Starting all over

I haven't done any active attempts at LD for many years now and the last time I did it was only for a few weeks before I got busy again.

The other day I was able to rest well and get some LD in without much effort. Now I want to be able to get into the LD state more regularly.
In the past, I had the most success when I could dedicate an extra hour of sleep that I didn't really need to get fully rested. I would often wake up to an alarm after 4-5 hours and be awake up to 15 minutes with a focus to LD afterwards.

Any tips for attempting LD when you might not be getting enough sleep to be fully rested most nights? :)

same case to me omnipotent :/

Hey Omni,

If your lifestyle has limits, work with them. I guess, there is an ideal of discipline, of practicing LDing every night. But if you feel restrained for sleep, find the right balance.

What kind of sleep schedule do you want to have? If you are not sleeping enough, can you find that time? Otherwise, is there one night or a few nights in the week when you can dedicate more time for sleeping?

If you can have a longer sleep night on Saturday, maybe that can be the dedicated night for using an LDing technique such as WBTB. The other nights can be different, relying on DILDs. Dream Journal, RC, set intentions before sleep.

We often talk about using different techniques for different people. But it's also relevant to choose different techniques for different nights.

What's important I think, is know why you want lucid dreaming to part of your regular experience. What about dreaming? What about sleeping? If all these are things you value, you can feel a sense of success even when you don't lucid dream. It's good to have specific attainable goals. I also encourage having a thematic goal (Sleep/dreaming) so that if you wake up remembering your dreams, if you wake up feeling rested, if you have a day where you look over your dream journal, etc, you can feel aligned with your goal. I say this so you can feel a sense of consistency with the practice even if you are not lucid dreaming every day/week.

An additional thing to try, OmnipotentTitan, is to train yourself to remember your awakenings between each REM cycle or after each dream and use that for DEILDs. I'm not sure how little sleep you're getting, though.

If you wake up during the night after REM, is DEILD preferred over using MILD. Is it more effective?

Just wanna say that if you think you need to wake up and disturb your sleep schedule to lucid dream, you absolutely don't. If you are having a really hard time with recall, setting an alarm might help to get you started, but only use it as a last resort. There are a lot of methods that people use that disrupt their sleep and I think while that's fine when used in moderation, it doesn't really work with most people with realistic schedules. I would suggest focusing on strategy's that don't require any sacrifices to sleep. Basically focusing in on the things you can do during the day in your free moments. Diligent dream journaling, and reality checking are huge here.