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Stage 0: Awake
I start off by trying the WBTB method (sleep, set an alarm to interrupt your sleep, get up and walk around and do stuff for about 5 minutes, then go lay back down) and that seems to help. I lay down in my bed on my back with my spine straight. I close my eyes and start counting breaths. After ten seconds, my breathing rate drops. After about a minute, I can feel all of my body's muscles relaxing. In another minute or so, they'll all be relaxed all the way.
Stage 1
Now I'm all relaxed and the darkness is beginning to dawn on me. My senses are still all wired up though, and I can feel my chest going up and down as I breathe consciously. I can still barely hear the sounds of cars driving by in the distance and sometimes my eyes move around in their sockets like they're looking for something but there's nothing to be seen. Relaxing the brain is the key to getting to the next stage from here.
Stage 2:
This is when the itchies and twitchies start to come. I have to fight them off tooth and nail. It's a little bit tough to do, but if you focus on the specific body area that is itching or threatening to move, and just think "relax, relax, relax" then it'll die down and go away without your muscles tensing up or you involuntarily scratching or rubbing or whatever. If you DO succumb to the urge to scratch or move a muscle, then you will find that your brain tends to slip out of Stage 2 and you end up back in Stage 1 and have to go through this all over again. The eyes also relax and stop moving in this stage.
Stage 3:
After maybe 5 minutes (it used to be a lot longer, like 15-20 minutes when I first started) of NOT moving anything, my body will begin to tingle. It's kind of similar to the "pins and needles" feeling you get when your arm (or butt) falls asleep, for example, but it's certainly not the exact same feeling. This tingling carries a little bit of pleasantness along with it, a pleasantness that doesn't tell the brain "hey I should move my arm 'cuz the blood is cut off from it". It's the feeling of your body falling asleep before your brain does. At this point, the senses begin to "fail". Hearing becomes "farther away" and more echoey. In my mind I know that I am still quite in my bed and in my body for now, however. In this stage my eyes usually drift upwards and my brain "stops caring" about visual data at all.
Stage 4:
At this time, I've found that you can make a choice. You can consciously control your breathing and maintain it slightly lower than what the body wants to do (and end up in the hypoxic stage), or you can "let go" of consciously controlling your breathing entirely (and end up in Stage 5). I've tried going down both routes before.
Hypoxic stage:
The hypoxic route feels bad. It feels like I'm depriving my body and brain of oxygen, but it's not a significant enough amount to cause me to involuntarily gasp for air, at least not all at once. Over time, my muscles gain a spastic quality, like they want to jerk to try to wake me up. I get extremely lightheaded and can feel like I am certainly losing some brain cells due to the lack of oxygen right now. If I force myself to stay in this stage, then it feels like all of my limbs are "lighting up" and it also feels like I'm going to faint. Staying here even longer results in a slight euphoria every time I breathe in, air feels good when you are depriving yourself of it. After about ten to fifteen minutes of this, my body starts to feel like it's "glowing" and soon after that, it feels like I'm filling with a strange energy. When that energy fills me all the way up, I experience a bright light and my entire body convulses, causing me to wake up.
Stage 5:
This is where you go if you give your body automatic control of your breathing and you let it make sure that you're breathing enough. In the beginning of this stage, a few new things occur. Firstly, my face and neck fall asleep. After that, I experience this weird sensation that feels as if my brain is sending some sort of energy to various parts of my body. However, this is also the stage where problems begin to occur. I won't realize it happening, but I'll realize after it's already happened that my neck and shoulder muscles would tense up very gradually until they're entirely tensed. This is very uncomfortable and sometimes can cause me to slip out of this stage and back to Stage 4 or Stage 3. Also in this stage, it feels like my consciousness is somehow "weakening" or getting "further away". I already can't feel my body at all and it's as if I'm a ghost drifting through the blackest regions of outer space. Finally, in this stage, I often get a fairly realistic feeling of gently falling. Not the kind of falling where you're jumping from a very high place, but it's like I'm a leaf slowly drifting to the ground. Thoughts tend to drift in this stage and time is very difficult to judge. I often lose track of my breath-counting here. Also, some bad news: Not only is it extremely easy to get an erection from this stage, but if you have one, the sensation coming from your body will knock you back out to Stage 4 or 3 again :(
Stage 6:
I've only been to this stage a few times, it's the deepest I've ever been (consciously of course) and it's difficult to stay in it for too long. Hopefully this will get better through practice. Anyhow, in this stage it feels like my entire body is "simplified" into a single point and it's very difficult to count, so I usually stop trying to count when I get here. I also lose the feeling of falling and it's replaced by a feeling of being gently spun around. This feeling is just like when you spin around really fast and then sit down and you're still pretty dizzy and you feel like you're still spinning for a bit. Only, the feeling lasts for over five minutes (I think? Time is *REALLY* hard to tell from all the way down here). This is also the stage where I start hallucinating hard-core. I start to see pulsing and shifting colors, and I can hear strange (but not at all frightening) noises.
Stage 7/8:
Dreamland
