Quote Originally Posted by ColdRusalka View Post
So I've been going for about three weeks, my dream recall is way up. I've been doing WBTB pretty religiously, but simply. Any tips or readings on how to get WBTB to work better for me? Check out my workbook if it helps.
Hi ColdRusalka! Congratulations on the increased dream recall. That's a very important step on the way toward regular lucid dreaming, so you're doing important work there. I'd say that it's one of the most important foundation skills for LD.

The direction of my advice would depend on what kind of trouble you're having. If you're having trouble falling back asleep, I'd push things more in the direction of keeping WBTB shorter and working to really relax your mind as you drift back to sleep. For situations like this, clearing your mind and employing tricks like backward counting should be helpful.

Now if the issue is more that the results just don't come like you'd hope/expect, the most important thing would be to focus on the idea of lucid dreaming while you're up and during the time you're falling asleep. Spend that time thinking about lucid dreaming or reading about it, and as you fall back asleep, let yourself marinate in the idea that the very next thing you experience is going to be a lucid dream.

The idea is to really saturate your mind with the idea of lucid dreaming as you prepare to go back to sleep so that it becomes more and more likely for the idea of lucid dreaming to occur to you at the right time. When this notion strikes you at a moment of high awareness / high recall, you are very likely to become lucid at that point.

The second thing you can do in this situation is play with a longer WBTB period. Stephen LaBerge's experiments at the Lucidity Institute showed that longer periods of wakefulness led to an increased likelihood of lucidity in general. In some cases, the difference was dramatic! Here's the study:
Wakefulness Makes Lucidity More Likely

Ophelia showed me this one a while back and it was eye-opening. A lot of people do well with short WBTBs, of course, but this shows that a longer period could be well worth experimenting with, particularly if the results haven't been what you'd hoped.

So overall: play with WBTB length, and spend that time carpet-bombing your brain with the concept of lucidity. That makes it so much more likely for your brain to remember, however vaguely, that you were about to have a lucid dream. Good luck!