Introduction along with some questions

I've been interested in lucid dreaming for awhile now, but I've never really stuck with it enough to be any good at it. I probably got interested in it when I was about 10-13 (somewhere around there), and I'm pretty sure I had one dream back then where I found out I was dreaming but I wasn't able to control anything. I'm almost 21 now and I'd like to be able to LD consistently.

I've had 2 LDs a couple months ago, each time was kinda similar - I woke up in the morning after a dream, went back to bed, but I was more prepared when I went back to bed and the next time I "woke up," I checked the watch next to my bed, which was flying through numbers and let me know I had a false awakening. I had a little bit of control, and each dream probably only lasted a couple of minutes.

I've been checking out a bunch of tutorials on here and I don't really know where to start. I was hoping someone could give me some ideas about what method might work well for me, since it seems like there are so many techniques out there. Right now I have plenty of time to sleep in on the weekend, but I work Monday-Friday so I'm usually getting between 5-8 hours of sleep during the week. During the week, it would be tough to do anything involving waking up in the middle of the night then going back to bed.

I've started doing RCs (pinching my nose and counting my fingers) and I kind of tried WILDing the last 2 nights, without much success. The first night I was just focusing on my breathing before I went to sleep, trying to put myself in sleep paralysis. I got to the point where my body felt heavy and my eye lids would shut, but it felt weird and I ended up waking myself up. Last night I woke myself up after about 5 hours of sleep, stayed up for 20 minutes, then tried to focus on my breathing again, but I was too tired and fell right back asleep.

Anyways, that's probably enough rambling, just wanted to give everyone a feel for what I've been doing. Any suggestions would be appreciated, I'm mainly wondering if there is one specific method I should try, or if I should experiment with a few different ones. Also, would any supplements like Melatonin be recommended? Thanks for reading, I look forward to speaking with you all.

Welcome to Dreamviews :).

Generally, you should try out each method to see which one is best for you. I would recommend trying either DILD (Dream Induced Lucid Dream) or MILD (Mnemonic Induced Lucid Dream) if you're building up your reality checks, as these can help to become lucid in the dream. I'd recommend trying DEILD (Dream-Exit Induced Lucid Dream) first before you go on to try WILD (Wake Induced Lucid Dream).

Basically, all techniques are variants of DILD and WILD; the lucid dream is induced while either awake, or dreaming. MILD uses repetition to make you remember to do something during a dream. For example, many people use a mantra while falling asleep, like "I will have a lucid dream" over and over in their head. DEILD is similar to WILD, in that when you wake up from a dream, you first go into SP (Sleep Paralysis). If you're aware when you wake up, you can immediately enter another dream, effectively WILDing, but you don't have to go through the process of reaching SP.

As for supplements, I wouldn't recommend using any. However, if you want to find out about them, take a look in the Lucid Aids forum, located in the Attaining Lucidity forum. Or click the link below.

Lucid Aids

If you have any other questions, feel free to ask!

ShockWave.

Thanks Shockwave, I appreciate the advice. I think my main problem with DILD is I don't remember a whole lot of dreams right now so I'm not sure how many opportunities I'll have to try it. I've just got a dream journal so hopefully that will help. I also downloaded a lucid dreaming app that will play a voice during the night telling me I'm dreaming, so maybe that will prompt me to do some reality checks the next time I dream.

I'll probably focus on MILDs and DILDs during the week, since I won't have time to wake up in the middle of the night, then on the weekend I might try out WILDs and DEILDs. Hopefully I'll be able to figure out a way to do this consistently.