Thank you for reading.

I've been faithfully following the very clear methods on dreamviews.com about lucid dreaming, starting from step 1. My dream journal is thick with vivid dream accounts considering that I've started very recently, and my dream signs are numerous.

Basically, my dream recall is very healthy and I think I'm just on the verge to begin to regularly have lucid dreams.

But I discovered a major problem. As I lie to sleep, I do all the usual things like talk to myself about what I'm going to do during my dreams and what things I'm going to work on in order to get closer to lucid dreaming, and then I try very hard to really relax. But for some reason, ever since I've started this passage to lucid dreaming, it's become very very hard to actually fall asleep. This has never happened before; my sleeping habits are very normal and falling asleep is generally not a problem for me.

I've figured that maybe my new concentration before entering sleep is holding me back from true, deep relaxation. But now that it's hard to sleep, I just become frustrated with the whole situation, and then my priorities change from entering my dreams with a certain amount of alertness to now I just want to freakin' get to sleep in the first place! So I feel this frustration is definitely hindering my ability to bring in more consciousness during dreams.

I also followed the instructions on one of the sections of dreamviews.com where it said to picture your thoughts as floating clouds, going from one to the next. When that doesn't really work, I try to just picture myself in a place that's totally relaxing to me. That didn't work either. I'm running out of ideas.

Lucid dreamers, did you have this problem when you first began training? Am I doing something wrong? Am I truly concentrating too much? Do I really have to wait for two hours in bed with my eyes closed before I actually fall under while attempting to lucid dream?