What went wrong with my attempt?

Okay, so I felt pretty relaxed and the thought of a WILD crosses my mind. I lay down in bed with the curtain closed at about 3:15. The only sounds were the occasional slight thumps from another room and some birds chirping in the distance at one point. I was completely still for 40 minutes and I counted my breaths up to about 40 and then decided to just visualize a red door but I didn't get further than that. I was in that state for about 30 minutes and it's 4:12 now.

Before, I've done the exact same thing and I began to feel a presence above me and my heart rate shoot up. That was the furthest I've got, so what went wrong?

Try going to sleep first. Wake back to bed with an alarm + wild has many benefits

1. Later in the night your sleep cycles are longer

2. It's easier to enter into sleep paralysis because your body is already tired

3. Since you are tired and go to sleep faster you want deal with as much hypnogogia. I.e. The presence

Remember, when you wake back up, make sure that you don't wake yourself up too much. I normally just reality check and then go back to bed while keeping my mind awake. Also, don't go back to sleep too early or you won't go into sleep paralysis!

So you don't have to wake up in REM because if you WILD the transition phase places you in it anyway? Just normally when I wake up my breath feels stunted

Yes, you do want to wake up in the middle or beginning of rem. You can plan around 90 minute sleep cycles, but if you wake up after at least 6 hours of sleep, then the rem cycles become so long at that point that it really doesn't matter when you wake up.

Yeah if you successfully transition when your not in a REM period I think you'll just transition into darkness or you may have an OBE.

Rather than create a new thread I thought we could make this the universal "What went wrong with my WILD attempt" thread.

So I have tried to WILD twice now. The first time I got up to seeing the 'light show' and passively watched that, and I swear my leg spasmed violently.

The second time, I kind of felt like a I was vibrating, and I sometimes twitched a bit, but I really didn't get anywhere.

What can I do to improve :P

WILDs are very difficult to learn, often requiring many tries and effort, while other times they happen by accident. Don't follow the hundreds of noobs who think that having a WILD is the easiest method because it's guaranteed, read up and learn how to do it correctly is my beat advice isaace. By the way, if you just can't get sleep, try inducing a WILD combined with WBTB, it will make it easier to get to that final step in the WILD.

ok, thanks, I think I will try a WBTB every few days. Or should I do one every day? Because I'm afraid that I'll get into a rhythm and the WBTB will lose its effect...

No, it won't lose effect. The longer you sleep the longer your REM stage of sleep (the opportune time to LD) increase in length making it easier to enter into one, this being one of the benefits of WBTB. Check out a tutorial, but basically you want to sleep for 6hrs+ before you wake up to maximize results. Read read read, You can find so much info. On this site. Check out the WILD subtopic under attaining lucidity.