First LDs in ages, a few techniques that helped me get 4 WILDs within an hour the other night
I haven't tried to have lucid dreams in ages. I wake up several times a night naturally. After waking up about 3 times (it was around 1:30am) I woke up and retained enough awareness to see an opportunity to get lucid without putting so much effort into it that I would wake myself up and have to stay awake for a while before getting back to sleep, or really caring if I failed or not. Given that I hadn't done more than rolled a round just a bit, visualization was quite easy and leads me to the first technique I discovered to help things along involving visualization.
1) Usually around this time of night, given you have already slept at least some, when you close your eyes you will get some sort of imagery. I took whatever bits that I saw, and produced a moving picture without trying so hard that I had to micromanage what was happening in the scene in great detail to the point that the images would become choppy or frequently disappear, like if I normally try to visualize a scene when being awake. Instead what I did was guided the imagery with a few thoughts about various people being the in the scene and watching them do things, but overall the visualization was very general and low quality. It was like watching a very low quality youtube video. There were people, but it was hard to tell whether they were male or female, there were only a few colors in the scene, and most of what was important was that the imagery be this way so that it could stay constant and fluid. After long enough of letting the imagery build on itself, I sort of just "stepped" into the dream.
This led me to have my first WILD in over 2 years. After that dream, I had 3 more.
2) I induced the last 3 WILDs by tactile sensations alone. In two of the induction sequences, I had to get in the dreams after reaching REM atonia. Usually this was very fluid for me in the past, I didn't have much trouble at all. I still didn't, but it was very smooth before, this time it felt like every neuron that was in my body (as in, not my brain or spinal cord) I had to be "ripped" out of in a strange sequence. It was almost painful in a way, but not quite.
In any case, the way I was able to induce WILDs with tactile sensation was to do an exercise with my "dream" body, or non-physical body, however you want to phrase it. I would reach my arms up, so to speak, and rhythmically move my upper body (this is all with my dream body, just "visualizing" with thought-induced tactile sensations) a bit too, up and down a bit. I did it in this way so that eventually it felt like my body and the surface I was lying on was rocking like a boat. Once I got that sensation to stabilize as something that I didn't have to do, but was still happening to me, I increased the angles at which the surface would go in each direction. That is to say, I would get closer and closer to getting it to almost flip upside down, if the fulcrum of the rotating and rocking were at the base of your spine directly above your hips but slightly below the belly button. When I would go too far in once direction, I would fall. This fall would result in either going directly into a dream (as it did the first time), or "falling" into REM Atonia (like the other two).
The falling into REM Atonia was a strange feeling, once I had to transition from it into a dream. Reaching REM Atonia isn't surprisingly or odd feeling to me, I usually welcome it. Rather than what happened in the past, where I would imagine a vortex at my head or feet and get sucked into it and end up in a dream, I was still falling the entire time I was in it. In or to get in a dream, I had to make my feet and legs start to rotate and twist in such a way that they were "falling" on a different vector than the rest of my body. When I say this, I mean it was like they were again, being sucked into a black hole or a vortex, but instead as they got sucked in (very slowly I might add), the separation of my physical and non-physical body was happening. Instead of being crunched or teleported once reaching the "event horizon", so to speak, the neuronal mapping of the physical and non-physical body, the web of neurons that tied them together, were being pulled apart in every direction. The separation was, as I said, nearly painful, it felt like pulling apart two incredibly powerful magnets that I could "feel" being together, and pulling them apart made me feel great pressure in those areas. Anyway, my whole body would be sucked into the event horizon in this spiraling and then pulled apart everywhere fashion, and once all the way through, I'd be in a dream.
The first dream was the only one worth nothing especially because how much non-lucid elements were taking place in such a stable lucid environment. I was in a gym at my home town and lots of people were there, and I saw a dog on the floor (all the people were in the stands), I moved over to it and then looked at the people and they instantly grew old and died and withered apart very quickly and fluidly, I looked at the dog and it was lying on the ground and did the same thing, then looked at my hands and they followed suit. Surprisingly the dream didn't end because I was in such control, but that intro bit was pretty goddamn cool looking, lol.
Anyway, I hope the low-definition visualization and rocking dreaming body mini-techniques (idk what else to call them really) might be able to help somebody else.
