Hello you, the person who is reading this =) Are you dreaming? (do a reality check)

I'm here to introduce myself, my name is Lucas and I'm an artist. I usually do illustrations and concept art for games.
I learned about LD recently and I was really fascinated by all the possibilities. I wanna dive in this fantasy world and, if possible, bring some new amazing ideas to my illustrations and art.

I had few Lucid dreams before in my life, I became aware that I was dreaming spontaneously, but I woke up shortly every time. I thought that happened because I was about to wake up naturally, that's why I never even questioned the possibility of a "Lucid State" thinking that it was a waking up process. But recently, when I learned that it was a "thing", I was mindblown by it and wanted to be a Lucid Dreamer.

First video I watched was on a youtube channel called Koi's corner or something. I also learned about "world of lucid dream" by Rebecca Turner... but... shortly I started to listen to Nicholas Newport videos =(. It seemed so informative and started to try all he said there and got in a state similar to SP, but it was all wrong.

Luckily I found this forum to discover that all he says is bs.

But I still find that is hard to take those ideas out of my head as if I was contaminated by it.

Well, after I realized that, I tried some WBTB, and it all failed. Then I stop trying to LD for a bit and just kept a Dream Journal to help increase my dream recall and I also tried to fix a schedule for my sleep, since I heard that it would help to improve my REM cycles. Also I started to do some RC during the day, to give myself a chance of DILD (which is hard, because no matter how absurd is the dream I still don't question it). Meanwhile I started to read some posts here in the forum to get more familiar with the subject.

Well, I'm keeping my Journal for more than a month, did feel some improvements on my Dream recall, there was a time I realized that I was dreaming but I woke up a few moments after... (I can tell about that later).

Problem is that, now that I kept this routine I wanted to try some of the more active methods like WILD, WBTB, MILD and also another one that I found on the internet called FILD (that people said it was very effective and easy), but every time I try something like that, I just can't sleep.

During the attempt I seem to forget how "I used to sleep", if I try to say conscious/aware I just can't sleep at all. For example, there was one time that I woke up naturally in the middle of the night like 3 am, felt dizzy/sleepy, but went to the bathroom, came back and thought "I'll try some MILD now" and all I did is to stay awake to have a miserable working day because I was exhausted.

If you manage to read until here, can you give me some advice, what should I do, what I'm doing wrong or what could be the method for me?

Thank you very much! My introduction was also an attempt of troubleshooting.

=D