Thread: Questions about WILD/Lucid Dreaming

^^ I think the first thing you might do is try to take SP out of your WILD equation, Sarimdesert.

Why? Because SP has pretty much nothing to do with WILD, and should certainly not be considered a goal in a WILD dive; this is especially true because actual SP occurs when you are waking up, and not falling asleep, so you would not encounter it during a WILD. This might run contrary to much of the popular, um, stuff, that you've been reading on these forums, but I hope you'll at least consider making SP less important to your WILD attempts -- doing so, I think, will only help.

In case you're curious, here are a couple of threads that might help you better understand (or more easily disregard) SP:

Sleep Paralysis Explained
Sleep Paralysis Demystified

And no, you're not supposed to open your eyes in the real world during a WILD. Your eyes, and the rest of your body, should be behaving as they normally do whenever you fall asleep. I suppose that, if you sleep with your eyes open (and some people do), then you might have an issue (but it would be solved by wearing a sleep mask, I think). There is a chance, though, that you were opening your dream eyes to see a dream scene of your room, which does happen often, and which means that you completed your WILD... a quick RC will resolve whether you're in the real world or not.

I highly recommend that you look at DV's WILD tutorial, if you haven't already. Also, I humbly suggest that you look at my DVA WILD class. I think they may be worth your time.

As long as I'm here:

Originally Posted by sarimdesert

A few other questions:

Q1) Aren't dreams just memories? If so wouldn't you say that lucidity is linked with the vividness of these memories or do people really live through these dreams?

No. Dreams really do happen, and are remembered after they occur in your mind. They are not manufactured by memory without ever happening. People do indeed live through their dreams, lucid or not.

Lucid dreams are actual waking-life consciousness events, so You (as your waking-life self) are there to witness the dreams as they occur, in real time, and this makes them much easier to remember than NLD's. This improvement in the quality of recall has led people to believe that lucid dreams are more vivid, but lucidity really has nothing to do with vividness.

Q2) Is time a dimension in the dream world? Can you feel time passing by? Does real world time coincide with dream world time?

Time is experienced in dreams just as it is in waking-life, and real world time does seem to coincide with dreaming time (though some have made good arguments against this). Dreams -- particularly non-lucid dreams -- can sometimes seem to cover far more time than how long you actually slept, but this is likely because your dream jumps from scene to scene (like a movie, which can span many days, months or years in its plot, yet it only lasts a couple hours on the screen), so a lot of time seems to have passed, because you tend to fill in the gaps caused by those jumps with an assumption of time passed (as you would in waking life).

Q3) Can one lose the line between the dream and the waking world? Confusing one with the other?

Sure. But I wouldn't worry about it. Your immersion into the dreamworld would have to be extremely intense and extensive before a blurring between waking and sleep starts to occur. And even if it does, it's pretty easy to pull yourself back over that line, usually with a simple RC or moment of remembering.

Q4) Does the real world environment affect the WILD technique? E.g: The lighting in the room (too much sunlight), sleeping with someone else, noises from the real world.

Of course it does. Remember that you are going to sleep when you do a WILD, so anything that might effect your sleep normally will still effect your sleep during a WILD.