Thread: New Member Introduction from Leo

I see you’re having difficulties with this WILD. I’m no expert myself (yet!) but perhaps I could be of some help by sharing the way I do WILD.

I seldom do WILD on its own, as in waking up in the middle night and trying to focus my way into a LD. My previous experiences have caused me to give up on doing WILDs like that as I easily lose concentration and fall back asleep. Consequently I combine WILD with the WBTB technique. So I wake up by alarm around 5 or 6 hours upon first sleeping, recall any dreams and write them down, wait until I’ve been awake for about 15-30mins then go back to bed (I don’t recommend just 5 minutes out of bed, unless you’re very awake already). However, my visualisation skills are often not the best at this time and so I use what I call “visual aids”. By visual aids I don’t mean anything fancy. They are simply PowerPoint presentations containing pictures I’ve collected over time of where I want to go in my dreams. So I look over those for about 5mins before I go back to bed hoping they will burn into my mind (the screen shouldn’t be too bright btw, that might ruin things). I found this usually helps me with visualising dream scenes as I lie in bed waiting to be in them (some people call this VILD).

Ah now tossing and turning is no good. If it is really difficult for you to stay still (as in near impossible) then maybe WILD is pointless for you and you may want to focus on MILDs or DILDs instead. Otherwise you could look into meditation - I hardly practice what I’m preaching here but I definitely will be doing so regularly asap! Meditation is good because it will help you focus of course and ignore unnecessary distractions, perfect for lucid dreaming. All you need is some ambient music to practice breathing and clearing your mind of clutter.

By the way, your dream signs seem very exciting compared to mine. I’d rather not bore you with what mine are, lol.

One more thing I noticed: Where I spend a lot of time watching TV and/or movies and playing video-games (and I'm sure I'm not the only one here with that issue) it seems like my dreams shift perspective more often than not. In last night's dreams I was, at one point, driving, and feared running out of gas. I suddenly realized that I didn't need to worry about it, though, because I was "actually" playing either "Grand Theft Auto IV" or "Just Cause 2" and in the dream I even questioned which I was playing without questioning how I could be playing a game and not remember which it was. It shifted directly from first person POV to a third person, over-the-top unrealistic video-game and I never thought to question it. Perhaps I would benefit from increased focus on awareness during video-game play or movie viewing or whatever.