Originally posted by sloth

Anyway, good job on your first attempt. Is this your first attempt at LD, or just WILD?
At any rate, you did fine, but don't try to make it happen quite so hard. Have you ever tried to MAKE yourself fall asleep? Doesn't work.

-sloth
Hehe yes it is my first attempt at WILD, no it is not my first attempt to LD. I have done it a few times that I can remember in my life, albeit by accident. I have never done it with intent however I tried to MILD a couple nights and it just succeeded in keeping me awake a while. Yeah I know all about attempting to MAKE myself fall asleep. It takes me 45-60 minutes every night to fall asleep. In the past I tried to combat this only to make it take 2 hours instead. Now I just kind of figure "Meh, I'll fall asleep when I fall asleep" What I do when I am trying to sleep is just pretty much play out random scenarios in my head. Stuff you might actually dream about. It's usually pretty vivid to the point where I eventually stop thinking about what whomever I might be speaking to is going to say and they take on an existence of their own. Note that I have rarely (if ever... not sure) dreamed about the scenario I played in my head before I slept. Eventually it just becomes foggier and foggier til I fall asleep. Occasionally whilst "daydreaming" as you might call it, I will suddenly twitch, these I imagine are the hypnagogic jerks I spoke of earlier. In the end doing that has many similarities to WILD. The major difference being that in the formor method I am wanting to lose awareness, not focusing on it at all, while with WILD the object is not to lose it. As for being too excited, yeah I figured that may have been part of my problem, probably the biggest part, but hey it's a learning experience right. I'm not discouraged at all. I am actually rather excited that anything happened at all. I had fears I would just kind of lay there and be bored as heck. But from what I've experienced its rather progressive, so its not like your clueless. My biggest problems were when I lost something to focus on. For instance, after I stopped feeling the need to twitch, but before my knees started feeling pressured, there was really nothing. I wanted to wander but I forced myself to find something to focus on. I had been counting all along as I said but I decided to focus on breathing making it as steady and relaxing as possible. This worked until the next phase. Actually I realize while saying this I may be focusing too much. Perhaps... Well in the end I didn't expect it to work the first time, it's just that I came so far (at least I think) and was like "Holy Crap!" and now that I know that I can do this eventually, I just gotta perfect it. Thanks so much for your input!