New and slightly discouraged

[turtlelover7]

Hello dreamview community, I'm new here and have been reading the forum as of late and It has really helped me with my knowledge of lucid dream methods and lucid dreams in general. I thought I was well versed in my knowledge of lucidity so I decided to try the WILD method. I have been doing numerous reality checks throughout a course of three days since I've joined this sight. And I know, lucidity may take months or years to achieve, but my WILD attempt was pretty horrible. So here is how it went. I recently went to Target, a general goods store, and bought a bottle of Natural Made B-6 vitamins. My plan was to get home by 10 and fall asleep by 10:30. I actually got home at around 10:45. I had a quick bite to eat in the car on my way home so I decided to take a tablet of the B-6 vitamins. I eventually got ready to sleep around 11:20. I set an alarm to wake me up at 4:30 during the day in hopes that I would stick to my plan of falling asleep at 10:30. Due to my poor time managing, I decided to turn the alarm off and just try to remember my dream as much as possible to practice my dream recall. I rarely wake up when I sleep so it was odd that I woke up around 2:20. I decided that this would be the opportune time to try the WILD method. I think I made several mistakes here. Instead of WBTB, I just lied in my bed and proceeded with the technique. I also had no recollection of any dream after waking up. I tried remaining perfectly still and focusing on my breathing and the inside of my eyelids. I counted up to 290 and decided I should rest and it was hopeless. I tried to fall asleep, but I couldn't stop thinking about my breathing and performing the WILD method. Mind it was about 3:10 right about now. I decided to go downstairs and get a glass of water hoping it would help clear my mind. It sort of helped and I went back to bed, but still unable to sleep. I tried WILDing once again. This time I was really concentrated, but it was windy outside and the rattle of my brother's hamsters kept distracting me. I was able to hold still and try to concentrate for nearly 2 hours. I tried and tried to go into sleep paralysis, but just couldn't. I read a thread that mentioned that falling asleep was more crucial than maintaining awareness. So I tried to fall asleep a little more than trying to concentrate on my breathing. I still couldn't sleep. I also went on my phone a lot during the sleepless hours. Eventually I just decided to give up on sleep and did my regular morning routine. Oh and my heart was beating faster than usual while I tried to WILD at first and consisted throughout the night. If anyone has any suggestions on what I could be doing, it would be much appreciated!

[MasterMind]

Welcome! EDIT: I see now that when I wrote this I thought you were WILDing at your bedtime, but I see now that I was wrong about that. Anyway I hope the post helps you. I know how it feels, I started out with WILD as well. But the thing is that you have to realize that WILDing at your bedtime is an advanced and difficult induction. But the irony in that difficulty is that it's not difficult because you aren't able to do something, it's difficult because you aren't able to do nothing! Sort of like floating in the water, when you first try it out (wthout prior knowledge) you might just start splashing around in the water and getting frustrated because you can't float. Then the person who can float will tell you to let go of trying to do something and just letting go, relax and trust that your body will do it on it's own. It's kind of the same thing for WILDing, but instead of only trusting your body, you also have to trust your mind. As you relax you'll naturally get more in more in state for transitioning into the realm of thoughts or dreams. This is a great challenge, and just as when you start floating it might be hard to know how it will feel like if you have never floated before, so you might need some training wheels at first. And that would in this example be a floating pad By getting used to both navigating and floating in the water by using a floating pad, you can later on learn to do it naturally on your own. For WILDing this floating pad would probably be an awakening, just as you would float in water by doing nothing, you'll dream by sleeping unaware. However we want to enter a dream aware, so how do we do that? By using REM sleep. Here is what I do to give myself lots of oppurtunities each night to induce awareness within a dream. (I use lots of different theories to think about in order to motivate myself, but this post will be focused on WILDing.) Waking up in REM is basically like putting on your WILD pad, and some "funny" wordplay, I use my Ipad in order to aid me as well. ^-^ Let's say you go to bed 22:45 and then you set an alarm to wake you up 04:30, tell yourself to be aware of all your awakenings and to use these awakenings to do a transition attempt. Then you'll have atleast secured one chance of transitioning if you don't wake up naturally on your own. Last night I woke up about 7 times during the night, and on one of the awakenings I visualized myself standing in a dark room, so in other words I couldn't see anything, but I could use my hands and suddenly I just felt my arms moving and I knew I was in a dream, I stepped out of the room and found myself in a big mall, a typical dream sign for me, for some reason. After this dream I woke up and the time was 02:45 So I had woke up before my set alarm! The kind of idea this little routine is based on for me is that in water you navigate by floating and swimming, in dreams and thoughts you navigate by awareness and intent. I intend myself to try to transition (in what ever way I want), on my awakenings, and I focus on staying aware. Some nights, nothing happens (but then I have a back up plan. And that is the Ipad's alarm.) and some night spontanious transitions like this occur. What I do here is to sleep unaware and let my body naturally start dreaming and instead of inducing awareness in the dream, I induce awareness in the physical state to then just relax and watch the dream world re-build in front of me. I also do a WILD attempt at my bedtime, but it's kind of complicated to explain how, because I do that in order to maintain the chemicals in my brain that governs critical thinking, so I go through the process of WILDing to make DILD easier. But only focusing on WILDing at bedtime, is very advanced because it would take you atleast 90 min NATURALLY to induce a dream, so if you do something wrong like not relaxing your mind and body or something else, it might take you hours. So the risk is not worth to take in my eyes. I hope this wasn't to random and complicated to understand. I was basically describing how I create oppurtunities to DEILD each night, which is a WILD variation. To return to what I talked about before, this is a way of trusting your body's natural induction of a dream. To do it completeley without sleep in between is done by trusting your mind and that is achieved through meditation. And well since the result is the same and it's still naturally induced I prefer the training wheels for now.

