WILD is my favorite technique. I will wake up after my first REM cycle and then rather than trying to re-enter my last dream, which is never successful for me, I instead try to WILD. It's probably the weirdest and most unpredictable method to use, but it's the only one I can use with any sort of regular success.

Anyway, something is happening that's sort of new. It's not scary but it's definitely messing with my usual technique. It happens the most often if I'm trying to WILD from a nap rather than after I wake up at night.

Instead of the dream slowly forming and then stepping into it or feeling it solidify around me, it arrives with a BANG. I mean that I go from awake/blackness to startling lucidity immediately. It's so jarring that it tends to wake me up, which understandably leaves me frustrated.

Two examples of this happening:

I'm not sure if this counts as WILD or VILD or a hybrid, but it works for me: I walk around an imaginary room and feel all of the surfaces and explore all of the aspects of it while I am falling asleep, while also simultaneously paying attention to the state of my body. I can do both of these things at once. Normally, what happens is that I start to feel my body falling asleep while I explore the room, and when I feel the tingling/my limbs going numb, I know that I can start trying to pull the dream together and actually form the room I've been "exploring". This is usually a fairly gentle process that takes a while, and pulling the dream together takes a little bit before it really coalesces.

Last time, though, I was "exploring" the room. I felt my body getting heavy. Maybe my awareness slipped, but I don't think so... maybe I got too "into" what I was doing. I was running my hand along a stone wall. I am used to the wall remaining "imaginary" until the dream begins to coalesce and slowly becomes more solid... I have to "step forward" into it in order to make it really form. Instead, suddenly the wall was there and very real - my generic stone wall had suddenly become a very detailed granite surface and I could see my hand with incredible clarity and feel that the surface was very solid. It was jarring in a way that's difficult to describe, like the mental equivalent of diving into a cold pool. The shock woke me up, and I was disappointed.

It happened again today. I lay down for a nap and attempted to WILD. I tried exploring my room but that wasn't working (not everything has a 100% success after all) so I switched over to trying to see stuff in the colors and sparkles floating around in front of my eyes. I started to slip into sleep. When I do this, I am used to stuff slowly forming - instead of things slowly coalescing out of the colors and lights, without any warning there was suddenly an explosion of vivid, multicolored lights behind a volcanic mountain range in a landscape that was suddenly very, VERY real. I remember the black, shiny volcanic stone. The shock startled me - I woke up again.

This is kind of one of those things it's really hard to prepare for. I've gotten past the excitement of going lucid waking me up, but this is so jarring when it happens that I feel like I don't even have a chance. It's not an excitement thing - I'm being started. I just go WHOA and then wake up.

Is there anybody this happens to? How do you handle it? Have you just gotten used to it to the point where it no longer startles you awake? Is this just going to be one of those "get used to it" things?