Hey guys,
Well I studied lucid dreaming in my psychology of consciousness last year and I was actually chatting with a friend yesterday who actively does it. So last night when going to bed I took his guidelines and used my breathing as a sort of anchor to keep my consciousness alert while my body fell asleep. Anyways, what started as tingling turned into a sort of numbing feeling, and then a great blackness spread throughout my visual field and I had a sensation of falling or spinning wildly through space, all the while still focusing on my breathing and suppressing any deeper thinking. Eventually I lost all bodily spatial orientation, but whenever an image or vision would appear I found it very difficult to enter, form or sustain it, as my conscioussness would just abruptly snap back out of it and back to that transition phase. Eventually (after what seemed like only 15 minutes) I gave up and opened my eyes, and 2 hours had actually passed. Is passing through this transitory phase just something that comes with practice?