my attempt at WILDing

I will say sorry in advance if you are getting bored of these questions which would be understandable as it looks like there are a lot of nearly the same ones :?, so, sorry for that :P

Hey, I've been looking around this site for a few days and I've been interested in lucid dreaming for a few years for several reasons but I have only just started to try to consciously start one.

So I read up on all the techniques I could find and WILD seemed to be the best and most interesting one for me which I have tried twice now (but I won't talk about the first as I didn't do that right and I know why) however, it is really hard to tell if it is working or not as I have no first hand experience of it already, so now I will explain what happened.

I went to my bedroom shortly after 2pm (I woke up at around 9am) to try to WILD during a nap which I think is fine. I lay on my back although I do not sleep like that usually, my sleeping positions would be extremely hard to WILD as I actually have one arm halfway in the air xD and I just did the usual don't move your body at all thing. I did swallow several times as I can't really stop myself for that long but I did try to make them as natural as possible and think I succeeded in that.

I got slight twitches throughout the experience and I didn't have light patterns in front of my eyes as such but the blackness seemed to lighten although it was still black. At random intervals my body felt a bit like it was moving through air and going at slight angles but this always stopped after around 30 seconds. After a while I started to kind of dream (no SP) but I was obviously still awake and it was only for a few seconds at a time before I became normal again. These dreams were not lucid dreams or even normal dreams, they were more like closed eye hallucinations which my eyes followed although they were still closed.

Does anybody know what exactly was happening? Because I don't have a clue :P

Edit - Oh, and also, sometimes part of my body felt like it was lifting upwards when in reality it wasn't moving

I did have two cold and flu tablets not long before I did this but I'm pretty sure that they wouldn't of affected anything and I havn't felt any different after taking them.

Ok, I just read Yoshi's WILD technique and it appears like those closed eye hallucinations are meant to happen but I thought you were meant to get SP before then.

Though it still seemed different

Those images are called Hypnogogia. They simply are visual and auditory hallucinations that happen whi8le falling asleep. More times than not we don't remember this phase, but it is a marker in the WILD technique.

Ok, thanks :D

So if I carried on for a while longer do you think I would of had a lucid dream?

You would've at least gotten closer.

Hypnogogics are the early stages of the WILD. The auditory hallucinations, coupled with the soon to come Sleep Paralysis, can be the hardest part to get through, despite being very close to achieving a Dream State.

Congratulations on getting just that much closer. :goodjob:

Thanks both of you, unfortunately I tried it again and got stuck at the same stage but my hopes are not lowered in the slightest as I can use WBTB as well which for me should be very effective as I always have a dream that I can remember fully and I am very slightly conscous during these times just not enough to become lucid.

Combined with WILD as well, it should be easier. It's harder at the moment anyway because my sore throat and cold makes swallowing naturally impossible sometimes.

You could try to set that hypnogogia into motion by imagining walking around a scene, you might feel like your not actually hallucinating it but don't discourage yourself from doing it, eventually you'll find them easier to focus on, and they will stabilize to some degree. You might beable to get them strong enough that you will make your mind comfterable enough to reverse your focus (usualy works best when you wake up and don't move at all), which means instead of focusing externaly, you will focus internally and go into dreaming.

This might not work, but just giving you ideas so you can find what works best.