The trick is NEVER to concentrate when doing SSILD. Do not attempt to see/feel anything during the cycles. They are necessary evils, just get them over with so you can go to sleep -- that's the right attitude.
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In the lucid dreaming world I often see people say things like "this makes a lot of sense to me so it's probably a good technique." I beg to differ. In fact, I often like to see it from exactly the opposite angle -- because it seems to make a lot of sense it's probably NOT a good technique. Please keep in mind we know very little about how the brain works and what consciousness/awareness truly are. In this case, the rules we see as "correct" or "make sense" may not apply at all! Techniques that are invented this way often leads to nothing.
Sageous just posted his thread on whether ADA is beneficial to LDs here:
http://www.dreamviews.com/attaining-...-lucidity.html
I still have to go back and read it after work, but briefly on the fuzziness, I sometimes experience something similar when I'm really exhausted and I have been able to transition out of the "fuzziness" by imagining a new dreamscape.
Success!
Been trying this for close to a week now and I just had my 2nd ever lucid, my 1st lucid being over a year ago.
There were a couple of differences between last nights SSILD "routine" than my previous failed attempts which I think helped.
Firstly, I was doing my ADA much more comprehensively yesterday compared to the previous days.
Secondly, the WBTB yesterday was naturally rather than due to an alarm clock. This is how it went: I went to sleep at about 10:30pm and set the alarm for 3:00am which would have meant I would wake up 4.5hrs after. But I ended up waking up at 11:57pm, feeling hot for some reason. Since my sleep was disturbed, I thought Ill just cancel the alarm, have a proper sleep and try again tomorrow. So i cancelled the alarmed. But then I naturally woke back up 4:17am needing to take a mad piss. So I went straight to the toilet and straight back but I decided I might as well do the cycles now. I did the cycles, went to sleep, and had a long and vivid lucid dream.
So what changed in my SSILD "routine" last night was that I woke up later than usual(4.17am compared to my usual 3:00am), and I also did the cycles differently. I kept reading CosmicIron saying on here that you need to do the cycles in a relaxed and not highly attentive matter but I just wasnt getting it and kept doing the cycles robotically. But last night, I decided that I would prioritize going back to sleep first and the cycles second. Meaning I was putting my main focus on going back to sleep and the cycles in the back of my head which kept me much more relaxed than usual. Of course by doing that, my mind kept drifting off but I would catch myself and continue the cycles. I ended up finishing about 3-4 decently long, albeit broken up due to my mind drifting off, cycles.
So there it is.
The main reason I posted this though is to thank CosmicIron for all your input in this thread and for introducing us to this technique. Im going to need to keep at this technique for a little longer to really have faith in it, but so far so good.
Very interesting, the stats given on the success rates are also very exciting. I will start testing this method today. :)
Hmmm I think I used this technique before unknowingly. I just recognized the dream by strange feeling that everything I feel, hear, see ha a slightly different nature than normally.
I using SSILD and he's work :)
This looks promising! I'll definitely try this one tonight. :)
Was this method ever confirmed to be more than a placebo? After scrolling through all of the pages of replies and trying this myself, it seems that it is more of a placebo than a reliable technique to use nightly.
I have been using it successfully for about 6 months. I usually only try on the weekends. I have heard some people say that is more the act of using wake back to bed than the technique but I always wake back to bed to go to the bathroom every night and that by itself is definitely not enough for me. Whether it is the fact that doing the cycles activates your mind rather than the specifics of the cycles, I don't know. I think the one where you focus on the back of your eyelids helped me get lucid when I noticed that I could see through my closed eyes. I am open to hearing arguments on that. Either way, I plan to continue using the cycles as my method of activating my mind before going back to sleep for now.
The challenge with this thread is that it is kind of buried in a sub thread that you don't normally see when scanning through the main forum sections. If you do a search (of all sections) for SSILD you will find 476 different threads. If you narrow down the results in the last month or newer there are still 30 different threads.
A placebo is something that has no real medical value but works due to perhaps psychological reasons. By this definition, you can probably say that all lucid dreaming techniques are placebos. You probably meant whether or not SsILD can be used reliably in long term. I'd say, based on my own experience and observations, it is more effective in long term than many other well-known methods. It is not difficult to find report on this forum which show people having success with this technique over a long period. On my own forum, there are more than a dozen people, myself included, who use the technique every day and succeed every time. All of these are well documented. If that's placebo, then placebo so be it. LOL
Hahašthis technique worked for me the first day (hmm night) I read about it here :D
Well that was also the last time. But hard to say, I always use more techniques together so don't really know which helped me most to attain lucidity.
Yes, that is what I meant. I do not doubt you or your technique, I just find it odd that no one on this site has really found long term success with it. I just wander about people having success with it, but when that initial excitement phase wears off they start not having success. This happened to me. I found mild success a few times with this technique (a few shorts lucids and a few FA's.) but now no matter what I do I can't find success.
Such evidence are not difficult to find on this site alone. There is a thread that people record their results over a 30-day period and you can see some amazing statistics there, for example. To get sustained success with a technique one needs to not only practice but also analyze. This applies to every known techniques, not just Ssild.
Rynkrt3, I don't know if you missed my earlier post, but I've been using it for 6 months successfully. I usually only try on the weekends because I want to go straight back to sleep after my nightly getting up for the bathroom on work nights. I was off today and tried and succeeded last night but did fail Friday and Saturday night...I think I went to bed too late those nights. I know the OP doesn't suggest it, but maybe if it is no longer working for you try tweaking it assuming you went back over the steps and we're following them and it stopped being effective for you. have you tried a shorter or a longer WBTB before trying the cycles? For me, to keep from waking up too much I tweaked it to where I basically did the three cycles together after doing the first/shorter ones separately (thanks to the tip from PennyRoyal!). :)
you know how there is a quick set of cycles and then a longer set of cycles? The longer set of cycles I actually do the eye, hearing and feeling one in the same breath over and over again for a few minutes or more. I do focus on the three cycles separately but they more flow together than being done 4-6 cycles of the eyes one before going to the sound/hearing one.