Thread: My first WILD

I originally posted this on another forum, and decided to share it here. So, a little context to help explain some of it:
I explain some of the terms to the extent I understand them, because the forum is not familiar with LDs.
Before this, I had attempted to WILD once, but somehow it lead to a week or so of quite bad insomnia. Sleeping maybe an hour each night. I'm not quite sure what caused this, but it might be because I was trying to go to sleep in order to LD, and trying to get to sleep is a bad way to get to sleep. I also tended to get excited when I thought I was about to sleep lol. I fixed this the night before last, by avoiding all napping during the day, avoiding my bed except when going to sleep, not eating after 6pm (I get annoying tachycardia after eating most of the time), drinking coffee before bed (for some reason it helps me sleep), and by turning off my alarm and giving up on LDing temporarily, which took off the pressure to sleep.

So here is my post:

This was quite an interesting experience for me, so I thought other's might like to hear.

Wake-initiated lucid dreams are ones in which one enters a lucid dream essentially at will. This is different to the more common type, which typically is that one is within a normal dream, and then becomes lucid.
The key to a WILD is essentially to let your body fall asleep whilst maintaining some degree of consciousness throughout.
It's considered a fairly advanced technique, not recommended for beginners. Supposed to take months of practice. But I decided I'd just go straight ahead and try it first, rather than just hope a dream would happen by chance on its own (which is essentially the typical way, with techniques centered on increasing the odds.)

However, the first time I tried, somehow it caused a random period of insomnia. Of course, it's quite hard to have dreams when you can't sleep. But I basically cured the insomnia on Tuesday night with a variety of methods, prime among them drinking coffee before bed (don't ask me why that works). So, effectively, this is my second time trying.

So I woke up this morning about 7:30am. I think I fell asleep around 1am, so I was probably still tired enough to sleep if I tried, although I didn't really feel like it.
I figured I'd give WILD a try. It's supposed to be easiest just after you've woken up, because you can fall back asleep easier, since you're already partly asleep in a way. But you're not supposed to be almost fully rested, as I was.

Anyway, it's kind of hard to explain exactly what you do when you fall asleep. You get comfortable, close your eyes, and try to relax. I focus on my breathing. Not necessarily try to control it, but pay attention to it. But you can't pay too much attention to it, or you just stay awake. It's like an anchor. You need to let your consciousness go enough to sleep, but keep enough of it focused somewhere to stop from losing it completely. Once I felt myself starting to drift a bit, I imagined myself somewhere. Actually, just in my bed, but I was imaging it. Not just imagining the scene, but placing myself in it. Letting myself see things, feel things, immersing myself in the environment, as though I was actually there.

But it wasn't quite a dream yet, I could still feel myself in real life. But immersing yourself in that image as though it is real is what lets you drift off ultimately. So long as you have some sort of awareness that you are only imagining it.
At the point at which you fall asleep, it can get a little weird. The first time I tried this, it felt like I was being sucked down into some sort of vortex, a kind of acceleration and pressure, like my head was being squeezed too. That made me wake myself up fully before, because it got a bit too intense and worried me. This time, it still felt like I was falling in a way, but I just let it happen. Or it was more like sinking into an ocean quickly.

At some point, as I was imagining myself in the dream, it felt like I might be asleep. Hard to tell when, sometimes, but something feels a bit different. Like the scene has become a bit too real. So I figured I'd do a reality check and see.
For some reason, I decided to get a couple of spoons out from under my pillow and touch them together, as a reality test. If I was fully lucid, I'd have realised then instantly I was dreaming, but for some reason it didn't occur to me as strange that I had spoons underneath my pillow
I put the spoons inside each other, and it seemed fairly normal. But then one of them melted through the other, and I figured I was dreaming.
At that point, I got slightly excited, and the dream went less real, and I couldn't see anything clearly. That's what happens when your suspension in the dream weakens. If you get excited, you can wake up. I started rubbing my hands together in the dream. Focusing on the sensation, re-immersing myself in the dream, seemed to help.

