not move my dream body. Maybe I was so lightly in the dream state that my connection was to my physical body instead of my dream body.

But for whatever reason, I could not move. Maybe this was a real case of sleep paralysis. But trying to move caused the dream visuals to vanish eventually. What I did then was relax, and recreate the undefinable "feeling" that I had just before the dream started, some sort of combination of relaxation together with paying attention to the contents of my mind's eye, but not using my physical eyes. Doing this, the dream scene returned, again like I was "seeing through my eyelids!" The wall texture had changed, but still was non-waking. I had a bit more movement but still could not get up out of bed and in about 30-45 seconds the dream visuals ended and I was awake.

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Hopefully my reply isn't off topic by responding directly to your experience, but I actually get a few VILDs that might also be considered WILDs this way if what happened to you is like what happens to me. Sometimes when I wake up, I sort of just gain consciousness, but I don't really move or anything. Suddenly I'll realize I'm seeing a very stable, long lasting image that would otherwise be a dream, except I am not feeling any of it and my body isn't involved in the images at all. Like, I'll see myself doing things in the first person, but it is totally devoid of tactile sensation. I'm fairly certain this is either hypnopompic (if you are experiencing it waking up) or hypnagogic (experiencing it going to sleep, although not necessarily going back to sleep--sometimes it's difficult to distinguish between the two really) imagery that is so stable that it's at the cusp of becoming a full on dream. If you know how to do it, you can actually enter the dream during this state.

I wake up and have these movie-like, very vivid scenes playing maybe 7 times a year. I have a pretty good success rate when it comes to turning it into an LD, it's well over half the time and maybe even more than 75% of the time. What I do is let myself relax and pay attention to the images passively. Passively observing something can be a bit tricky, but luckily when you wake up in this state it isn't actually all that difficult to do. I patiently watch without letting myself drift off, and at some point, usually after 30 seconds to 2 minutes, I get the sense that I can "step into" the dream. I really can't explain how I do it, or how I know when it's ready. For all I know, it could be ready almost instantly, and I'm waiting for no reason. When I say stepping into the dream though, I really just mean transition into the dream, but somehow it's a mixture of an active decision and something I just let happen. I suppose what I'm doing while just watching passively is letting my mind become convinced that this is something I am actually doing, but I'm just letting my body move on its own; kind of in the same way you don't always pay attention when you drive a car... you just let it happen. I feel like at some point, I subconsciously accept that I am indeed who is performing the actions on some level, but all without really thinking about it. I kind of just know it. At a point I feel satisfied with waiting, I decide to stop letting my body/unconscious do it's thing like I decide to pay attention again when I'm driving and actively pay attention to and control what I am doing. In this sense, I step back into "reality" from an inattentive state while awake, and so to in the case of getting into a dream, I step into the dream. I decide it's my body to control, and control it.

Sorry if this doesn't make sense or isn't helpful, but I love it when I either wake up in a state like this, or I find myself experiencing REM Atonia or Sleep Paralysis, because it practically assures a lucid dream for me (and as I mentioned before, I don't actively LD, so it's responsible for the 20 or so I get a year naturally). I think what's important to transitioning into a dream from both a state like we just spoke about and SP/REM Atonia is being able to utilize the power of suggestion and expectation. All I do to get from SP/REM Atonia into a dream is imagine a vortex/black hole by my feet or head and kind of just "know" or expect it to put me into a dream when I'm all the way sucked in; this is what I tried doing the very first time I found myself in REM Atonia, it worked, and it's what I've used nearly every time since.

Here is what i usually do. I go to sleep around 23.45 and sleep until 4-5 am. Then go to the bathroom, drink water etc, then back to bed. I lay still until i feel that my body is about to fall asleep and then start to slowly counting. After counting to 100 i start to visualise. This is where i can lay for over an hour and not have any success. I have never had any SP when trying a WILD.

I´ll check that out, thanks.