Swimming to increase vividness
I tried to WILD this morning for the second time and it again didn't work, but I think I got very close, and experienced some strange things.
Sometime after I fell asleep, though, I had a dream in which I was talking to my boyfriend online, and he said something that made me feel horrible, something that I often feel in real life, but in the dream it was exaggerated. It seemed that, for some reason, the intensity of the feeling made me realize that I was dreaming. As soon as I realized it, I began sinking in my dream-chair and everything instantly went black. I felt a buzzing sensation in my mind for a few seconds before waking up.
I also had a semi-lucid dream sometime later which I felt was fading and dull. There happened to be a small pool of water near me, so I jumped into it and started swimming. That swimming sensation, of using my entire body to swim, immersing myself with water, feeling it all over my body and using all of my muscles to swim, brought instant clarity to the dream world and worked way better than the handrubbing or spinning techniques ever did for me. The problem was, it became too vivid, and I ended up falling back into a non-lucid dream. That's the first time that's ever happened to me that I've remembered. In the past, my lucid dreams have ended with waking up due to the dream fading out. I think dream swimming might be the ultimate way to increase vividness.
