DILD Difficulties

Hey dreamviews! A little background first: I've been into lucid dreaming for about 11 months and have had about 5 (very short) lucid dreams, all of which were from MILD or failed WILD (so essentially all MILD).

Recently I have shifted my focus from techniques to self awareness; throughout the day I try to see myself and my effects through others' perspectives and recall what I was doing 5 minutes ago. My dream recall has been good if I write my dreams down throughout the night, however, I do not feel this awareness has been carrying over into my dreams. DILD always has and still does feel impossible; I can't figure out how you get yourself to suddenly become aware or question reality in a dream (even in dreams about lucid dreaming, which I've had many of), no matter how crazy the dream.

So I came here to ask two things:
How important do you feel the techniques are to inducing lucid dreams?
How do I get waking-life awareness to carry over into my dreams?

Edit: I realized there is a contradiction in what I said since MILD is a form of DILD. I guess what I meant was how people fall asleep at night and, without WBTB, have DILDs. This seems to me the best approach to LDing since you can have consistent LDs with an inconsistent sleep schedule.

It's hard to say because everyone is different. Virtually every method seems to have cases of working almost instantly for some but being totally worthless for others.

After spending years practicing lucid dreaming, my DILD rate has generally improved over time. And yet, to be completely honest, I still don't really know what exactly makes it tick. It seems that there are quite a number of factors which all contribute to whether a DILD occurs, and they are very difficult to clearly identify. Self-awareness practice during the day, regular thinking and musing about lucid dreaming, motivation and excitement, MILD-type exercises or LD-related mantras during the night while falling asleep, the condition of my sleep and circadian rhythm, and current amount of stress in my daily life are just a few things that seem to influence it. As to the relative weight of each one: I still have no idea. ;)

Also, I don't know of many (if any) cases where DILD is totally consistent all the time. One can certainly get into a good round of practice and lucid mindset and have LDs pretty regularly, but there's almost always going to be some degree of luck (or what appears to be luck, at least, given how little we understand) involved for many of us.

So far, it appears you've had some success with MILD, if just a little, so you might just continue with it. Better yet, maybe combine it with the self-awareness practice you're currently doing. It doesn't hurt to try a few things in parallel. A lot of times they work together and produce a better effect than doing just one at a time.

Also, regarding the self-awareness development: In my experience, this seems to be something you have to stick with regularly and develop for quite a long time (possibly even a few years or even longer) for it to really take off. But this is pretty much no different from lucid dreaming skill development itself in most cases, so you might as well. :) Even then, it might be hard to notice anything happening until you look back on old diary or dream journal entries and realize how different you actually were back then. That's what I've started to experience. The changes are so gradual, it's a bit like growing up where you don't realize how tall you've gotten until one day when you just happen to look back at a record from several years ago. I think the effort is worth it, though: Not only has it been helpful for LDing, I'm starting to feel like it's been improving my waking-life personality as well over the last couple of years I've been working with it. I'm certainly not perfect and still have many big issues, but looking back I'm starting to see that there has been at least some noticeable improvement.

Have you tried reality testing? Continue self-awareness, but regularly check if you are dreaming by:

Seeing how many fingers you have

Pinching your nose and seeing if you can breath

Check if you are floating

Push your hand through a solid object.

This habit will move across to your dreamworld.
Over time, with sufficient motivation, self awareness, reading about lucid dreaming, DILD rates will increase.

However reality tests are neccessary to get it all started!

Thanks for the responses.

That was a very informative post Travis, and I will certainly consider all of the factors that you mentioned and experiment with them. I'll also have to read some of my older dreams to see if I notice any changes. I once started doing this thing that I called the 30 Day MILD Commitment. I was going to attempt MILD once a day with my intentions well set; I got three days in when it got interrupted by other things in life. I think I could now try to complete that and see what happens.

I have just recently picked up reality checks again. I guess I never should have stopped doing them, but I've never had much success with them. I'll take them more seriously and make them a bigger part of my self awareness.

RCs are a useful tool that I'd recommend, too. The important thing is to make sure you always do them with full attention and self-awareness and not let it become a habit that you do in “auto-pilot mode” without paying much attention. (The latter could happen, for instance, if you happen to do RCs a bit too often and they become so tedious that you tend to just zone out and do them as quickly as possible without much thought just to get them out of the way. In that case, it might actually be better to cut back on them a bit.)

I like to do the RCs whenever I just happen to think about them, as well as trying to remember to do them anytime I experience something that seems kind of odd or unusual (even if only slightly; it doesn't have to be something that couldn't happen in waking life, just something that you weren't quite expecting and makes you hesitate for a bit), or experience strong emotions, or anything that seems similar to something that has happened lately in my dreams. This helps train prospective memory (the ability to plan to do something at a future time and then remember to do it when the time arrives), which improves your chances of remembering, when you're later asleep and dreaming and encounter one of those things, that you might be dreaming at that moment. With some luck, you'll then remember to do the RC in order to find out if you're really dreaming, and discover that you are. Then you're all set to have some fun. :)