My own variation of WBTB. Bon apetit!

[Fitz]

The method that I worked out is a modification of the classic WBTB. A reverse WBTB, you might say. It's also less demanding, it seems. And as an extra bonus, you get to have a snack Before I elaborate on how I came up with my method - and bore you to death - let me lay down the basics of what you need to do. 1. Go to sleep earlier than you usually do. Two hours earlier would be perfect. It helps a lot if you're really tired upon going to bed. That way you fall asleep pretty much instantly. What I do to achieve that is sleep two hours less than usual on the day before - so my body's trying to compensate in getting more sleep. 2. Wake up two hours before you have to/want to get up. If you're able to "tell yourself" to wake up at a specific time, that's great. If you can't, I guess an alarm clock is an option, but for me personally, the sound comes as too much of a shock for me every time and I can't fall back asleep. What I do is drink some water/juice before sleep so that I have to get up to relieve my bladder 3. Get up and go to the fridge. Take a bite of something sweet - like, a chocolate cookie - and a few sips of something sour - like an apple juice (EDIT: found a thread about this: http://www.dreamviews.com/community/....php?p=1208250) or orange juice. You only need a BITE of that cookie, and just a few sips of the juice - a quarter of a glass tops. It's also important that your bladder is empty (sorry for the physiology details, but it IS a part of this, so bear with me), so that you don't have to get up and pee the moment you go back to bed. 4. You go back to bed pretty much right away and go back to sleep. Simple, right? You don't even have to stay up before going back to sleep again, as you do in the classic WBTB. Now, if you're not bored, let me tell you my reasoning behind this method and how it emerged. Who knows, maybe some of the details and observations will help you improve your own techniques? Why go to sleep earlier? Well, the reason why WBTB doesn't work for me is that I can't go back to sleep once I've been up for more than five minutes. My body just switches to "ON" mode and will continue working at full capacity for another 8 hours or so. Regardless of how much sleep I had - eight hours or two hours - come 8 AM, I'm up and ready to go. I got used to that in college. I could even go on without sleep if I had to. And now I have steady working hours as well, so the waking time is the same every day. What does vary is my bedtime. On some days it's midnight, on some days I'm falling asleep in front of the tv at quarter past 9M. I tend to sleep 8 hours on average. What I noticed, however, is that if I sleep longer, my dream recall is waaay better (I can remember pretty much everything) and dream signs come up more easily and seem to be more obvious. Why wake up and get up, then? Because it does seem waking up and going back to bed promote lucidity by interrupting the cycle. Why go back to sleep so soon, then? Can't say anything beside the fact that if staying up longer prevents me from falling asleep again, then staying up for as short a period as possible is the only option. That method also seems to cause false awakenings a lot. Most of the LD's I got that way were false awakenings - even if I woke up on the bus instead of my own bed. A lot of times I "woke up" to go pee - time and time again, before I REALLY woke up. A lot of you experienced that, I guess. It is one of the main reasons for false awakenings. Which brings me to another point. Why eat and drink a little before you go back to sleep. Two reasons. One: because if a full bladder helps you in having false awakenings - fill it up! Two: because maybe - I'm no nutritionist, so I can't say - something in that juice or that cookie stimulates your brain. Some of my LD's started with a... sudden awareness. Some sort of an abrupt halt or "awakening" - and realizing this isn't real. The sort of "Now wait a minute...!" feeling. I had this one nightmare in which I was running away from something, and heading for the exit - and when I reached it, everything as if froze. It was like finishing a level in a game: one second there are monsters chasing me as I run for the door - and the next, I'm outside, and there's nothing around me. Aaaand the image is super-clear and so 3D it just struck me as weird. This recurring feeling led me to believe there's something that triggers my awareness. Maybe it's the bladder giving me the first subtle pang of pain, not strong enough to wake me up, but enough to let me know I will have to, in some time, not to wake me too brutally. Or maybe it's the metabolized sugar? As I said, I have no proof for that - but it's a pattern I noticed. I'd have dry spells of weeks, even a month and a half without a single LD and very VERY poor dream recall - but when I had something sweet and something sour (sweet/sour, to be more exact) a few hours before getting up in the morning, even if I didn't get an LD, I could recall every dream and they were all vivid and FUN. I'm not sure how much of it is chemistry, and how much a conditioned response, a sense of a ritual being fulfilled - but it works. Not EVERY SINGLE TIME, but most of the time. It helped me get the most amazing LD's. This is also how I got my first LD since I started really practicing about a year ago. I had no success for a couple of weeks of doing dream recall, dream journals, visualizing, reality checks, WBTB, FILD, etc etc. THEN after a super stressful day at work, 12 hours straight, I lay in bed, unable to fall asleep, rolling from side to side, for hours and hours, grumbling and replaying the whole day in my head over and over. At about 4 AM or so, I got up and got some water to drink, because I was dying of thirst. That didn't help much, so I downed another glass. Then a whole orange. And THEN some tea. Theeeeen I went back to bed-- --and woke up on a bus. It looked like I just missed my bus stop. I shot up from my seat and got out of the bus on the next bus stop. It didn't bother me at all that it was in the middle of a huge lawn. Busses do that all the time, right? Then I started descending some stone steps - and at some point I realized they're huge, like two or three feet tall each, and thought to myself how ridiculous it is to make such huge stair for people. At which point it dawned on me: it must be a dream! Hand check! My hand was glowing orange. Ergo: a dream! Yeehaw! Soooo the first thing I did was try flying, of course. I got off the ground easily, as soon as I thought about it. Some say that while it's the first thing people want to try out, it's also the hardest to do, because you have to realize rules of physics don't apply. I think I had that past me at that point. I had an LD a couple of times before - the only difference being that I didn't know about dream sings. Or that flying was supposed to be difficult :lol So I flew befoe - by flapping my jacket like wings! And now I flew again. Soon enough my dream was over, because I got over-excited and then - distracted. But I had an LD! It was amazing! Bored to death yet? Well, I'll end it here, anyway. I'm brain dead. And thirsty! Questions? Thoughts? Theories? Don't be shy