Quote Originally Posted by NyxCC View Post
I totally understand you! I have been using natural wakes for several reasons and it's just really hard to hit the optimal time for WBTB. Recently, I have been waking up too late so I either call off the entire thing or end up...with insomnia and lose so much sleep.
Glad to not be alone. What have you found to be too late in your experience? For me it seems to relate more to how close to morning, daylight, and activity outside rather than strictly about the number hours of sleep. If there's any trace of daylight or cars going by, I seem to generally be doomed.

Quote Originally Posted by Xanous View Post
Raising the caffeine levels slightly might help but I would hate for you to suffer insomnia on a G night. However, I do find that if I wake after an hour of ingesting caffeine, I am not usually awake more than an hour. So It seems, for me anyway, that there is an hour window for the caffeine to kick in and hopefully get lucid then an hour wait to try and pull off a WILD.

As you know, I use an alarm but the few times I have had a natural WBTB have been the most pleasant so I understand going with the early one. But, I have found that the longer I wait for WBTB the better results I have. 5 hours seem better than 4 hours (I think I even did a 6hour wait before) but there is always the problem of my son waking me up too early or having to get up at certain time for work. That's also why I use the alarm but that's not always fool proof. Like last night I was too tired so I thought I hit the snooze but I woke naturally 30min later. I'm looking forward to see how you wake naturally in the podcast by the way!
Yeah, I know what you mean about taking that extra risk on G night. G is great for reducing the amount of latency between settling down for sleep and the dreams starting. Caffeine helps with keeping the mind active long enough to help cross the gap. But it's so easy to take it too far! I mean, I did still hit a DILD in the end, but I really like hitting WILDs with G since WILDs are not my usual way of getting lucid.

Thanks, I think you're right about the later WBTBs. I'd say the later the better so long as there's no insomnia. I had a pretty late WBTB last night. I was really nervous about insomnia so I cut it to about 15 minutes. I fell asleep really quickly and even though I didn't hit a lucid, I had some close calls and recalled 8 dreams, which is just a huge number for me. I'm going to experiment with timing my natural WBTB simply because it's so darn useful and as research for mahoogie's question!