I can't remember every detail of what happened, and in the exact right sequence. But at one point, I tried to rub my hands together again, but one hand was caught in my covers (was still in bed). So I tried to put the hand straight through the covers, since it was a dream, and I was aware it was a dream (but at this point I thought I might have woken up after all). It kind of went through the covers. It was more like penetrating cling film.
Sometimes, I couldn't really see anything, like my eyes were closed, and I just felt things happening. I've heard that can happen some of the first times you try, because you get better at immersing yourself in the dream and gaining greater lucidity with practice, which makes things more real. A couple of times, it was because my eyes were closed in the dream, but I was worried of opening them in case I actually opened my eyes in real life, and woke myself up. But then I tried anyway, and just opened my eyes in the dream, and I could see, which came and went.
At one point, I tried to fly. I was still lying down, so I kind of levitated myself up and through the window. I didn't have complete control. There was quite a realistic lurching feeling with it. I wouldn't say the lurching feeling corresponded perfectly with what I was doing (which wasn't always very sharply defined anyway), more like my brain knew there should be a lurching feeling accompanied with me flying lol.

At one point, for some reason, I decided to wake up. When I did, I found myself in sleep paralysis. I knew this could happen, so I wasn't too panicked. I couldn't move anything. But what I was afraid of, was that I knew hallucinations often occur with sleep paralysis. I didn't really want to be seeing and hearing scary things while I felt so helpless, especially since I couldn't 100% be sure they were hallucinations, with the way my imagination runs away with me. Nothing overly scary happened, but at one point it was like my bed was sloped quite steeply. I closed my eyes, opened them again, and found I could move. I sat up, thinking about how I might improve things next time I try. I decided to do another reality check just to be sure. I held up my hand, and counted five fingers, excluding my thumb. I was kinda like "people are supposed to have five fingers, right?" but then I closed and opened my hand again, and suddenly had six fingers. I figured at that point something was definitely going on
So basically, that was a false awakening.
I woke up again, for real, and realised I was still in sleep paralysis. But it went away after a few minutes. While I was still in sleep paralysis, I was trying to thrash my legs at one point, and I felt the bed moving, as if it was working (couldn't see or feel my legs), but I think I wasn't actually, and the bed moving was just a hallucination, because it was only moving gently, and with no sound.

So anyway, it was quite an interesting experience. I think I will try again tonight.

I'm not sure how I achieved a WILD after essentially 2 days of trying. I tend to be a person who spends most of his time wrapped up inside his own head, so in a way, I might be more familiar with my own consciousness and its boundaries than most people, if that makes sense, which might help. I don't imagine it's so easy for someone well grounded in external, every-day, sensible reality to grasp the abstraction of the process, of what they need to do.

I also made myself a simple program to help train myself to pick up reality checks as a habit. It plays a single beep at user-defined intervals, to remind you to reality check throughout the day. It obviously has advantages over conventional alarms, which usually tend to require you to manually switch them off, and reset the time each time, which isn't practical.
The program is here if anyone wants it. It took about 5 minutes to code, once I knew what I was doing, so I don't mind giving it away.
d-h.st/xJh (add http thing on front... forum seems to think I'm a bot or something trying to spam links)
Of course, you can't be sure that program is not a virus, since you've only my word that it isn't, so I'd advise you all to scan it before running it, if you want to try it. The value for time between beeps is in minutes. It goes up to 100 minutes, but I was using it with 20 minute intervals. It might also be useful to run it whilst asleep. If you're trained to reality check when it beeps, perhaps hearing a beep whilst asleep would trigger one in a dream. Might also wake you up, however. Maybe depends on how familiar you become with the beeping sound, might startle you less if you're familiar, and not wake you up.

I should also say, I posted this here because it includes my methodology. I'm actually quite surprised, because I've just read people mentioning visualising at the right time during it, and other techniques that I seem to have done out of instinct.