Questions of an Unexperienced Dreamer

[Folles]

Hello, folks. It's been a while since I last visited this community. Much has happened to me since then in regards to lucid dreaming, although I still haven't managed to have anything but small moments of lucidity in a few of my dreams. Though I must admit I did not dedicate myself to the matter as much as I could either, so this time I am willing to give it a more focused try. Either way, about my experiences, they were mostly failures. I did not focus on specific techniques, I just mainly tried to keep on my mind that I was about to enter a dream, and that I was supposed to remember that it was just a dream. It actually worked to some extend a few times. The first time, when I realized that I was dreaming, I was so excited about the idea of having a LD that I actually woke up because of the strong excitement about it. A few other times ended up with a slight moment in which I could manipulate my dreams to some extent. I could fly in one of those dreams - after being aware that it was a dream - but the flight was terribly slow and clumsy. I felt too heavy to go too high, and I was scared about falling down, likely not totally believing that it was all but a dream. Anyways, such moments usually are brief, and I always end up being distracted with the dream as a whole and forget that it's just a dream after all. One of my recent tries had me end up stuck in a nightmare with a gazillion false awakenings. It was horrible. I would wake up, realize that it was a dream, but as soon as I began flying around I would wake up again. I woke up so many times, and it is quite hard to tell which one of those awakenings actually happened and which happened while dreaming. I would wake up, fly through the window, wake up again and stumble upon a horrid three-headed dog on my bedroom's door, wake up again and see weird blurred moving colors on the wall, among other weird things that happened in that night. But indeed, I lost in the end, I ended up embracing the dream after all, resisting just had me suffer more. It is rather funny though, it seems that my mind plays tricks on me, and even mocks me sometimes. For real, as laughable as it might seem, I've already dreamed that I was talking to a few friends about lucid dreaming. Yes, talking about lucid dreaming in a dream, and talking about how stupid it is not to realize that you are dreaming. Oh, the irony. And yes, it happened more than once. Anyways, to the questions. I now want to try the good and old WILD technique, albeit my only experience with sleep paralysis was definitely not a good one. 1. How long (on average?) does it take to induce sleep paralysis? Yesterday I spent quite a while laying on my bed and not moving a muscle, trying to focus on my breath, although I couldn't help it but be distracted a little bit with some other things. Although I did feel that my senses were getting somewhat disconnected from my body, nothing happened for many minutes, and I ended up moving my arm in the end. I tried it again, but this time I was far too tired to resist and lost consciousness quickly. 2. How lucid are you when you enter sleep paralysis? Really, I want to know that it is just sleep paralysis, and that I do not have to fear the hallucinations when they show up. My first experience with it was not induced (it happened a few years ago), but it scared me a LOT, and I would hate to have it happen that way again. I am willing to take the risk once more, but I don't want to end up stuck in a terrible situation again, I just want to have beautiful dreams. I am not hoping to have it work right away, but I want to have some signals that I am progressing to some extent. Hopefully with some practice I may manage to have a couple LDs every month. And sorry, for I know those questions have probably already been asked before. But I also felt like sharing with you the small progress I've had on the subject, so I really wanted to create a new thread about it. Thanks for the help!

[BigFan]

1. How long (on average?) does it take to induce sleep paralysis? Yesterday I spent quite a while laying on my bed and not moving a muscle, trying to focus on my breath, although I couldn't help it but be distracted a little bit with some other things. Although I did feel that my senses were getting somewhat disconnected from my body, nothing happened for many minutes, and I ended up moving my arm in the end. I tried it again, but this time I was far too tired to resist and lost consciousness quickly. To be honest, I haven't fully experienced SP. I have gotten to the point where I couldn't feel my hands, had a dream scene playing in my head and feel some heaviness, numbness, chest becoming colder with every breath, etc.... but not full on SP. What I can tell you though is that it's better to try to get into SP using a WBTB(Wake back to bed). REM increases as the time you sleep increases, thus, waking up between 5-6hr would be the best place to try to WILD. I awake up at 5am, get out of bed, do some simple stress and then go back to sleep focusing on my attempt to WILD. 2. How lucid are you when you enter sleep paralysis? Really, I want to know that it is just sleep paralysis, and that I do not have to fear the hallucinations when they show up. My first experience with it was not induced (it happened a few years ago), but it scared me a LOT, and I would hate to have it happen that way again. I am willing to take the risk once more, but I don't want to end up stuck in a terrible situation again, I just want to have beautiful dreams. One thing that has been repeated over and over and that makes sense to me is that SP works on expectations, so, if you get scared, you will get bad hallucinations. My advice would be to just relax when trying to enter SP. Listen to the sounds, etc.... and just relax, no use getting worried about it because it'll only get worse. There is a WILD thread in the research section. I would check it out, it has logs of ppl trying to WILD for 90 days. Reading through that would give you an idea of what ppl do. I would also look into Yoshi's WILD technique

[Hukif]

Welcome to DV! 1.- Depends on the person, if you try it after first going to bed though, it can take hours and not happen... I hear that the average after waking up in the night is like, 15mins? 2.- Well, you can change the hallucinations if you wan't to, like imagine something funny instead of something scary, pretty much what BigFan said. And for a tutorial on WILD: http://dreamviews.com/community/showthread.php?t=66238