[turtlelover7]

Wow thanks for such a detailed and helpful response! I will try this way of being aware physically. So what your saying is that WILDing is much harder to achieve than DEILDing?

[MasterMind]

You're welcome! In a sense they are variations of the same thing, it's just that I usually call the process of entering a dream consciously without prior sleep for WILD and the process of returning to a dream after an awakening for DEILD. It's a bad habit I guess, because a DEILD is a WILD and a WILD is a direct way to enter a dream consciously. So I hope you didn't got confused by that, I should call a WILD without prior sleep for, well a WILD without prior sleep. But my whole point of this post was probably to encourage you to focus on the DEILD variation of WILD because it's much easier and awarding. So read up on the DEILD method and ask if you need any help.

[Sivason]

Welcome to Dream Views! This is the place to be for anyone wanting to learn how to lucid dream. The Dream Guide team is here to help you navigate the forum and answer questions. We all have 3 green stars above our avatar. Click on our user name and you can then select private message if you have a question, or you can start new threads. Don't worry about starting threads that have been started before, just try it out, if it ends up in the wrong place one of us can move it for you. One thing you can do in a post is place a link to another thread. I have done this below. You can click on the colored words to see the new thread. Start with this extra basic one, it will help you read the acronyms in other posts, Help With Acronyms For Complete Beginners After that one the very first thing you should do is check out basic tutorials. This one covers most of the terms you will see members using in much more depth, so start here, The Beginner's Guide to Lucid Dreaming Also be sure to check out the DVA Dream Views Acadamy, click on this link to get there, DV Academy. Matte , our Dream Guide team leader runs a general lucid dreaming class, and you can join in contests where you gain points for dreams you have. General Lucid Dreaming (Matte87) Gab , another Dream Guide runs a class that is very valuable to beginners on MILD/DILD, which is by far the best method to start with. DILD (Hukif and gab) Finally as far as the DVA stuff goes, there is a class on introduction to lucid dreaming. This is a great place if you are just starting out and need a little personal help. Intro Class (OpheliaBlue, RareCola, CanisLucidus, Chimpertainment, Xanous) I hope to save you some time by giving you a link to a thread we all put together on the topic Sleep Paralysis. There has been so much misinformation and confusion on this topic, that after a few days on the sight, you would surely run into confusing statements refering to SP. Save yourself some frustration and read this post if you want to know about SP, Sleep Paralysis Explained Now, on the lighter side, you may be excited to learn to fly! Here is a thread where people explain how they went about learning to fly, Can U Fly/ How Did You Learn? Then just for a laugh here is a thread where people list all the things they want to do in an LD. It is mostly light hearted and supposed to be funny, 1000 things to do in a lucid dream!!! Have fun and good luck with your dreaming!