Thread: Hello Everybody

Welcome!

Your recall is awesome. 3-4 dreams per night is very very good since you dream once (one block) per 90 minutes or so.

For the WILD, the thing is you want to keep your mind awake while making your body go to sleep. That's all.
There are relaxation techniques, meditation you can do, concentration is involved, and experiences related to what happens before you actually get into the dream are explained. That's all what's in the tutorials. If you can keep your mind awake and make your body go to sleep, you've succesfully WILDed!

Hey, welcome welcome That definitely seems like fairly decent recall for someone just starting out, a lot of people have trouble just getting their recall up so it seems like you're already in good shape!

The differences between the techniques can be a bit confusing. A WILD is basically going to be any lucid dream where you lay down to go to bed, but you keep your mind just barely conscious and mentally aware. Not too much, or you won't fall asleep, and not too little, or you'll fall asleep just like any other night. Do it properly, and you'll retain that consciousness right into a dream, so you'll be lucid from the moment the dream starts. There are a zillion guides out there, because with the only criteria being 'keep your mind awake' there are infinite methods of doing so, and it really depends I guess on you personally. Just try to read various WILD techniques and see if any of them seem to really make sense to you, perhaps you'll have an affinity for whatever method/advice someone posted. You can find them in the tutorials section, by checking out links people have in their signatures where they detail their own personal technique, by browsing the forums, by googling, by searching other websites, etc. The main 'categories' are the vanilla WILD, simply keeping your mind busy with some task like counting, VILD, which involves visualizing (or just flat-out imagining, not necessarily limited to sight, ideally you want to use all senses) something until you've distracted yourself for long enough that you start dreaming what you're imagining, HIT, where you focus on hypnagogic imagery and it becomes a dream, and the Attention to Body techniques, where you focus on your body (which you generally don't do with the others). In some cases people will experience Hypnagogic Hallucinations, and essentially you can use this to transition through just like in HIT, and some others will slip into sleep paralysis.

MILD, on the other hand, is a very specific method that was invented by Stephen LaBerge. Short of reading about it in his book EWOLD, I recommend reading what I wrote up on it here. I basically felt that it had to be written up because every version I could find online was atrocious and left out what, according to him, are the key components of this technique.

A couple more fun little things to help you get started. Most important is to just consider what the questions are asking and why that might be important for learning to lucid dream. Keep working on becoming familiar with your dreams and boosting your dream recall, and really consider your sleep habits and sleep hygiene and how that might factor into really learning to LD! And, of course, if you have any really specific questions, ask away!

What's Better for Me, WILD or DILD? Personally, I feel that unless a person has some sort of physiological predisposition, like they suffer from frequent episodes of sleep paralysis, or somehow have a history of unintentionally WILDing, that those new to LDing should focus more on the DILD techniques. On the whole in my opinion they seem to have a higher and more consistent success rate than WILD. But, this isn't always true. The best thing you can do is read absolutely everything for yourself, practice each technique that sounds probable to you for a serious amount of time (2-3 weeks per technique), and then move on if you're not having success with one of them.
What DILD Tech is Best for You?

Took the quiz in your post, Shift. My Result:*Reality Checks to Increase Awarness. Already doing that, so I guess I don't have to change much. I've got some pretty damn weird dreams, hopefully I'll catch that and RC. Last night was everything from WWI zombies, the absolute WORST EMTs ever, and of course a giant videogame style deathmatch.