Thread: Questions on WILD'ing!

The reason you are ment to stay awake long enough is so that you can make yourself more aware to prepare yourself for the WILD, when you've just up you may not be as aware, you will be tired and maybe a bit groggy, if you try after waking up you may fall asleep easily, but don't let it stop you experimenting

WBTB is employed because it schedules your WILD at a time when it's most likely to be successful. When you try to WILD at the beginning of the night, you're fighting more of an uphill battle because you're less likely to have a solid, vivid dream at the onset of sleep. However, when you perform WBTB, you're doing so at a time that's closer to the longer REM (dream) periods of the night. That means that you're more likely to succeed with your WILD.

Remember, WILD is a method of going directly into a dream - more specifically, a lucid dream - from the waking state. So, to become lucid directly from the waking state, the ideal conditions are those in which you start already at or near a dream cycle.

Dreams which occur at the onset of the night's sleep are generally short, not-so-vivid and quite fleeting because they are primarily of the hypnagogic variety, as opposed to being "true" dreams.

In short, combining WBTB with WILD gives you the best odds of success. And if you fail the WILD, you still have a greater chance of a DILD.

Like everybody else has said, your first REM phase doesn't normally occur until 90-100 minutes after sleep onset. Unless you are able to alter your initial sleep staging (i.e. skip the original descent into delta sleep and back up to the first REM stage, and instead just go straight into REM from waking), your body naturally progresses from wake through the non-REM stages, then back up to REM. If you can alter your sleep that way, you could potentially have a WILD at the beginning of the night. This would also hold true if you have a certain sleep disorder that sends you into sleep-onset REM. But, again, those first REM periods are shorter than the ones toward the end of your sleep, so they're not ideal WILD territory.

When you do a WBTB, you wake yourself up in the middle of sleep (or more toward the end), at a time when your REM periods are longer and therefore closer together - they still start every 90 minutes or so, but they last longer, so the end of one is closer to the beginning of the next. And since you've already had a good amount of restorative sleep, your body isn't as concerned with going through the non-REM stages, so you can "force" yourself to go from waking brain activity directly into REM sleep.